Architectures of Non-Disruption
“Innovation must be a clearly thought-out response to a change in circumstances, and not indulged in for its own sake.”
Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poori
Every inch of our existence is arbitrated by design: an unthinkable multitude of causalities that determine the manner through which we encounter the built environment. Though space itself bears no witness to the histories that unfold inside of it, the modes that predicate how we constitute our own identities are wholly predicated by an enculturation within space. This condition is ubiquitous to such a degree that we cannot fathom the enormity by which buildings, public spaces, and all other designed items around us circumscribe how we understand our world, and—by extension—how we come to perform our identities within it.
Architecture owes much of its disciplinary prowess to this capacity for engaging extant conditions, and due to its sheer ubiquity, it is perhaps the most efficacious profession to do so. In curating the spaces which we inhabit, labor within, and congregate around, buildings are distinctively robust in their aptitude at transcribing abstract principles into the tangible form of concrete, glass, and other built material. Our constructed world engenders the boundary between the believed and the lived-in. Its placement of walls, doors and windows inscribes a series of value statements about what we see ourselves to be. Though they cast no literal reflection, buildings are a kind of startingly opaque mirror through which societies physicalize themselves in architectural portraiture.
Recently, the interface between architecture and the realities of the built world has been operated by a means of disruption. Our mode of practice, from academia to office, has become saturated by the idea of disruption, by an aberrant newness whose constancy borders on disorienting. From the juried critique to the client presentation, architecture has come to be communicated through its deviation from that which situates it, in the contexts of its immediate physical surroundings and the larger, market-driven prerogatives of economic development. We aspire to a distinctness that resonates beyond the aesthetic, a question of value in the sense that our designs visually distinguish themselves, and thereby perform differently than their surroundings. A disruption is therefore a demarcation from things which already exist. This will asserts itself to such an extent that even the nascent wave of green architecture has done little to buck the trend, instead itself becoming yet another commodification of newness. “Commodification” here is not used passively, because the economization of this architecture-as-market-tool for development and branding underscores our discipline’s penchant towards the iconic as a monetizable signifier of difference.
Where once palaces exhibited architecture’s proximity to power, we now witness a slew of branded corporate offices and private art museums, each boasting a new appropriation of the spectacular in a bid to engage a host of contemporary concerns. In our time, these strategies rely heavily on a formal mechanism, a trick of form or shape that defies expectations and elicits a rakish flavor of the Avant-Garde. The language of our moment has consequently become distinctly concerned with form as the basis for singularity. This is unsurprising—throughout nearly every period of architecture we encounter respective measures of difference, from the stylistic departure away from orthodox Modernism of the 1960s to the enthrallment with new materials and iconoclastic non-ornamentation that informed the Modernists at the turn of the last century. Particularly among what we identify to be our Avant-Garde, the practice of architecture in the West has become an oedipal merry-go-round on which generation after generation of designers decries the stylistic degeneracy of those who proceeded them.
It has become imperative that we, as designers, address this. Failing to do so effectively perpetuates the obstacles that stand in the way of creating meaningful architecture. While clients routinely expect design that punches above its weight, our fetishization of architectural genius has brought about a relentlessness wherein designers overlook a sense of disciplinary community and regard one another’s careers with smug shortsightedness. Various design practices slip in and out of fashion, creating an ecosphere of design work that is perennially bookended by a binary between that which is either outmoded or trending. Biomimicry, Parametricism and Object-Oriented-Ontology are just a few of these recent discards, with AI likely to follow soon.
This turnover is symptomatic of an unhealthy system addicted to originality for originality’s sake. In its pursuit for the never-before-seen, our discipline risks becoming unfit to accumulate the robust body of knowledge necessary to coexist among related fields such as engineering and consulting. Compared with such fields whose practitioners labor continuously to amass additive disciplinary knowledge, rather than besetting themselves with constant reinvention, architecture courts its own irrelevance when it preoccupies itself with a dependency on idiosyncrasy.
Disruption can no longer remain the cultural currency by which a young generation of designers strives to calibrate the efficacy of its work.
In her analysis of the gig economy’s predilection for newness, artist Jenny Odell writes in How To Do Nothing that because “our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new,” disruption is “routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized,” over other strategies of creation—particularly those which might privilege “maintenance and care” in place of the “rhetoric of growth” endemic to our economic model.ii Architecturally, it is obviously true that spaces beyond our expectations capture us emotionally; they transport us to worlds unseen and suggest modes of being that enrich our lives with hopeful possibility. The allure of novelty can be stimulating and compelling, but architecture’s push towards novelty as disruption is inextricable from a culture of branding and sales that monetizes identity.
