Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure
Sarah Williams Goldhagen I know. That’s why I asked. 28
Hubert Murray My feeling is that, as an architect, I can really affect some change in an institution. The hospital for which I work is forty million square feet and seemed like a good field in which to develop a public will about going sustainable and making the hospital green. In contrast to the universities, it’s actually a lot harder to develop a public will about a sustainability program, because what we don’t have in the hospitals is a constantly refreshed body politic of idealistic students. That population has proved to be a tremendous boost to the universities as they take the lead in sustainability programs and show municipalities and states where they need to go—not only in what is being built on the ground in the institutions, but what people are being taught to go out and do from the universities. In a hospital you’ve got a lot of sick people who have other things on their mind, so the strategy has to be different and the tactics have to be different. Marcel Smets I am relatively close to politics of the last four years because I live in this mandate, and what I constantly see is that our policies all over the world are organized in sectorial manner—we have ministers of environment, and there are different communities of public works, and there are different communities of naturalist preservation… Basically, what we are dealing with today in our crowded societies is space. Space is not sectorial. Space involves all these things at the same time. What we need is not a policy, what we need is a project. Sarah Williams Goldhagen What do you mean a project? Marcel Smets A project is something that involves all the sectors of policy making and starts out from the organization of space and from designing the details. This is where we need designers. Because social scientists have never been able to properly fill that need. We are the only profession that tries to resolve complex problems by operating in a designerly way.