Rights of Future Generations

On May 25, 2018 in Venice, Adrian Lahoud, curator of the inaugural edition of Sharjah Architecture Triennial, announced the theme to an audience of invited guests attending the vernissage of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale:

Rights of Future Generations is an invitation to radically rethink fundamental questions about architecture and its power to create and sustain alternative modes of existence. The last decades have seen a massive expansion in rights, yet this expansion has failed to address long-standing challenges around environmental change and inequality. A focus on rights to health, education, and housing as individual rights has obscured collective rights such as rights of nature and environmental rights. At the same time, the conceptualisation of rights as basic standards reduces the diversity of human existence to mere subsistence within a universal minimum.

These deeply-held preconceptions, expressed in very basic ideas like shelter, continue to inform how we think about architecture as something that protects us from the environment, or as some primordial need that exists irrespective of the existential differences between societies. The same is true for concepts like habitat that are deployed in the same way and by the same institutions. This colonial legacy has never ceased informing the kinds of desires and ambitions the discipline and the profession authorizes. Any emancipatory project will have to start with this condition.

Rights of Future Generations questions how inheritance, legacy, and the state of the environment are passed from one generation to the next, how present decisions have long-term intergenerational consequences, and how other expressions of co-existence, including indigenous ones, might challenge dominant western perspectives. Turning to alternative concepts of architecture and the environment, Sharjah Architecture Triennial will focus on moments where experiments with architectural and institutional forms collaborate to generate new social realities. Architecture's power is fundamentally propositional and pedagogical. Design is an opportunity to bring alternative modes of existence into being, including new concepts of what buildings, cities, landscapes, and territories are. In order to do that effectively, architecture has to find ways of working alongside institutions that are able to structure the protocols, habits and rituals that organize lives according to these new ideas."

Lahoud further explained that the theme emerges as a radical proposal within indigenous struggles and international law: Rights of Future Generations aims to fundamentally challenge the way we think about designing societies and environments, with important implications for architecture, urban design, and planning. The exploration of this concept both within the context of the Arabic-speaking world and the Global South is at the heart of the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

Motivated by the unique circumstances faced by architects, scholars, planners and artists in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and South and Southeast Asia—from non-existent or fragmented archives, to restrictions on travel, or the absence of institutional support—Lahoud aims to use the occasion of our inaugural edition to create a platform for dialog between an emerging generation of architects drawn from across the region, and its diaspora.