It’s About Time
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January 2025. The ongoing, devastating fires in LA tell a truth impossible to ignore. The consequences of our footprint on the planet are increasingly felt: melting ice caps, forest fires, floods and droughts in ever extremer forms. The current situation was predicted 50 years ago by the Club of Rome, an informal group of academics, scientists, politicians, diplomats and industrialists that published The Limits to Growth in 1972. In that report, the club outlined the possible consequences of an exponential increase in population, agricultural production, resource extraction, industrial production, pollution and the loss of biodiversity. The report caused a worldwide commotion and was the start of international climate talks.
The tenth edition of the Architecture Biennale Rotterdam in 2022 looked back on the 50-year period since the publication of the Club of Rome report. The exhibition brought together historical research (from 1972 onwards), inspiring practical examples (anno 2022) and future scenarios (towards 2072).
The exhibition painted a picture that was at once worrisome and hopeful. The work of the architects, urban planners, artists, academics and landscape designers featured in the exhibition documented and mapped the causes and consequences of climate change. They created a landscape of climate change based on their observations.
The history of climate change and architecture are linked in many ways: architects have played a role both in the large-scale use of fossil fuels that led to the current ecological crisis, and in researching and developing various alternatives to alleviate the effects of climate change.
The publication following this exhibition was published in the autumn of 2024. Bridging past, present and future, the book presents historical and contemporary projects, with 45 key moments in the history of environmental awareness.
SabinevanderVooren
SabinevanderVooren
It’s About Time acts both as a handbook and an inspiration for designers and is intended for architects, teachers, students, civic agents and anyone involved in shaping the plural future of our contemporary landscape. The message is particularly urgent: the momentum to realise change has arrived. Architecture can and must play an important role in the coming transitions.
Derk Loorbach, Véronique Patteeuw, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Peter Veenstra and Saskia Stein are the authors of this groundbreaking reference work.
We invite Véronique Patteeuw to introduce the working year 2025 | TIME within the framework of this book, It’s About Time.
Véronique Patteeuw (ir. Arch., PhD) is senior lecturer at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et du Paysage de Lille and guest lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture at KU Leuven and EPFL Lausanne. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century architectural theory. By re-reading texts, drawings and buildings, she investigates the relevance of post-war design concepts for architecture within the new climate regime (Latour). Véronique Patteeuw is scientific editor of OASE, journal of architecture. Her publications include Authorship (2023), Modernities (2021), Critical Regionalism Revisited (2019) and Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture (2018). She was co-curator of the 10th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam “IT’S ABOUT TIME”. The book of the same name is hot off the press.