Bart Lootsma: Individualization

From at least the 1960s on, individualization has been one of the implicit, secret driving forces of the architectural debate. However, the perspective on this phenomenon has largely changed. In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and even largely today, individualization was seen as something that had to be achieved. The main task of progressive architecture was to find and create aesthetical and organizational differences or even to provoke them. Today and in the next decades, individualization will become something that should be dealt with, that must be accommodated. That is a completely different program and we are already struggling with it. Some of the biggest problems in architecture and urbanism, like urban sprawl and the uncertainties about what public space is, are immediately related to individualization. But individualization is doing more than that: it is threatening the very nature of what we have learned to consider as Architecture (with a big A) and urban planning. Now, in itself that may be not a problem, but there are some essential responsibilities and tasks in society that would have to be reshuffled, particularly in the field of urbanism and urban design. This is an enormous task ahead of us that is still taken too lightly, particularly by architects. It is such an enormous task because, as Ulrich Beck writes, “any attempt to come up with a new concept that would provide social cohesion must depart from acknowledging that individualism, diversity and scepticism are rooted in Western culture”.

Bart Lootsma is a historian, theoretician, critic and curator in the fields of architecture, design and the visual arts. Currently, he is a Professor for Architectural Theory at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Innsbruck. He has been visiting professor at several leading institutions, including the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and Head of Scientific Research at the ETH Zürich, Studio Basel. He was a guest curator of ArchiLab 2004 in Orléans and co-curator of the Montenegrin Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2016. Lootsma published numerous articles and several books and was an editor of Forum, de Architect, ARCHIS, ARCH+, l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Daidalos, Domus and GAM. His books include Media and Architecture (1998, with Dick Rijken), SuperDutch: New Architecture in the Netherlands (2000), ArchiLab 2004: La ville à nu / The Naked City (2004), and Reality Bytes: Selected Essays 1995–2015 (2016), among others.

The lecture has been kindly supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands in the Czech Republic.

Photo: Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse, 1993.