On 29 May, Francisco Mangado officially became a member of the French Academy of Architecture, speaking in French on Crisis Against Architecture after a laudatio delivered by Pablo Katz, the institution’s current president.
The architect from Navarre presented a decalogue of factors in society that have led to a deterioration affecting the very essence of the profession, which, as he said, is thus reduced to a mere object of the market. Among other things he spoke of how the corporate imposes on the individual, annulling the creative and risk-taking part of architecture. This promotes specialization as the way to organize knowledge. “Our work is fundamentally a work of synthesis. We manage countless variables and specific bodies of knowledge, but the architectural project, informed by all of them, is much more than a linear sum of solutions to each problem,” he stated…
