Rethinking City Hall

Late June saw Barcelona hosting the UIA World Congress under the theme ‘Becoming: Architectures for a Planet in Transition’. Among its sessions was The Architect’s Blues, convened by C40 Cities at the Disseny Hub on 30 June — an examination of the crisis facing the profession: economic uncertainty, the urgency of decarbonization, and a shortage of affordable housing.

As part of this discussion, Laura Viscovich, Executive Director of the Holcim Foundation, sat down with Jacob Meyers — a Holcim Foundation Fellow and Emerging ChangeMaker who came through the Foundation’s 2025 Brussels Fellowship and the Emerging ChangeMaker Retreat in Zurich. Originally from Singapore and now completing his master’s in architecture at TU Delft, Meyers sits on the executive committee of Docomomo Singapore and researches the reuse potential of twentieth-century mass housing.

Laura Viscovich: At the Holcim Foundation, we’ve had the pleasure of supporting a number of fellows over the last couple of years, and we’ve heard today, Jacob, that there are multiple difficulties, constraints, challenges that perhaps people who were studying 30 or 40 years ago were not thinking about. In relation to these challenges — climate change being the major one — do you think about that as a constraint, or are you actually just thinking in a completely different way about the new way to design better?

Jacob Meyers: We definitely don’t think of them as constraints. We think of these pressures as the basis for a structural rethinking of what architects should be and what the architecture discipline should be. There’s a real acute awareness that architects and architecture have maybe struggled to find their agency in the world in addressing these pressing problems, and as a result there’s been a real push to expand the disciplinarity of architecture — to think about how we can not just make use of the existing tools that we have, but adopt new tools, new ways of thinking, that expand the remit of the design question into questions of economy, questions of land, questions of logistics. For young practitioners, it’s in this expanded disciplinarity where we feel the most exciting things are happening in architecture.

Laura Viscovich: There are many amazing solutions and innovations that you can draw upon to help the built environment. But it’s about the how: how you can connect better with city authorities to activate those innovations. Speaking on behalf of the next generation of citymakers, how do you think you could be helped to be bridged better with the decision-makers?

Jacob Meyers: As a bit of background, I’m involved in reuse advocacy, and engaging in these forms of advocacy alongside professional practice is an amazing way to engage with city authorities. There are also amazing initiatives like the C40 competitions, which are fantastic. But yesterday, architect Charlotte Malterre-Barthes said an amazing thing in her panel discussion: that architects need to become re-engaged with the boring work of attending meetings — showing up at local authority meetings. Maybe these are areas of work that we ceded to other specializations, or that we no longer feel we have a voice in, but it’s in these seemingly bureaucratic settings that architects can find a renewed voice. There is also an opportunity for architects to re-engage directly with the public sector. The conventional trajectory now is to graduate and go into private practice — yet in the 1960s, the vast majority of architects in Europe worked in the public sector. Maybe the public sector is where architecture should go back to.

Laura Viscovich: We spoke to the Mayor of Pristina, who won a Holcim Foundation Award last year, who is an architect, and who was really encouraging architects to get into the public sphere — so we echo that. And I’m interested that your background is Singaporean: you’ve practiced in Singapore, and you’ve been researching and practicing in the Netherlands. Is there anything Europe could learn from the Garden City, or vice versa, about this bridging between the discipline of architecture and the public sphere?

Jacob Meyers: Singapore is obviously an incredibly exceptional context, but the thing to learn is again the role of the public sector. There’s an immense quantity of public ownership of land, and the state remains the main public housing provider. These considerations are not unproblematic, but they are incredible virtues to think about in this day and age. More on the ground, the nature of advocacy and the relationship between the state and civil society in Singapore is quite uniquely non-adversarial. There’s a synergy between the state and civil society, and in my experience with reuse, that’s been a really productive relationship — to not treat it as an adversarial relationship between architects and public bodies, because we’re fighting for the same things.

Laura Viscovich: So we do have things to learn from Singapore. You participated with the Holcim Foundation in the Fellowship, and then the Emerging ChangeMaker program last year, where we really were trying to mix the disciplines. Was there one key takeaway — something you weren’t expecting to learn in that whole process?

Jacob Meyers: As part of the Holcim Foundation Fellowship program, we worked really closely with the people who lead the Brussels non-profit HouseEurope!, an organization that made it so clear to me how much of what architects do — or could do — to increase their agency in the world is an issue of communication. Architects have this incredible, maybe unrecognized, communicative skill set that we use in client meetings and in these more professional settings, but it is a huge asset we can use to cultivate an expanded agency in the world. That was an amazing takeaway from the fellowship program.

Laura Viscovich: That’s fantastic. We’re excited now — we’re supporting the C40 Students Reinventing Cities program, and we’ve got several fellows here today who have made proposals for 10 cities in the competition currently. From the Holcim Foundation perspective, we really want to support these spaces that enable people like yourselves to have that conversation — that door-opener to public authorities — and to be able to actually advance better building.