Very Important People

One of the idiosyncrasies I find in the profession is the inversion of responsibility. It seems the more senior one gets, the less fun one is allowed to have. Even for a profession hellbent on sucking joy out of people’s lives, the process of joy extraction is alas not instantaneous and it gets even crueler with time. When you are a young graduate, you get to draw and design and experiment and optioneer and imagine to a degree (but your opinion is dismissed off the cuff). When you are a more established senior architect or associate, you get to quibble over emails, trawl standards, draft trackers, pretend to be awake in boring CPDs that hijack your lunch break, and play petty politics. Many would argue you become far too expensive to draw. I became an architect because I enjoy drawing and I enjoy the process of creating not because I wanted to fester in and be consumed by taxing responsibilities I had not signed up for in the first place (or at least I thought I hadn’t).

I am not saying that management and admin are not essential parcels of a senior architect’s role or that they should never be done; however, I do genuinely feel that they have been inflated to mask some insecurities in the profession about design prowess. It is far too facile to seek comfort in the non-judgmental world of admin as an antidote to impostor syndrome: I am not designing, not because I am shit, but because I am far too important to. Think Harry Enfield’s very important man. Not only that but those who have latched on to admin as their calling have set a template for the profession as a whole, pressuring even those who have no qualms about desiging and drawing to toe the joyless admin line.

It also does a disservice to design. It reduces it from a process to a moment. An epiphany. A sketch. A fleeting brilliance. A lip service. Many architects have fallen prey to their own propaganda in cinema. A great design is a design that doesn’t know yet exactly what it will look like after going through a rigorous process of exploration and refinement. A great design is also predicated on sophisticated details not on inadvertent gaudy ostentations. When I start a drawing, I may have an idea of it is I may want to realise but need to go on the drawing journey to actually come up with a design which may conform to where I started or go somewhere else entirely. A master sketch holds great ideas and talents to ransom because it has shut the door on experimenting and questioning and going on the journey. It the same with renders and photoshop. They are not street portraits in tourist hotspot intent on faithful facsimiles of subject matters but rather templates to try on different guises, colours and material finishes.

Actually addressing this inversion of responsibility would also make good business sense, especially with Part 1 placements. At the moment, Part 1 graduates seem to cost practices money to keep because of the how the profession is structured. Part 1 graduates are left to do the drudge work that is neither essential nor needed. Rather than viewed as young professionals with a university qualification, they are perceived as glorified summer placement teenage students. Part 1 graduates make models and pick up unnecessary drawings, basically largely superfluous jobs that are only created to keep them busy. Conversely, these Part 1 graduates do not seem to learn a lot, if anything at all, and get the wrong impression that the profession is an extension of their university experience and studio culture. By not being shown the full breadth of the professional culture, they are unable to fully appraise whether they would want to continue on the path of studying architecture or whether professional practice in architecture is the only path in which they can avail themselves of their degree.

Instead, how about the administrative tasks being assigned to Part 1 graduates? Meeting minutes, trackers, searching code books,..etc? Not only will more experienced members of staff be freed up to spend more time on things that are actually enjoyable and that would make them less bitter, it will also open a window into the inner workings of practice to Part 1 graduates, providing them with complementary knowledge they cannot acquire at university instead of redundant tasks. They will gain an understanding of how the business works, be respected as university degree holders and perhaps discover avenues they can explore in due course with their architecture education.

Win-Win.

Nobody should be too expensive to draw. Really.

Ghost Ship: When Does a Dead Profession Realise It’s Dead?

It somewhat feels like the third season of BBC’s Ashes to Ashes (2008), where the protagonists feel an increasing sense of malaise and that their world is shrinking. Something does not feel right but we don’t know what it is. This is true of the world today, but this is especially true of the architectural profession for the last 40 years. The system seems to have died and running on autopilot because no one has bothered to shut it down. People feel it but they can neither diagnose it nor articulate it. The profession has been at the throes of death but those in charge keep it on life support, not because of any nefarious agenda but rather because of not being capable of envisaging an alternative or simply because of panic. Architects felt that the world they operated in until the 1980s had been changing beyond their comprehension: They misconstrued change for loss and opportunity for bereavement. With a world around them centred on services and on specialisation, architects felt that outsourcing construction to contractors was dispossession although they hadn’t particularly enjoyed construction before. Like a child who is bored with a toy, somehow the toy becomes desirable when another child is playing with it. The same applied to blockwork and waterproofing and dot-and-dab. Just because contractors took the lead with design-and-build, somehow architects wanted nothing else but a contractor’s remit.

