Critical mass: The Baumeister in July 2024 is here!

What’s the story behind our latest cover?

This is the story behind it, by Kinga Gacsályi:

I am a Hungarian architect and I work as a craftswoman with clay interior plaster. The photo was taken during the international Forward to Earth workshop in Dobrava pri Škocjanu, Slovenia. The main topic was getting to know and working with the material earth as well as the relationship between the workshop group, the local inhabitants and the architecture. Each participant had the opportunity to write a text about the resulting work and to supplement this text with an image.

The idea behind my text was the connection between the earth’s life cycle and us, the people. I asked myself how we can use existing materials again and again, from generation to generation? I grew up in the countryside, where my grandmother taught me how to maintain the traditional mud-brick house. This was done together with the whole family, every year. At the workshop, I was reminded of these cycles and wrote a haiku about them:

Earth and people

are connected in unity,

begin again.

(English original:

Earth connects people

born, build, live, demolish, die

and it starts again).

During the workshop, a hole was created where we extracted earth material. In the photo, it represents the womb in which new life is born. This is how the ideas of earth and man are combined. It is a cycle of the earth. The soil that we use today has already been used in the past. We use it with respect, in the hope that our descendants will do the same.

Climate-impacting emissions and resource consumption are pushing us to the ecological limits of our planet. According to some researchers, we have a remaining CO2 budget that will only get us through the next two years. What role does architecture play in this apocalyptic drama, and what does the future of building really look like? We let researchers and architects have their say.

Green architecture, eco-friendly, net-zero energy, biophilic design and sustainability in general. These and so many other buzzwords must unfortunately all too often be categorized as “marketing bullshit bingo” (affectionately abbreviated to MBB).

Architecture seems to be particularly susceptible to such term battles. But in the end, isn’t it about more than marketing and the end in general? In this issue, we explore in a variety of ways the questions of whether we will still be able to build in the future and, above all, the role of architecture in a world that will eventually realize that it is not enough to simply make something somehow sustainable in order to be able to claim to have made it sustainable.

To put it plainly: our world’s resources are finite and we are bitterly close to the end. What if we can no longer fall back on the building materials we have grown so fond of? What role will architects have to play in the future? Do we still have a choice in this situation, and how will the soul of our work reinvent itself in such a future?

As you can see, in this issue we are juggling with a number of really complex questions that are even more complicated to answer and have managed to bring together some of the most exciting minds of our time to provide answers, or at least critical thoughts, to these and many other questions within a three-part main section.

Critical thinking is something like the central theme of this issue anyway. We deliberately show fewer projects and focus entirely on all the topics that will have a significant influence on the architecture of the future. In my humble opinion, this issue is a future issue. The people who have their say in this issue look to the future and are not afraid to look at light and shadow at the same time and in an equally unfiltered way. I consider it a great privilege that this gives us the opportunity to look into many “multiversal” future scenarios at the same time.

After all, and we should be aware of this, architecture will have to do much more than just build in the coming years. In my view, hardly any other industry is currently facing such changes. This is precisely why we benefit from the diversity of the people who have significantly shaped this magazine.

Our contributors come from numerous countries such as Canada, the UK, Slovenia, Lithuania, Spain and Argentina, but of course also Switzerland, Austria and Germany, and their backgrounds are just as diverse. For me, it is exciting to see how people who will shape our future and deal with the issue of increasingly scarce resources are taking a stand in such an extraordinary way.

I can say one thing in advance: In this issue, we see how courage and dedication can really make a difference. I hope that you will be at least as inspired by this issue of B AU M E I S T E R as I am. I look forward to hearing from you about this issue.

The booklet is available here in the store!

Our latest issue, B6, is all about The City of Basel. Read more about it here!