15 Must-Reads to Help You Prepare for 2022

How does one prepare for another uncertain year? By throwing one’s mind back, and remembering: we have been here before and prevailed. To help with that, the Metropolis team has gathered 15 must-reads below. Gathered into 5 themes, these selections from a year of painstaking reporting and thought-provoking analysis should help you prepare for the challenges that lie ahead in 2022.

PERSPECTIVES ON EQUITY

Why Aren’t Black Firms Working on Memorials to Slavery?
A new memorial in Virginia is the latest cultural project acknowledging a debt to enslaved African Americans. But the most high-profile commissions and contracts are hardly ever awarded to African-American firms.

Six Initiatives Model Ways to Practice True Design Justice
Across the globe, architects, designers, and planners are redefining what it means to be an advocate in the design professions.

Can Craft Save America?
A trio of exhibitions seeks to rediscover something about our nation through the work of its makers and artists.

A New Concept for Good Architecture: Embodied Justice
As the social justice movement thrives and the concept of embodied carbon shifts the climate conversation, architects and designers are reexamining the deep impact of their work.

PREPARING FOR THE METAVERSE

Form Follows Fantasy: The Rise of the “Dreamscapes” Movement
At the intersection of architecture and advertising, a new aesthetic movement in digital art blurs fact and fiction.

A Neon Pink Structure Rises in the Metaverse
Digital designers Benny Or and Cyril Lancelin discuss their four-story NFT environment, The Meeting Place, and the potentials for metaverse architecture.

RESPONSES TO THE PANDEMIC

What Makes the Perfect Workplace?
From virtual reality to circular design, here is Metropolis‘s vision for today’s dream office.

Can Manuals and Toolkits Help Us Design a Safer Present or Future?
Nearly a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, architecture and design firms across the country have shared numerous toolkits and manuals, but will they help build a future rooted in equity?

David Benjamin’s Venice Biennale Installation Makes the Case for Probiotic Living
While some experts seek to protect us from pathogens, others argue that we must learn to live with microbes.

A Pandemic-Conscious Blueprint for Architecture
How uniform standards applied across the built environment can protect our communities from COVID-19 and future pandemics.

THE OPPORTUNITY TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE

Biden Must Not Miss the Chance to Build Back Greener
A group of architecture, engineering, and construction firms call on the Biden administration to use the Build Back Better program to raise the bar on the industry’s sustainability.

The American Jobs Plan Should Help Us Avoid Climate Catastrophe, Not Build a Carbon Bomb
Billy Fleming, Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the American Jobs Plan and its implications for the design industry.

AROUND THE WORLD

Hong Kong’s New M+ Museum Is a Beautiful Study in Contradiction
Designed by Herzog & De Meuron, the impressive building asserts Hong Kong’s cultural ascendancy while also magnifying the region’s unescapable political tensions.

This is What Germany’s First Second-Hand House Looks Like
Outside of Hanover, Germany, a curious client and an innovative architecture office pushed the limits on the possibility of building with recycled materials.

6 Projects That Made the Netherlands a World Capital of Adaptive Reuse
A recent wave of large-scale projects is transforming five Dutch cities and encouraging creative reuse of derelict industrial sites around the world.

Source: metropolismag.com/