Future Human Visionaries #5 — Wouter Vantisphout on societal engineering

Welcome to Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to futurological thinkers brought to you by Future Human and the V&A. We seek out people who are reimagining innovation in their field, and ask them to apply their intelligence to emerging trends.

Wouter Vantisphout is the founder of the Crimson Architectural Historians Collective, and works at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Rather than operate in an academic context, Wouter and the Crimson Collective apply their expertise to live architectural projects.

He explains how the Crimson Collective transformed a 1960s modernist utopian social housing project in the Rotterdam town of Hoogvliet. By 2000 the town had fallen into a pattern of deindustrialisation, social ghettoisation and criminal activity until Crimson Collective realised a ‘techno pastoral’ vision of the town, which was focused on a very moral ideal of public social activity that became celebrated around the world. What role can architects play in shaping the values of a society? And can the social housing projects of the 21st century learn from the failures of past architectural utopians? Presented by Jack Gwilym Roberts.