The dominant narrative around AI and employment goes something like this: artificial intelligence will progressively learn to do your job, and one day, it will replace you. This is a compelling story, neatly packaged for headlines. It is also, for the most part, the wrong story. The real mechanisms through which AI is destroying jobs are far less photogenic - rooted not in the technology itself, but in the perception of what it might become, and in the financial engineering that perception enables.

Consider the unfolding saga of Paramount's bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — a deal now valued at around $82 billion. As Scott Galloway observed on a recent episode of Prof G Markets, when you overpay for an asset at this scale, the arithmetic demands that you find ‘efficiencies’ on the other side. The deal will be heavily leveraged. Debt must be serviced. And the primary lever available to service that debt is labour cost - which is to say, people. AI provides the narrative cover. The acquirer doesn't announce mass redundancies, it announces a "transformation programme" underpinned by artificial intelligence. The language of innovation softens what is, in essence, a very old playbook.

This is not unique to media. Grant Thornton's global private equity tracker reveals the increasingly dominant role of leveraged buyouts across sectors that were previously insulated from this kind of financial intervention - housing, retail, healthcare, professional services. The logic is always the same: acquire, leverage, extract efficiency, return capital to a few limited partners. AI has become the newest and most compelling justification for the "efficiency" part of that equation, which has always been code for reducing headcount.

But here is the critical nuance. It is extraordinarily difficult for AI, in its current form, to replace an entire job. A job, however, is a collection of tasks. AI can replace individual tasks with increasing competence. The question is not whether AI can be an architect, a lawyer, or a financial analyst, but whether AI can perform enough of the tasks within those roles to fundamentally alter the economics of employing a human to do them. We are not there yet, but the perception that we are, or soon will be, is doing real work in the world.

Sinead Bovell articulated this precisely on a recent episode of her podcast. Some companies, she noted, are not laying off employees because their jobs have been automated. They are laying off employees to become leaner in anticipation of a transformation they believe is coming. Others are cutting staff directly to redirect capital toward AI infrastructure. In both cases, the driver is perception — a bet on a future that has not yet arrived.

This perceptual pressure operates on employees as well as employers. If you believe, rightly or wrongly, that your employer could plausibly replace elements of your role (or your whole job) with AI, your bargaining power diminishes. You become more compliant, less likely to negotiate, less likely to push back. The mere possibility of replacement disciplines the workforce without a single algorithm being deployed. This is not a side effect. For many organisations, it is the point.

And as robotics, world models, and physical automation mature, this phenomenon will migrate beyond white-collar work. The same financial logic - acquire, leverage, automate, extract - will apply to warehousing, logistics, manufacturing, and service work.

AI, then, poses an enormous threat to job security globally. But the threat operates primarily through perception and financial engineering, not through the one-for-one replacement of workers that dominates the public conversation.

The real engine of disruption is not the technology. It is the story we tell about the technology, and the capital structures that story enables.

Why a Doomsday AI Blog Wiped Out $300 Billion

Podcast Episode · Prof G Markets · 25 February · 36m

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AI Can’t Do Your Job. So Why Are Companies Laying Off Employees?

Podcast Episode · I’ve Got Questions with Sinead Bovell · 4 November 2025 · 17m

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Yesterday, Autodesk invested $200 million in World Labs, the world model AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, as part of a $1 billion funding round. While the architectural software industry debates the contours of BIM 2.0, Autodesk appears to have leapfrogged the conversation entirely.

World models are AI systems that generate and reason about three-dimensional environments. Unlike the large language models powering ChatGPT and Claude, which predict text, world models attempt to understand spatial context, physics, and geometry. As Li put it: "If AI is to be truly useful, it must understand worlds, not just words”.

This isn't a fringe bet. Yann LeCun, another titan of AI research, recently launched his own world model startup, AMI Labs, reportedly seeking a $3.5 billion valuation. Google DeepMind and Runway are also in the space. The people who built the foundations of modern AI are converging on the same conclusion: understanding three-dimensional reality is the next frontier.

And Autodesk, which already underpins architectural, engineering, construction, and entertainment workflows globally, has positioned itself at the centre of it.

Why This Matters for Architecture

The AEC industry has spent the last two years talking about BIM 2.0. As AEC Magazine's Martyn Day has documented, this has mostly manifested as a wave of startups tackling individual components of the design process, typically the ideation and concept stage, using generative AI trained on existing BIM data. Think AI-assisted massing studies, plan generation, and code compliance checking. Useful incremental improvements, but fundamentally operating within the same paradigm: you still draw buildings in software that works more or less like it did a decade ago.

Autodesk is already developing what it calls "neural CAD" - generative AI models trained on geometric data that can reason about components and entire systems, producing functional 3D models rather than images. The World Labs partnership extends this capability from individual design files toward holistic digital representations of physical environments. Autodesk's chief scientist Daron Green described a workflow where you might start with a world-model-generated sketch of an office layout, then drill into specific design elements using Autodesk's precision tools — or place a precisely modelled object into a world-model-generated context.

If this works, the implications are profound. You wouldn't start a project by opening Revit and placing walls. You'd describe or sketch an environment and let the AI generate a spatially coherent, physically plausible starting point that you then refine.

What This Means for the Competition

Meanwhile, Nemetschek — parent company of Archicad, Vectorworks, and a portfolio of AEC tools, continues to invest in improving its traditional software. Better interoperability, cloud features, AI-assisted drafting tools. These are genuine improvements for today's users. But they are improvements to a paradigm that Autodesk may be preparing to make obsolete.

The uncomfortable question for Nemetschek and others is this: if world models mature to the point where spatial environments can be generated, understood, and manipulated by AI systems that reason about physics and geometry natively, what exactly is the role of conventional BIM software? The painstaking manual assembly of parametric building elements, the core workflow of every BIM tool on the market, could become an intermediate step that simply disappears.

Autodesk isn't guaranteed to succeed. World models are early-stage technology, and the path from research demos to production architectural tools is long. But Autodesk has made a billion-dollar bet that it knows where this is heading. Its competitors appear to be optimising for a future that may never arrive.

The architecture industry should be paying attention. Not to BIM 2.0 — but to what comes after it.

Go to r/WorldModelAI on Reddit to share and follow more on this topic.

World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch

The partnership will see the two companies exploring how World Labs’ models can work alongside Autodesk’s tools, and vice versa, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases.

TechCrunchRebecca Bellan

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The future of X (no, not that one)

Sometime in 2017, Richard and Daniel Susskind struck upon the revolutionary premise of this book, and crystallised the frame through which we ought to view the future of the professions.

To an audience of neurosurgeons, tasked with identifying ‘the future of neurosurgery’, the Susskinds transformed the question from a matter of practice (process) to a quest for outcomes — “patients do not want neurosurgeons, patients want health”.

This seemingly innocuous re-framing provides a solid foundation for addressing the challenges that all professions, and indeed, all white-collar jobs, face in our rapidly evolving technological revolution, currently juiced by the hype over Artificial Intelligence. Their re-framing does not presume an intermediary at all, at least not in the traditional sense. In a way, it legitimises much of what human cultures have done for as long as they have existed — solving problems directly, be they matters of justice, health, or building.

Given that our focus is the built environment, and architects in particular, we are spurred on to ask — how, in the future, will we solve problems to which architects are currently our best answer?

This stimulates an entirely different thought process, which, by nature, calls into question the professional nature of architecture itself. And how will we solve the problems? Not only does the reframing question current structures, but it opens the door to an expanded view of what those problems are. We know that the problems in architecture do not simply relate to form (style) or materials (constructibility). We know that they are also climate related, socially related, and economically related.

So when we ask about how in the future these problems will be solved, to which architects are the best currently the best answer, the field of play becomes quite elastic and dynamic indeed.

Some in the profession anticipated this state of affairs with their focus on the spatial rather than the architectural. If we take their intuitions to their logical conclusions, we are probably left with something that is not a profession at all.

Who are the new overlords?

It’s technology, stupid. Mainly the Internet, but also the systems (software) and hardware that the 21st-century provides.

The forces of disruption, even though the authors have moved away from this word, are technological, and, naturally, involve encounters with a new hierarchy.

The music industry was infamously disrupted by the illegal file sharing platform Napster, but who calls the shots now? Yes, we still have the big labels such as Universal, Warner, Sony, and so on, but music has moved from the physical to the digital.

When Steve Jobs approached these labels in 2002, to strike a deal for iTunes, the labels really had no idea what they were getting into, and the paradigm shift that was about to take place. No, I was not in the room, but the deals that were struck transferred power definitively away from the labels. At that moment, power also shifted away from the artists, towards the technology providers.

Before, we spent money on LPs and CDs. Independent artists could even control their own supply chain of these physical artefacts, increasing their profits. Now they receive tiny fractions of a penny per song from streaming services – Spotify, Apple Music and the like.

The new overlords are the tech giants. The new physical artefacts are the devices that the giants sell. Mark Andressen famously wrote that software was eating the world, but what software really ate was services. Hardware ate the physical world. Money still flows in the music industry, but it flows upwards and in a very narrow stream to the providers of software (streaming) and hardware (devices like the iPhone).

The new overlords are the tech giants. The new physical artefacts are the devices that the giants sell. Mark Andressen famously wrote that software was eating the world, but what software really ate was services. Hardware ate the physical world.

The professions await the same fate. There is no escaping a hierarchy of some sort. If professionals disrupt themselves using technologies to routinise, disintermediate, or decompose, vulnerabilities identified by the authors, they may well succeed in their goals, but they will answer to new overlords, the ultimate providers of that technology.

So while end-users may celebrate a broad democratisation of knowledge, if we are not careful, we are simply facilitating the transfer of knowledge-bases (Big Data), and their accompanying wealth-generating potential to a select, feudal few.

Task-rabbits

The authors chart a course for the future of the professions that will be uncomfortable reading for any nostalgic professional. They foresee the diminishment of jobs and the arrival, to a much greater degree than today, of tasks.

They foresee several potential roles, in the future, to be executed, decomposing what would previously have been broad professional positions, into constituent tasks executed on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps they could have pushed the point even further.

On the one hand, I expect the traditional professions, from law, to architecture, teaching and so on, to continue in their current form, but as even more niche and exclusive pursuits. The question here is not what professionals do or how long it will endure, but who they will serve. I expect this audience to get significantly smaller, but not disappear. For example, in teaching, we can expect a class divide (pun intended) between, say, one-to-one teaching at a top fee-paying school, and artificial intelligence augmented lessons, stewarded by high turnover staff at state schools.

On the one hand, I expect the traditional professions, from law, to architecture, teaching and so on, to continue in their current form, but as even more niche and exclusive pursuits. The question here is not what professionals do or how long it will endure, but who they will serve.

On the other hand, perhaps, there will be no such thing as roles, per se. We have already seen, since the publication of both editions of this book, a massive increase in the capacity of visual machine learning models such as Midjourney and a Stable Diffusion, and now multi-modal systems, such as GPT-4 and Gemini — which work natively with text, images, sound and video. Will the role ‘designer’ survive these advancements? The same applies to writing and other knowledge-based roles.

In this scenario, individuals would not have roles within tasks, but their specialisation might be as generalist tastemakers who employ one tool or another to achieve the desired outcome. Not even the concept of ‘roles’ survives.

Subject matter expertise

In chapter 2’s "From the Vanguard", the authors walk through a roll-call of professional titles and the threats they face: health, education, divinity, law, journalism, management consulting, tax and audit, and finally, architecture.

Their observations about the architectural profession include insights on key technological developments such as computer aided design (CAD), algorithmic concept development and 3D printing.

These observations jump to the forefront and ring true in the context of our technology obsessed media. Superficially, they capture the spirit of our age, demanding our attention with their technological bells and whistles.

The reality, however, is that the impact of almost all the technologies mentioned is marginal. Undoubtedly, they have the potential to transform the process of design and construction, but how and, again, for whom? The authors use the oft-quoted statistic that less than 5% of buildings in the US are designed by architects. Algorithmic design and 3D printing are possible, but imagine what tiny percentage of buildings will be 3D printed in the future.

As with the overt design-process focus by Nicholas Negroponte and Christopher Alexander, each ultimately failing in their goal to transform architecture, the examples presented here miss the structural dimension, if you forgive the pun, of the built environment. This is more evident with subject matter expertise which, perhaps, the authors, with their legal background, do not have. Architecture is not just lines on a page or bricks stacked on top of each other, but a manifestation of social, financial and political dimensions of the space in which it is situated. Therefore, an over-emphasis on technology is likely to go the way of Negroponte’s architecture machines or Alexander’s patterns – fascinating, but largely ignored.

Anthropological speculation

It has become fashionable in some corners of the media to question established beliefs of ‘experts’ in the anthropological field. We need look no further than Graham Hancock and his theories over multiple decades, targeting not only anthropologists but also archaeologists. We even observe challenges within the establishment of the anthropological field itself, asking new questions and shedding new light on what might have otherwise been considered as ‘received wisdom’. In this example, we might look to the late David Graeber. So it is with it a little trepidation that I speculate on an alternative anthropological view to the linear narrative of communication.

The authors cite Walter J. Ong and describe a four-stage sequence of the development of human communication:

1. Orality (oral culture)
2. Script
3. Print
4. and information technology.

They suggest that "it was surely not feasible, in any field, for vast quantities of detailed knowledge to be held in the hands of anyone. No one could have recalled even a small fraction of the bodies of knowledge upon which the professions to pin today". Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that their sequence skips over broadcast as a transformative means of information transfer, my speculation goes back to origins. Though the authors quote Ong in his warning that "[f]ully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is it like", the authors do venture there.

They do not give much credit to these traditional societies for their ability to hold and extract large quantities of information. I propose that this interpretation, placing traditional societies at the beginning of a linear sequence, suggesting a lack of development, is wrong.

The trick that is missed by the authors, perhaps, is that what the holding of knowledge was not simply in mental exercise, but also a physical and spatial one. We already have the lessons of the phenomenologists and their mind–body–environment theories of perception and interaction. Perhaps, the facet of these cultures that we simply cannot appreciate, today, in our industrialised societies, detached from nature, is the degree to which memory was held outside the individual mind, in the bodies of individuals and communities, with a seamless informational relationship with the nature and built environment around them.

Perhaps, the facet of these cultures that we simply cannot appreciate, today, in our industrialised societies, detached from nature, is the degree to which memory was held outside the individual mind, in the bodies of individuals and communities, with a seamless informational relationship with the nature and built environment around them.

Symbiosis and harmony were perhaps not just scientific phenomena, but also informational ones. Looked at this way, if true, the notion of a spatial memory within these communities would have been highly sophisticated, though experienced on a day-to-day basis through informal habits and formal rituals. It is not an experience that a city dweller living in London can empathise with. But we can speculate.

AI fallacy

As the authors look to the future, and ask what solutions might there be to problems to which the current best answers are the professions, their arguments, regarding machines, are underpinned by a belief in an AI fallacy.

The story goes, as many of their doubters claim, that machines will never be able to do X because they cannot do X like humans would. The point, of course, is that machines are not humans and neither can nor need to imitate us.

While early investigations into artificial intelligence in, say, language recognition, might have looked at how a machine could establish the context of a sentence to better ‘understand’ it, later advances, and the advent of Big Data rendered that requirement obsolete.

The authors give the example of the machine recognising the phrase “my last visit to the office took two hours too long”. Now, incidentally, I dictated that sentence into my phone, as I do with all of this text, and the words were recognised perfectly (iOS 16.5.1). The Neural Engine on my phone does not need to establish the context of the sentence to differentiate between two and too, but rather crunches enormous quantities of data to establish the probability that two would likely have followed took and too followed hours.

The fallacy is rooted in critics’ preoccupation with process rather than outcome. As the authors point out, "… whether machines will replace human professionals is not about the capacity of systems to perform tasks as people do. It is about whether systems can help outperform human beings – full stop".This focus on outcome, sits on the same wavelength as the authors’ foundational re-framing question — how in the future will we solve problems …

The authors cite physicist Richard Feynman (I paraphrase), and his warning that machines need not imitate humans nor nature to surpass humans or nature. We need not imitate the locomotion of a horse to surpass a horse, as a cars do, nor do we need to imitate the flapping of a bird’s wings, to surpass the bird, as a plane does.

With the primacy of outcome over process, machines will excel in ways that human beings simply cannot, and sometimes cannot even imagine.

Weak AI fallacy

If the authors forgive my butchering of the phrase, there also exists a weak AI fallacy, and it can be observed in the field of architecture.

While the success of Wikipedia is rooted in a commons-based sharing of knowledge, its architectural cousins, to date, have been less successful. I think of examples such as the Open Source Architecture Community, WikiHouse or Elemental, all providing, to varying degrees, off-the-shelf kits of parts, either physical or digital, in an open access format.

Even though they are ostensibly about sharing knowledge, they are, in fact, about sharing physical objects. These objects come pre-packaged with bundles of socio-economic relationships that do not necessarily translate well from one place or time to another, and, frankly, are not generally as portable as pure knowledge, as in the case of Wikipedia. As we noted above about how architect really manifests, none of these open source projects gets to grips with the matter of land.

Even though they are ostensibly about sharing knowledge, they are, in fact, about sharing physical objects, and none of these open source projects gets to grips with the matter of land.

