Joshua Ramus of REX lectures on “Empowerment”

Believing architecture should actively empower its users and communities—not simply be a representational art—REX advances building paradigms and promotes the agency of architecture. This ethos guides the studio’s aspiration to produce inventive designs so functionally specific that they offer new and inspiring aesthetic experiences. Across typologies, REX has found architecture’s most powerful tools for empowerment to be new forms of flexibility. However, despite an increased need to accommodate change, contemporary architecture still relies on the antiquated modernist vision of flexibility: a blank slate (or white cube or black box) upon which any activity can occur. This approach has historically produced banal, sterile architecture, and the intellectual and economic costs to reconfigure these architectural tabula rasae have become prohibitive. New concepts of flexibility must and can be advanced.