Winston Churchill said: «First we create houses, and then houses create us». The phrase is familiar, but how can it get along in our minds, with the thesis that first we must get rich, create ourselves, and only then we will be able to create beautiful houses, beautiful architecture...
The last Pritzker laureate is Diébédo Francis Kéré from the country of Burkina Faso, with a GDP of $800 per capita, where 20 million people live. And the choice of the jury seems to hint to the whole world that we have forgotten, architecture always comes first. No matter what the economic situation is in the country, you can always build a good school, and not just a good one, but one that will become an architectural masterpiece, and the children who will go there will have a chance to create themselves at the same high level at which the school was created.
You can do such a thought experiment:
You walk the streets of a modern European city with a GDP of 50-60 thousand per capita and the architecture motivates you, you don't understand how it was made, that everything is so beautiful... That there are people who united in the most complex incomprehensible systems and arranged this beauty. You subconsciously set these people as an example and when you come home you want to develop and work, learn languages, travel... And be a similar effective part of the system that managed to build this complex project, like on the scheme below:
But when you go around the city with a GDP of 1-5 thousand per capita, look on the asphalt with dirt, look at these terrible panels-houses with air conditioners and you understand exactly how it was done, and it could have been done much better, you have no motivation to get on the same level with the system that builds these "cubes" and roll the sidewalks into asphalt below the ground level so that when it rains, all the mud from the ground above the sidewalk washes out and flows onto your feet and under your wheels...
So it turns out that the primary is architecture, not GDP. First, we create houses, and then houses create us!