In Jan Dalley's FT piece, the British architect expresses his concerns about architecture as a mere tool of the free market, the shrinking role of architects as society builders, and why we are building "horrible cities."
David Chipperfield again explains his commitment to a different architecture, with the architecture social role. A few days ago he had published a letter about the silence of the RIBA face the drift of Brexit and the loss in his country of the social values that have characterized Europe. Now, he again express in this article in Financial Times, ideas on the commodification of architecture,
 
“I think architecture is in a sort of crisis,” says David Chipperfield. “We’ve lost our social purpose. What we are seeing now is construction as a product of investment. We are building a lot, but we are building big investment projects, as if we’re doing architecture without architecture. It’s more about investment than it is about urbanism. We used to be involved in planning and building cities, building societies. But now we are discussing housing as if it were a strange product like washing machines...
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David Chipperfield was born in London in 1953 and studied architecture at the Kingston School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London before working at the practices of Douglas Stephen, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster.

In 1985 he founded David Chipperfield Architects, which today has over 300 staff at its offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai.

David Chipperfield has taught and held conferences in Europe and the United States and has received honorary degrees from the universities of Kingston and Kent.

He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA). In 2009 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2010 he received a knighthood for services to architecture in the UK and Germany. In 2011 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture and in 2013 the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, while in 2021 he was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in recognition of a lifetime’s work.

In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

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Published on: May 16, 2018
Cite: "We’ve lost our social purpose. We are discussing housing as if it were a strange product like washing machines..." METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/weve-lost-our-social-purpose-we-are-discussing-housing-if-it-were-a-strange-product-washing-machines> ISSN 1139-6415
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