Transfer Global Architecture Platform, is a new digital editorial project based on the production and transmission of architectural knowledge with the aim of connecting contemporary ideas and practices to build a global architectural culture.
Transfer is a nonprofit organization which welcomes private or institutional donations to support the production and distribution of original, independent and high-quality architectural knowledge, addressed to a creative global audience.
Sharing reflections on the current and future challenges for society and architectureSomething of what I would call naturalness in the way we see construction is very important. We have to understand that the point of construction is to have a sense of adaptation
The potential for public space design in the wake of the shock to humanity that coronavirus represents opens doors that were much less likely to be opened before
One of the most important lessons of Covid 19 has been to witness the power of sharing ideas and the willingness to experiment with new ways of doing things
Population density is certainly a condition that contributes to the rapid spread of infectious diseases, but it is the distribution and quality of that density that really needs to be focused on
The biggest impact of the pandemic, whether we are architects or ordinary citizens, is how we imagine the relationship between the home and the world
What I hope for architects to become in the future is to develop a wider awareness of our function within the current capitalist system, and to act from much more political positions
Does the global emergency braking finally have the power to catapult us from home-seclusion and home-introspection to a joint recovery of the housing value?
The pandemic has demonstrated the need of the public realm. But public space can no longer be defined only in urban terms, it requires trans-national thinking in order to be meaningful
Covid may have been the crisis that stopped us in our tracks, and to which we actually paid attention, that helped us to see other things a little easier
The consequences of this experience will undoubtedly be the result of social agreements in which architects have to provide necessary and appropriate syntheses (projects) for transformation
Is returning to rural areas only a tactile move in the wake of a world-wide crisis, an escape strategy, or could such return present feasible alternatives?
Our global civilization has to wake up and learn from both the threats and the benefits of nature, appearing this time in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic
As part of its paradoxes, the pandemic has also pushed us to a crucial crossroads that has immense implications for the built environment and the future of architecture practice
If it were to find floor plans of freedom, elevations of ecology, architecture could help us rebuild the ruins of our future
As the most immediate physical experience, the earthquake that took place in my city in the midst of the anti–pandemic measures, woke up our awareness of things at our hand and our (architectural) spatial sense
The direct experience of their spatial conditions will have given rise to a collective awareness about the elements on which the architectural discipline has traditionally placed most emphasis
If the future indicates that more viruses like Covid will come, we will have to radically question whether the domestic space can and should contain other functions, and if that can continue to be called a city
As a cultural and material practice that is highly sensitive to changes in political and economic structures, architecture needs to reinforce and expand its operational capacities
Because some technology tends to gear people away from the tactile architecture, architects ought to produce imaginative spatial experience and thoughtful craft to bring them back
Current discussions around the “Smart City” and “Living Lab” concepts indicate that Europe’s planning culture will change fundamentally as a result of the coronavirus. Epidemiology and urban planning have both a common history and future
Maybe this as a unique opportunity to place architecture as a discipline that cares for others, irrespective of the idea of growth. Architecture as research into social interactions and their possible outcomes
In the light of global warming, it is not so much the impact of the Great Pandemic Depression we should be concerned about, but rather what the global warming means for the future of humanity
The global pandemic has concretized the crucial call for alternative values, and ways of thinking and acting. The current confinement is teaching us that imagination is our ultimate mode of freedom
The stopped present could be a good place from which to look at the near past and, most of all, the future.
TRANSFER NEXT aims to invite shared reflections on the new scene that coronavirus will probably usher in.