Y E A H !
Much of our discipline’s history is based on events of physical convergence and the ideological divergence occurring at these events. Manifestos, charters, mantras and dogmas have eventually become their product, consumed by generations of architects and planners thereafter.
While we seem to have lost the gusto to exchange ideas and experiences, to confront the debate, to articulate or stutter a vision for tomorrow, new specialists, consultants, managers (you call them) today package strategies about futures of the built environment and sell them in our name.
However, the risks and responsibilities, the pains and pleasures of planning, plotting and building, and the value of such economical, technical, social and political experiences is only difficultly equaled.
Harbored by post-pandemic all-in European comforts, war at the gates, gathering for the sake of sharing experiences and cultures is not merely an option, it’s a responsibility for an upcoming generation.
A generation that is assisting professorships or starting own academic positions in notorious institutions, conducting research and publishing essays but also and foremost designing and building first seminal projects. Trans-European networks of colleagues, fellows, friends, a web of equally fascinated and envious followers suddenly become identifiable.
Luxembourg merely is a satellite to this web, for its young and precarious Master program is pulling hard on the strings of the network but seemingly without succeeding (yet) in implanting the grains of emerging practices. Nevertheless, the high pressure on the planning and building sector, the frenetic (hyper)activity of the market, the recent past experiences and upcoming challenges make it a nurturing ground to discover and discuss alternatives in architecture. Supply and demand.
Festival, congress, conference: Young European Architecture Happening! gathers an unestablished and/or upcoming generation of architects, makers and thinkers of the built environment on the European scale, in order to exchange ideas, visions and experiences with the larger public in a casual setting.
YEAH ! is both a pretentiously sophisticated acronym and a deliberately simplistic affirmation.