History

The Guild emerged between the financial crisis of 2008 and the Pandemic of 2020, as global and local social, political, economic and ecological tensions were amplified by the instantaneous nature of digital technology. The broad adoption of such media began to create a cumulative ‘present shock’—a state of anxiety in which people try to keep up with the ever-increasing speed and immediacy of time—and ‘future shock,’ the consequences of “too much change in too short a period of time.” This acceleration, combined with a fragmented, siloed, extractive and politicized economic system (capitalism) diverted attention from the rapidly deteriorating planetary ecology.

The birth of the Guild acknowledged a departure point from the Industrial/Machine Age worldview currently dominating human social-systems to a quantum/living system paradigm—and the shift in perception and human consciousness that resulted. Buckminster Fuller is among numerous individuals who have discussed this paradigm shift. In the 1970s, he proclaimed that mankind had unprecedented resources that would allow everyone on the Earth to have a high standard of living. Founder Sharon Chang articulates this presumption of resource abundance in defining future architecture while acknowledging a crucial missing element: systems-level design that centers the value of beauty, defined as “experiencing life with a profound appreciation of our connections to one another and the worlds within and around us.”

Informed by traditions from many places and times, an alternative cultural worldview is re-emerging based on a profound understanding of the interdependence of all living things. The process of bringing people together to articulate and manifest the intangible, invisible and impossible—by putting languages, systems, and practices in place to honor our interdependence —is part of the core foundation for future architecture, as is the importance of collaborative authorship to address current and future challenges.

Major influences include the authors of works such as Collective Wisdom, Design Justice, Emergent Strategies, Doughnut Economics, Project Drawdown, and Race After Technology. (GoFA_SC_language_authored_113020)