Conversations With Friends

I recently watched a 40-minute interview with Sally Rooney, a young writer, on her book Conversations with Friends—which is essentially, a story about the love life of two young women. In the subsequent conversation, Rooney covers a lot of ground, jumping between fundamental questions on literature, love, gender, capitalist social structures, principles, power dynamics, and more. The video has received tens of thousands of views, and the audience at the museum where her talk took place is large—so many people have shown up that even the interviewer himself has been surprised. Sally’s work is relevant. It resonates with people across the globe. It has something to say about our world, about what it means to live today.

Would there be an architect today who could talk for 40 minutes and say something that resonates with ‘normal people’—to borrow the title of Sally’s other bestseller? What do we still have to say? This is ironic, as there has probably never been as much good architecture as today. I need to stop buying every single issue of the famous Spanish architecture magazine El Croquis, as all of them today are full of beautiful, incredible, and fantastic work. But something is missing. Altogether, the past decades of El Croquis magazines may have covered five hundred houses—at the most. Five hundred beautiful projects for five hundred lucky people. But if a building is good, why not repeat it a thousand times? Why do we have to begin again and again every time, every single day? Why is all that architectural goodness only available to so few people?

Dreaming of 10,000 Homes

Many years ago, in 1942, when architecture was arguably still relevant, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann attempted to build a factory for 10,000 homes. After the Second World War, the General Panel Company delivered thousands of beautiful houses, all of them different, yet all of them were built with the same flat-pack kit of timber parts. A revolutionary idea, which of course, radically failed. When the company had to close down in 1948, it had built barely 200 homes. This is just one of many setbacks architects from both East and West faced in their mission to address the post-war housing crisis and provide homes for millions of people. They held conferences, wrote books, and gave interviews in mainstream newspapers—not just in lifestyle sections—sharing their ideas on how to live, on open floor plans, new technologies, and housing for all.

A few decades later, in 1972, the idea of architecture as a discipline with societal relevance was effectively abandoned. Architectural theorist Charles Jencks declared the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex the symbolic end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism. From then on, architecture architecture would no longer hold any truth or try to answer any problems. It would be funny, ironic, and irrelevant. Utopias were scratched, and architecture no longer had a mission. Fast forward, and we’re left with my collection of El Croquis volumes—thanks for that, Charles.

Early Digital Experiments

This was still the particular context in which the early digital experiments developed in the late nineties and early noughties. Let there be no doubt these experiments were radical and optimistic. The very nature of how we build was called into question. Space was no longer considered a rigid assembly of fixed parts, historical references were abandoned for a complete reset: architecture was to become fluid, continuous, complex, and non-hierarchical. While these experiments were initially difficult to materialize, research into new fabrication methods slowly but surely, made them a reality.

Robots could help us craft incredible complexity. Nothing would ever repeat again, architecture was freed from its reliance on parts. In a postmodern way, architecture could finally always be specific, hyper-individual, customized to the tiniest detail.

The first instances of this new architecture found their way into the world in the neoliberal economic frenzy of the early noughties, in pop-up cities across the Middle East and China. The incredible freedom afforded by digital modeling tools gave architecture a chance to scream for attention, a psychological strategy to distract from its irrelevance. To compensate for a lack of content wrapped in complex surfaces, architects deliberately attempted to make their buildings seem “interesting.” Of course, there is often an inverse relationship between attention-seeking and substance. Digital tools were used “superficially,” primarily to create striking surfaces, resulting in a rather "thin" architecture. Alucobond cladding, glass railings, and spotlight cutouts in Gyproc panels. And, of course, a brief interview in the lifestyle section of a weekend newspaper.

The financial crisis of 2008 abruptly put a stop to this early digital experiment. Suddenly, early digital was found to be affiliated with the neoliberal mess that had caused the economic collapse, the increasingly clear urgency of the climate emergency, and all kinds of other societal problems. What was the relevance of all of these complex shapes at a time of increasing inequality, at a time of a global housing crisis? What was the purpose of these fluid surfaces?

In the following years, the digital discourse was swiftly put on hold and removed from subsequent Venice Biennales and academic programs worldwide. In an attempt to regain its lack of substance, architecture employed yet another psychological strategy, this time around literally assigning itself “substance” by reverting back to something much heavier than the surface-thin work born in the nineties, something that “matters.” Heavy columns, arches, archetypes, stone, and mass were mobilized to make architecture undeniably substantial again, serious, and grounded. In this specific post-2008 context, the urgent need arose to reboot the digital project, to rescue it from its neoliberal and postmodern legacy, and to repurpose it for a new mission.

