David Chipperfield speech
Corresponding Academic bestowal ceremony
Royal Galician Academy of Sciences
17 September 2025

On the occasion of his appointment as a corresponding member of the Royal Galician Academy of Sciences, David Chipperfield delivered the lecture Common Ground reflecting on contemporary environmental and social challenges and on the experience of Fundación RIA in Galicia.

First of all, let me say what a great honour it is to receive this acknowledgement. I feel rather unqualified for such treatment. I am neither a scientist nor am I Galician, and furthermore my Spanish is so poor that I must deliver this short acceptance speech in English. I want to focus my talk on the importance of our environment and how it influences our quality of life. I will try to explain how the challenges we have in developing and protecting our environment require us all – and especially my own profession – to react to the issues of climate change and social inequality. I will explain briefly why and how I have, alongside my other more conventional offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai, initiated my own environmental studio, Fundación RIA here in Santiago de Compostela. I will explain how we have developed a programme based on dialogue, research, societal collaboration and practical realisation through real projects.

As we all inevitably become more aware of the damage we have done to our natural environment, we must accept that the way we live now is threatening the way we will live in the future. The way we build our cities, our towns, our roads is not only damaging our environment but it is also promoting advantage and disadvantage, access and exclusion and undermines the very idea of an equitable society. As an increasing proportion of the population find it more difficult to house themselves and as the price of land and of rents escalates, we increasingly neglect to ensure that everyone by right should be provided with a secure and comfortable place as a human right and as the basis of quality of life.

The way we plan our towns, cities and villages is not only critical to our individual comfort and security, it also determines the quality of our social and civic life. This simple provision, individual comfort and security on the one hand, social and collective structure on the other, is one that has been proved in history as the basis of a healthy society, and yet one that has proved over the last 50 years to be increasingly difficult to deliver or protect. This cannot be about resource or ability but one of political will and commitment.

In my own city of London there can be no more explicit illustration of the phenomena of the commodification of architecture and of the city. The city has developed not as a response to human needs but as part of a global investment market. This construction is not about making a better city, the buildings do not conform to any idea other than the exploitation of land value. In this process the two fundaments of the way we made cities have been abandoned, that is the opportunity to represent collective values and to protect and enjoy the social and cultural complexity that comes with urban density.

Even at a more modest scale, building houses is not driven by any consideration of community or environment but by commercial forces and convenience. It demonstrates in the most explicit way that we have no mechanisms in place to safeguard those concerns, to represent our ideas of how we should live. Urban planning has been replaced by development control. Instead of determining where development should happen considering social and civic priorities, planning is reduced to trying to coordinate and make sense of market-driven energies. Planning no longer directs but follows along. The impending crisis of climate change and the growing crisis of social inequality mean that we can no longer regard these issues as unfortunate and as an expression of our time but ones that must be addressed if we are to truly confront these existential challenges.

In 2012 I was invited to be the director of the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The biennale alternates with the art biennale and is one of the most important events for the architectural community. Over the last 30 years it has tended to become a showroom of individual talent giving architects the opportunity to show their work and their design skills. At the time of my biennale I felt that as a profession we had to examine our collective contribution as well as our individual careers. We have like everyone been swept along in the energy of the consumerist society and found our tasks more determined by the priorities of the market rather than the concerns of society. Given the growing understanding that the wider construction and real estate sector contributes significantly to both environmental degradation and climate change, and has also done little to address the issue of affordable housing and secure environments that would reduce the growing issues of social inequality, we need to bring these concerns to the foreground.

In the biennale Common Ground, I challenged my colleagues to submit works that demonstrate collaborative initiatives between architects, showing how we can work together rather than promote and continue a competitive and rivalrous profession. I also invited them to show projects that were more directed towards the interests of community than to those of commerce. The cry was to the common good and that the idea of common ground was not only a metaphor of what we share but to remind us that it is also a physical reality.