A few generations ago, some architects had bold visions and a commanding voice to shape the world around them. They knew their position in the world and the power (and limits!) of their discipline. They were not indoctrinated to feel shame of their vocation nor were they oblivious to the way the world worked, and whilst it is true their role was more encompassing to comprise an element of construction, but so did barbers who used to moonlight as dentists in the Middle Ages. Architects today are like some centrist politicians with no project, no stance and no vision, politicians who rely on fickle opinion polls and fashionable causes to concoct their policies piecemeal, always striving to give the public what they perceive that public wants to hear. Such people are managers rather than leaders, administrating events rather than making them; so, they are always surprised by these events and always two steps behind. Like in politics, the profession has tuned to populism by following the diktats of estate agents, planners and contractors; worse still, the diktats of other architects who regurgitate what the estate agents, planners and contractors instructed. Agents and planners only reflect on what has been done and what has hitherto demonstrated success so they seek to emulate it. This means that their advice is always retrospective rather than forward-looking, which, although valuable, goes counter to the essence of design: innovating and sowing the seeds of the future. Agents and planners know their game and practise their trades well but somehow they have been forced to do our work on our behalf without the knowledge or training. All of this would have been fine (not really) if this were expressed with candour. But no. Practices still have the temerity to weave their bland administrative role into “award-winning “studios where “people come first”. What are these awards and how do people come first?

To compensate, architects wish to express their agency by espousing grandiose-sounding yet anodyne and out-of-context causes that look good for optics: like placemaking, contextualism and CLT. These are safe and decontextualised causes that are unlikely to court any controversy but unlikely to have any meaningful impact because the profession approaches them so superficially and with an inflated belief in the power of architecture to play politics (architecture can stop wars and end famines). What’s even more tragic is that architects hang on every word uttered by their own peers. They ignore the world to seek approval from other architects or most likely, not to be at the receiving end of their counterparts’ derision - which they will get anyhow. Architects pretend to be contractors to appeal to developers and pretend to be sanctimonious street preachers to appeal to their counterparts; however, they fail on both accounts because they stopped being architects.

In other words, the professional model today is permeated by grandstanding albeit jejune dogmas: money is greedy and corrupt (although it is the way of the world), aesthetics are superficial (although it is why clients pay architects fees and what people find joy in), intellectual discourse is academic, nay, immature (although it has revolutionised the world, like psychoanalysis has with advertising), lifestyle is pretentious (although architecture belongs to a cultural and stylistic zeitgeist), popular culture is vulgar (although it is people for whom we design, not other architects). Architectural dogmas are redolent of Orwellian tropes: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. What does this leave us with? Managing construction (we’re not contractors), administrating codes (we’re not lawyers), running mindless repetitive tasks (we’re not AI algorithms). and shaming people for seeking joy (we’re not street preachers). Those in charge of the profession are content to be middle managers with no clout and no influence, bureaucrats whose opinions don’t matter much and whose input into property is incredibly ineffectual; furthermore, Architects’ contempt for money and lifestyle conveniently obfuscates that fact that their profession is enmeshed in what they find contemptible, like teenagers refusing the authority of their parents yet having no qualms about the same parents fielding the expenses.

Since the 1980s, the architectural profession has gone into intellectual administration. No project, no vision, no purpose, no role and no commanding voice. Like a ghost ship bereft in the ocean that everybody forgot about but where the ghosts still hold a party like it was 1983, architects just don’t fully appreciate that their current business model is dead, and had been slowly dying since the 1980s. Architects can have an influence to really promote good practice and laudable causes by sticking to what they were trained to do: to observe, to research, to design, to imagine, to innovate and to narrate. Had architects not abandoned design to focus on production, they could have been a reputable authority and opinion makers when it comes to property, not irrelevant receivers of the dogmas of others. Architects disregard pivotal disciplines intertwined with them: Trends in style, technology and sociology. The profession has refused to play the game in engages in by being oblivious to the tenets of the economy and being willfully aloof to lifestyle and popular culture. Instead of observing behaviours around them and trying to innovate typologies, architects latch on to feel-good causes that will make them look morally superior but benefit no one.

