You might be one of the only cultural pundits who has noticed and questioned the growing homogeneity of worldwide design initiated by internet influence. How do you see digital macro trends impacting architecture in the built environment?

Architecture has been subject to globalization for a long time. What has changed in recent years is how the starchitecture vernacular, which was born in the 1990s as a distinctive, highly individualistic style, has been flattened into homogeneity through repeated replication in cities worldwide—and amplification online. This creates an endless feedback loop that weeds out diversity. While architecture is not a digital medium, digital material now shapes the physical world. Being hyper-vigilant about what works on the internet and what digital audiences are paying attention to, coffee shops, boutique hotels, apartment blocks, and parks—all align with the digital homogenous standard. When Rem Koolhaas published The Generic City in 1995, he already said that international architecture was beginning to look like McDonald’s. His innovation, which we are still negotiating, saw this flattening as a strength. I believe, in contrast, that creating interesting aesthetic experiences through unique architecture is essential for the human creative spirit and that architecture, and especially design, should resist flattening.

How can architects and designers resist flattening without sacrificing success?

Homogeneity involves taking inspiration from the same sources; architects and designers all make the same references in their practices. Resistance requires being aware of what the generic style is, of what is totally globalized, and of what is driven by digital aesthetics rather than by physical aesthetics. This means being online observing what’s going on, digitally transmitting your own work through powerful images and messaging, but at the same time, removing yourself from internet influence to look towards new and different sources of inspiration. Vintage magazines, classical literature, music, and films that you can only find in library archives, for example, idiosyncrasies in nature and new and obscure obsessions.

Architects like Thomas Heatherwick have critically discussed the rise of soulless, uninspired architecture, accusing boring buildings of making us sad, stressed, and lonely. How can architects and designers balance digital influences with a commitment to creating meaningful and unique spaces?

Our digital lives have propelled us towards a life-work lifestyle where the many multi-uses we require of space are combined into one flexible environment. In every city, there are glassy cube vernacular loft apartments. Everyone who lives in them lives as if they are in a WeWork that mirrors a digital platform. They go to the same common rooms and the same kind of bar on the bottom floor. They ride the same rental scooters around their same new industrial neighborhoods. There is a subconscious wish that apartments be like hotels and apps, frictionless spaces that we come and go from without leaving a mark. This ‘Filterworlding’ of space is deadening. Homogeneous lifestyles make us more boring as people, which I’m sure makes us sad. On the other hand, frequenting spaces that are not generic and are intentionally designed, offer a different kind of life that embraces individual quirks and limitations. Departing from mainstream sameness may be less relatable, but if this lifestyle can be shared with others, it can be built into a positive sense of local community that creates bonds and solves loneliness.

How can architects and designers preserve local cultural identities to lean into Filterworld resistance?

I wonder about this. The value of architecture is in responding to the context of its site, but what if every site is the same? What if every site is a modernist city block? Creating a distinctive space might require returning to specific local cultural reference points, such as particular decorative motifs or local architectural language, like the Siheyuan courtyard houses in Beijing. Not every place offers novel references. In this case, responding to the climate, the distinct uses of a place or a space, or how a site is shared with other agendas, occupants, or lifeforms can be used to create strong architectural identities.

In what ways do you think the digitalization of architecture is changing our experience of public and hybrid spaces?

One of the great pressures that spaces now feel is existing in order to create content. Public space becomes the defacto stage for the performance of TikTok dances, skits, and videos to upload. Socially, this shapes the way we experience the public. Much like starchitecture and art museums, parks are becoming less about functional architecture and more about creating stunts to be photographed as visual icons for their cities.

Is the cityscape losing its functionality?

It is. Unless we say the cityscape’s function is to create content under the dictates of digital functionalism, in which a space is meant to function digitally rather than physically. The fact that we are living inside our phones has driven the purpose of space toward the digital. This is a strange scenario for the quality of physical architecture until we begin to think of architecture as a digital space, too. Architecture can be adapted to digital functions by being suitable for recording performances and creating and projecting digital media. Through integrating content creation tools such as LED screens, stages, and audio recording pods, space becomes a participant and a provider of shared online experience. Immersive architecture is also a destination in itself that creates function through being shareable in the physical as well as the digital—at the same time.

Architects are starting to use AI and site-specific algorithms to gather and apply information for building decisions. In the speculative stages of pitching for competitions and jobs, architects are also beginning to create digital models and video game designs to immerse potential clients in their design visions. How do you see the role of algorithms being co-creative in the future of architecture?

Algorithms can mean so many things. Using generative AI tools to sketch, make mockups, and move to a 3D rendering faster is very powerful. However, there is now an expectation that a piece of architecture can be fully imagined, rendered, and digitally experiential before it even exists as a building. This inflation of content means more investment and risk by the architecture firm and implies clients’ lack of imagination and desire for literalism—to know everything in advance, to have all pre-existing notions confirmed. These approaches make us more conservative aesthetically; they lessen creative innovation. In Filterworld, as there is more punishment for being abnormal, everyone takes fewer risks. This will change when we are able to talk back to algorithms, slow them down, and customize them for a better cultural output. This is a matter of creating generative systems that are localized and tied to the infrastructures of ‘smart buildings.’ The feed of a social network is a massive digital algorithmic space; it’s the same algorithm working similarly for billions of people despite their varying circumstances and habitats. Architects are well placed to create cultural currency and democratic agency by building their own algorithms and developing their own distinct local ecosystems. By using algorithms as a tool for taking in the data of a single building, the architect creates a unique and valuable algorithmic space. This, to me, is a much more interesting and less exploitative version of Filterworld.

The most recent statistics on TikTok (including Douyin, China’s version) clock the platform at 2.8 billion daily active worldwide users, which makes it the most significant arbiter of the globalized zeitgeist in history. What, in your view, is the worldwide TikTok aesthetic, and what does TikTok airspace tell us about where design and architecture are moving?

It is so accurate that TikTok is the dictator of the zeitgeist; it reaches that many people. It’s mind-blowing that our global mindsets and aesthetics are influenced by the same singular platform [one that is led by Gen Z voices and values]. If Instagram prioritized the perfect presentation of a clear graphic, iconic minimalism, TikTok is the material sensory ASMR zeitgeist, where textures, sounds, and movements are pleasing; there’s something to experience and dwell on in every part of a space or a building. Cozy virtual aesthetics are the dominant sensory regime. I would describe this as ‘virtual hygge’ if the aesthetics come from a video game: hygge from Scandinavian Modernism meets cozy from Animal Crossing and Japanese anime. Gen Z, the future architecture client, is the demographic that embraced the TikTok wall projectors that brought the warming Harry Potter fireplace to their bedroom walls. This capability is the next step for architecture, where space is customizable as an individualized representation of the content we each like to consume and broadcast into architectural space. It’s personalized design as an immersive environment that reflects, reinforces, and comforts us—and responds to our specific needs.