Down To Earth. Designing For The Endgame

This book about designing in times of climate crisis – the endgame is a given, we are smack dab in the middle of it – is the concluding project of DOWN TO EARTH, the antitypical 9th edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. In a world in lockdown, chief curator George Brugmans turned the traditional biennale model inside out and focused on completely unfolding the IABR–Ateliers’ research on how to use the energy transition and water issue as leverage to find real world solutions to help realize the world community’s sustainable development goals..

In the first part of this visually rich book, How can we land?, Brugmans reports on this research, anchoring it in the history of the IABR as a cultural research institute aimed at real change, and describing the exhibited results. This also makes the book a retrospective catalogue of a series of seven smaller exhibitions that were organized across a year and in different locations from September 2020, as the pandemic permitted..

In the second part, Where Can We Land?, including an essay by Dirk Sijmons and an account of a conversation between teachers and students at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design, George Brugmans reflects on our complex presence in the Anthropocene, argues for a new art policy as a condition for a truly free creative space, and makes suggestions to designers and imaginers on how to take a stand now that the endgame is the human condition..