The Labour MP Gerald Kaufman once described Labour’s 1983 election manifesto as the “the longest suicide note in history”. He could well be talking about the current architectural professional model. The thing is, some of us do not wish to die with it.

Lipstick on a Pig : Architects, Millennial Pink and the Fate of Offices

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.  

Be More Architect.

Are architects still relevant? No, really, are they?

In a world where planners dictate what the building forms and facades look like, where agents ordain what layouts and interior finishes should be, and where contractors and their suppliers mete out facade articulations and fenestration, what is the role of architects today?

Is it to put together the litany of cliches otherwise known as the Design and Access statement which architects recycle from project to project almost verbatim, basically giving planners what they want to hear? If the buildings are so contextual, why is it almost impossible to discern whether the brick-clad edifice is in London, Berlin or Oslo? How do the John Rocque maps manifest themselves in an ocean of brick slips and open-plan-kitchen residential layouts? I feel bored just writing about it.

Or is it to count builder’s-work-in-concrete holes and to detail inverted roofs? Tasks and responsibilities whose links to architecture are tenuous at best, tasks and responsibilities that can be done better by trade subcontractors and AI. I feel ashamed just writing about it.

Or is it to feel resentful when colleagues leave on time rather than burn the midnight oil to enjoy the perks of being an architect with no friends or life? Perhaps it’s not giving business cards to anyone below a certain level in an attempt to pull rank? I roll my eyes just writing about it.

Architecture is relevant. It underpins everyday life, and every single person interacts with it; however, architects have foisted on themselves a self-imposed obsolescence that has been growing for the last 40 years. The profession has grown stale and awkward, bereft and out of place, joyless and demoralising, sanctimonious and hitching a ride on the bandwagon of headline-making causes.

The profession behaves like a classical army fighting guerrilla warfare. It is a gargantuan phalanx commanding thousands within its ranks, yet slow, heavy and riddled with inefficiency and stifling bureaucracy. In a fast-paced battle, instead of delegating decisions to field commanders who can in real time appraise and take decisions, the profession centralises decision taking where every decision has to clear red tape and be processed by the proverbial ministry of defence. The profession values more office politics over genuine talent, more conformists over disruptors, more territoriality over collaboration, more diffidence over confidence to an extent that it considers any new ideas or any innovation, especially coming from younger staff, as an affront that needs to be punished and sedition that needs to be stamped out. The result is evident in most contemporary buildings around us, insipid at best and (unintentionally) vulgar at worst. The result is most certainly conspicuous in our shrinking fees.

The discipline has a lot to offer, and I do believe architecture can still pull a rabbit out of the hat if architects capitalise on what they were trained to do rather than what they think they ought to do to be seen by the construction industry as “adults”. There is no shame in being perceived as “fuddy duddy” designers and there is no glory in being perceived as “credible” builders. We have turned our backs on the essence of our trade to try to outdo contractors in theirs (and they do their trade superbly because they respect their discipline and they innovate). If we don’t take our discipline seriously, how do we expect others to? To take a leaf from VCCP’s sublime 2013 “Be More Dog” campaign for O2: Waterproofing is meh. blockwork packages are meh. Davit posts are meh. Yet, look at everything else connected to architecture: Design is amazing. Cities are amazing. Art is amazing. Fashion is amazing. Graphic design is amazing. Advertising is amazing. Style is amazing. Film is amazing. Theatre is amazing. Music is amazing. Tech is amazing. Entrepreneurship is amazing. Younger staff’s outlandish fresh ideas are amazing.

So, Architects: Why be so contractor? Why not be a be a bit more…architect?

Be less contractor. Be more architect. Be more dog.

The Politics of Precarity: What Have Architects Learned in the Last Decade?

Have architects learned anything from the financial crash of 2008, whose reverberations the world is still reeling from until this day?

The financial crisis of 2008 almost decimated the architectural profession. It caused an avalanche of job losses, bankruptcies and redundancies. It led to offices competing to the death for dwindling work, slashing fees and offering services for free. It has effected a significant plummeting in earning power. It has meted out misery to so many people. To cut a long story short, It has shown how precarious the world of property and construction is.