I liken this to the AI fallacy, in that these projects are similar to early aircraft prototypes with flapping wings. They take traditional architectural practice, itself with pre-packaged socio-economic relationships, and open it up to the world, without redefining those relationships to a great enough degree. Their lack of success, through the lens of outcome, is proof enough, but what might success actually look like for a commons-based architecture? I suggest that it would not follow an open professional model at all. Wikipedia is not an open version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s expert model. It is a user-generated, gift culture powered, open knowledge movement. It has a fundamentally different DNA structure. Any successful open source architecture would need to be an entirely different animal to professional practice today, open or otherwise. The answer lies in the response to one of the authors’ originating questions — how does society organise the sharing of expertise?

The answer, for architecture, must look at the foundations of the walls built around the profession. There we will not find predictors about whether the edifice above will be closed or open. What we will see, persistently, but without fanfare, are the structures of class. Anything built on top of these foundations, whether closed or ‘open’, has to come to terms with its foundational reality.

Therefore, if we seek success by working backwards from outcome (transforming the built environment), we need to keep digging until we can start entirely anew.

Authors: Richard Susskind & Daniel Susskind
Year of Publication: 2022

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1, 2, 3, contact

There have been many claims for the title Web 3.0. If Web 1.0 was the original internet, a static, read-only but, granted, global resource; and 2.0, in short, the user-generated web; various camps have been scrambling to claim the ‘3.0’ moniker.

We have the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee and his semantic web, a boundaryless, universally machine-readable internet where all digital information is genuinely connected, and infused with rich meaning, which itself is readable. We have crypto and its shortened ’web3’, disintermediating centralised commercial powers, servers and even money suppliers, empowering individuals, and enabled by blockchain technologies. Lastly, we have the spatial web.

This third ‘3.0’ is less ideological and more embracing, and, in its own way, claims that all versions are correct, but not exclusive. It gives a further extension of Jonathan Grudin’s image of computers reaching out into the world – a vision of not just of an internet on screen or an internet of things (IoT), but, to quote the authors, an Internet of Everything, in which past and future technologies are integrated into a seamless, three-dimensional, real-world, whole. The authors call this new, techno-spatial reality, the convergence, or more specifically, The Spatial Web.

A common theme running through all versions of a web 3.0 is decentralisation. The semantic web breaks down barriers, the crypto bros scream “decentralisation” from the rooftops, and the spatial web evangelists hark back to the innocence of the original version of a decentralised Internet.

One thing that we can be sure of, is that Web 3.0 is here, and that one way or another, each version has a claim to legitimacy, as a vision for the future.

Where the web is concerned, the third time’s the charm.

A common theme running through all versions of a web 3.0 is decentralisation. The semantic web breaks down barriers, the crypto bros scream “decentralisation” from the rooftops, and the spatial web evangelists hark back to the innocence of the original version of a decentralised Internet.

A hyperlink to everything

"The web was designed to be a universal space of information, so when you make a bookmark or a hypertext link, you should be able to make that link to absolutely any piece of information that can be accessed using networks. The universality is essential to the Web: it loses its power if there are certain types of things to which you can’t link.”

The words of Berners-Lee, in 1997. His paradigm was a digital library of information, shared globally through networks. This book, however, takes the spirit of the statement and applies it to the three-dimensional world.

This aspiration changes the nature, the demands, and the potential of what universal hyperlinking might engender. We are still dealing with the sharing of information, but the realm of its employment moves from communication to the experiential. This will require a new suite of protocols to turn “any space into a webspace".

The Spatial Web looks at how this might unfold, and the new threats and opportunities that arise as a result. If the authors are right, only a few decades after Berners-Lee introduced us to browsing the web, we are facing a major paradigm shift.

A spatial cycle

René and Mapes make the case for an evolutionary progression of "human interaction with information at scale". They identify a First Age with the shift from spoken language to writing; a Second Age triggered by the invention of print; and a Third Age with the invention of the screen. They map these ages on to the Agricultural, Industrial and Information Ages respectively.

It is a convenient sequence, but perhaps does not capture the entirety of the picture. Rather than looking at the sometimes abstract component, which is information, we may perceive our history differently if we look at it from the point of view of people, and their desire, rather than the informational output. From this alternative perspective, the desire is to communicate.

Before the invention of script, print, or screens we had an oral culture, which still of course exists, to some extent, in all societies. We would not be giving oral traditions their full due if we simply restricted them to the acts of speaking and hearing (or listening). We don’t need to go back in time or travel to a pre-industrial society to experience what an oral culture might have been like. We need only step outside and have a conversation with a group of friends. We would not simply observe speaking and listening, but, fundamentally, phenomena of situated communication. The simplest example is body language, which we use consciously and unconsciously to help get a point across.

So, in one simple step, communication moves beyond the limits of movement of air through our vocal cords. To get a broader point across, we may point at objects or gather them together, or draw lines in the sand — simple forms of accompanying physical representation. Together, they create effective forms of spatial communication.

Therefore, it might be fair to say that the first age was not simply oral but spatial, and that in the march through history – to the invention of script, the printing press, broadcast, and digital, we are returning to our roots. From this perspective, this is not a linear progression, but rather a cycle.

The authors give a clue to this themselves when they state that "spatial computing humanizes our relationship with information". It does so because it reduces the abstraction and the distance between what we want to communicate and what is represented. If we can point to it in the real world, either physically or digitally, then we are dealing with spatial communication.

It might be fair to say that the first age was not simply oral but spatial, and that in the march through history – to the invention of script, the printing press, broadcast, and digital, we are returning to our roots.

A luxury industry

The authors are certainly techno-optimists, and some might argue (derogatively) techno-solutionists. They foresee, breathlessly, that the future will be populated by trillions of network-enabled Internet of Things objects; will see trustless smart contracts disintermediating the legal profession; will see the dawn of quantum computing and its mind-bending potential; and all of these things will power artificial intelligence which will enhance our lives in unimaginable ways.

The idea of a convergence, involving all of these various elements, is, essentially, correct. The individual arguments put forward are not unique, and their forecast for how the multiple futuristic technologies will come together is slowly becoming something of a received wisdom – see Kevin Kelly’s mirrorworld or Ori Inbar’s AR cloud. It is safe to say that convergence is a future, but not necessarily the future.

As the authors gaze into their crystal ball, they skip over the wider challenges of society. How effective are IoT objects going to be if they are washed away with flash floods brought on by climate change? How intelligent can a system be if there is no electricity? How relevant are blockchain smart contracts going to be if they are written by those perpetuating economic inequality?

All the future technologies are possible, and indeed likely. The question is not if they will happen, but how, and for whom?

We already see the beginnings of a tech inequality. On the one hand, more than a third of the world population has never used the Internet! All of these technologies mentioned take money, and so, we can expect that they will advance, not only in countries with greater wealth, but in the subset of wealthy individuals and communities within those wealthy countries. On the other hand, we already see a backlash against extremes of tech, particularly among the very wealthy. Why are so many children of tech entrepreneurs restricted from using the very devices that their parents have made their parents wealthy? Why do ultra-exclusive, Silicon Valley schools, such as Brightworks or the Waldorf Schools, where so many of the tech elite send their children, focus so strongly on one-to-one human interaction and forbid digital devices? What do the tech elite know about tech that we don’t?

Looking at the other side of the example of teaching, we may see in the future, that state or poorer schools have no choice but to supplement a limited teaching staff with artificial intelligence learning systems. In this way, high-tech can work against the disadvantaged. Teacher shortage, no problem. Teacher strike, neutralised.

The same concept can be applied across the professions, for those seeking, say, legal or medical advice. Now and in the future, we aspire to revive human attention and engagement. Perhaps the real luxury industry in the future will be people.

Why do ultra-exclusive, Silicon Valley schools, such as Brightworks or the Waldorf Schools], where so many of the tech elite send their children, focussing so strongly on one-to-one human interaction and forbidding digital devices? What do the tech elite know about tech that we don’t?

Dystopian by default

It is interesting to see how every major iteration of the web presents tremendous potential for decentralisation, but then the very same protocols are co-opted by centralising, usually economic powers.

The DIY Web 1.0 made everyday tech enthusiasts into potential publishers, but, as human nature would have it, money came into the picture, certain winners were anointed, network effects took hold and the offline world was replicated in its power index.

Web 2.0 came along and magnified the potential for mass, user-generated content, but again, the winners such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and others succumbed to the extraordinary economic power that they created, once again replicating the power index, but increasing the power inequality to near feudal levels.

The authors would have us believe that Web 3.0 will finally deliver salvation. All we can do, however, is wait to see how this too will be co-opted. Its shorter name cousin web3 started with ‘decentralisation’ written into its very foundational code, in the form of the Bitcoin white paper. Within a few years, and after the introduction of thousands of alternative coins and tokens, we observed, again, a hyper-centralisation of asset creation, ownership and ultimately wealth, this time in the shadows, in the form of venture capitalists such as a16z.

The process, optimism followed by economic realism, followed by reproduction of traditional economic hierarchies, is all but a given.

We can imagine a very graphic dystopia of the Spatial Web in the form of Keiichi Matsuda’s Hyper-Reality — an extreme layering of commercial information (opportunity) on the real world. In an unchecked Spatial Web, how far off a future reality is this hyper-reality?

Or the authors’ observation, touted as a feature, that "[t]he ability to perceive (see, hear, touch, etc) anything on the Spatial Web is determined by the permissions as defined by the Spatial Domain where a given Asset is located … If the Smart Space that an Asset is currently in is searchable, the Asset itself has to agree that based on your user permissions, you have the right to even perceive it.”

The authors precede this seemingly optimistic feature of the Spatial Web with an argument that a digital experience economy will supersede the services and offline experience economies. Now, imagine, having to pay just to browse something which you might have been able to pick up and touch in the real world. Imagine, among your friends or work colleagues, not being able to perceive objects or an experience because, say, you missed a payment on your credit card. Imagine further, with the advent of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), that if the government’s automatic debit for your speeding ticket bounces because you do not have enough money, that you are denied a whole range of social services — not just that you cannot access them, but you that you cannot see them at all.

Rather than imagining this technology or that, that can be applied to a new Spatial Web, perhaps our primary responsibility is to ensure that at least one version of this ‘third’ web remains decentralised. As author Nicholas Shaxson states, “there is no group richer and more powerful than the rich and powerful”. This is who an idealistic Spatial Web is up against.

Human ingenuity will always flower with the right incentives, particularly monetary ones. There is no risk that startling technological advancements will not be made. With this in mind, the alternative challenge is therefore not technological but social. All forms of the web are decentralised by default, but rapidly become dystopian. A Spatial Web will not be spared.

Authors: Gabriel René & Dan Mapes
Year of Publication: 2019

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Thou dost not protest enough

Critical spatial practices

What magic spell has been cast over the British public, that allows them to accept, and even encourage, change after change against their interests? Why did the French experience weeks of protest in response to the proposed raising of the retirement age to 64, while simultaneously in the UK, the British prepare to raise it to 67 with not even so much as a whimper? Why do the British not protest? Or at least, why not enough?

This book is about spatial practices, ostensibly expanding the definition of what might have otherwise been called ‘architecture’, ‘urbanism’ or other practices with traditional names. The subtext, however, is activism. Spatial practices to be certain, but at their core, critical spatial practices.

The activities so often celebrated through the book’s essays are typically anarchist or leftist in their values: DIY; temporary, atypical interventions; permanent artistically justified interventions, and the like.

Even though the last 15 years since the great financial crisis was a fertile period for reflection and activism, the needle simply has not moved. Correction, the needle has moved in the opposite direction to what much of this activism aspires to.

In the past 15 years, society has become more unequal; our public spaces have become more privatised; our media landscape more monopolised. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the spatial practices value system is leaving us with crumbs. This is not for wont of trying by the many contributors identified in this book. Somehow, however, they/we have not been able to break down the power structures that perpetuate the problems that they identify, and, while trying, the same structures have become even more entrenched and more powerful.

This book is about spatial practices, ostensibly expanding the definition of what might have otherwise been called ‘architecture’, ‘urbanism’ or other practices with traditional names. The subtext, however, is activism.

Orange

Despite British passivity, we are experiencing a minor ‘orange revolution’. Just Stop Oil is probably the most effective spatial practitioner operating today. I would theorise that the principal source of British passivity is a media landscape compliant to the will of the powers that be, without a strong counter-narrative. Just Stop Oil co-opts this very media infrastructure in a playful but deadly serious way. They are derided by both major political parties, which provides the strongest clue that they are on to something, because both of these parties answer to the old or new establishment.

If 30,000 pages from the IPCC are correct, and who am I as a non-scientist to contradict them, then the orange paint or confetti of Just Stop Oil is mild. Compare that to the scale of the protests in France against the raising of the retirement age. Compare to the prospect of social and economic collapse that could come about as a direct result of climate change in the coming decades. Compare, unfortunately, to the intellectualised spatial practices of so many in this book.

We need to take a root and branch approach to reassessing how spatial practices might actually be effective. This starts with funding. Perhaps we have a culture in non-traditional spatial practices now where, through the grant system, we have just enough activity to give a sense that change is coming, but, in reality, not nearly enough to effect that change. If you are sitting in a seminar where everyone around you is nodding their head and feeling transformative, you are probably not going anywhere.

Climate change, economic inequality and social justice are the great challenges of our time. The likes of Lefebvre, Harvey and Davis give us, spatial practitioners, a foundation of reflective nourishment. But we must now build on it, broadly and quickly. If the medium is the message, and space is a medium of communication, then we have the opportunity to grab the 21st century modes of spatial storytelling with both hands and agitate for change. Our actions do not have to be dramatic, but they must be strategic. Just Stop Oil may be “annoying” to some, but within the realm of spatial practices today, they are leading the way.

Tip: If you are sitting in an activist seminar where everyone around you is nodding their head and feeling transformative, you are probably not going anywhere.

Code switching

Activism is not always overt. Minority and marginalised communities, through race, class or religion, become adept, through necessity, at a number of survival and thriving mechanisms.

Code switching is one such mechanism, typically employed, facing a majority culture, to minimise the attention given to your difference.

The complexities of conflicting values between what we wish to see and what we are forced to inhabit, mean that there is no ‘purism’ of thought or action. Whether pontificating about radical transformation from the relative comfort of academic tenure, or say, working with a community-based collective on the weekend while building offices for hedge funds on the weekdays, we are forced, not just to code switch, but to hold two positions at once.

Holding two positions at once

Property developers have a story to tell. It is typically one about Regeneration; about breathing life into cities; about capturing the spirit of a location, however superficially or cynically, and transforming it into a value system that you can buy your way into – and by extension, that can create commercial value for the developers themselves.

Tricia Austin has something to say about these practices. In her piece on spatial narratives, she addresses the commercial turn that so much of our urban story-making has taken.

Austin trains her bull’s-eye on property developers, but also another flavour of developer – the tech kind.

App-based augmented reality emerged in the first decade of the new millennium, bringing spatial storytelling into the digital realm. AR, in the hands of these developers, is typically of the visual kind – location-based details overlaid on images, on screen-based devices. Austin rightly highlights potential pitfalls of the use of this technology, including digital graffiti, digital trespassing and location privacy. Half a decade on from writing, these issues all remain critical.

Austin is wary of the commercial corruption of digital space as much as she is concerned about the way that this has already happened with physical space. This presents a challenge, reconciling the commercial, which she is critical of, and the activist, which she celebrates.

In the impact world, ’scale’ is a bad word. It is directly associated with speculation and extraction, at the expense of users and communities, whoever they may be. Commercial developments, whether physical or digital, typically have a higher velocity of funding because of the greater potential for financial returns. But, naturally, this speculation is accompanied by a potentially unpalatable values. Balancing inputs, outcomes, and values remains elusive.

Nevertheless, to be genuinely impactful and transformative, sustainably, narrative environments will need to simultaneously activist and commercial. It requires an outlook in which these two positions can be held at once.

So while the process of acquiring financial success, or even stability, tends to bend values away from addressing impactful values, the trick is to co-opt tech-style ‘scale’ approaches for collective action - to act now, in small bits and a lot as a way to overcome centralising, extractive tendencies. This too is ‘scale’, but of a more decentralised flavour.

Freedom and solidarity

Jeremy Till is typically brutal in his assessment of architectural education.

As elsewhere, he shines a spotlight on the structural deficiencies embodied in the totems of architectural education:

• The unit and its attendant master with a cult of personality
• The primacy of the drawing and its attendant individualism
• The crit and its attendant power dynamic

We are reminded of an educational system with rapidly spinning wheels, attached to a chassis that is standing still. The overall picture of architectural education is one riddled with failings, yet with a high enough degree of acceptance for it to perpetuate itself. We are reminded of an educational system with rapidly spinning wheels, attached to a chassis that is standing still.

Till responds with the call "to take the premises of spatial practice and reverse engineer pedagogy from them". This, he insists, will provide us with a parallel educational system to that of architecture, leaving its predecessor intact, and acting as a complimentary field of education to fill the many gaps that he takes the time to identify.

Critically, he presumes the retention of the university system, and, by implication, the retention of professional practice. Till warns, quite rightly, that "architecture education in its isolation is educating for something that is not architecture". He clarifies that this is not just a rehash of the old critique of the lack of practical transferability of much of education, but a more serious accusation – that it leaves the architectural graduate unable to imagine anything apart from the status quo.

Till, aligning with Reinier de Graf, offers a way out, suggesting that "education could be the place where we turn ‘practice itself into the object of thinking’”. This sounds a lot like an apprenticeship, but Till does not go down that seemingly obvious road.