The task of directing the biennale came shortly after completing a project that influenced my attitude to design and the role of collaboration not only between professional colleagues and clients but with the wider community. The reconstruction of the ruin of the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island engaged me and my office into a project that required not only conventional skills and responsibilities but also an engagement with the expectations, emotions and anxieties of the citizens of Berlin and Germany. The reunification of Germany was a huge project with enormous political, emotional, financial and physical implications. These issues were felt with particular focus in Berlin, a city totally contorted by the war and the subsequent partitioning of Germany. Split in half and then stranded deep into East German territory, West Berlin developed in the most artificial manner over the 50 years following the war. Both parts of the divided city became a heightened subject projecting their ideologies onto this exhausted physical place. With the collapse of the wall this poor city had to deal with its complex history once again.

Within this context the Neues Museum, which had remained a ruin throughout the GDR period, became a complex symbol and record of this history. Our project wasn’t a simple one of rebuilding. I had committed to an idea of rebuilding and repairing the monumental ruin in a way that protected the complex layers of history while making it once again into a functioning museum. It was an approach that irritated many Berliners who were rather fed up with history. There is a saying that all cities have history but Berlin has too much. The polemic approach, intellectually correct but emotionally difficult, made the project the subject of much attention and debate about how Berlin should deal with its complex past in the process of rebuilding itself.

I have no intention of explaining the project here, only to say that the experience forced us to see the complexity and challenges of the project not as a regrettable limitation but as the very purpose of the task. It taught us that dialogue and open reflection is the basis of a critical process. Our project could not be realised unless it engaged seriously with the contradictory concerns of the community, not only of Berlin but of Germany. Making this project depended on us framing and reframing the question at the same time as developing possible solutions and answers. The solution is to be found in the doing. The doing needs to be properly considered and articulated, strengthened by exposure rather than protected by being hidden.

We developed over the many years of planning a process of engagement, dialogue and participation that allowed us in the most transparent way to determine the design not as an a priori solution but one that grew out of an engaged process. The scepticism of the Berliners was a continuous presence in our concerns, not to be ignored but considered and engaged. The project was continuously the centre of discussion and I learnt how to take this discussion to the community. I believed it was my responsibility to the city and its people, in fact as a foreigner I had no right to behave otherwise. The results thankfully were well received, and the project was praised for exactly what we intended, a physically coherent project that brought together the past and the future, the negative results of destruction and the positive results of completion.

What does this have to do with Galicia and the work of the foundation? My family and I had spent every summer for the last 34 years on holiday in the small fishing town of Corrubedo. Gradually the two-week summer holiday became an annual two-month summer retreat for colleagues, staff, clients and friends. Our commitment to the region became substantial but it was still one of grateful visitors. The commitment was not accidental, we found in Galicia not only a beautiful nature and wonderful food but a culture that was direct and seemingly less worried about the aspirations that we find ourselves. As an architect I had always been irritated by the bad architecture and development of the typical towns and villages. Probably the coastal villages have suffered most and Ribeira can probably claim the title of the capital of “feísmo”. Being on holiday I accepted it and felt that it was at least an honest ugliness.

Finally, eight years ago I decided to accept the challenge to consider the factors that have been eroding the quality of the cities, towns and villages of the region over the last 50 years. Of course, these problems are not uniquely Galician or Spanish, as I have already explained, we can identify the same issues and tendencies everywhere. The situation is quite different from London to Galicia, but the factors are the same, we struggle everywhere to find a balance between development and protection. We struggle to include the complex and contradictory concerns into the way we develop our environment.

We have always complained about the way things change around even while there might be good reasons why decisions are made. We have needed to build, to develop industries and develop better systems of communication and connection. This is not in question. But as the scale of these operations gets bigger so does their consequence. As the dimension of these operations gets greater, decisions depend increasingly on political will and commercial realities. As this process becomes more complex the place of result becomes more and more detached from the place of decision, and those that decide become further from those affected. This is not a conspiracy, it’s not a question of blame or politics, it’s a contemporary challenge that we shouldn’t ignore.