And the lethargic market carried on for years: As it began to convalesce, the Brexit referendum added an air of uncertainty that caused developers to get cold feet and led to projects being discontinued. Then the Covid 19 pandemic happened. Not only this, but wage growth has stagnated as a result and architects now earn exactly what someone at their level would have earned in 2008. Only, the cost of living has increased significantly leaving anyone in this profession with a conundrum: stay put and suffer from a deteriorating standard of living or job hop to (barely) keep up with one’s standard of living at a great cost to stability.

It would be facile to chalk up the tumultuous decade to bad luck, and it would be easy for architects to get addicted to eliciting sympathy from others about their plight because it is not totally wrong. But it is also not totally right.

Given how persistent this sluggish market has been and given how often it happens, how has the profession reflected on the experience and how has it adapted to roll with the punches, nay, how has it kept up with the times in general since the 1980s?

From my personal experience, not much if not at all. Offices repeat the same mistakes. To quote Rita Mae Brown: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” The architectural profession is so failing and the business model is so obsolete it is rather embarrassing. The global economic order has changed significantly since the 1980s; yet, the architectural profession has not received the telex.

So how can architects learn from the nadir of the last 14 years?

1-Agility Practices’ recruitment processes are a triumph of hope and optimism over common sense. Recruitment is fueled by project needs rather than the long-term needs of the company. Some companies err on the side of caution and strive to keep the headcount at a certain number but many succumb to the pressure of new work to expand the team. Because projects can pause and stop at the drop of a hat, many companies find themselves in this vicious circle of recruitment and redundancies. How can companies be more agile and intelligent in their recruitment process? One suggestion is to keep a core team of the right mix of skill set and talent and rely on contractors/ consultants. Contractors are well aware of the ephemeral nature of their contracts but they should be compensated adequately for their risk. The last 10 years gave rise to short-term contracts which, in my opinion, are criminal because they offer people neither the rights and job security of permanent employment nor the risk premium of contract work.

2-Scope of Services Architectural practices relish adding more to their scope of services as it gives them the erroneous impression that they are pivotal to the property and construction process. Little wins like waterproofing packages and underfloor drainage act as a force of resistance in the face of changing times and loss of prestige. These soul-corroding little wins arguably augment the fee (by a pittance really) but be that as it may, taking on more scope requires more resource that would ultimately eat into this fee and profit margin but also sometimes force companies to recruit new staff who may end up being made redundant if the project stops.

3-Outsourcing If, for some reason, architects have to compromise on how much they add to their scope, they can outsource a lot of the production and documentation. Many packages can be outsourced to third parties which is expensive in principle, but still a more risk-averse approach that the revolving door of recruitment and redundancy.

4-Rethinking Our Role The architectural business model has remained unchanged since the 1970s despite the cataclysmic changes that have altered the economy and the world around us, leaving the profession bereft in an increasingly alien landscape. I have argued often that we have failed to specialise and embrace architecture as a service rather than just a product. A Luddite profession obstinately refuses to take stock and explore new horizons. I have been writing about this for 2 years, about how many opportunities the profession misses out on and about how everyone else profits off our discipline. The profession has not questioned whether the obsession with construction is healthy, whether the role of architects in a consumerist society should change, whether there are new revenue streams we can probe.

Architecture is predicated on design and innovation as well as on research and development. We have the tools and training to manufacture taste, to create virtual worlds for the gaming, film and television industries, and to act as mediators between developers and game/ film companies.

Architecture comprises so much innovation, so much imagination and so much pleasure that is weaved into everyday life that everyone interacts with in some way or another. It really does not deserve to be strangled by such a joyless and rudderless profession. So much wasted talent and so much wasted potential have been lost over the years by a business model that ignores the writing on the wall. This business model has had its chance and it blew it so isn’t it time for the architectural profession to radically reinvent itself?

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)

Unreal Cities

“It’s just a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. Will I see you on the other side?” Reflektor, Arcade Fire, 2013

Anyone watching the long queues as shops were allowed to open across Britain on 12 April would be hard pressed to believe that online shopping killed the bricks-and-mortar stores. In fact, ‘online shopping’ has arguably become a fig leaf to hide what is actually wrong with retail, the economic order and the fate of our cities. It is a reductive explanation relying on quick answers and facile solutions. It is rather one symptom of the estrangement many people increasingly feel towards their own cities.

