1.

What conditions, whether social, political, economic or environmental, arise

today as most relevant for architecture and the city? Do inequality and poverty
occupy a prominent place?
Architecture is a contextual practice. One could even make the case that it is the practice
of context. What is relevant is relevant to something, someone, somewhere. It is therefore
difficult to speak of architectural relevance in the abstract. Everything is relevant. What is
more or less relevant is, as follows, almost impossible to qualify. Yet what can be
determined is what makes something relevant. Relevance is not so much defined by
desire, but potential; relevance is not an only if, but rather an as such. The question of
relevance and architecture is perhaps better thought of not as what is relevant to
architecture, but what is architecture relevant to? How is architecture relevant? And
crucially, who is architecture relevant to?
2. Can those conditions be explicitly addressed from the field of architecture?
As the process of building the environment, architecture is relevant to everyone, in its
own way. In this sense, architecture is a privileged lens through which relevance is
refracted and can be read. What does it do, and not? What does it prevent, and allow? To
address relevant issues through architecture, we must first use architecture itself to
understand the way it is interpolated within a network of forces. From the point of
architectures contextualization, we can critically evaluate its relevance according to
certain criteria, be they ideological or ethical. Architecture can become relevant by
understanding the way it articulates these very conditions in question, and by means of its
complicity, serve as the platform for their re-articulation.
3. What case of architecture that addressed that kind of problems, recently or in the
past century, would you mention as an example, successful or failed, and what can
we learn from it today?
Im inclined to recall the mid-century instrumentalization of architecture in post-colonial
contexts throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. What defines them
as success, in my opinion, is not the current state of their constructions today, but the fact
that they were able to align themselves with and articulate an emergent notion of spatial
justice. In todays context, with the predominance of the real estate market, we need to
find ways of producing a built environment according to alternative metrics of value.
Ideas like a carbon tax seems to indicate that the market itself can be turned otherwise,
but we should perhaps not wait for the powers that be to see things differently.
Architecture can cultivate alternative powers, other modes of building the environment;
its power is to identify emergent forces and dynamics that can be articulated.