Architecture as a gauge of morality

Ann Dingli reviews the 2022 World Architecture Festival held in Lisbon at the end of November.

In 2013, a retrospective of the late architect Richard Rogers’s work at the Royal Academy in London positioned “cities as a high point in human achievement”.

A year later, Rogers gave the keynote speech at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore, discussing the city as a structure that supports the meeting of people – an economic framework for creating an exchange of goods and an exchange of ideas.

Almost 10 years later, the World Architecture Festival is still going, this year taking its stage in the ever-winsome city of Lisbon. This edition ran to a single-word theme, ‘Together’, yet its content addressed the concept only arbitrarily, instead tying more closely to Roger’s focus on cities as a measure of humanity’s performance, with individual building projects by and large being framed by their designers within their broader contextual narrative.

In 2022, however, the scope of focus moved beyond the city, encapsulating urbanity at evermore macro scales, at times scrutinising urban dynamics beyond the metropolis to cover nations at large, and in the case of keynote speaker...