The End of Starchitecture: Architecture Must Address Climate, Social Crises

The era of starchitects and iconic, expensive architecture is over. Architecture must now focus on research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and addressing real-world problems. Key challenges include climate change, with projections of 70-80 cm sea level rise in the North Adriatic within 60 years and a 1-meter rise by century's end threatening Venice's lagoon ecosystem. Social issues are urgent: 1.1 billion people live in extreme poverty, 125 million are refugees. Big Data, AI, and predictive models could inform public space design, mobility, and urban planning, but must also foster creativity. Architecture should return to sensory, embodied experience, drawing on neuroscience, mirror neurons (Parma school), and thinkers like Antonio Damasio, Lynn Margulis, and Donna Haraway. Empathy of spaces matters: proportions, light, color, and tactility affect well-being. Examples include the Parthenon's optical refinements by Phidias and Ictinus, Bernard Rudofsky's 1964 MoMA exhibition 'Architecture without Architects', and Mediterranean porticoes as altruistic architecture. Paolo Rinaldi, engineer and director of the eco-hydrology lab at EPFL Lausanne, warns of Venice's future. The article calls for abandoning myopic governance and reinventing architecture to serve the 98% rather than the 2%.