Despite his appeal that education should provide mechanisms to break with the status quo, or that "architecture needs a real knowledge of practice if it is to produce any meaningful critique of that same practice", Till maintains a protective embrace around three status quo pre-requisites.

1. First, spatial intelligence. Undoubtedly, architectural education allows its practitioners to develop a flavour of spatial intelligence. But we would have to be as isolated, as accused, to believe that architecture retains an exclusivity on this skill set. For spatial intelligence, we need go no further than any ‘vernacular’ to experience a non-professional flavour of spatial intelligence; one that the likes of Christopher Alexander, Hassan Fathy and many others, appreciative from many perspectives, might have pointed out. So architects do not have a monopoly on spatial intelligence.
2. Second, the ‘freedom’ of student life – "the space to speculate unfettered by everyday demands". This is presented as an equivocation by Till, perhaps anticipating the critique that he will deny future students the opportunity to experience this halcyon era. But its contradictions are right in front of us, in black-and-white: "unfettered by everyday demands". The very source of this supposed freedom is the denial of the very contingencies that Till insists we must incorporate. This ‘freedom’ should be recognised for the extreme privilege that it is, and one perhaps that is not fit for purpose in an age of reassessment of architectural education.
3. Lastly, the professional. How broad, indeed, are spatial practices? If we accept that a movement such as Just Stop Oil engages in spatial practices, then what happens if, for example, we reverse engineer their practices, as Till himself suggests as a strategy? What are we presented with? I would suggest that we are certainly not presented with a three, five or seven-year university programme. We are certainly not presented with a pedagogy laying out a runway for its graduates to take off as Victorian era style professionals. If Jeremy Till is completely honest, in reverse engineering the breadth of spatial practices, he may have to advocate for the abolition of university education entirely.

Nevertheless, Till leaves us with essential advice on how to negotiate the sometimes contradictory demands of spatial practice. In this, again with Dodd and others, he invites us to engage with both sides of the coin: detachment and engagement, freedom and solidarity.

Build it and they will become

Theory is dangerous. Architecture that lives on the page exists in a realm of possibilities that can sparkle the imagination, travelling into the farthest reaches of what might be. So often, words jump off the page with optimism. Equally, often, when theory is immediately followed by a recounting of implementation, much of the energy is lost.

The contingencies of the context – physical, economic, social and so on, bring themselves to bear on the process of transformation from theory to reality. It is a bit harsh to say that many of the project examples here are uninspiring, but that thought creeps in when I am being honest to myself.

This is an ivory tower danger that we must be wary of in the practice of architecture, and, in fact, anything that has to be ultimately realised outside cloistered walls. The more distant the journey from theory to reality, whether in time or in space, the greater the degree of energy loss.

We can therefore assume that the scenario with the least possible energy degradation is one in which theory and implementation are one and the same. The solution is to build – early and often.

Game developers are advised to play-test with external users no later than 20% into the development process. Architects, as they traditionally practise, would not be able to heed this advice, since their spatial play-test, (occupation), happens at 100%. Everything before this moment is abstract theory, even the technical elements.

So again, build early and often, and if user input has to start at 20%, that implies that the users themselves should have an active role throughout.

Christopher Alexander’s GRADUAL STIFFENING pattern comes to mind here, in which we start the physical and social framing of space before we have the full picture, and gradually fill it out to complete that picture. Here, building is theory.

Naturally, we cannot live in a ‘gradual’ structure without a roof, but we can physically occupy the space, collaboratively with others, as part of the process of creating that space, in situ.

If theory is a problem, building is the solution. As the tools of architectural practice evolve, perhaps some of them will include devices to make simultaneous building and theory a reality.

Build early and often, and if user input has to start at 20%, that implies that the users themselves should have an active role throughout.

Growing up

It would be interesting to publish a book like Spatial Practices which specifically excludes anyone under the age of 35.

We have spoken about ‘contingencies’, both the ‘front-of-house’ and ‘back-of-house’ varieties. Back-of-house contingencies have to do with the typically unacknowledged facets of life that impact the practice side of architecture – how to allocate your time in relation to other pursuits; how your upbringing and your network impacts your ability to build a practice in the first place; and above all, how to pay the bills.

Younger practitioners, recently graduated, are usually free of the burden of mortgage payments, challenges from the spouse to be ‘serious’, or other social or family pressures that come with the approaching of middle age years. The recently graduated may find it easier to accommodate romantic aspirations, even if these occupy the time outside a numbing 9-to-5 job. But how many of these aspirations survive life’s later demands? If you are interested in starting any kind of architectural practice, this is perhaps the most important question of all.

It is a question which we could ask of featured collective EXYZT. As interviewer Shumi Bose put it, their "architectural education gave [them] some skills that [they] could use for money. But also, some ideas that [they] can exercise, maybe not for money”.

The collective supported their ‘hacker’-style projects by working freelance for established architectural practices. As a group, they had some elements arguing that projects should not be economically driven, and other questions about whether governance should be more hierarchical or horizontal. These are foundational questions for practice, whatever form it takes, critical, if it is to endure. These are the back-of-house contingencies that too often are dealt with peripherally or only in crisis. They should be central questions.

The years between university graduation and marriage/mortgage are typically full of one thing – options. Those options narrow as soon as life’s other demands come into the frame. Individuals themselves also change quite significantly over the same period, maturing and working out ’what they want in life’, within the wider social frames. The marriage/mortgage stage of life is where so many collectives quietly withdraw from the spotlight or dissolve altogether.

Certainly, architecture is enriched by their youthful energy, but the implication, with their lack of longevity, is that they are the beneficiaries of privilege – the privilege of youth; often, in architecture, the privilege of wealth; and if not, the privilege of not having to worry about the lack of wealth. The damning conclusion is that economic and social pressures, regardless of their gravity, dominate, despite ‘alternative’ values.

Now, late capitalist societies, with diminishing social support, new or increasing student loan debt, and steadily increasing inequality, are shortening the period of these ‘golden years’. Perhaps, with student loans, the marriage/mortgage era has been brought forward to the day of graduation. Students may face the prospect of having no golden years at all. Therefore, we need to think more seriously about these back-of-house contingencies. How many idealistic practices will survive in this changing environment, or not be able to start at all.

A model based on privilege is not sustainable. We need a new model altogether.

Perhaps, the marriage/mortgage era has been brought forward to the day of graduation Students may face the prospect of having no golden years at all. Therefore, we need to think more seriously about these back-of-house contingencies. How many idealistic practices will survive in this changing environment, or not be able to start at all.

The future is now

The chapters of Spatial Practices are structured in a ‘last but not least’ format. The concluding three certainly give us food for thought and leave us on a note of optimism, with ideas for the future.

Situated drawing

Andreas Lang’s notion of situated drawing is fascinating, and begging to break out of the walls of academia. The practice, an improvisational manner of representation, using the context and sometimes materials of the site in question, addresses, at a stroke, so many of the aspirations of the spatial practices evangelists. At least as a teaching tool.

First and foremost, it takes the student out of the studio into the real world that they deem to make proposals for. It provides a direct incentive for students to engage with the communities where the project is cited. In the open air, so to speak, it offers a release from the hidebound values of mainstream architectural education. Lastly, from a material perspective, students are incentivised to use what is at hand, and potentially with their hands.

Public Practice

Pooja Argawal’s piece on Public Practice, now well established, takes architects away from the purely commercial into the realm of the public. This is not the landscape typically celebrated in architecture school. It does, however, embed architects closer to the site of decision-making and ultimately power, than the position they would operate from as ‘consultants’.

They operate within the framework of strategic design, closer to the brief than to the result. It is a position, simultaneously, of great learning and influence. How much more impact could an architectural practitioner have on, say, the carbon emissions of a project, at the briefing stage rather than the design/execution stage? How much less personal energy would be if expended by getting it right early rather than making it simply ‘good’ later on? How much more collaborative must we be by default when sitting among our peers but outside a purely plastic design context? If impactful design making is the question, strategic design is the answer.

Unionisation

Peggy Deamer, though evangelising for cooperatives, illuminates an under-reported limitation in architectural private practice – firm size.

92% of firms in the US have less than 20 employees. She gives us other statistics, but the key takeaway is that the high volume of smaller firman means that, by and large, the profession is unable to access economies of scale, experience corporate longevity nor compete with large multinational practices.

Her solution is cooperativisation, of the consumer, producer, and worker varieties. She is up against it. The possibilities here, as with the two other examples above, run counter to the driving forces within architectural culture. These forces will not be overthrown overnight.

Takeaway

We should note that all three approaches, immediately above, not to mention the many other examples in the book, present alternative value systems within spatial practice.

They all demonstrate that possibilities do not lie in the future, but are all here now. Dodd and her accomplices have done us a service by illuminating them.

Now to shout their stories from the rooftops, and get working on the ground.

Editor: Mel Dodd
Year of Publication: 2019

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The future of architecture is not what you think! Let’s rebuild it from the foundations up so that it is accessible to all, and make it relevant for the 21st century while we’re at it.

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Space is indeed political

Theme, as screenwriters define it, is one of my favourite topics because it goes to the heart of identifying the writer’s values – what ’the moral of the story’ is. The closest equivalent in academia is thesis.

The authors’ theme here is that the production of space is a political act, and that what separates spatial agency from traditional notions of architecture is that it is driven by transformational intent.

Transformation demands drilling down into the mechanics of that production, deeper than matters of form, into the how’s and why’s of that spatial production. What is encountered there is inevitably both political and economic – the driving forces behind the motivations to produce, in the traditionally procured built environment.

The authors castigate architects for sidestepping these fundamentals and rightly, themselves, keep them front and centre.

Spatial agency implies an active rather than a passive outlook.

The traditional architect is primarily a passive observer to the process of development. Before they have been hired, most of the critical decisions have already been made, by lawmakers, bankers, and clients. Their job typically entails going with the political-economic flow, leaving little room for genuine transformation. Genuine power to transform lies with the landowner and financier.

It should come as no surprise then that architects remain so preoccupied with the little that is left – superficially, ‘design’. Architectural transformations are measured in primarily formalistic isms rather than with the yardsticks of social impact – unglamorous dimensions such as land tenure, access to safe drinking water, or indeed personal and community agency within the dominant power structures. Architecture sits at the end of the tail, most certainly wagged by the dog. Spatial agency, taken to its logical conclusion, starts at the tail and not only wags the dog but offers the opportunity to be the dog itself.

The politics of space captures all layers of life, not just so-called high art or elitist notions of existence. Genuine transformation engages all of these layers and is necessarily broad, collaborative, and inclusive. Spatial agency makes structural demands on the producers of space, to take the correct posture, to release the transformative potential present in their time and place.

Spatial agency, taken to its logical conclusion, starts at the tail and not only wags the dog but offers the opportunity to be the dog itself.

Words matter

Systems thinking

Architecturally trained, multi-hyphenate fashion designer, the late Virgil Abloh, infamously claimed that the foundation of his enormous success at French luxury group LVMH could be found in his 3% rule. This was his assertion, that he need only change a fashion object (or any other object) by 3% to alter its conceptual nature. In other words, he tweaks it. But that is not all, of course. He and his corporate masters, with the benefit of a track record, built a targeted marketing strategy around those small changes. It was a system.

In similar fashion, if you can forgive the pun, architecturally trained Buckminster Fuller advocated for the discovery and use of trim tabs in effecting change. A trim tab is a miniature rudder attached to the full-size rudder, which itself is attached to the rear of a sailing vessel or aircraft.

Adjustments in the tiny trim tab facilitate the movement of the larger rudder which turns the entire vessel - a very small tail wagging a very large dog.

Or the finding that political change does not need a wholesale change of thinking within a population, but has always succeeded where only 3.5% of the population are actively involved in agitating for that change.

These small percentages are not accidents. When we look at the phenomena that they are applied to – systems - we recognise what famed systems thinker and environmentalist Donella Meadows referred to as leverage points. We should not be surprised that a small adjustment can effect change, but we can note her observation that small changes, applied to the leverage points of a system, can have surprisingly large effects.

Architectural systems

Awan, Schneider and Till may not be believers. At the very outset, they carry out a wholesale clear-out of all recognisable terms:

1. From ‘architectural’ to spatial
2. The banishment of the words ‘alternative’ and ‘practice’
3. The introduction of the word ‘agency’
4. … and finally give us a new name for creative practices (sorry), Spatial Agency.

In each case, for each word, their reasoning is sound and convincing. The overall result though is alien. It is a difficult start and the term faces an uphill struggle to endure. It is certainly not a single digit percentage change to what we might consider labelling a space and place-making craft. An academic might appreciate the unveiling of this new definition, but outside this niche audience we are deprived of familiar reference points.

How might the word architecture, in the hands of Abloh, Fuller or Meadows, have been transformed or re-appropriated?

Words matter.

The authors, to be certain, have made that clear. However, the power of their new words is immediately blunted by the unfamiliarity of wholesale change. Perhaps a huge marketing campaign might have helped, but that is not the world that we are inhabiting here. Spatial agency is one of those terms that will immediately have to be explained after being uttered or written.

Frozen music

Leaning in

Typically, in producing media content, whether written, spoken or visual, or indeed spatial, we re-refine as we develop, through a process of internal and external critique – in short, editing.

Editing is not simply a process of cutting away fat, but honing the message according to a particular theme, such that each sentence, or each frame plays an active and non-redundant role in delivering the message of that theme. Typically, we are left with less than what we started with, and a more refined version of whatever is left.

The role of the critic is, in a way, that of a post-publication editor. What is it about? What might have been? What was missing? It is more common to encounter a criticism that a book, musical album, or film is too long rather than too short.

The authors here have divided the book into an initial 25% or so of argument, with the latter primarily project examples. It is a typical format for architectural monograph style books, and to the authors’ credit, and by the very nature of their arguments, they have avoided being seduced by the ’heroic’ in the latter 3/4.

Their arguments, set out in the initial 1/4 are strong and, unlike most criticism of media content, this section is too short.

Connections

Despite the rest of their word clear-out, Till and co are sitting on a goldmine with the word ‘agency’. Through interrogating this word, they have uncovered insights that define our key challenges in the 21st-century …

• In its relationship to Actor Network Theory, its systems-based framing of our relationship to our surroundings
• In mutual knowledge, the interchange of living information among individuals and groups, not in thrall to the class-based preoccupations of ‘professionalism’.
• In the intentionality of agency itself, the “ability of the individual to act independently of the constraining structures of society”, and to negotiate “existing conditions to partially reform them” … or choose not to act.

And on and on.

The Introduction alone, merely nine pages, is worthy of an entire book. That book, of course, is the other 200-odd pages of Spatial Agency, but the introduction captures something elusive that leaves us wanting more.

The Introduction is a launchpad, a collection of living thought, stimulating line by line, ready to send the reader off in multiple interrogative directions. It is a process that has somehow become frozen in the book.

It is interesting to note that Spatial Agency started its public life as a conference, and then a website – two formats with great potential for living information exchanges. Most of the book is taken up with project examples, for which the authors, with great equivocation, justify omissions and inclusions. Spatial Agency, as a living format, is begging to carry on. And perhaps the authors struggled with this, as their format of hyperlink style references back to other areas of the book shows. These paragraphs are begging to be presented in a more dynamic format.

It might have been interesting for the book, conceptually, to stand as a ‘brochure’ (yes, that sounds a bit crude), for the more dynamic format such as the website, pushing the reader there, or even to a series of filmed documentaries.

Unlike the default mode of architectural press, which excises people from the story in favour of ‘clean’ architectural spaces, the stories of spatial agency are relatable, human stories, with which the public at large may empathise. There are unrealised opportunities here.

Emergence

Through a different frame, the Introduction is a procedural - conceptually an algorithmic engine, which can be run over and over again, across time and place, to deliver stimulating results.

Within this frame, the projects are emergents – snapshots, frozen in time, of what those algorithms might produce.

We need to go back to the procedural and bring it back to life.

Spatial Agency should have been the most important book architectural book of the 21st-century. It certainly started that way, but, somehow, with its worthy database format, it has stopped itself dead.

Agency implies intent, which is a precursor to action. Till and co have given us the engine to move forward, but they have taken away the keys.

Agency implies intent, which is a precursor to action. Till and co have given us the engine to move forward, but they have taken away the keys.

Sound Building

Changing the world

Where do we place Awan, Schneider and Till, within the canon of architectural thinking? Or specifically, where do we place their book?

As lofty and perhaps pretentious as this question may sound, it is a relevant one, because of the extraordinary transformative potential that its publication represented – timed both in the early days of a new century and so soon after the global financial collapse of 2007/8. Spatial Agency was poised to question much of what had been taken for granted.

Despite the brevity of the opening section of the book, the authors have gone to great lengths to define ‘spatial’, ‘agency’, the reasoning behind the discarding of other potential terms, and of course ‘spatial agency’ itself. My frustration with this term, having lost its living nature, is perhaps because the book begins as a call to arms but, looking back, sits more as an archive of possible alternative values.

Nevertheless, it gives us the ability to recognise and emulate further manifestations of spatial agency. This, to be sure, is enough. My disappointment is rooted in the failure of this value system to have proved world changing, when, of course, it need not have been. Nevertheless, its transformative potential, as a rallying call, remains.

Social transformation

Author Andrew Saint, and his book The Image of the Architect (1983), charted the history of the role and the perception of the architect over the centuries.

As he brings the book to a close, he faces up to the potential reality of a smaller profession, with a much reduced degree of real-world influence and imaginative potential, calling into question the profession’s very future: "Finally, can architecture survive as a special and unique profession if the ‘imaginative’ element is curbed? That is only possible if some such goal as ‘sound building’, in itself an uncharismatic target, can be raised to the level of ideology still enjoyed in schools by the endless debate about styles”.