How might an architecture appear which is aestheticized without fixating on the bold or novel? What would it mean to truly design something secondary in stature? What would Odell’s prerogative of “care and maintenance” mean for a discipline driven by intervention? At a time when multinational corporations have capitalized even the most prescient political movements, we must carefully consider the bedfellows we maintain both professionally and at a broader level of the discipline.
We are adept at designing unconventional spaces, spaces which orient themselves towards the exuberant joys of the individual with little regard to lasting value. Unfortunately, we seem less dexterous when envisioning spaces of empathy—spaces which both collectively hold us as a human ecosystem and promote an understanding beyond the myopia of the individual. Spaces of singular experience stress novelty and excitement, often belaboring their spatial effectiveness on engagement at the overly ephemeral plane of individual preference. Perhaps instead we might seek a spatial quality that connects us in today’s increasingly solipsistic world.
This matter is not merely stylistic in nature; it is contingent and consumptive, affecting all aspects of our field. Coinciding with larger economic tendencies, architecture’s acquiescence to constant brand-oriented merchandizing is rooted in our broader cultural landscape, where we have witnessed the ossification of freelancing as a labor model in the developed world post-Great Recession. This is particularly true in the United States, where the current one-third of the labor force categorized as freelancers is only expected to inflate, eventually projected to encompass a majority of workers by the end of this decade.iii Capitalizing on this demand have been companies like WeWork, whose media identity broadcasts an empire erected on the mythos of entrepreneurship and individuality.iv For architects and designers, this can-do spirit indulges a larger sense of self-anticipation, an intoxicating presumption that one’s Guggenheim moment is just one competition around the corner. If the opportunism of the late-20th century competition was a motivation for many, the framework by which it operated was constructed on the potential for visionary disruption.
It is not without empathy that we can understand how this system delivered fruitfully for previous generations. That it chaperoned the rise to prominence of an entire swath of offices amid the innumerable competitions of the late 20th century is irrefutable. It is equally true that their collective oeuvre has contributed an abundance of significant works to the architectural canon. Nevertheless, this mode of work is now outdated both creatively and moralistically, incompatible to a younger generation who are seconded within a world incapable of buttressing itself on the intrinsically unstable nature of unpaid internships and open competitions. These issues are both systemic and structural. We must overcome the patriarchal notion that each generation’s path forward begins in suffering those same professional hardships as its forebearers. Not only does this mindset ignore changing economic circumstances which are redefining the professional context in which we commence our careers, but it wholly disregards the fact that such practices are inherently unjust.
These patterns simultaneously discourage disadvantaged groups from entering the design field and predispose those privileged enough to participate to a life of de facto servitude at the hands exacting clients and underequipped municipal entities. Consider the differences between the Guggenheim’s 1991 competition and its 2014 successor for art museums in Bilbao and Helsinki, respectively. Where one delivered an acclaimed art museum that not only launched an individual office to superstardom but announced the arrival of an entirely new digital paradigm for design, the latter squandered over a thousand entries in an effort to erect an arguably unnecessary art museum without proper funding models or well strategized long-term planning goals. It is telling that the majority of high-profile competitions in recent years have served little role in bolstering fledgling design practices, more often than not landing in the seats of the same few offices time and time again.
Such factories of design operate exclusively in the world of the unexpected, delivering surprising architectural concepts that predicate themselves on a predictable climax. Though they seek architecture that astonishes or inverts expectations, their projects have nevertheless attenuated a field uniform in the consistency of its supposedly confrontational style. Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai identifies the gimmick as a labor-saving device in its promise to simultaneously reap larger rewards while reducing the effort necessary to bring a task to fruition. Beyond the immediate areas of concern in which Ngai stages her poignant criticism, the relevance of this understanding to architectural production is unmistakable. Ngai’s analysis neatly pinpoints the transitional precipice at which initially disruptive cultural productions lose their potency when repeated ad nauseum. Because repetition “inevitable weakens the impact of [an] aesthetic effect”, the “perpetual reuse of a…device for producing a specific aesthetic effect is often exactly what transforms it into an irritating impoverished gimmick.” This feature of the “gimmick” is utterly familiar in a discipline whose cycle of ideas invariably dilutes even the most erudite philosophical concepts into eventual nuisances of style. What the single-surface project of the 1990s once purported to manifest from the world of literary criticism is now almost entirely devoid of meaning when its disembodied form can be seen on an abundance of built works—regardless of whether it befits their architectural nature.