We can dismiss these issues as mistakes or acts of ignorance, we can justify them as the price of progress, we can accept things as somehow inevitable. We can also get confused about cause and effect. Is this place ugly because of the buildings and therefore it’s just a problem of design, or are the design of the buildings a consequence of a larger problem and they are the expression not the cause? Perhaps we are just nostalgic, we all remember when our towns were more beautiful and we regret what has happened to them. Of course, we can look back at how things were and imagine a more harmonious time forgetting the significant social and human advances we have made in the meantime. It is difficult to select which bits of progress we want and which we don’t. But if we allow ourselves to romanticise the past we can see in this an idea of a relationship between human activity, built environment and nature. A relationship that has been lost in our contemporary arrangement. While we might have only lamented this loss before, we must now consider this more seriously, not just as a picturesque memory but as a symbol of our contemporary condition, one that is determined by our dysfunctional relationship with the nature we depend on. This triangle has been eroded and our physical and natural environment is undeniable proof.

We can’t put things back, unwinding the mistakes, but we can try to be more aware of the consequences of our actions and we can try to repair the damage. But this is only possible if we accept that it is a problem. We have become surprisingly accommodating of such situations, they have become a new normality, pushed away by citizens as something that seems uncomfortable but inevitable and by politicians as something too complex and sensitive to deal with. As we become more conscious of the effects of the damage we have created globally, we begin to realise that such situations cannot be seen only as a shame and visually disturbing but otherwise without significant harm. We now see such things not only for what they are but what they stand for. They represent our failings to anticipate the harmful consequence of apparently harmless decisions, not just in the place but as a cumulative erosion of our environment.

Even actions made with the best of intentions within the limits and pressures of an operative process, keeping traffic working, responding to needs and priorities. No one is purposely damaging our streets, our towns and villages or our natural environment, but as a society we have set priorities and targets without sufficient understanding of their results and without sufficient reaction to the consequences.

The environmental crisis that now confronts us requires us to reconsider the way we live and the way we make decisions. We must anticipate the consequences of how we develop our environment. We must develop decision-making processes that are currently inevitably and understandably dominated by short-term results to become more determined by long-term effects.

As architects and planners, we must take care about why we build, what we build, where we build. The answers are not so simple and not easy to confront within the constraints of conventional commercial practice. Eight years ago I decided to set up an independent studio dedicated to these issues. If in normal practice we are constrained by the limits of each project, unable to question but only to give creative answers, I was interested to question these limits. Free of limits and free of clients we can ask the questions: Why is the centre of this town full of traffic? Why are there so many empty buildings and yet we continue to build on green land? Why are the villages in the rural being abandoned? Of course, these questions beckon answers which we try to address and these answers require us to go far from our professional subject or knowledge. Once we accept that decisions require us to connect issues together we return to the task of engagement, consultation, collaboration, communication. We have addressed our concerns about the environment and its challenges, through real projects and more recently through the public program of Casa RIA where we try to use our building as a place of exhibition, dialogue and research.

The ambitions and criteria of the foundation are quite direct. They are founded on a number of overriding beliefs that are not scientific but seem to have substance. Firstly, that the physical, environmental, social and commercial conditions that exist in Galicia give it a great opportunity to achieve sustainability targets more easily than might be possible in other regions or parts of the world. This premise is based on the fact that the region is not dominated by major metropolitan centres, that it contains a high proportion of forested land, a productive food system that is still small scale and a community that is very committed to its natural qualities and with a great understanding of the ways of nature both on land and sea. With this knowledge comes an understanding and culture that has not been extinguished even under the forces of modern society.

I will attempt to summarise what we believe will secure a sustainable future for the region, both in terms of natural and built environment and from a social and commercial one: to protect and develop the natural environment, considering it as the region’s greatest asset, its natural capital; to consider the region as a territorial unit balancing commercial development within the overall environmental and social framework; to strengthen the planning and governance systems to support a territorial approach that engages local conditions, knowledge and experience within well strategic and coordinated policy frameworks; to encourage innovation, development and inward investment of the traditional food and forestry sectors, especially considering the development of secondary and tertiary industries; to prioritise practical and vocational training and development in these sectors in order to increase employment opportunities within the dispersed communities; to create employment opportunities by investing and developing secondary industries as an extension of the primary productive industries of food and forestry; to develop the communications and transport system consistent to the challenges of a dispersed community; to re-qualify and repair urban damage in cities, towns and villages by prioritising conventional urban, social and civic values and needs.