The sound building that he was referring to, represented values that John Ruskin prized and sought to achieve in architecture. Ruskin’s value system was wrapped up in a personal ideology with a relationship to craft, religion, and aesthetics - unglamorous, yet wholesome.

Saint reminds us of some qualities of sound building:

• Simplicity and economy
• Respect for client and user
• Knowledge of techniques and materials
• With a further reminder, that collaboration was central to the idea of the sound building

He foresaw that at an inheritance of the ideals of sound building would involve technological undertakings.

Perhaps, however, the undertakings are social.

Perhaps, the inheritance of sound building is to be found in spatial agency. Coincidentally or not, this is, too, an ‘uncharismatic’ goal, but one grounded in a socially useful value system. This is the region in which the world-changing potential of spatial agency lies, at least within the context of the built environment.

He foresaw that at an inheritance of Ruskin’s ideals of sound building would involve technological undertakings. Perhaps, however, the undertakings are social.

Enclosure

The tentacles of neoliberalism have spread into all dimensions of society, not least architecture and the built environment, which are ultimately (only) clothing thrown on to financial–political bodies. The dynamics of political economy in the 21st-century are trending in the direction of a new era of enclosure …

• Of physical space (for example, with increasing proportions of privately owned public spaces)
• Of thought (with an increasingly narrow and monopolised media landscape)
• Of life and health (monopolies again, with a mere handful of multinationals controlling the production and distribution of food and pharmaceuticals across the globe)
• Not to mention the financial industry (with truly giant organisations managing values of assets comparable to mid-size countries - way too big to fail).

In this landscape, enclosure is a problem. As such, agency is a solution. In the built environment, the solution, specifically, is spatial agency.

Spatial Agency is an attempt to solve the social contradictions inherent in the profession of architecture:

• A class-based title and status, but to transcend class
• A professional and entrepreneurial arc favouring the already well-off, but to appeal to all
• A protectionist construction industry, but to deliver agency to the everyday dweller and worker.

These contradictions, within the socio-cultural frame of ‘professionalism’, are unsolvable – but only within this frame.

In this landscape, enclosure is a problem. As such, agency is a solution. In the built environment, the solution, specifically, is spatial agency.

De-professionalisation

There are hints that the profession of architecture can be absolved of its sins of conspiracy with the worst of capitalism. The authors give clues for a way out: Michelle Provost’s suggestion “that architectural significance and relevance are inversely proportional to the visibility of architecture or the conspicuousness of the architectural image”; or the authors’ own assertion that "the architect can operate modesty and invisibly, but to great effect, through an intelligent and imaginative engagement with the production with the economic, social and political contexts of spatial production, and that it is here that the architect regains a prominent role, and with it a social significance”.

These are dabblings with de-professionalisation … but the Rubicon is not crossed.

The authors remain protective of the title and identity of Architect. Curiously, most of the internal contradictions in traditional professional practice are solved, at a stroke, by de-professionalising the architect.

Most of the internal contradictions in traditional professional practice are solved, at a stroke, by de-professionalising the architect.

The true potential of spatial agency

Awan, Schneider and Till assert that “The key political responsibility of the architect lies not in the refinement of the building as static visual commodity, but as a contributor to the creation of empowering spatial, and hence social, relationships in the name of others”.

They could have gone further to say that the key political responsibility of the architect is to empower their local communities with agency in the everyday production of space, without the need for ‘professional’ intermediaries, thereby making themselves redundant.

Herein lies its world-changing potential.

Authors: Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, Jeremy Till
Year of Publication: 2011

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The future of architecture is not what you think! Let’s rebuild it from the foundations up so that it is accessible to all, and make it relevant for the 21st century while we’re at it.

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Space is political …

… as they say.

If space is indeed produced by social forces, this implies that it can be transformed similarly; as Zoe Cohen’s simple, but effective action suggests.

It implies that architects, whose core competency is the crating of space, carry responsibilities that lie beyond the simply physical (whether visual or environmental), but that these responsibilities expand into the realms of perceived space (via our bodies) and lived space (through our subjective experiences and emotions).

This three-dimensional social construction of space itself produces, in reverse, tendencies towards particular social phenomena. It is a constant dialogue, mediated by ourselves and our tools.

The social dimension of our craft has a higher number of adherents now, than when I studied architecture thirty years ago. However, despite its structural, transformative potential, architectural education remains stuck in old ways – out of the reach of many, and out of touch.

If space is produced by social forces, this implies that it can be transformed similarly

Beware of architects bearing gifts

A British (local) student entering the Bartlett School of Architecture this month (September 2023), can expect to pay the following, to call themselves an architect (ARB/RIBA Part III), assuming that there were no increases in tuition fees over the years:

• Part I (undergraduate): £27,750 (~ USD$35,300)
• Part II (post-graduate): £18,500 (~ USD$23,530)
• Part III (professional): £3,750 (~ USD$4,770)

… for a grand total of £50,000 (~ USD$63,600) in tuition fees alone, not including quasi-lifetime student loan interest and living and material costs, which, given the ostentation of the annual summer show, may be quite considerable.

It’s no wonder that cash-strapped UK universities are increasingly chasing after international students because the equivalent figures for them would be:

• Part I: £93,300 (~ USD$118,650)
• Part II: £58,000 (USD$73,775)
• Part III: £3,750 (~ USD$4,770)

… for a grand total of £155,050 (~ USD$197,195)

This is an absolute scandal - extortionate sums to educate students in a manner that the Victorians would recognise, and for a practice model in the future that the Schools themselves acknowledge is unsustainable.

I cannot speak personally for any architectural educators, but it is worth questioning the degree to which they are invested in perpetuating architecture, for the sake of the profession itself, having been committed to it, economically and energetically, sometimes over the course of decades.

The dirty secret about architecture is that, for many ‘architectural’ pursuits, architects are simply not necessary.

While it is difficult for a young student to map out their future career, given the costs and time commitment involved in traditional architectural education, they must keep asking what, qualitatively, they want to achieve. Traditional architectural practice is far from the only way to make a meaningful impact on the built environment.

If, however, a student would simply like to work in traditional architectural practice or have their shot at being the next Zaha Hadid, then their pathway (or lottery ticket) is there.

The dirty secret about architecture is that, for many ‘architectural’ pursuits, architects are simply not necessary.

Strategic design

Towards the end of last year, Central Saint Martins held a lecture series called Production Studies. The last session asked “… how sites of architectural production, the climate crisis and architectural pedagogies can intersect”.

The penultimate question to the panelists was posed as follows:

“We have talked about capitalism, labour, land use, but we haven't talked about power …

You had a slide which showed the RIBA workstages, and you had '0+'; zero being the strategic design dimension of the process, and the experience about how Architects might see themselves. We had another comment about disobedience and why we're not brave enough or strong enough to be disobedient.

I’m just wondering, if you have a desire to be located in a 0+ RIBA workstage, what does it take for an architect to achieve the ability to participate, meaningfully, in the strategic design stage of a built project?

Because, typically, we are taken on when 90% or more of the critical decisions have already been made.

We have seen diagrams about land use, but we typically don't own land. We have heard arguments about how things should be done and how projects could be executed, but we typically don't have the money.

So if we are going to exist and if we are going to be strategic in our contribution, how can we locate ourselves in that 0+ position?”

The follow-up question, by a student, succinctly got to the heart of the matter, and asked, “How educated … do you think the architect should be, to get into these 0+ strategies?”

There can be no doubt that the question was heard loud and clear because the chair of the panelists, Will Thompson, repeated it. I can only imagine the torment in Thompson’s mind in the second or two that he had to ponder potential answers. Any answer would likely be deeply unflattering to the architectural educational establishment, and potentially invalidate the entire lecture series. Thompson immediately shut down not just the question but the entire session.

This fundamental speculation was left unanswered.

If the leading lights of architectural education struggle in this way, then why are they asking students to pay up to $200,000 to acquire supposedly transformative skills?

If we are going to be strategic in our contribution, how can we locate ourselves in that [strategic design] position?

Horizons

Thankfully, spatial practice is not restricted to architectural practice.

The next items on our reading list will look at alternative modes of spatial engagement.

They are:

1. Spatial Agency (Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider & Jeremy Till)
2. Spatial Practices (Melanie Dodd, editor)
3. The Spatial Web (Gabriel René & Dan Mapes)
4. The Future of the Professions (Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind)

About

Behind the scenes, building an architectural tool for everyone!

amonleamonle

AMONLE

The future of architecture is not what you think! Let’s rebuild it from the foundations up so that it is accessible to all, and make it relevant for the 21st century while we’re at it.

YouTube

Re-imagining architectural practice

How, in the future, will we solve problems to which architects are currently our best answer?

amonleamonle

What architecture is

The passage of years has seen an extraordinary decline in the number of dinner party invitations that Jeremy Till receives from other architects. Having not so much stuck his neck out, but rather pulled the tide out, he has exposed the nudity of a number of his peers – not the ideal dinner guest!

I jest of course, but who knows?

Architecture Depends is likely a difficult read for many architects but an eye-opener for those passionate about architecture. Till emphasises throughout that the practitioners and the practice are not the same. Architecture is framed as a socio-cultural institution as much as a profession. Therefore, reimagining architecture itself means going to the heart of its social production. To paraphrase his theme – the clash between what architecture is, and what architects want it to be.

In Till’s world, the architectural profession is inverted. Architects, while tasked with defining the inclusion of physical space, are rather preoccupied with a sort of escape room-style game – to get out of the ‘annoying’ contingencies such as the passage of time, socio-political concerns and real life in general, towards a goal of revealing ‘pure’ architecture.

Naturally, there is no escape, and this is the root of the problem. Architecture ‘depends’.

Reimagining architecture itself means going to the heart of its social production. To paraphrase his theme – the clash between what architecture is, and what architects want it to be.

Architecture as a verb

Till’s heroes are evident, and in some cases explicitly admitted – Zygmunt Bauman, Henri Lefebvre and even James Joyce - towards an architecture that is social, political, and lyrical. In one example, he presents the possibility of the architect weaving lived time with the built environment, analogous to Joyce’s temporal literary devices in Ulysses. It is a fascinating idea, but far too abstract to be retained and carried over into everyday practice. An isolated example to be certain, but characteristic of the challenge that the author creates for himself – how to build that bridge back to what architecture actually is.

Even though Till nudges architecture from the realm of nouns to verbs (plan > to plan, plot > to plot etc), he is somewhat hamstrung by being wedded to the idea of the architect as designer/author rather than the architect as doer. He gets close with the attention that he gives to lo-fi architecture, but somehow dares not cross the line. So many of the issues identified, are, negatively, rooted in architecture’s denial of life’s contingencies (or ‘externalities’, as a neoliberal might put it); or say the application, positively, of situated knowledge, are addressed head-on by the architect getting out of his chair and getting his hands dirty. The architect here 'builder', doer – or more specifically, architecture then resembles a vertically integrated undertaking. It implies a direct engagement with space, with people and the various contingencies and realms of knowledge therein.

An uppercase ‘A’

At the outset, our author takes aim at the prevailing culture of architectural education, with depictions of studio life combining the austerity of an army bootcamp with a follow-the-leader passion of a cult. In the world of architectural education, Till identifies a conflation between “radical thinking” and “radical making”, in which we are seduced by the variation in form from school to school or era to era, and deluded into believing that this is directly proportional to underlying variations in values. He convincingly argues that this could not be further from the truth.

Till strikes gold when he identifies the positive potentials of architectural education when seen through the lens of architectural intelligence rather than architectural knowledge.

It is a frame also employed by the likes of …

• Jacques Herzog and Rem Koolhaas, who have both suggested architecture “as a way of thinking”
• Alejandro Aravena, with architecture as “a set of tools to understand society”
• Henri Lefebvre, and his notion of “architecture as a mode of imagination”
• Randy Deutsch, with his focus on critical thinking in architecture

I could go on, but the picture painted here is of an architecture without an uppercase ‘A’, and perhaps something that might not be called architecture at all.

Till strikes gold when he identifies the positive potentials of architectural education when seen through the lens of architectural intelligence rather than architectural knowledge.

De-professionalisation

Architecture Depends repeatedly skirts along the edges of salvation – in which the architect is liberated from his responsibility as individual ‘designer’, and architecture from its lofty position as a ‘profession’. Till, perhaps accidentally, goes to the heart of the various problems identified in the book that result in architecture’s detached “black box”. Salvation lies in de-professionalisation.

Unfortunately for Till, at the time, he headed up a multidisciplinary design school, Central Saint Martins, where his students were laying down hundreds and hours and thousands of pounds every year, towards the goal of becoming that very ‘professional’. Had he advocated for de-professionalisation, it would have been a bit awkward at the office.

Architecture also depends

A London architectural duo running a “research-based practice” recently gave a talk that included an interesting project in Australia, where they flew out to work on it for months; and a bold, self-funded development in the UK. If we put design questions aside for the moment, we are left with quite fundamental ones. While they were away for months on end, how did they pay the rent or mortgage? How did they eat? Was this one long-distance project enough to sustain them? Clearly, there was a very significant part of the story that was not being told.

Or a celebrated collective, building award-winning projects straight out of university. How did they pull that off? If this is broadly achievable for graduating students at large, then surely gold is to be found in their story, regardless of the creative awards. We assume they weren’t hungry or living on the street as they started up. Have they been able to sustain that early idealism, or must practices like this eventually revert to more traditional models? Can their youthful idealism survive the social and financial demands of a house purchase, a pregnancy, or a marriage – in short, real life?

Architecture also depends on these contingencies, it's just that they are awkward and un-romantic to address. They also should not be ignored.

Architecture is the most elite profession in the UK, with 73% of its members coming from privileged backgrounds. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining so many of the practice stories that do not get fully fleshed out.

The future is blight

If this book’s arguments could be condensed to a single line, an excellent candidate would be the one that appears roughly midway through: “Remember who you were before you were branded an architect.”

So where are we now, more than a decade after publication? If you thought the detachment of architectural photography was bad, now we have generative AI. If you thought the detachment of generative AI was bad, today we have the metaverse. But wait, we may even have generative AI in the metaverse!

Good luck, Jeremy Till. You certainly have your work cut out for you!

Author: Jeremy Till
Year of Publication: 2009

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About

Behind the scenes, building an architectural tool for everyone!

amonleamonle

AMONLE

The future of architecture is not what you think! Let’s rebuild it from the foundations up so that it is accessible to all, and make it relevant for the 21st century while we’re at it.

YouTube

Re-imagining architectural practice

How, in the future, will we solve problems to which architects are currently our best answer?

amonleamonle

A promised land

Architecture school, almost universally in the West, delivers a creeping realisation to its students that architecture, compared to other professions such as law and medicine, is not a high-paying career. Our profession shares prestige with its cousins, but its growing appeal is partly the result of the implication that as an architect, one has the opportunity for creative self-expression, while still carrying a professional title – the best of both worlds.

It is the self-expression side that the American Institute of Architects implores us to focus on, and which, the author ultimately argues, facilitates the exploitation of junior staff and inhibits the development of enduring practices, operating at scale.

For staff, this comes about because the artistic (romantic) inclination works against both the development of a more efficient division of labour within the profession (evident in law and medicine), as well as rendering unpalatable, the idea of unionisation. Today, 25 years after publication, this is beginning to change, but not by much.

For practices, the focus on individual creativity, engendered in architectural school, lends itself to practice models that reward autonomy, evidenced by the appeal of the ‘master/atelier’ model and the overwhelming majority of one-man-band and small firms in the industry. To be sure, this is not completely out of sync with the preponderance of small businesses in the economy, but Gutman argues that comprehensive practice, at scale, is the route to greater relevance in the construction industry, and for longevity of businesses as a whole.

The reality is, that in large firms in particular, staff are working “at levels below their talent and training”. This is a function of both the non-technical and incomplete nature of much of architectural education, leaving it to practice to complete, but also the reality of staff resourcing in an environment in which architectural firms are increasingly squeezed on the fees front, while having to deliver on increasingly administrative duties.

Drilling down through the layers of Gutman’s arguments, whether on firm size, breadth or specialisation, is the issue of morale. It is evident that architecture schools produce vast numbers of graduates, who are promised an ideal, which is not realised in practice.

Business, professional and economic issues aside, this is a core problem that must be addressed in order for the profession to thrive, and indeed survive.

It is evident that architecture schools produce vast numbers of graduates, who are promised an ideal, which is not realised in practice.

Historical irrelevance

Gutman makes an interesting point about architects' increasing marginalisation within the overall building industry, as more niche specialists, as other specialisms are devolved to other professionals. One such area, relevant since the 1970s, is technology. Gutman’s point is that architects respond to their diminished role by trying to ‘re-capture’ their relevance by making "technology into a subject for aesthetic manipulation” – as in the case of British high-tech.

In more contemporary times, decades after its 1988 publication, we can observe a similar phenomenon with parametricism.

The author’s conclusion that the architectural ‘habit’ of "translating social and technical ideas into principles of form” does not do much more than boost morale and make “architectural activity appear relevant”. His implication, of course, is that this is all very hollow.

Decorator of the shed

The opposite of the trend towards specialisation is comprehensive practice, providing, in-house, the multidisciplinary requirements for realising a construction project.

