The Power of Youth

Exhibition The Power of Youth. Young Architects in the Field of Design

Twelve young architects who have ventured into the world of design.

One of the definitions of design, in this case industrial design,  is that it “studies function and form – and the connection between product, user, and environment.”[1] For the field of architecture, the definition could be rephrased as follows, as one of many possible partial definitions of the practice: architecture is the exploration of function and form, with the essential link between the built environment, the user and the environment. Design and architecture meet in defining the relationship between form and function, and in their relationship to the user and the environment – what is different is their scale of activity. Are architects good designers? Why do architects take up design, especially young ones? What are their views, their working principles, what guides, inspires and bothers them? These were just some of the questions posed by the exhibition The World Stands on Youth! Architects in the field of design.

The connection, even an overlap, between the fields of design and architecture is of course not accidental. Architecture is an ancient profession, while (industrial) design emerged after the Industrial Revolution, it only really gained momentum in the 20th century, and developed with high modernism and the Bauhaus school. Throughout history, many of the objects that are now part of the design canon were designed by architects: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Arne Jacobson, Gio Ponti, Zaha Hadid, and Patricia Urquiola, to name but a few of such names.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design (31 July 2022).