When competitions and the architectural media that accompany them promise ever more magnificent feats of building with less thought, less investment and less physical impact, they amount to little more than gimmicks in so far as they consistently underdeliver—despite the laborious drudgery (usually on the accord of interns) required to bring them to fruition. Whether their ultimate letdown comes in the benign form of a glass façade ruined by value-engineered mullions left dubiously absent from competition renderings or the more insidious character of a project that consumes valuable public space without offering the connectivity and community promised in its diagrams, the results of architecture generated in these fast-paced charrettes are often anticlimactic at the scales of both aesthetic encounter (the utilitarian curtain wall) and moral quandary (wanton municipal expenditure.)
It is precisely the economic constitution of the gimmick that resonates with our moment of design. Where might we locate the exact point at which the apparatus driving this variety of architecture flatlines? Like Ngai’s gimmick, many disruptive buildings operate on a form of engagement that relies on an undelivered promise of economic performance, whereby they transfigure otherwise banal building forms into architectural stunt. By now, such customary maneuvers have become canonical—the tediously studied axonometric sequences that persuade abstract, white masses to become something twisted, pushed or reoriented towards some hypothetical solar body. While these tools may be effective for communication, the proliferation of buildings which terminate, conceptually speaking, at the crux of the diagram is staggering—though not surprising, given their marketability in a world that privileges the easily digested over the challenging or nuanced.
As designers, we too have been duped by this geometric pantomime. We have anticipated the arrival more, eventually—and we have passively continued to view this relentless performance of novelty in hopes that it would deliver creative transcendence.
It is under the climate of this belated stagnation that architects and designers must come to terms with the reality that the design prodigies of our generation are unlikely to arise from multi-hundred-million-dollar museum design competitions. Moreover, we ought to avoid the assumption that we await their arrival in the first place. We would instead be better off taking stock of all that exists before us, to do good diligence in compiling the intricacies of our history before moving forward. Though the unabating roar of progress compels forward momentum, our profession currently lacks the aesthetic apparatus to imagine a future based solely on our esoteric dispositions about how that might appear. Our world is one we inhabit amid an endless number of complexities. Mass inequality, economic subjugation and impending ecological collapse are but a few of the pressing items we must attend to before imaging what unforeseen novelties illuminate the indeterminacy of our future.
There exists an attitude of conquest innate to the disruptive, something almost colonial-adjacent in its vigor to assert its omnipotence over all places and all times. Disruption is, therefore, an act of critical violence that necessitates the splitting open of a context for the insertion of an exterior idea. The space of newness is not inherently predicated on destruction, but, more often than not, it relies on forms of erasure both conceptually and in a literal, material sense. An architecture of constant resistance trivializes existing bodies of knowledge while antagonizing the quintessential value of those who engineer, construct, and ultimately inhabit our buildings. It fosters a mode of thinking in which all parties outside of a design’s conceptual underpinnings are subconsciously undervalued, understood to be counterproductive to the formal strength of an architectural idea. Given the near global urgency to adapt and retrofit existing structures as we move towards a more environmentally accountable mode of architectural practice, such behaviors are particularly problematic for the collective of emerging designers now configuring the first trajectories of their young careers.
In urban centers like New York, where a shocking majority of extant building stock is forecasted to carry on well into the current century,vi it is imperative that designers negotiate with that which precedes their involvement. Architecture is much more than the physical assemblage of constructed matter; curating and inhabiting the multitude of intricate histories that populate it means considering more than just the built material that we encounter on a given site. A building is a deep microcosm, a porous boundary between states of being that predicates in its divisions of space how the comings and goings through its falls unfold. Architecture is a set-dressing to life, and thus our spaces are authoritative by necessity. It is elemental to the nature of the profession that buildings author the codes by which we conduct ourselves as a society. They instruct us at a generally subliminal level on how we are to conduct ourselves in all realms—public and private. What, then, might architecture offer, if not an act of disruption?
