Regeneration: Design as Dialogue, Building as Transformation
No. 23
F/W 2005
“Nothing will come of nothing.” In the next decades designers will need ot shift their prime paradigm from drawing on blank slates and to adaptively redesign the already designed and built environment. This shift, which will be necessitated by increasing resource shortages and the need for sustainability, could be thought of as threatening designers’ creativity and autonomy, but such an assumption is based on the treacherous belief that monologues are “freer” than dialogues, that one cannot bring oneself into being more fully in a rich, demanding responsiveness to givens, like transformations of rail yards into parks, malls into housing, or military bases into villages, and adding onto rather than tearing down buildings. Harvard Design Magazine 23 focuses on and theorizes exciting, effective, urgent, and rich redesign or “co-design” (additions)—past, present, and future.
