In his 2002 documentary The Century of the Self (which I incidentally saw at the Quad Cinema in New York – I will get to New York later), the brilliant Adam Curtis charts the progression of the concept of “the individual” in Western societies over the last 100 years and how advertising nurtured this concept by being incredibly successful at addressing and even manipulating sub-conscious desires. Advertising as a science of manipulation has been shaped by what Edward Bernays learned from his uncle Sigmund Freud about the tenets of psychoanalysis. This is why advertising is so effective because it focuses on the psychology of the consumer. Architecture has a commensurate power, not to manipulate people, but to address them on so many levels and make the world around them not only more useful but also more joyous. If only architects optimised their knowledge and looked beyond the empirical, they would have far more influence on the built environment and on cities. Rather than focus monomaniacally on construction and production, architects have the aptitudes to discern abstract relations that govern and influence society, relations predicated on sociology and psychology. What is oft forgotten is that space is instrumental as both a manifestation of these relations as well as a catalyst.
Nothing rings more true than the current conversations about the fate of the office and the pertinence of the office typology with the rise of working from home over the last two years. Yet again, the architectural profession finds itself at the margins of this discussion albeit with the false consciousness of being a relevant participant. Architects think they are driving this discussion with token design gestures like putting plants in the office and ramming the spaces with ping pong tables or whatever when they are merely applying lipstick to a pig. In fact, since the 1980s, the professional business model has reduced a potent discipline with latent power to a trite, increasingly irrelevant profession that abandons design and focuses on construction. Since we cannot outdo contractors in their trade and since we gave up everything else trying, we have lost control of the narrative. To compensate, we ended up trivialising the issues and dumbing down how to approach them.
So back to the debate about the precarious future of offices after the Covid-19 pandemic ushered in an era of working from home, how can architects perhaps wade in with a relevant contribution buttressed by a skill set that they had retired far too early? We need to properly diagnose the issue beyond its empirical manifestation by delving deeper into the causes rather than the visible symptoms. The future of the office, or any space for that matter, hangs on demographics, so in this instance, how can we entice millennials - because they constitute a significant chunk of the workforce- back to the office? The rhetoric around millennials has so far oscillated between trivial (they all love avocado on toast so let’s offer that in the building caf) to silly (let’s paint the façade pink and dub it ‘Millennial pink’) to outright sinister (Millennials love being crammed in crowded bedsits and a sea of ‘hot desks’). Millennials have been victimised twice: once by finding themselves in a world where the stable door has been shut after the older generations depleted the fruits of social justice and social mobility; and again by having this unjust world glamorised as if to add insult to injury. Millennials did not choose to live in an ever unaffordable world where they skimp and yet they are not able to have a space of their own, so it is mendacious to pass an unfair deal that had been foisted upon millennials as what millennials want. This discourse reminds me of the incredibly devious PR surrounding New York. When I lived there, the city was squalid: resplendent with sub-par housing, shoddy public space, heaps of rubbish on the street, the stench of sewage and terrible public transport (I don’t care the subway runs 24 hours; it’s still shit) and a very brutal quality of life. Rather than address or remedy any of these issues, the powers that be repackaged misery as hipness and convinced New Yorkers and much of the rest of the world that such mediocrity is what makes New York the greatest city in the universe (it’s not). The same strategy is applied to millennials in which their penury and misery is presented as ‘cool’. It’s not, and I am sure they don’t find it that amusing.
So why not reconfigure the office typology to address this millennial malaise? Can architecture address the biggest woe Millennials suffer from which is the loss of agency? In a world of Soviet-style collectivism and lack of private space dictated by exorbitant real estate prices and stagnating wages, why can’t the office offer a space millennials can appropriate and claim as their own? Let’s ditch the open plan and reinstate an office space of boundaries, of private offices or clearly-delineated workspaces where employees are given the opportunity to customise and individualise. Perhaps also relegate CAT-A fit-outs to the dustbins of history by offering employees the opportunity to pick their own furniture from a management catalogue. The office becomes the primary space where the dispossessed Millennials have an alternative and a stake, by operating at the level of the psychology of wants, needs and desires. I am not arguing against amenities or the sociable aspect of the workplace which I think are important. I am rather arguing that the typology needs a radical rethink rather than cosmetic changes. This is where architectural research and innovation matters but it doesn’t stop at the typology. Architects need to tap into the aesthetics zeitgeist by observing trends in their target demographics: What do they eat? Where do they shop? What do they wear? What film/TV do they watch? What music do they listen to? How do they socialise? What expressions do they use? What are their values? This is a treasure trove of knowledge that can be deployed to design spaces rather than rely on stale typologies and estate agent advice (based on stale typologies).
There is far more to architecture than a building trade. Almost every architectural studio regurgitates on their website the same platitudes about their work being more about people than it is about buildings or bricks and mortar or whatever tired cliché they copied from other websites; yet most of these studios do not put their money where their mouth is. How is their architecture about people when most architects are oblivious to people and society; however, architecture is a discipline that is comfortably interwoven with sociology and psychology as much as it is with technology. Realising its potential and shunning a soul-corroding business model that is no longer fit for purpose, a business model that has failed us again and again, perhaps we can find relevance and contribute to making the world a slightly more pleasant place.