But why do people feel estranged? What is it about this sense of alienation that makes it impervious to strategies of “placemaking” and other well-meaning endeavours?

It can be argued that urban alienation is the apotheosis of a very long tradition of Western modernity that has shaped our economies, our cities and ultimately ourselves. According to Timothy Mitchell in Colonising Egypt, Western modernity is predicated on a system of representations where the human has become the centre of the universe facing the world which the human turned into a series of exhibits, or rather a representation of ideas and modes of production of capitalist accumulation. In this new universe, space has been transformed into objects on display for the human subject to experience visually. Cities have been radically reconfigured into a curated collection of images and objects manifest in retail arcades, view corridors, panoramas, boulevards, manicured gardens, facades and international exhibitions all designed according to the distanced point of view of the human observer.

What has been lost is the ability to experience the world with all the senses, without being detached from it, and without it being propped as choreographed images for us to view. Urban space no longer reveals itself in fragments or manifests itself gradually as a spatial-temporal function. The world-as-exhibition to borrow the term from Mitchell or the city-as-object more specifically is how London has been rendered into a flat representation of itself as if the real London does not exist any more. Mitchell quotes Martin Heidegger in that reality has become the accuracy of the representation because this representation regime keeps multiplying. Londoners have been relegated to self-contained enclaves in the suburbs where they experience their city by how it is represented on their phones and they consume commodities by how they are arranged on the screen whereas before commodities were organised on shelves in department stores and guarded behind glazed shop windows that ensured the distance between the observer and the goods.

Cities have been further abstracted by being obsessively designed: Any form of production has been banished to the periphery. Anything involving any sort of manufacturing has been scuttled away as if commodities were brought about through immaculate conception. Pedestrianisation writ large has abolished vehicles from the streets, creating a make-believe world where goods do not flow and where people do not commute. All the networks of production that actually underpin cities have been hidden to pave the way for photogenic urban spaces with picturesque facades and attractive people. It is ironic given that these cities have developed and flourished particularly by being critical nodes in the cycles of production. One thinks of the growth of Western global cities like London and like Paris thanks to the extensive rail network connecting these cities to their hinterland and the docks connecting the metropole to a global colonial network of flow of raw materials and goods. Back then, these networks were celebrated as hallmarks of modernity: Even today, people still marvel at the architecture of these magnificent railway stations like King’s Cross and docks like Shad Thames.

Abstraction has ultimately made cities feel unreal. They feel like yet another representation of a truth that seems ever more elusive. Cities feel like spaces for other people, people not like us. This reproduction of representation has made cities simulacra of themselves. No longer will dwelling in urban space experience it as it is so why would one visit the city centre to be faced with yet another representation that can be better achieved in high definition on a 4K screen in one’s semi-detached with the drawbridge pulled up?

This is compounded by well-meaning attempts at placemaking. Urban spaces have now to earn their keep, to work harder, to be “successful”. Having people cheek by jowl in every single urban nook and cranny has become the only metric of the space’s “success”. But why should urban space be successful and what does success even mean? Instragrammable cities? Iconic cities? Cities are living organisms laden with imperfections and randomness. Urban space can be ceremonial or intimate and everything in between. The quest for the real lies in the claims of tourist brochures promising you to experience the city as its locals would. People feel a sense of triumph when they come across a backwater space in the middle of the city because it gives them ownership of the urban narrative and it allows them to stake their claim in it.

In fact, the widely-derided hipster culture has constituted the biggest force of resistance to the abstraction of cities. Hipster culture is always a quest to find the “real”. Hipsters cherish working with the hands: craft, making and production rather than mainstream consumption. The hipsters have mounted a campaign of resistance to create agency for themselves in a world where everything has been meticulously arranged for them to consume. The hipsters are trying to challenge the official urban narrative’s hegemony. They move into abandoned neighbourhoods from which production had been outsourced, and they recreate local economies that eventually produce a sense of place (which gets absorbed by mainstream real estate promotion eventually). That being said, hipster culture is reductive and almost exclusive because it feels like the preserve of the middle class only (Hipsters are arguably the shock troops of the middle class), so it offers neither an equitable nor a comprehensive approach but it is a successful example of going against the “placemaking” orthodoxy.