Architecture is unusual in its slowness amid the accelerating pace by which cultural media circulates. To the extent that architecture represents the literal tempo of concrete curing, paint drying and, in many cases, actual grass growing, it is diametrically opposed to our societal expectation of prompt gratification. Every building demands a multitudinous set of hours to design and build. This process involves communication between human beings that remains relatively analogue in nature, unsuited to the digital automation that has streamlined other fields. The process of creating a building expands further beyond the space of a firm, or the offices of its financers, when we account for the very real time that is spent in meetings with city officials on such legalities as plan checks and, eventually, in the immensity of labor invested in its construction. These qualities of our discipline all speak to the vibrancy with which it resists forms of efficiency despite the most fervent pressures of our economic climate. The pace of architecture is magnificently, geologically slow—glacial in its sluggish march forward.
This is obtusely antithetical to the mechanics of disruption, which hinge on the instantaneity of excitement. Those buildings around us which are created to the most disruptive are frequently also those whose character wears the fastest, deflating almost on-the-spot after they assert their market statement. This recession into the background roots them once again to the position from which architecture is inherently practiced in everyday life—that is to say, from the fringe. Our built environment is at its most potent when met peripherally, because it is within this vicinal field of perception that buildings craft our interactions.
Consider the case of folk art, much of which emerges from the intersection between long-held traditions of making and the immediate tactility of an individual’s dexterity and personal background. This technique of creation is one derived from a uniquely calibrated degree of authority. While aware of their implication in the act of making, a craftsperson is often themselves a vessel of sorts, carrying forth a breadth of internalized knowledge and cultural tradition while oscillating emphasis in the work between convention and personal prerogative. Such touches of authorship may at times roar in crescendo, however much of the time they are relinquished to the essential character of the craftwork.
What could this degree of authority inform about a sensibility towards architecture? Where disruption conveys an authoritative statement of intent, a building which relegates itself to the background can be an exercise largely of humility. It is nonetheless not a concession, but instead ought to be seen as a recognition that buildings do most that do least. It is also an acknowledgement that in its most truly radical instances, architecture offers the suggestion of change—a hint of how things alternatively might be—not through didactic demands but by subtle insinuation. The construction of the vast majority of architecture in innately incapable of being revolutionary in the strictest sense due to the complexity with which it compiles of the work of countless other professional tracts into one coherent assembly. Still, architecture capacitates spaces which exert a most minute influence over how we envision existence. They do so at the crux of slightness, at the razor-thin cusp of the nearly inconsequential. For instance, the institution of only the most minor adjustments in how we encounter a door, or see through a window, might represent a fundamental retooling of how we arbitrate space. This relationship subsequently defines how we position ourselves in the world vis-à-vis the means by which we occupy the space around us.
Disruption as an act of design seeks to endanger this transaction, cracking open the moment at which architecture negotiates behavior. The infiltration may be honorable in its intentions; of course, it begets good design to question the status quo. Yet the particular mode by which our field performs this valuable function has become troublesome. In lieu of dialogue, disruptive design methodologies enforce an atmosphere of condescension. They are patriarchal by nature, concerned less with caring for existing relationship structures and cultural conditions than with providing a stage for their soliloquizing genius. Their insistence on ingenuity is in itself double damning, since it not only imprisons the constituents of architecture in monuments to showmanship but confines the creative disciplines involved in its realization to an unfair stipulation for iconicity. At a time of decreasing space, in a sense both physical as it is ideological, we cannot expect, nor even want, every building to be revolutionary. A city comprised of nothing but disruptions is a nightmare.
A design methodology that engages present structures of thought would be more valuable moving forward, rather than supplanting deeply engrained cultural principles. A new generation of designers might do well to push less for the unexpectedly novel and instead invest time in bearing witness to what already exists. In place of the egotistical agenda of disruption, we might imagine an architecture of concurrence—a build world that privileges the persistent maintenance of its communities over hasty grandeur. A field dedicated to the curation of a constructed environment capable of blending amicably with that which it encounters in situ rather than imposing a presupposition of dogmatic ideals would embody an aesthetic of honesty and straightforwardness, absent the final-hour punchline of the gimmick. There has been a perceptible appearance in recent years across disciplinary boundaries of a new aesthetic that speaks to these ends, a gentleness of design that supplies testimony to the elemental fragility of our world. Cultural critic Jonathan D. Fitzgerlad identifies this succinctly in his analysis of New Sincerity, a movement of the early aughts in which “an emphasis on sincerity and authenticity” provided space for concerns about “spirituality, family, neighbors, the environment and the country.”vii What underscores the poignancy of this observation is its propensity towards non-ironic earnestness. Though commenting specifically on the nature of pop music that “vulnerability shows up… where bravado and posturing once ruled”, Fitzgerald’s annotation about New Sincerity is applicable across a number of media concerned with depicting “authentic characters determined to live good lives.”
