Responses in Responsibility

The urgent challenges of our time confront designers with less familiar modes of responsibility. In a world disrupted by social and environmental crises, they are forced to navigate between regulations, ecological commitment, building conventions and economic constraints.

This Architecture Review Flanders N°16 shows how care is a recurring attitude of both designers and clients in addressing these challenges. This responsibility is expressed in careful approaches to renovating existing structures, ecological innovations that go beyond the norm, participatory processes for collective living, and the recognition of diversity in both society and the architectural field. Twenty-one projects, eleven essays and six photographers not only highlight the human, financial, material and ecological aspects of the built environment, but also investigate the democratic content of decision-making processes.