Deirdre & Nicholas McDermott
Co-founders & Partners, Future Expansion (FE)
The Instrumental Past
Architecture comes into being as a sequence of decisions we make in the present while thinking, more or less, about the future. The architect, as the expert in this scenario, operates in the role of the fortune teller. Unlike the fortune teller, however, the architect has a hand in making the built future tangible. This is an opportunity and it is the past that informs our ideas about what to project forward. But the past is slippery, hard to access, and ultimately a thoroughly designed artifact itself. This lecture presents the work of Future Expansion (FE) within context of the instrumental past. This talk is the first of a three part sequence. The second will consider potentials of the present, with its brief window of action, while the third will look forward toward possible futures and ways in which we plan for context and change over time.