An aesthetic of forthrightness is an appeal for discourse at a moment increasingly concerned with the perpetuation of singular voices and dogmatic isolation. It begs us to confront reality in two ways: not only must we bear witness to those things which we physically encounter in the literal space before us (be they the qualities of a site or the prerogatives of a community) but also a temporal beforeness whose circumstances predate our arrival. This is an act of humility in the presence of those histories which presage ours. Such a reconciliation with the condition of things is a reckoning of the degree to which we acknowledge our culpability in sustaining the unfair practices of history, markedly in those many places besieged by the unfair practices of colonialism, racism, and economic stratification. We face the impossibility of construct a future if we cannot first take stock of the often contentiously symbiotic nature by which we form our present.
As we look at a world changing rapidly on both social and political levels, it is natural that we too might find ourselves lusting for the new. An architecture without disruption might be a space which is vulnerable, which forefronts the preservation of and care for its occupants over the singular a priori vision of an architect. As such, it would be an architecture of reticence—an architecture which relinquishes the superficiality of its outward perception for an inherently inconspicuous temperament. Such an architecture might not even be readily discernable and may be indistinguishably sublimated into its context. It would acknowledge that buildings can be boring in an infinitely precious way. If architecture seems to have drifted from importance in our culture of media immediacy, we would be well off to remember this dull ubiquity of space. We would also do well to grasp the implications that our designs enact on those who interact with them, and that this delicate interaction often relies not on bold imposition but on astute engagement.
Perhaps this necessitates a rephrasing of the relationship by which we consider design, not from the subjecthood of a designer’s vision but rather as an emergent process that brings material presence to metaphysical concepts in the space between people and places. There is an exquisite tapestry that comes about from the woven nature of a thousand souls—from designers to clients to consultants to regulatory bodies to, most importantly, local constituencies. That each character in this ensemble approaches the provocation of architectural construction differently is not grounds for rowdy argument, from which only one party can harness victory. Nor it is not a space that delegates architecture the role of disruptor, attempting to supersede the quarrel merely by yelling the loudest. An architecture of non-disruption has no defined aesthetic, but it has an air of modesty, an acknowledgement of the blankness of space through which our buildings arbitrate the soft palpability between abstract value systems and firmly tangible materials. This architecture would not demand to be encountered but might instead silently bear witness in the manner that architecture does best—as a backdrop which spatializes the human condition. Discarding disruption as the primary mechanism by which our discipline participates in our cultural habitat, we can conceivably approach something more human—a more humble architecture that, in place of verbose disruption, engages with and cares for its inhabitants, fosters their communities and, ultimately, bespeaks a renewed interest in spaces meaningful enough to provide much needed moments of respite amid our tumultuous time.
Connor Gravelle is an architectural designer interested in the cultural, political, and social intersections that define buildings. Connor seeks an architecture which not only speaks to its moment but addresses the larger human forces that shape our histories and identities.
Having graduated from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 2017, his experiences in the field have included work in Los Angeles, London, and Seoul, in which he spent two years before relocating to New York, where he currently resides.
@connorgravelle
gravelle.xyz
i
Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 24.
ii
Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019).
iii
Jessica Klein, “35% of the U.S. Workforce is Now Freelancing,” FastCompany, October 3, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90411808/35-of-the-u-s-workforce-is-now-freelancing-10-million-more-than-5-years-ago
iv
UpWork and Freelancers Union, “Freelancing in America: 2017,” https://www.upwork.com/press/2017/10/17/freelancing-in-america-2017/
v
Sianne Ngai, “Theory of the Gimmick,” Critical Inquiry 43, University of Chicago Press (2017), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/689672
vi
City of New York, One City Built to Last Technical Working Group Report, 2nd ed., (New York City: City of New York Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, 2015), http://www.nyc.gov/html/gbee/downloads/pdf/TWGreport_2ndEdition_sm.pdf
vii
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, “Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age's Ethos,” Atlantic, November 20, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/sincerity-not-irony-is-our-ages-ethos/265466/