“The relationship between generations is at the heart of our struggle to avert a climate crisis. Architecture’s role is pivotal because it shapes our co-existence with others, with kin that have passed and those yet to come.”

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Adrian Lahoud is an Australian architect, urban designer and Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London. Adrian produced a moving project as part of the 2018 exhibition The Future Starts Here at the Victoria Albert Museum, London. With a large-scale immersive video installation entitled Climate Crimes, he explored the relationship between air pollution and refugee migration. The project used atmospheric data gathered by satellites to measure the cause and effect of pollution, tracing its path through the air and its disruption into the Earth’s climatic system as forms of drought, flood or fire. Climate Crimes illustrated the vast impact of climate change, the people it effects and correspondingly traps, irrespective of national borders, thus redefining a unified responsibility.

As the curator of the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial: Rights to Future Generations, from 9 November 2019 to 8 February 2020, he addresses the urgency of climate change and with a radical rethinking of architecture and its power to create and sustain alternative modes of existence, Adrian looks to the future of humans and their inhabited environment. 

Adrian believes that architecture “holds the key to all our shared futures” and asks us to think about the state of the environment in a time of climate change, considering cities, buildings, landscapes, nature and generations future generations as stakeholders to the future. Urban development and its relationship to the environment require solutions to face today’s challenges and long-term consequences. Architecture is imagined in an expanded sense with addressing housing, land rights, resource extraction, social impact, isolation and international trade. Incorporated in the Triennial and integral to the 2020 Summit and beyond is the intergenerational lens in creating a “we” to globally unite and take action.