With the green turn and accelerating digitalisation and automation we are creating more and more complex systems that govern our lives and influence our environment in unprecedented ways. Building these complex systems – ecological, digital, social – do we leave enough room for subjectivity, or are we still stuck in modernist thinking, trying to engineer the world? Systemic solutions have created systemic problems in the past. The system built housing of the postwar era is deteriorating and substantially contributing to the climate crisis. At the same time we have a housing shortage in many growing cities. While fixing the mistakes of the past, we need to be sure not to make even bigger ones today, when digital platforms make innovations rapidly scalable.
How can these complex systems be directed in a meaningful way? Do we need fully automated design and construction systems designed by good architects? Or should we leave the industrial and capitalist model behind and build social systems of participatory design and construction? Or can these approaches work hand in hand after all, to build systems that accommodate subjectivity and meaning? With “Building Systems” we want to look at the past, present and future of systemic thinking in all scales of the built environment and envision paths forward towards building systems of meaning.
EKA Arh conference is a biannual international peer-reviewed conference held as a satellite of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale. The previous iterations have been Space and Digital Reality in 2019 and Innovation and Digital Reality in 2022. The keynotes and papers are published in EKA Faculty of Architecture Proceedings.
Conference is supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the New European Bauhaus Academy Alliance.