To Be and Not to Build: A Contingent Manifesto for Sustainable Belgrade

Abstract

More than 100 years after the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture written by Antonio Sant’Elia and reinterpreted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Italian Futurism, we are once again questioning our ventures and an ongoing course of our discipline. The Italian futurists radically speculated that our houses would last less long than we and that each generation, would have to build its own city. But our thoughts about architecture and design altogether are nowadays fundamentally altered. The pandemic situation we are currently living in shows how frozen globalized production systems are, as Bruno Latour argues, not only seen as a great opportunity for the ecologists, rather as a vast potential for the reconceptualization of our working models. So what does this mean for architects and architecture discipline?

This research project aims to design a narrative for the (un)built environments of the future; a narrative that is at once economically realistic and ecologically positive. The concept of sustainability in this research is represented in the state of not building anything ever again: The only sustainable architecture is the one that is built upon the existing built environment. What can’t be rebuilt or built upon becomes the third landscape: no extra land is to be occupied by architecture ever again. The proposed scenario for the future does not evolve from architectural motivation- rather, architecture is an agency that reacts to changing circumstances.

This work is a design-based manifesto. It is embedded in the research that was conducted in the city of Belgrade as proving grounds. By using the research-by-design method this research attempts to make a small contribution to the long-lasting culture of manifestos in the architectural discipline. This design-based manifesto is conceived through research that has been developing through an elective course at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture for the past 3 years.