MONU #28 on "Client-Shaped Urbanism" released

“Are architects at risk of losing their relevance to the client?” asks Beatriz Ramo in her contribution “Sympathy for the Devil” for MONU’s issue #28 that we devote to the topic of "Client-shaped Urbanism". We consider “clients” to be crucial participants in the shaping and creating of urban spaces. We intend to find out how to improve things, such as the collaboration between client and architect or urban designer, for a more satisfying outcome for everybody involved and above all for the users and inhabitants of cities. For Alejandro Zaera-Polo architects today have not only lost the trust of clients, but also the trust of society to deliver anything culturally significant, because they have been fooling around with idiotic, self-involved ideas for too long and are now viewed with some level of distrust, as he claims in our interview entitled “Project Managers and the End of the Dominatrix Architect”. But he partly blames the clients too for this situation. On the one hand, client...