It is a generalised approach which remains unfashionable today among the more design-minded firms. Indeed, the use of executive architects/architects of record is now institutionalised in the profession, particularly with architects working across borders, in geographical settings where they have been engaged for their internationally transferable visual signature, and where local technical knowledge is required, behind-the-scenes, to make it happen. In David Maister’s brutal assessment, “increasingly, through their own actions, architects are running the risk of being treated as design subcontractors. Rather than being a spouse, many architects are becoming like the household chef, respected for technical and artistic talents, but nevertheless part of the downstairs kitchen staff and paid accordingly”.

We have looked at an adjacent issue before, the matter of strategic design, addressing the fact that architects are typically brought in when vastly all the critical decisions have already been made. In the words of an executive of Century Corporation, “We’ve done so many large office buildings, we’re able to make 90% of the decisions before the architect draws a line”.

Gutman rightly sees the architect’s narrow role as decorator-of-the-shed, divorced from the process of building, as a threat to the profession; particularly since this goes hand-in-hand with the implication that architects are therefore not competent to deal with technical matters.

"Increasingly, through their own actions, architects are running the risk of being treated as design subcontractors. Rather than being a spouse, many architects are becoming like the household chef, respected for technical and artistic talents, but nevertheless part of the downstairs kitchen staff and paid accordingly"
David Maister

White labels and dark kitchens

What might a future architecture profession look like? The cooking metaphor provides a clue, so we can run with it a little longer.

The food industry has seen a recent explosion of ’dark’ or ‘ghost’ kitchens – utilitarian cooking services, out of sight of customers; with no social connection to their locale; typically set up for delivery apps; and serving one or more commercial enterprises, down to menu, branding and packaging.

The principle is that, say MrBeast Burgers, need not go through the hassle and cost of setting up their own kitchens to establish a local presence or delivery area radius. They only need to ‘subscribe’ to a kitchen system, input their corporate formulas and let the ‘ghosts’ do the rest.

The concept of architects, as the downstairs kitchen staff, or the house chef, at least assumes the individual holding a privileged, professional role with a modicum of respect and individual identity. In the ghost kitchen model, their activities can be stripped to the bone, to provide the essentials (only) of regulatory and technical coordination, in the background. In this scenario, a mass of architects would not have a name, much less a face. This is in stark contrast to the big-tent idea of comprehensive practice, advocated by the AIA, and indeed the author himself.

We have, as a profession, by ourselves, cultured generations of young architectural staff to expect to be exploited – in the past and present, not in some theoretical, future dystopia. So they are primed for work in ghost practices. We also, already have architects providing white-label services in-house, on the client side, for property developers, interior designers, government organisations and the like, not to mention the executive architects (architects of record) previously referred to, doing the same, behind the scenes, for other architects.

A ghost kitchen style practice is simply a hyper-capitalist model on the other side of the coin. It’s not so much whether ghost practices are a possible reality, but how quickly that reality will come to pass.

Here is a business idea for a generative AI entrepreneur. Why not build an app with the ability to deliver multiple creative options at speed to users, hire a celebrity as a ‘front’, and support it all with a ghost architectural practice in the background?

MrBeast Architecture?

Now imagine a scenario further into the future where technological unemployment has taken hold. A generation of architects looks back, perhaps with a hint of nostalgia, at the morsels that were at least provided to them in ghost practices. Imagine, that ghost practices, with their regulatory and technical focus, were only staffed by architects and other support staff for as long as humans could do the job better than machines.

As the generative AI revolution in machine learning has shown us, any human activity that a system can be trained on, can be simulated by those machines with rapidly increasing degrees of sophistication.

Humans use technology today as an amplifier, magnifying their reach and productivity in ways unimaginable even a few decades ago. Eventually, when human beings become redundant in the technical/regulatory equation, perhaps then, architecture as we know it will receive its coup de grâce.

10 trends

As with McEwen, 17 years previously, Gutman frames his arguments under a number of key headings. Unlike McEwen’s outright advice, Gutman identifies 10 trends "that have been transforming the subjective experiences of Architects". Is also worth them in full:

1. The expanding demand for architectural services
2. Changes in the structure of the demand
3. The oversupply, or potential oversupply, of entrants into the profession
4. The increase in size and complexity of buildings
5. The consolidation and professionalisation of the construction industry
6. The greater rationality and sophistication of client organisations
7. The more intense competition between architects and other professions
8. The greater competition within the profession
9. The continuing economic difficulties of practice
10. The changing expectations of architecture among the public

And if we were to boil down Gutman’s overarching advice into one sentence, it would be that architectural practices should be bigger and provide comprehensive services. Scale and sophistication address, to some extent, all of the above trends. For traditional architectural practice, these are the qualities of the players that will hold on the longest.

Author: Robert Gutman
Year of Publication: 1996

About

Behind the scenes, building an architectural tool for everyone!

amonleamonle

AMONLE

The future of architecture is not what you think! Let’s rebuild it from the foundations up so that it is accessible to all, and make it relevant for the 21st century while we’re at it.

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Re-imagining architectural practice

How, in the future, will we solve problems to which architects are currently our best answer?

amonleamonle

Back to the future

I hold, in my hand, a book in which the author, in his introduction, references an economic crisis (inflation, high energy prices, anaemic growth), demands a reassessment of our consumption-driven use of energy and natural resources, and wasteful redevelopment which includes demolition of buildings which might otherwise have been suitable for adaptive re-use. He questions the concept of growth(ism) itself, advocating for de-growth. He laments the inequalities produced by rampant and rootless land speculation, in which architects have been co-opted and corrupted. Furthermore, he acknowledges the limitations of architects to change the situation on their own, but insists that a fundamental reassessment of the nature of building is necessary: “If Architects are to work for the satisfaction of human needs, very big changes are required in the structure of client demand, and in the financial and other controls applied to building”.

We have not even completed two pages in this book.

The year of publication is 1974.

“If Architects are to work for the satisfaction of human needs, very big changes are required in the structure of client demand, and in the financial and other controls applied to building”

Alienation

McEwan hints at the source of much of the alienation in our cities today, which is the rearrangement, ordained by the demands of capital (property development), of ourselves and our lives in forms of the built environment that do not support constructive human interaction. How many of us, whether living in tower blocks, mansion blocks or terraced houses, do not even know our neighbours, much less provide emotional, social or financial support to them? While the physical context of pre-and post-war slums, say in Glasgow, as identified, were deplorable, and a desire for wholesale renewal shared by residents and authorities alike, the subsequent nature of that renewal broke the social links that had existed in the physically unpalatable circumstances. Given that our current built environment is effectively ‘here to stay’, surely we must now find a way to eliminate the alienation and bring back 21st-century forms of social cohesion.

Form follows finance

Though the title of this book focuses on ‘architecture’, McEwan rightly shines a spotlight on the key underlying interests of the architectural environment – namely land. In framing the city as “a gigantic enterprise, an organisation for the production, distribution, and redistribution of wealth”, he is able to highlight watershed events such as the 1959 Town and Country Planning Act, a precursor, from a developer’s standpoint, to much of what we criticise about ‘free’ market-focused neoliberal thinking. He reminds us that “[t]hose with greater resources command urban space, those who lack resources are, David Harvey's words, trapped in it. Architecture is concerned with physical space, but the allocation, use and design of space are socially controlled by those who command the resources, and deploy them in response to the market."

Again, this is 1974, quite an ‘innocent’ era for ‘free’ markets compared to the post-Thatcher re-engineering of Britain’s financial landscape. Decades later, Alistair Parvin reiterates that "form follows finance", and equally that our housing problem is, in fact, a land problem. These statements ring true, even more so now than when MacEwen made his observations. Perhaps the challenge that we must present ourselves is to divorce the process of development from the necessity of land ownership.

It is frustrating to read that half a century ago, the government was appealing to banks to limit their lending for property development, structurally unproductive compared to industrial production, and exploding as a phenomenon following ‘liberalisation’ of bank lending controls three years previously. Now, with 90% of bank lending going to the financial and property sectors, significantly worse, we wonder why the UK has a productivity gap compared to other advanced nations. The causes are deep, and their history is long.

The repeal of the nationalisation of development values in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act demonstrates the power of law over economics, and the sustainability and vitality of our cities. It is a nation’s nuclear option. By embracing so-called free market values, a nation exposes itself to forces that are greater than even its government – namely the international financial sector.

They have broken governments before, in dramatic fashion, and, through land and property, we can see them once again breaking society, but in slow but steady motion.

While Brexit promised Britons that they would “take back control”, it clearly did the opposite – diminishing the collective weight of the European Union’s legislative oversight, and exposing the UK even further to the whims of international financiers.

We can therefore expect further social debasement and speculative bubbles in property, as observed by McEwan half a century ago, to accelerate even further.

It is an extraordinary challenge to the imagination to envisage where this leads. Or perhaps it isn’t. The same financiers, enormous financial institutions, are now investing heavily in homes for rental. Even retailer John Lewis is getting in on the act. They simply do not expect us to be able to own property in the future, nor are they fearful of competition from the government (social renting) in this regard.

We also have so-called ‘Freeports’, which are, in fact, vast tracts of land, inland, with relaxed financial and, naturally, planning legislation. Expect these multiple square kilometre zones to lay down markers for the rest of the country, attracting investors, and therefore jobs and interest, but in an environment with even less social value. Expect a two-tier Britain as the first stage of this process, with a second stage in which it may become ‘inevitable’ that the rest of the country follows the Freeport lead.

This is the true promise of Brexit.

Expect a two-tier Britain as the first stage of this process, with a second stage in which it may become ‘inevitable’ that the rest of the country follows the Freeport lead. This is the true promise of Brexit.

Thinking of the environment

Interesting things happen when oil prices are high. McEwan’s suggestion of mandatory Environmental Impact Statements for projects of a certain size is enlightened, not just because it calls for such things as an objectively measurable energy balance sheet, but also because such statements would include social and financial factors. He goes on to suggest that they could be used as a vehicle for aligning architects’ interests inherently with those of the public, by compelling architects to uphold the values of such statements, and likewise refuse commissions where statements by a previous architect may have fallen short. It would likely be a very unpopular administrative overhead in this day and age of bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, but the concept itself is sound. Critically also, it would “drag into the open the financial basis of development”, a key source of controversy in planning matters today.

Four tasks for architects

MacEwen, in his “passionate constructive criticism by one who is not an architect but loves architecture”, gives us, the profession, four tasks to take away, as relevant now as they were then. Their headlines are worth quoting in full:

1. The first task is to reduce the consumption of energy and other scarce resources

2. The second task for Architects is to ensure, so far as it lies within their power, that their skills and the nation’s schools resources applied to the satisfaction of the essential needs of the community

3. The third task for architects is to promote forms of professional practice that will release the skills, creativity, enthusiasm, and sense of commitment that many architects possess but cannot use in any satisfying way

4. The fourth task for architects emerges clearly from the other three. It is to rethink the role, functions, and structure of the professional institute.

Perhaps the practice of architecture demands an even more radical reassessment, but we could do worse than take this advice to heart, rather than let it languish for another half century.

Author: Malcolm MacEwen
Year of Publication: 1974

About

Behind the scenes, building an architectural tool for everyone!

amonleamonle

AMONLE

The future of architecture is not what you think! Let’s rebuild it from the foundations up so that it is accessible to all, and make it relevant for the 21st century while we’re at it.

YouTube

Re-imagining architectural practice

How, in the future, will we solve problems to which architects are currently our best answer?

amonleamonle

A class sandwich

The role of Architect has, over the years, been fluid and in a constant state of play. Lurking beneath this fluidity, however, is a preoccupation with class.

The architecture profession has employed methods of division to position itself with respect to others, such as ’higher’ owners (clients), and to elevate itself above others, particularly ‘lower’ builders and other construction specialists. The outcome of the means and acts of this stratification has been a profession erecting a protective (protectionist) ring around itself.

The obsession with class, manifested through gentlemanly and derivative codes of conduct, has been an active subject of debate for over a century. In that time, the societies in which this stratification has been employed (the West in particular) have experienced hugely transformative economic, technological and social–cultural upheaval. The hidebound practices of the profession have succeeded somewhat in their protectionism, but this has come at the cost of a lack of evolution, bordering on stagnation, as the rest of society gallops by.

And so, within this frame, the story of how the profession of architecture was assembled around the turn of the twentieth century is one of a rigid class system, providing the backbone to the status of the architectural profession, versus a fluid and evolving business, cultural and technological environment both engendered and exploited by owners above and builders below. Architects, in the middle of this class sandwich, have therefore been forced to adapt and evolve.

The role of Architect has, over the years, been fluid and in a constant state of play. Lurking beneath this fluidity, however, is a preoccupation with class.

The cast of actors

Johnston’s barometer, giving readings on the state of affairs over time, is The Handbook of Architectural Practice, first published in 1920 and evolving with the complexity of the industry.

Assembling the Architect primarily concerns itself with the shifting relationship over the years between architect, owner, and builder – its main cast of actors. However, it also engages with other relationships, such as those with engineers and technical specialists such as landscape and interior designers.

The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice

On the surface, a book about architectural business management, but at is core, a thesis on values and culture.

amonleamonle

Originally, the work of architect Frank Miles Day, the Handbook began as an office manual and evolved into a business administration guide, ultimately laying the groundwork towards recognition of architecture’s professional status in the United States.

This barometer of practice is monitored alongside its contemporary, the fictional, satirical Tom Thumtack’s tales, by Rockwell Kent, a commentary on architectural practice of the time.

Lastly, Johnston assesses these two publications against the backdrop of a further, the development of the Uniform Contract of 1888, for use between owner and contractor.

Division of labour

The handbook was a response in part to the perceived practical deficiencies among architects in business acumen, and a similarly perceived over-emphasis on the artistic side of the profession. Indeed, the author’s reading of the early handbook reveals the assertion that “it was only through the primacy of an efficient organisation, constantly evolving in harmony with the new methods of business management that the designer will be free to exert his creative and artistic talents.” In addition, it reflected the consequences of the division of labour within the industry, which typically left the architect with a more narrow agent/consultative role.

In the fictional tale of Tom Thumtack, we encounter the notion of the spatial organisation and spirit of the architect’s office as a manifestation of his business structure and values. This remains with us today, though more intertwined with the romantic notion of the artist’s studio than the technical principles of a business plan. Nevertheless, once populated by staff, the personal and informational flows through the office can be codified in The Handbook – simultaneously a trigger for activity and a record of the history of those activities – the software of the firm.

It is fascinating to read the author’s description of the entry sequence for clients from reception through to meeting with senior staff – a route with visual cues via organisation and portfolio displays, representative of what the firm stands for. It is a veritable promenade architecturale, framed as an exhibition – a narrative environment so-to-speak that was “an experiential advertisement for a profession that otherwise frowned on advertising in print”.

The office layout itself was an expression of a further division of labour – representative of the hierarchy within the firm. Unsurprisingly, the grunt work, back office staff are hidden away, lest they burst the illusory bubble.

Likewise, the preoccupation well over a century ago with the promotion of architecture as a fine art – gallery mounted and all. And, as today, the irony that the primary audience remains fellow architects rather than the public at large, who seem to show little interest compared to the blockbuster plastic fine arts shows. It is perhaps unsurprising then that architecture’s contemporary image-ready leaning towards the sculptural and dramatic, devoid of social or practical contingencies, sells better with the public from an exhibition/coffee table book standpoint.

One’s standing

Barnett Johnston’s vocabulary throughout hints at the social context of architecture and the firm at the turn of the 20th century, similar to today – a setting which drives decision-making and possibilities, where the opportunities for practice via wealthy clientele rest on a foundation of social and class standing. This is not explicitly stated, but implied, in the descriptions of the evolution of codes of practice, and particularly the detailed accounts of the character’s lives, some of which lean towards society, memoir–style writing.

This is a minor criticism, but perhaps it is simply emblematic of the realities that we still deal with as professionals serving the elite and powerful commissioners of our work. Regarding architectural registration, Johnston does make the connection between the idea of reputation that comes with registration, and class – highlighting that the differentiation between professional architects and design-builders is as much a question of practice as it is of standing in society.

Again, the social stratification, though representative of the time, still echoes today – with women in prescribed (non-technical) roles, and not a minority (black, Latino, Native American or Asian) in sight.

Barnett Johnston reminds us that the post-First World War era, when the Handbook was written, was one of huge technological and economic transformation. However, major social transformation was still to come.

Catch 22

In traditional procurement, the owner-architect-builder relationship has a built-in flaw – namely the conflict between the architect’s role as independent arbitrator (between owner and builder), and that of client’s agent. It immediately begs the question of how an architect can act independently for both parties (say as Contract Administrator of a building contract) when in fact he was hired by an acting for one of the parties – the owner. The architect depends on tangible qualities to justify this dichotomy – his statutory registration and/or membership of a body of his peers, such as the RIBA or AIA, and the codes of conduct that come along with them. He also leans on intangible qualities – his ‘professionalism’ and an implication of honour, gentlemanliness, and the pedigree of these qualities amongst his brotherhood – class-based qualifications of integrity.

Then and now, however, the builder and the owner have recourse to external legal procedures if the architect’s agent/independent arbitrator’s dichotomy is not resolved – a backup class leveller of sorts.

A social practice

In the latter stages of the book, Johnston switches on his inner sociologist, framing the practice of architecture in its historical context through the act of “constructing design as a social practice situated both culturally and structurally in the American context “, with the architect’s tools framed as “bundle[s] of social relations” – be they contracts, drawings, or the offices and staff themselves.