We do take our cities for granted. We expect urban life to persist as we gradually withdraw from participating in it. What the current pandemic has displayed is the dystopian future that awaited us as we increasingly turned our backs to civic life, a future many of us find horrific. Perhaps the future of cities lies in going easy on placemaking and regeneration to allow the cities to just be themselves. The malaise of urban space and the high street cuts much deeper than easy explanations like online shopping and token solutions like “user experience”.

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)

Dogmas of Domestic Design

Over the last 20 years, the real estate bubble in London has been cause for so much detriment because speculation has made housing unaffordable and has priced out a whole generation of Londoners from property ownership; yet, in principle at least, the silver lining for architects should have been more freedom to design and to question stale typological dogmas. Property in London has become so sought after that people would have bought it irrespective of the specifics of its architectural design. Evidently, buildings designed by architects still commanded a premium but, in theory, people chose to buy property based on availability and finances, not personal taste. This should have been a chance for architects to reclaim the discourse and the canon of taste. It was an opportunity for architects to question the orthodoxy, reconfigure the typology and refresh residential design, knowing that whatever architects did will not have an adverse impact on developer profitability.

The housing market is buoyant in the United Kingdom but you won’t find many singing the praises of domestic design. In fact, it is well known that British housing standards are parsimonious vis-a-vis their European counterparts but what about the design of these spaces? What are the dogmas of domestic design that have become so immutable that they have relegated architectural design to selecting templates off a catalogue? I talk here mainly of multi-unit developments and collective housing.

1. Materials: Most domestic architecture is clad in brick, render and aluminium (anodised and polyester-powder coated). So many residential buildings are clad brickwork to signify domesticity or so do agents advise and planners ordain. Brick as masonry construction works in compression but the ubiquitous use of brick as rainscreen means that slipform brick can cantilever, levitate and perform geometric acrobatics which is unsettling. I repeat that this is not a criticism of brick as a material but rather a tirade against the architect not having the choice of when and how to use it. The interiors tell of a similar, woeful story where most spaces have been smothered in a tsunami of white plasterboard and neutral colours in a very tenuous and dubious interpretation of Scandinavian chic, but this is gradually changing with many new schemes feting exposed concrete, brickwork and steelwork.

2. Layouts: Agents love open-plan layouts. They never seem to get enough of them. It is seen as some sort of spatial trompe l’oeil to create a sense of vast space; however, there is a time and place for an open-plan layout and it should be a conscious design decision rather than the default. What this pandemic has perhaps shown as people were confined to their homes that dwelling all day in the same space, no matter how expansive it is, has taken its toll. Domesticity is a discipline and a culture based on a series of quotidian daily activities that may be disparate at times and may overlap at others. Shouldn’t the home reflect this? If one thinks of Manderley, the estate in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the servants inform the narrator, the new Mrs. De Winter. that there is a morning room and an afternoon room for her to use. Whilst most people do not live in stately homes, most people do lead lives predicated on a constellation of activities: sleeping, working, cooking, dressing, washing, eating, unwinding, focusing, socialising. Each new home should be the architect’s prerogative to choreograph spaces around these activities and test out where these activities overlap and where they need to be separated. Does every resident ask for an open-plan kitchen, occupying a wall or shoved in a corner like an errant child?

3. Spatial Hierarchies: I find it disquieting that in so many contemporary flats, visitors have to pass the bedroom before reaching the living space. These designs lack hierarchy and clear delineation between private and public. The spaces seem to be oblivious to how humans behave and interact. I remember that, as a child and teenager, I was thankful to my parents’ flat layout that allowed my sisters and me to go to our bedrooms and use the kitchen without being seen by my parents’ guests when they were hosting and I was not in the mood to say ‘hello’; furthermore, when one thinks of home, it is a curated paradigm of how one represents oneself to the world through space. Such curation entails control of what to display and what to hide. A bedroom is akin to an inner sanctuary for some that they may leave guarded, without the intrusion of the visitor. It sometimes seems to me that since British homes were historically arranged vertically over many floors, the transition to lateral apartments has not been as effortless or successful as French homes for example with a pedigree in lateral spaces.

   As for bathrooms accessed through kitchens, I will not dignify this by writing about it.

