Dois Caminhos para o Futuro: o Vernacular Contemporâneo e o Tecnológico Hedonista

Abstract

Architecture is an image of the future. Starting from this premise, the question we want to ask is whether we aspire to a hidden or transparent, vernacular or technological future. A future in which we can create and intervene or a programmed and mechanical one. But how can we conceive of freedom and the creative act when philosophy and neuroscience tell us that we are biological machines, programmed by genetics and culture, with our decisions being the result of a causal network that we cannot control? Free will may be an illusion, and without freedom, there is no responsibility. What this ultimately means is that we cannot speak of an author, nor of an agent in a given process, either in architectural creation or in urban production. Architecture and urbanism have become autonomous objects, independent from the subject. On the other hand, global warming, once a prediction, now represents a real threat to the existence of human and non-human beings. This hyperobject is now unavoidable, and the path we must follow to combat it is still uncertain. Accompanying the evolution of this hyperobject, AI and Big data are having a significant impact on how we make predictions and, consequently, how we plan the course of our actions. Can we then, continue to consider architecture an intuitive process driven by decisions and actions? "Two Paths Towards the Future: Contemporary Vernacular and Technological Hedonism" thus proposes the conception of two paths supported by the analysis of two contexts that, in the course of metropolitan expansion and urban conurbation, projected different directions: Florianopolis, Brazil, and Copenhagen, Denmark. The hidden image of Florianopolis, the result of neoliberal policies that invalidated any long-term strategic vision, extends into the present, with a participatory plan that maintains a high degree of unpredictability. On the opposite side, the transparent image of Copenhagen, the result of the famous Five Finger Plan, an urban model implemented after World War II that goes into crisis with the end of the Cold War, culminates in the elaboration of the linear city of Orestad, after the change in the geopolitical paradigm that led to the implementation of market-oriented urban models. The two trajectories, invoked by the case studies, will then serve as an aid to this monumental task of thinking about the future.