In this framing, the profession of architecture is an emergent, after the efforts of individuals and groups within a particular socio–cultural context and anchored by the weight of history of the idea of architecture.

Practice is therefore not a single, ‘inevitable’ sequence of actions but a constantly evolving collection of codes, simplified for social, legal and commercial purposes under the brand of ’Architecture’. The standardisation professed by The Handbook of Architectural Practice was less an account of agreed principles and more, over the years, a self-fulfilling prophecy of the progression in an increasingly interconnected nation.

Practice is therefore not a single, ‘inevitable’ sequence of actions but a constantly evolving collection of codes, simplified for social, legal and commercial purposes under the brand of ’Architecture’.

The old and the new

Johnston shows that, with the benefit of historical context, alternative modes of practice seemingly stimulated by new technology such as BIM or management principles such as IPD are more cyclical than they are disruptive, returning to some of the ‘pre-professional’ arrangements of the 19th century - “… resuscitating the hybrid disciplinary agencies of the past”.

Given that we are on the cusp of further significant technological and social upheaval, the profession is poised similarly as it was then.

Before, a budding profession called Architecture.

Now, with different codes and bundles of social relations, a new profession will emerge that has not yet been named.

Author: George Barnett Johnston
Year of Publication: 2020

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A civilisational biopsy

This is not a post about climate. It just so happens that this past week has brought enough attention to climate change to shift the media conversation into the realm of the dramatic. However, despite the intensity of the drama, it hasn’t stopped the deniers or the side-steppers. Not even the drama of this week!

Incredibly, this was not the only recent civilisational crisis, at least in the UK.

Rents outside London, where many priced-out Londoners have fled, have risen by a third in only four years. You’ll spend a long time looking for workers whose salaries have risen comparably, unless, of course, you found the King. The rent situation is only one symptom of the UK’s housing malaise, driven by post-Thatcher, post-great-financial-crisis bubble economics of hyper-liberalisation, ultra-low interests rates and an avalanche of international money.

Meanwhile, the government, itself in crisis, has announced a crackdown on “rip-off university degrees” - linguistic cover for an actual crackdown on studies that are too far off the UK’s financialised train line. The prospects of UK degree programmes are now inversely proportional to the level of critical thinking that they stimulate. Who knows, some architecture programmes may even get the cull.

The prime minister, speaking not only for his party, but for all those who share his values, said the quiet part out loud - that universities are “full of, you know, people who don’t vote for us anyway”. To hell with your aspirations.

Over the pond, the continental US property industry has been literally bracketed by the withdrawal of major insurance companies from California (west coast) and Florida (east coast), presumably because of ‘unbearable’ losses from fire and hurricanes respectively.

What we are seeing here is a snapshot, a biopsy of sorts, of the current state of Western civilisation; or perhaps the edges of the anticipated polycrisis.

Imagine a World War. What are its characteristics?

• A prolonged conflict of enormous scale and scope
• … with mass casualties and destruction
• … with a giant impact, shaping geopolitics, economics, and international relations
• … involving major powers
• … rooted in historical, social and political ideologies

If these are the characteristics of a World War, then we need new terminology because they are also the characteristics of what we can expect to encounter, globally, as a result of climate change alone, not to mention the other dimensions of the polycrisis. ‘World War III’ will not be characterised by missiles, but rather by migration, mortality, and mitigation of a multitude of dire consequences.

Now imagine an architect, taking everything we know, and what we can envision of the future, and condensing it all down to a matter of style.

What is the diagnosis of the state of architectural practice, after this biopsy?

Not broken, but terminally ill.

What we are seeing here is a snapshot, a biopsy of sorts, of the current state of Western civilisation; or perhaps the edges of the anticipated polycrisis.

The end of architecture

Net Zero

We are steaming headlong towards a fundamental global reset. The end of architectural practice, as we know it, is guaranteed, not because we will run out of ideas nor even because a technology or a trend will disrupt it, but because the very social and economic underpinnings that make it possible will themselves be reset and unrecognisable from what we might identify today.

Here is a not so secret fact – Net Zero is not going to happen by 2050.

Here is another – global warming is going to blast through 1.5°C and keep going, with all the devastating consequences.

We can talk about structural change all we want, but what we urgently need to talk about, is how to survive.

Limits to growth

Now, one person’s structural problems are another person’s power edifice, that they will not demolish voluntarily. That edifice is built on a foundation that is innocent looking and even aspirational, and when looked at snapshot-style, only accounts for a small percentage of the experience of our everyday lives … growth, specifically the economic kind.

For about 3,000 years, until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution around 1750, “economic growth averaged only 0.01% per year. In other words, global living standards were essentially flat … [so that] by the year 2000, for instance, it shows that GDP per person was more than 50 times greater than three millennia before”.

The obvious fact is that unlimited growth is not possible on a finite planet. Going beyond the obvious, however, are detailed arguments for limits to growth (and degrowth) going back at least fifty years.

On the other side of the coin of these three millennia, we have seen a dramatic decrease in poverty and increase in quality of life globally, uneven as it may be.

Correlation does not imply causation, but undoubtedly economic growth and poverty reduction are connected, even in the context of increased inequality. Case in point, China’s ‘economic miracle’ lifted almost a billion people out of poverty. It also came at a huge environmental cost.

Nevertheless, there will always be a demand to build, but the architecture profession cannot be sustained within a product and services supply chain that is dependent on extraction of resources. As we have seen above, even so-called Net Zero aspirations are pies in the sky, far outside our capacity to achieve, and themselves demanding of physical extraction with significant human and environmental consequences.

For traditional architectural practice, the biggest impediment to structural change is our place in the hierarchy of the property industry.

As you can see below, only a tiny percentage of architects have a meaningful seat at the decision-making table for the development of property.

The rest of the time, we sit near the end of a decision-making chain with little agency to have a say, at the financial modelling and briefing stage, on the big ticket items of a building’s embodied carbon footprint. With our income typically coming from professional fees rather than capital investment, it is much easier to go with the flow.

A question of class

One of the posts in this series will look at how the client-architect-builder relationship has been in a constant state of play, particularly since Victorian times. Nevertheless, the contemporary architecture professional would find a recognisable version of themselves centuries before, in the persona of Philibert Delorme (1510-70).

He envisaged “a self-governing profession of specialists with accepted standards of training and clearly defined responsibilities and privileges”. Critically, however, he emphasised the social distinction between the architect and the craftsman.

Delorme didn’t mince words, speaking of a “third class of persons … the master masons, stonecutters, and workmen whom the architect was always in control”.

The key differentiator that we project outwards to society is our role in the professions’ primary responsibility to protect public health, safety, and welfare. It is a foundation that remains, while the other distinctions are increasingly called into question.

Nevertheless, inwardly, the distinction that we lean on most today, is class. It is enabled now, as it was in the past, by patronage from those even higher up on the social ladder.

Contradicting this, in David Maister’s brutal assessment: “Increasingly, through their own actions, architects are running the risk of being treated as design subcontractors. Rather than being a spouse, many architects are becoming like the household chef, respected for technical and artistic talents, but nevertheless part of the downstairs kitchen staff and paid accordingly”.

Architects are not artists.

Architects are not, by default, gentlemen nor ladies.

Architects are the help.

More appropriately stated, architects today are workers, and we should align our interests accordingly.

Only a tiny percentage of architects have a meaningful seat at the decision-making table for the development of property.

Crafting the art of solidarity

An organisation such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), or the American Institute of Architects (AIA), have their roots in the craft guilds of antiquity – fraternities, often hereditary, that served as an extended family of like-minded souls, sharing (and protecting) knowledge, resources, social connections, and ultimately crafting the art of solidarity.

In their contemporary form, they have become natural vessels for re-emphasising the social differentiation that the status of ‘professional’ requires. Even if the ARB and NCARB, in the UK and USA respectively, do the drudge work of regulation, the ‘member's club’, the source of status, and the provider of evidence via the letters after your name, remains the contemporary transformation of the guild – the Institute.

Even though the depth of fraternity may not match what would have been observed in antiquity, members still revert to those founding principles of solidarity in seeking support. This can be observed weather the Institute is making broad representations for the profession for political or economic ends, in wider society, or within the institution itself, on a subject such as wages for architectural workers.

Even if its days are numbered, traditional architectural practice will not disappear imminently. So institutes will have key roles to play for some time.

Transition is the key for the Institute:

• To proactively support the development of alternative modes of practice
• To broaden the socio-economic footprint of architectural (spatial) practice, whatever form it takes, with a consequential broadening of demographics
• And perhaps, rather than simply supporting the idea of unionisation, to actually become a union itself, as the Swedish Association of Architects has done

Perhaps, rather than simply supporting the idea of unionisation, Institutes should actually become unions themselves, as the Swedish Association of Architects has done.

The asshole-sucker spectrum

If you can forgive the profanity, it is used to get very specific about a key challenge that we face. Those who care the most tend to have the least power to effect the change that they envision.

Specifically, the acquisition of power, and the mechanisms to retain that power, whether political, economic, media-driven or otherwise, involve co-option by existing power structures – in a word, ‘capture’. In the West at least, power derives from winning the game of capitalism, and subsummation by its value systems.

Assholes tend to do quite well.

On the other end of the spectrum are the suckers.

I hesitate to pin a ‘sucker’ tag on Ms Mebane. I don’t know her, nor do I know how much personal satisfaction she may have gained over those 74 years. However, in the same period, in the US, CEO pay skyrocketed from approximately 20x the average worker to almost 400x! Have CEOs become 20x more effective at their work, or have they become twenty times more effective at controlling the narrative such that their workers don’t strike for fairer pay, or start a revolution.

The unfortunate fact is that wealth is generated and sustained by suckers. It’s just that they are typically not on the receiving end of it.

The spectrum is also there for a reason. You would be hard-pressed to find a ‘pure’ asshole or sucker. A personality, at any given time, is likely to sit somewhere on a sliding scale between the two.

As unpalatable as it may be to some, we all need to bring out our inner asshole from time to time (please don’t visualise!), not to fight fire with fire, but to hurdle over the insecurity that tends to get in the way of getting things done.

If you believe that the climate crisis is an emergency, you are right. The same applies to our economic and social crises.

In the long run, we are indeed all dead.

The time to act is now.

Own the game you want to win

Sterling advice from Chris Brogan, and relevant well beyond the boundaries of the personal development industry.

Since the turn of the millennium, the digital shifting of theinformation substructure under our feet has precipitated the disruption of creative industries far and wide, such as …

• Music with Napster
• Photography (The Chicago Sun-Times laying off its entire photography staff, or Marissa Mayer’s assertion that “there’s no such thing as professional photographers” within a week of each other)
• Warner cutting out the middleman and streaming its 2021 slate of films
• Or an uncertain future for music, again, as predicted by renowned critic Ted Gioia

Now we have large language models and diffusion image generators to contend with.

The practice of architecture will not be spared.

If, facing all the challenges mentioned, architects were to be ‘re-invented’ in the future, they might look remarkably similar to what they look like today – that is, if the task was given to those with power in society. What might 'the powerful' need? An agent to execute, in built form, their social, political and economic objectives.

We might discover an entirely different type of persona, however, if we gave the task to those away from the centres of power. They might ask, as Richard and Daniel Susskind have, “How in the future will we solve problems to which [architects] are currently our best answer?”

The latter task is the more pertinent one.

Along the way, we will have to discard our inhibitions and prejudices. We will have to co-opt, and be co-opted … tight-rope walking! We will have to engage with capitalism. In social pursuits, we will have to accept that tech, inherently, is not an enemy.

We should not be prejudiced against the pursuit of scale. We can and should use scale to act now, in small bits and a lot, towards positive ends. Furthermore, we can and should do all of this, to the greatest extent possible, on our terms.

If we are to reimagine architectural practice, we must also be prepared to sacrifice the idea of the Architect itself.

Most critically, though, any re-imagination only makes sense if it is socially relevant to the challenges of our present moment – and it must be coupled with action – to start, to do and to keep going.

—

Before jumping into the future, we will take a moment to look back.

Accordingly, the next books on our reading list are:

1. Assembling the Architect (George Barnett Johnston)
2. Crisis in Architecture (Malcolm MacEwen)
3. Architectural Practice: A Critical View (Robert Gutman)
4. Architecture Depends (Jeremy Till)

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The other kind of A.I.

Four architects who successfully expanded the definition of architecture and helped to shape the digital landscape

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Another Kind of A.I.

The introduction to this series was a bit of a tease.

’A.I.’ of the artificial variety is at or near the peak of its hype cycle, so it may have come as a bit of a surprise to some to find ‘Intelligence’ prefixed by ‘Architectural’.

There is a twist to the tale, however, because the architects spoken of do not leave the tech obsessed empty-handed. Quite the contrary, in fact, and it is here that our author Molly Wright Steenson shines a spotlight on a cast of architectural characters whose paths do not always cross in space or time, but certainly in theme – interactivity.

The characters, Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price and their associated collectives all left their mark on the digital landscape and remain influential, beyond the field of architecture, to this day.

Limits to growth

The early days of the development of a new way of life, or technology, reveal the components of its DNA that are maintained regardless of how advanced or complex that system becomes. So, it is with the relationship between computing and architectural design.

Christopher Alexander, unusually for an architect, had degrees from Cambridge University in both architecture and mathematics. He had very early access to computers, in the 1950s and 60s, at a time when their cost was comparable to a house and their size to that of a room. In those early days, when, again unusually for an architect, Alexander was able to programme these computers, he quickly realised a fundamental limitation: "The effort to state a problem in such a way that a computer can be used to solve it, will distort your view of the problem".

Wright Steenson points out that Alexander "struggled with the limitations of his programs and tools in representing the complexity he sought to find". We now have his well-known books The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language, which were more than a decade away, and these critical publications in his personal history demonstrate something fundamental – that the ultimate ‘software’ solution to create meaningful places exists within us already. Alexander concludes, in his own way, that the complexity of computer software is insufficient to represent the complexity of the world, a world which we experience with a human body in the further complexity of nature.

By the time he gave us his two, landmark books, computers were no longer his primary tools. Design via the computer can only simulate the complexity of design in the real world, and in his view, it does so inadequately, or at least it is most useful in solving problems that are "the most trivial and the least relevant". One could argue that this is true of generative architecture, successful in form-making games and physical production, but useless in addressing the other key social aspects of place-making.

Cybernetics, often conflated with computing through the use of terms such as ‘cyberspace’, is, fundamentally, not at all to do with computing, but rather a study of matters of control. It happens to be useful for computing, but its core thesis, illuminated by Ross Ashby’s Principle of Requisite Variety, is useful in understanding Alexander. Ashby stated that, in order for a system to be stable, the number of possible states of a controlling system must be equal to or greater than the number of states of the system that it controls.

It is therefore impossible for computer software to deal with the full complexity of place. Alexander’s alternative is to use the built-in complexity of the human mind and body and integrate it seamlessly with the complexity of nature using the synthesising methods of language, as evidenced with his pattern languages.

Those observations about the limits of computing date back 60 years, but they are as relevant now as they were then.

An unruly heir

The problem with Patrik Schumacher (not included in this book) is that his outrageous statements suck all the oxygen out of the room, before you can take the time to understand how he connects supposedly superficial formalism to deep social and economic thinking.

Schumacher, like his late mentor Zaha Hadid, is a proponent of generative design, specifically ‘parametricism’ - design driven by manipulation of algorithms. An algorithm is simply a set of rules that tells a system what to do when, under which circumstances. Parametricism is akin to having a series of knobs that you can twiddle, each with a generative input, with design forms coming out the other end as output.

Though some may be horrified at the comparison, including Schumacher himself, he is the 21st century heir to Christopher Alexander. What Alexander and Wright Steenson refer to as ’generativity’, is directly related to the algorithmic thinking of Schumacher and his generative design - the notion of code applied with syntax (as in language), creating a network of sequences.

Whereas Alexander’s patterns are executed in situ, typically by hand, and processed through human values, Schumacher’s cut to the algorithmic chase and are performed purely by silicon, except for the human knob twiddling.

Alexander’s generativity is carried out with the aspiration to capture the quality that cannot be named, spiritual, deeply connected to human values and the human soul. Schumacher, on the other hand, professes to be concerned about formal possibilities. But the trick that is missed in much of the criticism of Schumacher’s thinking, is the way that he connects the social dots from this formalism to a broad spectrum of libertarian values. This, in itself is not surprising, except that those with counter-arguments are typically less effective at dot connecting.

The irony of Schumacher’s libertarianism is that it is propped up by the dominant mechanisms of corporate power and a compliant state, while those with, say, impact or community-centred values are perpetually in a mode of resistance.

In Schumacher's case, there is no conversation (back-and-forth) between the algorithmic system and human values. There is, rather, a linear route from the knob that is twiddled, to the silicon of the machine, to the formal output, to the potential for the total exclusion of human hands from subsequent manufacturing processes. Schumacher’s freedom is freedom from the messiness of humanity towards a purity of form. In contrast, Alexander’s life mission was to excavate the patterns embedded in our very humanity.

Framed through the generative lens, Schumacher is indeed Alexander’s heir, but not one that Alexander would likely have been proud of.

The thing about ideas, though, is that they have a life of their own, and neither Alexander nor we can control how and where they land or evolve.

Unruly as Schumacher may be, if we dig a little deeper we will find that the libertarian blood that runs through his veins, flows from the beating heart of Silicon Valley - the very place where Alexander himself spent his formative, Pattern Language years.

