Wall Street Journal Magazine — “John Lithgow, Jeanne Gang and More on Status Quo”
September 7, 2016
Joining John Lithgow, Claire Messud, and Louis Fishman, Jeanne Gang weighs in on “the status quo” as part of the Wall Street Journal Magazine’s Soapbox: The Columnists series.
“The very nature of architecture concerns change. Design requires a strategic plan of action for the future; it’s progressive by definition. For a certain generation of architects, change only pertains to buildings’ ‘style.’ This is a very status quo approach, which can limit architecture’s potential in multiple ways. To me, climate change and other major challenges we face today require innovative design and delivery methods. This entails expanding the definition of what architecture is and the range of people who practice it. Architects can act as agents of change in order to build sustainably and meet the varied needs and aspirations of society, but we must develop new modes of thinking. Supporting a more diverse generation of practitioners to address these challenges will pave the way for innovation, but strangely there’s still resistance to this within our profession. For a field that’s about change, it’s self-defeating.”
Image courtesy of the Wall Street Journal