[5] Architecture's Youthful Revolution

"Not so long ago the typical professional path of a graduate meant working long hardcore hours under the wing of a bigger company and patiently layering brick over brick of professional experience, until a chance of a break comes somewhere in the late 40s. It necessarily included the slow and logical gradation from pavilions, beach houses and private homes to perhaps a small public facility and if lucky enough, a major commission. But all those preconceptions were shattered when in 2001 the 26-year olds Bjarke Ingels and Julied De Smedt left Rem Koolhaas' OMA to found their own, hugely successful PLOT, which only 5 years later peacefully split in the two just as successful practices BIG and JDS. OMA though was long before known as future-star incubator - just check this cute infographic. Or if you're a bit more shameless, go for this one, all from the resourceful and witty "Notes on becoming a famous architect" blog.

Most commonly the cut-off age limit for joining the "young architects" graph is assumed to be 40. But as practices are nowadays often founded and led by professionals in their early 30s or even younger, most of them are far from BIG's joyous success and would argue that actually producing buildings is what makes an architect. And while professionals and critics share the rising concern that ongoing recession and scarcity of jobs might chase young practitioners out of the field a considerable part of the latter are actually redefining the profession. Can you imagine starchitect gurus converting a former gas station into a temporary community cinema or gathering a dream team of colleagues to help the underprivileged world?

There is surely an agenda or rather, multiple agendas that arise as the discipline becomes even more densely involved with issues of economy, globalization, ecology and social processes. A lot of youngsters return to the hands-on craftsmen approach to skip the contractor and constructor steps through inventing and building their own briefs, mostly as light, temporary structures to pass the according laws. And this approach has produced some of the most original and provocative urban interventions recently going as far as Michael Rakowitz' ParaSITE project. An experiment running for over 10 years now his custom-made inflatable "bubble tents" for homeless people literally parasitizing on private homes have triggered an intensive social and political debate. Another decade-old, major initiative is Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stoth's Architecture for Humanity: a non-profit network of over 50 000 professionals providing design, construction and development services to communities in need.

Today's selection celebrates the diversity of the emerging faces: from the "radical pleasing agenda" of comic-loving BIG through the digital blobby optimism ofEMERGENT to the caravan architects of Fantastic Norway, travelling around the country to offer architectural services to different communities. There are, of course, numerous cultural and economic implications to this and perhaps rightfully Guardian's Rowan Moore warns us that

architecture like this could become a delightful, middle class game."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-mallory/young-architecture_b_931097.html#s334377&title=Fantastic_Norway_House (accessed August 25, 2011)