Challenging the dogmas of domestic design is not an impossible task. These dogmas are presented as timeless and inherent when actually, they are invented and quite recent, similar to what Eric Hobsbawm argues about traditions. There was a time not so long ago when architects were given free rein to do what they do best: The Barbican estate is one of the finest examples of intelligent multi-user housing. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon have been very successful in both customisation and standardisation. The Barbican apartments have been designed according to location and occupier density but within each of those themes, there are quite a few permutations. The Barbican apartments are truly designed to their site and programme rather than being facsimiles of every other flat from Barking to Ealing.

These dogmas have persisted because agents aver that this is what people want. This is a specious argument since most people have bought whatever they could afford, and these were the typologies offered to them. A vibrant housing market should have meant that people would have been receptive to new ideas. If architects assumed their natural role and engaged in manufacturing taste, architects could have offered people what people themselves did not realise they wanted in the first place. I wonder if any architectural practice has invested in researching domesticity and domestic trends in Britain and comparable countries. Domesticity is a socio-spatial science that architects are equipped to decode, interpret and employ in the property sector. In fact, I know that domesticity has been probed extensively at the Architectural Association when I was a student, and I ended up writing my own MA dissertation on it. But has this tome of knowledge been used in practice since housing affects so many people and is one of the chief drivers of the contemporary British economy? This is an area of intelligence that architects could monetise: Knowledge is perhaps the most valuable commodity in a service-based economy.

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)

The Picture of Dr. and Mrs. d'Alsace : Lessons from la Maison de Verre

La Maison de Verre is more than just an architectural icon. It is rather an immortalisation of the everyday life of an affluent middle-class couple, even arguably a window into the collective psyche of the professional bourgeoisie in Europe the interwar period.

La Maison de Verre is the medium in which the d’Alsaces chose to communicate their principles (and social stature) to the world; however, the house perhaps betrays more than the doctor and his wife chose to consciously divulge.

The house’s official narrative about embracing genuinely cutting-edge technology, the latest advancements in medicine as well as tenets of social justice, is evident. Pierre Chareau and his associates have succeeded in implementing their clients’ brief to a tee and beyond. The house gave the d’Alsaces the show they wanted to put on, possibly the best show in town with the pomp and the gimmicks and the spectacle and the bright lights and the drama. The house’s meticulous design and insight into the minutiae of the everyday life of the family and their staff is quite impressive. The doctor was very attentive into accommodating the vulnerability and privacy of his patients. Both the doctor and his wife were sensitive to fair treatment of their staff, too sensitive rather to render being served invisible which may cast their motives as perhaps cynical or hypocritical but it’s difficult to tell since what the clients outlined in their brief versus what the architect interpreted is not very clear.

Yet, one can’t help but infer that the d’Alsaces’ embrace of the avant-garde stemmed, consciously or subconsciously, from the professional bourgeoisie’s class anxiety. The avant-garde style was an appropriate taste to be embraced by a sophisticated and discerning professional class that did not wish to appropriate (and fail at appropriating) the tastes of the landed upper classes. Modernist architecture was a style the middle class could comfortably call their own without the risk of being perceived as style marauders. Embracing the new and modernity in general was the middle class prerogative.

As far as how the house accommodated the programme, is it far-fetched that the d’Alsaces’ relationship was fraught with tension? The architecture seems to imply that their marriage was precarious: The doctor and his wife had their own quarters that sometimes overlapped but mostly co-existed in parallel. The doctor and his wife had adjoining yet separate sitting rooms that were connected to their respective quarters within the house. The house was designed to accommodate two microcosms that could function independently and the technology in how the house was fabricated as a sum of myriad machines facilitates, nay encourages this segregation.

La maison de verre is a testament to the power of architecture. Long after people are gone, buildings and spaces remain snapshots or rather ledgers of how people lived, how they viewed the world and sometimes their subconscious thoughts. Psychology is an instrumental discipline that is arguably the lynchpin of architecture; yet, it is something that tends to be ignored or not taken seriously. Our production is predicated on human behaviour, both conscious and subconscious, which if we choose to decode, we may unlock a vast untapped opportunity that not only can be monetised but also reinvent the profession and perhaps rescue it from irrelevance as the world is cataclysmically changing around us.

Speaking of irrelevance, yes, lunchtime CPD on brick slips, I am talking to you.

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)