Therefore, the relationship between these two should not come as a surprise.

Though some may be horrified at the comparison, including Patrik Schumacher himself, he is the 21st century heir to Christopher Alexander.

Prefix: Spatial

What is the future for the title of Architect? The experience of Information Architecture (IA) might provide a clue.

IA was part of a burgeoning collection of design practices emerging out of the digital landscape of the late 90s and early 2000s. As their titles and functions rapidly evolved to reflect the similarly evolving landscape, they identified themselves as Information Architects, User Experience Designers, differentiated between “little IA” and “big IA”, and oscillated between metaphors of ’architecture (serious, thoughtful) and ‘design’ (cool, fleeting).

At the 10th IA Summit in 2009, Jessie James Garrett attempted to settle the matter. He declared, "What is clear to me now is that there is no such thing as an information architect … there are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers".

Wright Steenson points out that even this supposedly conclusive view evolved somewhat, but its purpose was to capture the possibilities where "more could be gained by uniting forces and promoting what the umbrella of the digital design practices shared".

Architecture is not Information Architecture. The title has been around for millennia, and it could be argued that the current professional structure of practice is over 500 years old. Nevertheless, it too is subject to the evolving landscape in which it operates. Digital developments, from the web to digital twins to augmented reality and beyond, are encroaching rapidly on the ‘professional’ world of the spatial.

While, in the future, we will still have uppercase ‘A’ Architects building bricks and mortar buildings, which will always be necessary, it may be more appropriate for the profession, like IA’s, to capture a broader spectrum of practices.

Academia has already embraced the term spatial practices in this regard, and so, perhaps, the inevitable umbrella term will be spatial designer.

Wright Steenson points out that the contemporary, more closed nature of digital experiences, has resulted in a shift towards the primacy of engineering (coding) skills. The demographic that accompanies this shift is less diverse than the population at large. Similarly, the profession of architecture still struggles when it comes to diversity, with minority ethnic groups hugely underrepresented, particularly in urban areas, and the representation of women only now catching up to an acceptable 50% level.

The ‘spatial’ prefix rather than an uppercase ‘A’ architectural title suggests a de-professionalisation of roles in the built environment. This is not have to mean a dumbing down of expertise, but what it can certainly mean is a broadening of fields of expertise and, critically, also of access. In the end, titles matter.

Authority

We can only marvel at the ambition and eccentricity of Cedric Price’s three landmark, but unbuilt schemes - Fun Palace, Oxford Corner House, and The Generator.

These are not simply paper architecture schemes, but ideas developed intending to realise them in true, physical form. In each case, Price had a mountain to climb. In each case, he was proposing to build a ‘walk-in computer’ – cybernetically interactive; responsive to the choices and desires of its users; physically altering the space in ways that would make a West End or Broadway set designer blush; incorporating computing, networking, electronics, and media in ways that we could possibly only observe on the newsroom floor of a major media organisation today.

How charismatic and convincing must Price have been to suggest the purchase (excluding running costs) of a computer to run the transformation of a tea house, costing roughly £15 million (about USD$19 million) in today’s money? His budget for the 10-month feasibility study was the equivalent of approximately £400,000 in today’s money.

As whimsical as the ideas were, these were not whimsical sums.

We would have to be in the room, in each case, to really understand how he pulled this off. However, we can certainly conclude that he had a solid crutch to lean on – the title of Architect.

A word in use since at least the time of the Roman Empire, the title, in its simplicity, directness and evocation of creativity, professionalism, and authority, carries weight and lends authority to those who are entitled to use it.

Today, the brand value of architecture is greater than its utilitarian value. We will examine the crisis in architecture, evident since at least the 1970s, in a future post, but, needless to say, the role of the architect, in the hierarchy of the property industry, does not live up to the authority of its brand.

Price’s title block on the Activity compatibility questionnaire for The Generator is telling. On the surface, we can read it as a traditional architectural document, complete with a title block and drawing number. If he slid it in among a pile of architectural drawings, we might not have had a second thought about it.

While the format is industry standard, and it carries the weight of a traditional architectural drawing, its content, and intent of its use, are anything but traditional.

In the lower section of the title block we have details of the author: CEDRIC PRICE MA Cantab. ARIBA AA Dipl. ARCHITECT.

• MA Cantab. = Oxbridge - elite and renowned university
• AA Dipl. = Private, elite and renowned architecture school
• ARCHITECT: Two millennia of authority behind this title

What we have here, is Cedric is Price wielding the authority of history and class as leverage to entitle himself to explore.

Today, the brand value of architecture is greater than its utilitarian value. The role of the architect, in the hierarchy of the property industry, does not live up to the authority of its brand.

3-dimensional artificial intelligence

Hype cycles are a hell of a thing!

In certain corners of the media, such as Twitter, but even in mainstream print and TV, you would be forgiven for thinking that artificial intelligence is about to take over the world.

Large language models (LLM’s) is such as ChatGPT and diffusion image generators such as Midjourney dominate the discourse. Almost everyone is skating towards the puck where it currently is.

In the background, and no less consequentially, is another major player. Apple has been quietly incorporating both language and image-based machine learning (ML) into its operating systems since at least 2017, when they introduced the neural engine with the iPhone X.

Though promoted at their developer’s conference that year, it was nevertheless a low-key revolution, not least because this processor is hidden inside a device.

What it does do, however, is dedicate a powerhouse processing unit specifically to machine learning.

Apple, unlike its LLM and image generator peers, has both feet firmly planted in the hardware realm. Its Apple Watch, iPhones, and even headphones, contain accelerometers and other sensors that monitor every dimension of movement of your body imaginable – from the blood flow in your veins to your walking, running and driving in the outside world.

The Apple Watch only sits on one wrist, but it can already approximate what the rest of your body is doing – as evidenced in its ability to automatically determine whether you’re running, cycling or even which swimming stroke you are using.

Apple is taking a different approach to artificial intelligence, which is strikingly similar to that proposed by Nicholas Negroponte and his Architecture Machine Group (AMG), 40+ years earlier.

Nicholas Negroponte’s proposed architecture machines were three-dimensional environments with sensors, feedback, and interaction with users, and, theoretically, could exist up to city scale. Where Negroponte spoke of ‘dialogue’, and its continual role in building the relationship between the user and the machine, we now use the term ‘training’ to refer to the machine learning process that takes place within large language models and diffusion image generators.

Both Negroponte and Apple were and are pursuing three-dimensional, artificial intelligence environments. The difference, now, in 2023, is that Apple has an even more intimate degree of training data than Negroponte could have imagined in the 1970s. Apple knows how long you were dreaming last night, or where you spend most of your time. It will soon know what you stare at most of the time. Where Negroponte’s imagined architecture machine builds a metamodel of itself, Apple can build a metamodel of the user. We already have the multiple sensors in its various personal devices. Now we have releases of further simulations of ourselves through technologies such as Personal Voice (which simulates your voice) and the three-dimensional avatar that the Vision Pro creates of its users.

Where Negroponte’s imagined architecture machine builds a metamodel of itself, Apple can build a metamodel of the user.

Apple, more than any other company, though not trumpeted, is in pole position to build a virtual you. This is the key difference between Apple and its rivals. Large language models and diffusion image generators create models of dialogue and visual creativity that might otherwise have come from a user. Apple, on the other hand, is building a model of the user themselves.

Negroponte’s insights, decades before we could envision the Apple technological ecosystem, are prescient: “The prime function of the machine is to learn about the user. It is to be noted that whatever knowledge the machine has of architecture will be imbedded in it; the machine will not learn about architecture. The machine will indeed build a model of the user’s new or modified habitat. But it is simultaneously building the model of the user and the model of the user’s model of it”.

Or “Does a machine have to possess a body like my own and be able to experience behaviours like my own in order to share in what we call intelligent behaviour? While it may seem absurd, I believe the answer is yes”.

These are huge insights, a lifetime ahead of their time.

What is more extraordinary, is that those corners of the media, so obsessed with the headline grabbing ChatGPT, Midjourney, and others, have not yet woken up to this spatial, three-dimensional approach.

Making a detour

One of the lessons that we can take away from Wright Steenson’s book is that architectural thinking can produce a goldmine of ideas.

Christopher Alexander essentially described the Uber business model among his pattern languages, at No.20 with MINI-BUSES. We cannot know whether the founders of Uber were directly inspired or not by the precedent, but if they wanted it, it was there. And we know, thanks to Wright Steenson, how popular Alexander’s ideas were in some corners of the tech community.

Though less celebrated than Alexander’s patterns, Richard Saul Wurman’s Urban Observatory is another source of raw material. Wurman’s speciality is the mapping of information, toward the goal of making cities more legible and useful: "Wouldn’t a city – any city – be more useful and more fun if everybody knew what to do in it, and with it?".

Wurman published a series of city access guides, fold-outs on paper, that offered "a different kind of access to the city".

As Wright Steenson points out, "Wurman’s Urban Observatory was a ‘visual data center of the city and region’ with multimedia content showing the history and future of the city.”

This immediately brings to mind other possibilities opened up by digital technology.

Rather than printed maps, we now have GPS guided mapping. Rather than referential information across the urban space on a leaflet, we have the possibility of location based, responsive information delivery.

This was brought to life in a little known and now discontinued app called Detour – an audio augmented reality experience. In an image obsessed culture, augmented reality is typically associated with the layering of visual information via screens or glasses. However, Detour took a different approach, going back to AR’s origins.

If you have ever used an audio guide in an art gallery, you have experienced augmented reality. The audio guide delivers information relevant to what you are looking at. Detour does the same, but takes things to another level by integrating GPS, and location-based technology. The result is that the city can literally narrate its story to you, intimately in your ears, directly relevant to where you happen to be located.

Despite the riches buried within architectural practice, architects themselves mostly remain obsessed with form-making and form-giving.

This has to change, unless we want the rest of the world to pass us by.

Author: Molly Wright Steenson
Year of Publication: 2022

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Architecture Machine Group

Nicholas Negroponte was trained as an architect, completing his Master's degree in 1966, with a thesis that gave a strong hint about the subject matter of his work to come.

He joined MIT’s faculty that same year, and within a few months founded the Architecture Machine Group. This book is the 1976 follow-up to The Architecture Machine of six years earlier, with both publications highlighting the experiments and outcomes of the group’s work.

Intelligence

Negroponte’s call to adventure came through his stance that “computer-aided architecture without machine intelligence would be injurious because the machine would not understand what it was aiding”.

Intelligence, or at least the perception of it, would be borne out of the machine’s ability to be contextual (provide feedback relevant to the situation at hand) and to handle what Negroponte called “missing information”.

The latter skill is the more interesting of the two. It is a sort of je ne sais quoi dimension of the design process which employs intangible elements such as wisdom or intuition.

Christopher Alexander’s pattern languages were inspired by and sought to generate “a quality that cannot be named” in the built environment. This soulful/spiritual quality most frequently reveals itself, through Alexander’s examples, in spaces formed manually, at a 'human' scale.

Negroponte’s journey starts at the other end of the spectrum, with machines.

In his desire to bestow them with ‘humanity’ Negroponte is drawn away from the edges, towards the centre of the spectrum, in the neighbourhood where Alexander also eventually finds himself, as his spiritual qualities intersect with the industrial realities of today.

Both men, ultimately, sought the same thing – sincerity in liberating the hidebound practice of architecture from a cloistered elite.

Computer-aided design

In architecture, computer-aided design (CAD) has evolved since the 1970s era of this book. However, to this day, it does not realise the full potential that Negroponte and his colleagues envisioned.

"As far as I’m concerned, machine vision and computer graphics are the same subject, even though they have been so far allocated to totally separate groups of researchers in computer science."

This statement by Negroponte boils down his driving theme to a single sentence. It is telling that only now, almost 50 years after publication, we are reigniting this sentiment and catching up with the aspirations of his early developments.

In recent decades we have gone from drawing on paper, to drawing ‘dumb’ lines on screen, to drawing ‘dumb’ three-dimensional forms on the screen, and finally, presently, ‘intelligent’ three-dimensional forms. The intelligence contained in these forms is that they recognise what they are. A line is not just a line, a cube not just a cube; but if it is ‘tagged’ as say steel, it ‘knows’ that it is steel. It can then be isolated by a structural engineer, with calculations applied to it according to its physical (visual) dimensions. It can even be ‘animated’, in context, as part of a ‘4D’ construction simulation.

This, definitely, is ‘progress’, but what Negroponte envisioned was something else entirely. He saw, what we now casually call ‘A.I.’, and computer-aided design to be intertwined, to fully realise the potential of both technologies.

Where the two approaches diverged, over the years, apart from their separation in research departments, were the practical limitations of applying one versus the other. "The manoeuvres necessary to get visual information into a machine are more difficult than those required to get it out". In other words, computer vision, then in its infancy, had a much longer trajectory ahead of it, than its counterpart in display technologies.

3D rendering and visualisation has advanced by leaps and bounds, not only of course in architecture, by all the way through two the film industry and beyond. The machine vision and spatial intelligence that was meant to accompany it, has taken much longer.

De-professionalisation

Both Nicholas Negroponte and Christopher Alexander tried and failed to create an alternative path for the practice of architecture.

In Alexander’s case, it was to have been through the use of patterns, empowering non-professionals not only to produce in the built environment, but also to create living environments in the process. Alexander’s was a very handmade anarchism.

Negroponte pursued a contrasting route, away from the intimacy of the hand, towards the complexity of technology. With Negroponte’s architecture machine, we were to have been liberated from the paternalistic interventions of middle-man architects. The machine, through its intelligence, was to have empowered the average man or a woman to create in the built environment – a techno anarchism.

Incidentally, both men sought to capture qualities apparent in vernacular architecture, building activity that takes place without a professional. Why did they fail? Perhaps because both methods focused on the design process, through the prism of architectural thinking, ignoring the economic underpinning of the construction industry.

So, you have managed to draw a few spaces on your new architecture machine … How do you finance the construction? How is it insured? Who does the actual building? How will you get all of your permits passed?

These mundane questions are actually at the root of why the built environment functions the way it does. Architects, for all of their feelings of self-importance, sit on the periphery, with their core activity of ‘design’. Before they are appointed, the vast majority of critical decisions have already been made, by lawmakers, banks, local authorities and clients. The design element is mostly an embellishment of these foundational decision-making processes. Therefore, any alternatives which focus on the design process alone are bound to fail.

Negroponte rightly points out that ‘user participation’ in design typically manifests in a way that is protective to the professional. However, true de-professionalisation requires addressing the messy, mundane but fundamental issues outside of the design process.

More than just a consolation prize, even though neither Negroponte nor Alexander succeeded in transforming the practice of architecture, they both had an enormous impact in the world of tech.

Gobbledygook

The introduction, a 30-odd page essay (mini academic paper) by cybernetician Gordon Pask, is a stark reminder that underneath the visual, three-dimensional and typically intuitive, contemporary interfaces that we experience with technologies such as augmented reality or artificial intelligence, is a level of discourse that is completely opaque to the everyday user. It is, as Pask acknowledges, a meta-language, and one that requires not only translation but a more in-depth understanding of complex theories.

In fairness, he begins with a warning, that he assumes "the reader knows the kind of symbolic operations performed by computer programs and other artefacts, that he will study the matter at leisure, or that he will take these operations for granted".

Taking them for granted it is!

Without taking the time to digest these ideas comprehensively, we can be sure that the systems described are concerned with communication and control, the key elements of cybernetics.

To be sure, cybernetic diagrams such as these are as inaccessible to me, as an architect, as a technical, architectural drawing might be to a cybernetician. We each have our written and visual meta-languages.

However, Pask’s writing style and drawings are out of place here because they are in direct opposition to Negroponte’s mission – democratisation.

Academic vision

There is, unquestionably, a great deal of rigour in the presentation of the thoughts of Negroponte and his colleagues. Their positions in academia demanded it.

We are asked to consider examples such as ”a computer’s model of your model of its model of you”; feedback and control systems of responsive/intelligent architecture; “you-sensors”, and the like. These are all fascinating topics, explored broadly and with depth, and presented referentially and reverentially.

Perhaps, however, there comes a point when these exercises become too self-referential (and too self-reverential). History is littered with examples of unscrupulous entrepreneurs raiding the thought libraries of universities and research institutions, and commercialising their ideas. If these ideas were represented by layers of experimentation, the uppermost layers would be visible and accessible, yet completely dependent on the existence and support of the lower, more theoretical layers.

The unscrupulous entrepreneur typically skims from the top and finds practical applications out of the simple need for their products to appeal to consumers.

Academia needs some of this hard-nose energy. However it is typically stuck in the lower layers of theoretical development, with even their uppermost layers couched in academic meta-language, specifically to appeal to other academics. To be sure, universities and research institutions are not blind to this problem, and some have specific business development units. Indeed, though its funding model from business, the MIT Media Lab (successor to the Architecture Machine Group) shares its research with those businesses in ‘pre-competitive’ layers.

It is a shame though, that in reading Soft Architecture Machines, that there was such a wealth of ideas explored, with so little realised, at least not by the proponents of those ideas.

Steve Jobs infamously raided Xerox PARC for their concepts related to the graphical user interface (GUI), which eventually found their way to Apple’s GUI operating systems, and huge commercial success. The Architecture Machine Group was no less influential. However, their impact has been more on the long tail of technological development – with an example such as Dataland influencing too, the Apple operating systems of the 1980s, but still relevant to the ideas such as Apple’s most recent product of 2023, the spatial computing Vision Pro.

