All That’s Solid

I am not an especially early riser. So I did not wake up at 5 a.m. to catch the start of The World Around’s “In Focus” summit. I missed the morning session, which was given over to collaborative design practices; perhaps more crucially, I missed the introductory remarks from Beatrice Galilee and Aric Chen, which may have helped to elucidate the day’s organizing rubric, “precarity.” I was able to log on in time to catch the second session at 8 a.m., about mitigating the effects of climate change. There, Rosario Hevia, founder of Ecocitex, inventor of the world’s only 100-percent-recycled yarn, and Maarten Gielen, of the cooperative design practice Rotor, laid bare the destructiveness of the fashion and building industries, respectively, before illustrating their investment in circular economies. In the third and final section, urban planner Alexander Schevchenko, founder of ReStart Ukraine, looked ahead to the challenges of reconstruction in the country, while architect Manuel Herz discussed a synagogue he designed at Babyn Yar in Kyiv, a mass burial site containing the remains of Ukrainian Jews, Roma, and others massacred by the Nazis. (Estimates put the number at 100,000.) Opened in 2021, the synagogue embraces lightness and color in a way that breaks with typical architectural approaches to Holocaust memorials, Herz said. “There is a stupid equation that if a crime is very heavy, the architecture to commemorate it must also be very heavy,” rendered in grim, gray concrete. Would it not be better, he suggested, to celebrate “the beauty of life”? Yet Herz acknowledged the challenge of maintaining this position—of staying alert to the nuances of blues and greens—amid the “black-and-white” situation of war. In addition to physical instability caused by climate change and global conflict, it’s clear that a building’s meaning, too, is precarious.