An Architect's Journey

An Architect's Journey - Mastering Future Trends in the Anthropocene is about mastering the perilous forces of the Anthropocene, as it threatens, changes, and redefines the future of architecture and the world as we know it. An accomplished architect and author, Larry Wolff, demonstrates how readers can embrace inevitable revolutionary climate change by leveraging the experiences, insights, and trends gained by bridging the most significant period of transition to occur ever within the time of contemporary architecture. An Architect's Journey provides the tools, methods, and strategies to make architecture vitally important again. The future directions defining the next few decades support a long-range forecast for unlimited professional opportunity mixed with turbulence, uncertainty, and peril. There is a clear consensus the future will be entirely different from anything ever known before.

Wolff details compelling realities and provides invaluable strategies and tools to master future outcomes. An Architect's Journey is a comprehensive guide and textbook written from an architect's perspective to help solve and transcend today's daunting global complexities. It supersedes past green case studies, checklist-driven sustainability recipe books and instead establishes ways to move the profession forward in profound and meaningful ways. Few established architects become authors, and even fewer write about architecture in ways that both demand and inspire change in the design domain. The result is a detailed compendium revealing the 26 trends challenging the profession giving readers new approaches and potential solutions to shape the future of the built environment. No other book addresses this need.

Architecture has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous two centuries, and these changes will accelerate significantly more in the next 30 years. As a result, much of what an architect did not so long ago has become obsolete. To succeed, architects must strive for positions of leadership, contradict the status quo, expand common thinking, behave unconventionally, abandon exclusive theories, innovate from a framework of multiple perspectives, and skillfully navigate the consequences of difficult choices and actions through informed, collaborative, and integrative practices to meet the future expectations of society. Thus, we should all expect much more from architecture than its present and limited condition and Holocenic devotion. An imaginative and creative architect, deeply involved within the urban fabric, must perform at the highest levels under the diverse array of many spotlights. As such, the very essence of architecture is to serve humanity and the environment.

Compared to the building industry, no other professional sector will significantly impact tomorrow's quality of life. People, places, ecology, and technology are the most critical issues facing the design profession, and architects need to recognize and treat them as such. An Architect's Journey reads like both a compelling novel and a profound textbook, while it draws a stunning culmination of present trends as it paints breathtaking thresholds into the future. The prose and images combine to deliver an unforgettable rite of passage into the architecture profession--loaded with invaluable insights for the novice, student, and veteran.