Hits and misses

As we approach the end of the book, the question arises, what does any of this actually have to do with architecture, and the core competency of its practitioners, crafting space? Yes, Negroponte was trained as an architect. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the tools and frames that he employs are architectural. Undoubtedly, however, the stars of the show were the computers.

It is curious now, looking back, that explorations in artificial intelligence were so intertwined with architectural thinking. But is this only because they happened to have an architect involved? The teams were so multidisciplinary, and it could be argued that the cyberneticians or the interface designers were as or more important in their work than in anything related specifically to architecture. Perhaps architectural thinking, or design thinking, helped to precipitate the whole process. Or perhaps architecture was not relevant at all. Nevertheless, Negroponte asks (but does not sufficiently answer) the most critical spatial question – “Can a machine learn without a body?”. This is a hugely significant question now, given the rapid developments of both large language models like ChatGPT (dualist in its mind focus) vs the more holistic and spatial approach by companies such as Apple.

Despite the many innovations which had a clear impact on the digital landscape of the past few decades, there were many moments in the book when one might wonder why we should care. Why was an architect exploring, in such depth, on the subject of storage tube displays, computer time-sharing, and giving names to obscure ideas on responsive materials such as “cyclics”? Why should I care? Why should anyone care?

On the one hand, Soft Architecture Machines leaves us with a feeling that some ‘classic’ musical albums might – with a couple of hits that everyone knows, and the reason that most people buy the album, but are then disappointed to find that the rest of it is obscure, dated, filler material. It is a harsh assessment, but architecture schools are guilty of the same phenomenon, with even less in the way of 'hits' and much more filler, designed for an academic audience, mostly creating filler themselves. Unsurprisingly, architectural academia is frequently accused of being detached, sometimes even by those accused of detachment themselves.

On the other hand, one could argue that the Architecture Machine Group was, and continues to be, one of the most consequential cauldrons of conceptual, technological and spatial thinking that has emerged out of an academic institution. Its successor, the hugely influential MIT Media Lab is testament to that.

The future of technology is spatial, and it is in the process of revealing itself. It interweaves elements such as machine learning (‘A.I.’), internet of things, augmented reality and more, with the key social demands of our time. The Architecture Machine Group began laying the groundwork for this revolution five decades ago.

Long live the hits. Let’s limit the misses.

Author: Nicholas Negroponte
Year of Publication: 1976

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Nuclear spring

Perhaps you have noticed, if you have ever tried to purchase A Pattern Language, that it is only available in hardback. Perhaps, Alexander kept it this way so that at least a few copies would survive the very long term. Perhaps a few copies may even survive a nuclear holocaust.

A Pattern Language is an instruction manual for humanity, to build everything from small objects to entire towns and cities. If, god forbid, we ever did experience a nuclear holocaust, this book would be a key survival and reconstruction tool.

It is self-consciously written for the non-professional to follow a series of organisational rules (patterns), assembled and executed according to the relevance of the context (sequences), in such a way that they are as much an observation of the best of humanity, as a manual to recreate it.

As with volume one, The Timeless Way of Building, it works best in a cart blanche context, hence the ‘nuclear’ scenario. An opportunity for sure, but more of a challenge in these times of extreme population density in expanding, already built-up, urban centres.

This leaves us with the further challenge of how to apply the lessons contained, without waiting for a nuclear war.

A Pattern Language is an instruction manual for humanity, to build everything from small objects to entire towns and cities.

Transition

A Pattern Language was already an enormous brick of a book – over 1000 pages! But it is not a whole book. It is the second part of three volumes, and it is essential to read volume one before venturing into this one. Despite its length, Alexander does not take the time at the beginning to say “here is my explanation of the concepts that I am about to present to you …” etc.

No, he goes straight into explaining, “this is process No.1; this is process no.2 … Etc“. If you haven’t read The Timeless Way of Building (volume one), then you have been deprived of a transition, and starting the book is jarring.

It is a little surprising that A Pattern Language is so much more well-known than its predecessor. Granted, it is ‘the solutions book’, but A Timeless Way of Building is certainly ‘the concept book’.

That is all well and good …

Around the midpoint of the book, Alexander walks us through a scenario using his sequences and patterns to design a structure. As in traditional societies, and historically in more developed societies, much of the work and thinking is carried out in situ – on site, with materials that will ultimately be used to build a structure, and by the people who will inhabit it.

Alexander talks about marking out layouts with string and bricks on the ground, and measuring by pacing. He implores us not to use paper. That is all well and good, but the reality is that in almost every society, now, globally, the act of building takes place within a highly regulatory environment.

The means of communication within that regulatory environment typically include a combination of documents (drawn and written) and inspections, the very things that Alexander wants us to avoid. It is no accident that the building industry has not escaped the standardisation of all other industries, and that the standardised products that emerge out of it help to lubricate our way through the regulatory process.

Therefore, unfortunately, it is typically easier to hire a professional, have them use standardised products, and work in standardised ways – i.e. on paper, with drawings etc. The sequence/pattern/intuition method has a romantic ring to it, and accordingly, a slightly unrealistic one. It might be suitable for temporary or some rural structures, but does not answer to the demands of permanent and highly regularised ones.

Universal values

We have to get all the way to page 742 (of 1,171), with the pattern OPEN STAIRS, for Alexander to reveal his underlying values – namely, a belief in a free, anarchist society, with “a voluntary exchange of ideas between equals”.

The entire premise of A Pattern Language is that we all, intrinsically, know how to build, and should be empowered to do so without centralised authority, or the need for protectionist professional input. The Timeless Way of Building posed the question “what works?”. A Pattern Language (humbly) answers, ”this works”, 253 times.

Alexander has scoured of the world for examples of spatial decision-making that enriches the human soul. In fact, he does repeatedly refer to Berkeley and Peru, we assume places that he has lived for some time, but his central message here, together with the message in the previous volume, is that the values and methods that he is attempting to excavate are universal.

The Timeless Way of Building posed the question “what works?”. A Pattern Language (humbly) answers, ”this works”.

Gradual stiffening

If we were to choose a single pattern that embodies the authors' beliefs, the message of this book, and indeed that of the preceding book (A Timeless Way of Building), it would be GRADUAL STIFFENING.

We encounter this pattern towards the end of the book, in a section dealing with construction matters, but the approach outlined captures the essence of what Alexander is trying to effect in the building industry as a whole. His pattern (or principle) of gradual stiffening can be summarised by imagining that if we want to build a unit of space, whether a room or a building, we start with the overall form ‘flimsily’ and gradually make it whole.

The driving values of this principle are that we do not need to prescribe all the details of a unit of space before it is built, but rather, we can sketch it out in place by starting with its footprint and, with confidence, filling the gaps as we go, to enclose it, and make it spatially and structurally sound – stiffening it.

It is a belief system in which we are implored to get going without necessarily knowing all the details of the final destination, but with the confidence that each step can make the previous step relevant. It is an act of faith. This is facilitated by two key components: materials that are conducive to manual use, and an improvisational mindset comparable to the use of language.

An approach such as this goes against the most fundamental architectural orthodoxy, which demands that buildings are set out and defined in detail, in advance. Incidentally, though, the vast majority of buildings, for the vast majority of human history, have been constructed in the way that Alexander defines. It is, indeed, the timeless way of building.

Culture shift

There are so many ideas which may intuitively strike the reader as wholesome and positive in many ways. Alexander presents examples, typically from traditional societies, which have not been transformed by industrialisation. Ideas such as his observations about a ritual of bathing (pattern 144, BATHING ROOM), rather than just ‘cleaning’; or sleeping in an alcove rather than making a full bedroom (pattern 188, BED ALCOVE); or even COMMUNAL SLEEPING (pattern 186), resonate in a way that might leave us feeling as though something in society has been ‘lost’.

Perhaps, if we implemented his suggested patterns rigorously, we would live more wholesome lives. However, the degree of culture shift that would be required is enormous, and would necessitate an ‘exit’ from our ‘developed’ societies, to some sort of off-grid, self-sufficient existence.

Regardless of the perceived benefits of timeless, living values, the challenge remains, how do we transform our industrial, urban environments using the lessons that Alexander and co have left us with.

Authors: Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa & Murray Silverstein; with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King & Shlomo Angel
Year of Publication: 1977

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The quality without a name

Alive, whole, comfortable, free, exact, egoless, eternal. These are all words that Christopher Alexander uses to try to capture the quality without a name.

This is an elusive quality whose search drives the purpose of Alexander’s writing of the book. It is a quality which he asserts exists in traditional societies, in corners of gardens, on cosy sofas and other places that we likely take for granted. But once we recognise the existence of this quality, it comes into view in many aspects of our life.

Alexander suggests that it is an emergent quality, for us, coming out of the chaos of non-self-conscious human interaction with the natural order of things.

A joyful melancholy

This is not a book about architecture, at least not in the sense that you might find in the architecture section of a bookstore – either full of staged images or abstract theories on building and form. No, this is a book about faith.

It has more in common with religion, and perhaps philosophy, than with form-making and construction. The quality without a name, whose themes pervade the book, is deeply connected to our human nature, and to nature itself. Its recognition requires taking several steps back from the methodical and self-conscious world of professional practice.

Its search touches on matters of family life, health, and death, in ways that have very little to do with how to lay a brick on top of another with perfection, and much more to do with identifying and working with the patterns that a natural order already suggests.

The melancholy that Alexander touches on, in relation to the transitory nature of man and his creations, is reminiscent of the complex emotions that arise out of a musical infusion in the blues or in the craft of Japanese Wabi Sabi. It is a unique flavour of sadness that is accompanied by a sense of joy.

The quality without a name, whose themes pervade the book, is deeply connected to our human nature, and to nature itself. Its recognition requires taking several steps back from the methodical and self-conscious world of professional practice.

The role of architecture

Through his advocacy for the recognition of the importance of living patterns for creating living buildings and towns, Alexander recasts the role of the whole of architecture.

He maintains that the purpose of architecture, insomuch as it is a creative act, should be the creation of a shared language of the built environment. He contrasts this open language of tradition with the compartmentalised, specialist and ultimately secret language of building, shared only amongst built environment professionals.

However, while he is careful not to use the word ‘tradition’ or ‘vernacular’, this, ultimately, is where his living environments can be found. He was writing at the time of an emerging post-modern approach to architecture, which looked back to history and to vernacular forms, for formal devices. This, however, was not at all what Alexander was after, since this intellectual reaction to modernism remained captured within a top-down design system, anathema to creating living environments.

Patterns

From identifying the quality without a name, Alexander moves on to his other core concept, patterns.

Patterns are the rituals (though he does not call them that), that represent the activities that are typical to a space – that happen over and over again there, and define the character of that space. Space simultaneously defines the character of those patterns.

Therefore, as with other branches of thought, such as phenomenology (with its intertwined relationship between body and space), and narrative environments (intertwined relationships between people, place, and experience), the irreducible element here is not an object, an element of geometry, or a single characteristic, but rather a relationship.

It is the relationship between experience and space which defines the pattern. They are interlocked, one anchored by the other.

Given that the irreducible element is a relationship, the core activity is dialogue.

Patterns behave as a genetic or software code might, governing the choice-making that is involved in built forms. It is a procedural system which results in what we might consider a vernacular. It is not a cookie-cutter industrial system but rather a series of procedures which deliver small, local, and unique degrees of variety within a generally, overall, homogeneous whole.

The genetic code that Alexander refers to – these patterns, are similar to Hassan Fathy's definition of tradition - that “[it] is the social analogy of personal habit, and in art has the same effect, of releasing the artist from distracting and inessential decisions so that he can give his whole attention to the vital ones”. Both cases suggest the use of a rule of thumb, which does away with self-consciousness ‘design’, and makes way for the incorporation of wholesome, soulful and relatable elements.

Vernacular

About a third of the way into the book, Alexander arrives at a core differentiation between his timeless method and that which we are taught in architecture school – namely, how problems are solved.

The architect is taught that problem-solving in the built environment, though collaborative, is a hierarchical system with knowledgeable elites at the pinnacle and lowly operatives executing the work itself. It fits perfectly within a hierarchical class system and with the distribution of capital in so-called civilised societies. This compatibility is part of the reason it has endured for centuries.

Wherever hierarchal power is loosened, particularly in traditional societies and in rural environments, another problem-solving method takes hold. Alexander's view is that this method consists of using patterns. It is a convincing argument, and one within which the individual, regardless of his station, is empowered to change the built environment around himself.

Limitations

Alexander’s pattern language works best for single, standalone, new-build structures, on open plots of land. The barn pattern is a perfect example: “Make a barn in the shape of a rectangle 30-55 feet wide, 40-250 feet long …” etc. Try that in Central London!

He does venture into other examples such as a collectively built clinic, and an approach to repair, but it is inescapable that a pattern wants to be executed for as simple a project as possible. Introducing sequences of patterns for more complex structures generates a requirement for coordination and likely the presence of a confident, strong-minded, charismatic leader to see it through.

The reality of the 21st-century is that now, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. Much of this is in high density state or informal housing – not many open plots of land to be seen.

The core contemporary challenge for pattern languages, if we wish to have living cities, is to find a way to make them relevant for these 21st century realities.

Faith

Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock shared an anecdote about an occasion when he was playing in one of the legendary groups led by Miles Davis. In the middle of his solo, he played a note which sounded completely out of place – a ‘wrong note’. He cringed. Davis immediately played a sequence of his own which turned this ‘wrong note’ into part of a coherent whole. Some might say that Davis ‘corrected’ the note, but what Davis showed Hancock was that there are no ‘wrong notes’, it all depends on what you play next.

Christopher Alexander asks us to take a similar leap of faith, to avoid taking a god’s eye view of the organisation of patterns, and deal with them, one after the other, in the faith that they will work themselves out. He asks us to let go of our fears and preconceptions when doing this. This is very similar to how we speak, given that we don’t enter into a conversation knowing every word that will be uttered. We essentially make it up as we go along, responding to the context and responses of others.

Alexander implores us to bring this approach to design.

—

We follow this up next week with a look at Alexander’s hugely influential, A Pattern Language.

Author: Christopher Alexander
Year of Publication: 1979

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A bit triggering, perhaps …

It seems that everywhere you look, you can find architects running away from architecture. What is it, specifically, that we are trying to get away from? What are we embarrassed about?

By now, within the profession, it is pretty old-fashioned to complain about the fact that architecture and architects are losing their relevance; that tech and media are fast while architecture is slow; that society is passing us by.

Some of that sentiment, about architects, can also be found outside the profession as well. Is it that Architectes are chasing the sexiness (and pay) of tech, or the romantic lifestyle and perception of artists? What is it that architects are so embarrassed about that they would like to be recognised for anything but architectural design?

Many of these hybrid practitioners might argue that they are expanding the definition of architecture, but if what they are pursuing does not reflect an architect’s core competency, namely, crafting space, then it is more an escape than an expansion.

Core competency

Architect Richard Saul Wurman (of Information Architecture fame) likes to say that "you can only understand something relative to something you understand". If this is an acid test for pursuits by ‘alternative’ architects, mentioned above, then many would fail ‘understanding’ of those pursuits, or at best show a tenuous and distant connection.

In each case, the alternatives capture a single element of architectural competency, be it the legitimacy to participate in an event labelled ‘architectural’; graphical skills on screens that might translate to working on other screens; or leaning on the perceived professional reputation of architecture itself, as a crutch to lend legitimacy to whatever other pursuit you wish to engage in.

In each case, the core competency of crafting space is sidelined, and in each case the alternative practitioners would likely have been better served by not spending years and money studying architecture at all …

De-professionalisation

… which gets to the heart of the problem

Despite my tone above, there is nothing inherently wrong about pursuing an alternative path. In fact, it is evolutionary and liberating.

The problem arises when we try to fit it into a professional box.

The most appropriate thing that you can do, after studying a full seven or eight years at architecture school, is build bricks and mortar architectural buildings in the traditional way.

If you want to do anything else, at all, it makes no sense to spend all that time and money studying, as you won’t fully exploit the core competencies that come out of the experience.

The current structure of architectural education and practice is over 500 years old. Our 21st century challenges demand novel approaches that traditional definitions of architecture restrict the development of.

So, by all means, go out and expand what the word architect means, but don’t spell it with an uppercase A.

The most appropriate thing that you can do, after studying a full seven or eight years at architecture school, is build bricks and mortar architectural buildings in the traditional way. If you want to do anything else, at all, it makes no sense to spend all that time and money studying, as you won’t fully exploit the core competencies that come out of the experience.

Architectural Intelligence

As it stands, we have no shortage of alternative practitioners who have expanded their architectural experience in influential and non-traditional ways.

Molly Wright Steenson is an academic and designer who has had a look at key figures, whose work has had an impact well beyond the field of architecture, and, in different ways, helped to define the digital landscape that we experience today:

• Christopher Alexander
• Richard Saul Wurman
• Information Architects
• Cedric Price
• Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group

As artificial intelligence takes the world by storm, we would do well to remember the lessons of these pioneers of architectural intelligence.

Four books of architecture

Accordingly, our next reviews will be:

1. The Timeless Way of Building (Christopher Alexander)
2. A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander)
3. Soft Architecture Machines (Nicholas Negroponte)
4. and of course, Architectural Intelligence (Molly Wright Steenson)

About

Behind the scenes, building an architectural tool for everyone!

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AMONLE

The future of architecture is not what you think! Let’s rebuild it from the foundations up so that it is accessible to all, and make it relevant for the 21st century while we’re at it.

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