It is outrageous, glib and counterintuitive to claim that a recession could be good for architecture. It is certainly not good for architects who are losing their jobs at the fastest rate since the early 1990s. It is disastrous for construction companies and housebuilders who have seen their share prices collapse and their business disappear. And it is bleak for developers who are unable to raise finance on solid proposals banks would have leapt on at any other time. But could we say that, although bad for architects, it may nevertheless be good for architecture?
This last boom saw swathes of appalling development – sub-standard housing isolated without proper infrastructure, dim corporate offices, sub-iconic skyscrapers and rafts of blank-looking retail development that is now physically as well as intellectually empty. From Denver to Dubai and on through China, the past few years have been a boom for construction but an aesthetic and cultural desert for architecture. The hope must be thatsevere economic readjustment allows developers, architects and urbanists time to think. The past couple of decades have seen an aesthetic free-for-all, the collapse of a single, overarching style or a deep conflict between the proponents of radically different styles on which architecture has usually thrived. While most agree this is a good thing, it has also led to the lack of a need to justify the architecture that is being proposed.