The only way such targets can be achieved is by common effort and through common responsibility. It cannot be the sole responsibility of the government nor should we be relying on the extraordinary examples of various individual initiatives. The challenge must be embraced as a common one, it needs to be concentrated into a collective mission. We should not be reliant upon or hindered by conventional politics. Issues of environment are beyond politics.

After 40 years working all over the world as an architect I have become familiar with the difficulty of trying to resolve idealistic targets with practical realities. We all live our lives in this ambiguous territory but in a professional condition it is quite defining. In planning is it possible to even imagine targets if they don’t seem practical given the conditions? On the other hand, doing only what is possible, realisable, feasible politically or financially means that our environment can only be the consequence of practical actions. How can we articulate criteria, give them status without them looking naïve or unrealistic? Our environment is the consequence of the realistic.

The projects of the foundation try to operate by accepting these two conditions. We believe that it is critical to realise results and by definition this limits the dimension and scale of the project. However, we consider each ‘realisable’ project to be located within a larger target. For example, the work we have done on the A305 can be dismissed as a local improvement of sidewalks and traffic, which it is, but its mission is part of a larger idea of protecting the urban character of the town which has been somewhat destroyed by the effects of a main traffic road cutting it in half. We have, working with the Xunta, with the local mayor and with the community, managed to develop a modest project that tries to repair this condition at least within the limits of what is possible. This initiative is part of a bigger idea about reducing the negative effects of traffic, improving shared transportation and repairing the fabric of the towns by giving priority to pedestrians over cars.

In order to develop the idea along the many towns of the A305 we also need to think how such projects can be commissioned and realised and more importantly how public infrastructure works can address not only the issues of practicality and engineering but also become more socially inclusive projects considering the civic, aesthetic and communal qualities of the town. With the support of the Marta Ortega Foundation we have developed the urban and traffic guidelines and launched a competition in order to ensure that the task is given the importance it deserves. This is one of many competitions that we are organising. We believe that defining the task and commissioning and controlling the process is fundamental to developing more embedded projects of intervention and protection.

We start as architects, looking at the derelict buildings or brutal roads crossing badly planned urban centres. As soon as you look a bit further, just a few metres away, you are already in the rural, a productive landscape so defined by the local resources and ways of production. The changes over the last 50 years have radically transformed the way in which we manage the land, our resources and ecosystems. The progresses of industrialisation and the anxiety of being modern have transformed over only 50 years the balances of our ecosystems, a sectionalisation of the topics (agriculture, forestry, urban) without considering the interdependencies and ecological balances. We have looked at our territory as a map, separating layers and without considering the role of local communities, and the territorial organisation of villages in this system. We are now suffering effects of these unbalances, unstoppable wildfires that are fed by the effects of rural abandonment, monofunctional plantations, and depopulation.

Barbanza Ecosocial Lab, a collaboration between Fundación RIA and the University of Santiago de Compostela, has been working with the local forest communities of the region for more than five years, supporting their initiatives with technical advice, governance assistance, funding contributions and communication actions. Applied sciences, planning institutions and community action have been combined under the common ground of the common good. The mission: to achieve a more resilient territory in a region where recurring wildfires are putting at risk not only the biodiversity, but the people’s lives and the economic income of thousands of families that live off the sea resources of the rías Arousa and Muros.

There can be few places that better illustrate the reality of common ground than the mountain communities. Common land represents approximately 20% of the Galician territory. While being in some ways anachronistic in our modern world, these communities, rather than being only a representation of another time and another way of life, can be seen as a way of caring about our landscape and the community.

Last week, this project was recognized by the Ministry of Ecological Transition as one of the 39 flagship projects of their more than thousand granted initiatives. It is not needed to say how honoured we are to receive this award, as coordinators of this project. But in this task, we must give credit to the local communities that bravely have taken the responsibility of accepting this challenge, accepting the big task which is managing an important European-funded grant.