Towards Two Billion Homes

The mission for a new approach to the digital in architecture could be to try to wrap our heads around one of the most significant questions of our time: how to build two billion new homes in the next 50 years in such a way that the planet remains inhabitable. We would all agree that there is some scope for relevancy in this problem, a good, old, bold challenge. Gropius and Wachsmann would have loved this one. Two billion homes, for 99 percent of the population. For Sally Rooney’s Normal People. This is a clear opportunity for architecture today to regain some relevance and, perhaps, to even become “interesting” again. In a historical parallel to modernist mechanization, we could think about digital technologies today not as a form of exquisite craft but as mere “automation,” thus re-connecting architecture with economic, political, and social questions, bypassing the postmodern decades.

Automation allows us as architects to formulate a manifold of crucial—substantial, and interesting—questions. Automation is essentially about the digital organization or distribution of all “things.” It’s a question of logistics, and of course, of data. Amazon Warehouse could be considered the most prototypical space of automation: thousands of goods, sourced from all over the planet, neatly arrayed on shelves by robots and gig workers, in transition from sellers to owners. The cultural dimension of automation is what I would call an “obsessive form of archeology,” a data-driven search for where things come from, how they have been produced, how popular they are, who clicks on them most, and which reviews are written. Every step of the logistical chain of how something comes into being is tracked and monitored to be learned from. An aesthetic of the “how,” of process, of logistics.

The Building Blocks of Architecture

Whereas early digital was obsessed with architecture without parts, an engagement with automation re-introduces the part as the foundation when thinking about distribution and platforms. The very building blocks of architecture itself—its elementary particles—are re-investigated and become the subject of automation. This “discrete” approach to architecture understands buildings as assemblies of parts that precede the actual design. These building blocks can then be “platformized” and distributed. Examples of this approach can be found in Wikihouse’s attempt to establish an open-source building platform for self-builders, but we also see emerging tech companies worldwide trying to scale good old-fashioned modular architecture.

The project of mass housing, canceled in 1972, reappears today in the form of an ecology of tech companies and platforms, optimistically trying to change the way we build and practice today. Multiple versions of a platformized, automated architecture could be imagined. For example, a platform could look at local materials such as stone and earth—or even reclaimed materials harvested from our cities’ building stock. Not every platform has to be “vertically integrated,” meaning that it delivers everything from design to production. For example, some platforms might focus solely on questions of ownership, developing new models to buy or lease. Others might look into access to land, using algorithmic approaches to identify suitable plots.

Beauty in Large Quantities

Entertaining this vast and complex realm of automation, we are immediately confronted with economic questions: what are the automated platforms for housing, and how are these distributed? We could also ask difficult political questions: who and how is housing being distributed to, who owns these platforms and these houses? But we can also ask purely architectural or aesthetic questions: what are the spatial consequences of these distributions? How do we experience the architecture of digital assembly? A discrete architecture, although based on parts, is not a nostalgic rehash of modernist practices. In fact, it takes on board aspects of both modernist seriality and the early digital ideas of continuous space. Architectural parts are understood as repeating, pixel-like building blocks, without prescribed role or function. Despite often appearing as jagged, chunky assemblies, the resulting spaces are experienced as continuities—the same operation of matter over and over again.

Parts That Precede Buildings

Parts, in this case, are not loaded with historical significance but become a kind of primordial, primitive matter, liberating architecture from strict hierarchies. While being based on shared platforms, built instances can be different and adapted to local briefs and context. We could therefore argue that this automated form of architecture is not dialectically related to either modernism or the legacy of early digital. An early instance of this discrete, part-based approach to digital can be found in LAVA’s 2009 project Stuttgart University Voxel. Here, a set of genetic algorithms aggregates repeating shear walls within a voxel space, constructing a non-hierarchical, open platform for learning. One could view this approach as a first step towards a platform-based design strategy, where the same building system could be applied to a variety of other programs, such as housing.

Moving on from the past few decades, when architecture was only available to the very few, the mission for architecture in the age of automation is to be able to deliver beauty in large quantities. Architecture in the age of automation is conducted on 99.9 percent of everyday “Normal People’s” houses. Given the particular history of architects starting factories, this attempt is of course very difficult and might fail. But shouldn’t we be optimistic? If we can’t even dream this, what is the relevance of our profession then? If this even works to a small degree, maybe, a few years from now, we might even be able to again say something interesting about architecture.

PS:

If you run a boutique architecture office, don’t worry, these will still exist, and you will still be able to buy a new issue of El Croquis every now and then. Besides my tech company, I still have my own boutique practice, creatively named after myself, trying to design a small unique house here and there or a competition for a cultural facility from time to time. Nothing more enjoyable than to craft a unique, never-to-be-repeated design as a good old-fashioned 21st-century architect.

This essay was first published in our book What If (2022, Birkhäuser).