ARCHITECTURE IN THE 21ST CENUTRY

Architecture has historically been a discipline of slow change; yet, over the past 25 years, the field’s aesthetic and theoretical development has dramatically accelerated. With the advent of digital technologies and new means of communication, architecture moved quickly from late-stage Deconstructivism to its spectacular successor, Parametricism — both of which make up for their lack of an overall organizing program with extremely athletic and expensive formal hijinks, often with organic influences (Herzog & de Meuron’s “birds’ nest” stadium comes to mind). Then came “blobitecture,” “biophilic” architecture (much of which consisted of buildings covered in plants), various iterations of “the digital turn” (the worst of which were the deliberately pixelated façades of the midaughts),and “diagrammatic architecture” (diagrams about architecture). In parallel, we saw a smattering of sustainability protocols and programs, ranging from the revival of 1970s experiments in renewable energy and low- and no-carbon living to the Green New Deal, and a program of environmentally grounded public works that reached its apotheosis in the mid-2010s, at what was generally perceived to be the peak of politicized architecture in the 21st century to date. (And that’s just “high architecture” — wait till we get to the rest of it!)

In rapidly gentrifying cities around the globe, public consciousness of architecture mutated from serious newspaper criticism to a hyper-glamorized exercise in spectacle and icon-making. In the digital age, as the traditional press struggled, architecture found a new niche in social media and online trade publications like Dezeen and ArchDaily. With the image as the main form of cultural currency, theory became largely relegated to academia. Public debates between architects lost cultural relevance, the vast majority of architecture writing now consisting of marketing manifestos disguised as missives on craft. As the digital boom expanded, designers themselves — most notably Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick — began modeling their casual mannerisms and modes of communication on tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, a broader reflection of the field’s increasing reliance on digital tools as a means of enabling new ways of building and form-making.

As deindustrialization ravaged traditional manufacturing hubs, many cities turned to tourism. Retail economies propped up the interim period prior to the rise of e-commerce, and some high-profile architects focused on the luxury sector, like OMA, whose work for Prada, Repossi, and Stone Island became canonical in the world of retail design. Most emblematically, however, civic architecture — of the museum and concert-hall variety — proliferated, in part because these typologies held simultaneous promise as tourist destinations, revenue generators, and urban icons, their cultural use often a secondary concern. The majority of the era’s best-known buildings, from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. to Thomas Heatherwick’s ill-fated Vessel in New York, fall into this category of the building as a celebrity-designed mass-transmittable image.

New technologies in computer-aided design made such complex structures possible, fundamentally reshaping the way architecture is practiced across the board, largely in negative ways. AutoCAD, Revit, and SketchUp (to name a few) were conceived as both form-expanders and time-savers, reducing the need for long hours at the drafting board and for the arduous manual assembly of construction documents. In theory, this shift was meant to free architects to focus on design and innovation; in practice, it allowed offices to ramp up the number of projects they tackled. Software reduced the need for previously extensive training in drawing and modelmaking, effectively deskilling the workforce and instituting a stratified division of labor and a race to the bottom with respect to pay. The creative gestures for which architecture is best known gave way to a series of inputs and outputs, lists of materials, abstracted interfaces, and increased scrutiny around cost, complexity, and liability. You can see the result in the field’s less illustrious buildings, like the ticky-tacky apartment complexes that sprout in every city, their flat façades and sticker-like articulations bearing all the trademarks of these tools for expedited design generation.

It is no wonder that, by the mid-2010s, architecture and its discourses began to politicize in new and divergent ways. The Right reinvigorated its anti-Modernism, long a pet project, as new generations of so-called traditional-architecture advocates mixed identity politics (specifically the doubling down on Eurocentrism at a time when diversity and inclusion were the order of the day) with the Classical revival that flourished during the style wars of the 1980s. On the Left, a new generation of critics (including yours truly) turned their eyes away from the big projects toward questions of labor and equity, as well as to cultural criticism: of the growing power and influence of the tech industry and how it has changed our interaction with the built environment through consumption (i.e. Instagram) and surveillance; of the widening aesthetic trends popular in everyday life, including the many iterations of minimalism (tech minimalism, industrial chic, and rustic modernism, aka the farmhouse style); and the varying discourses in urban planning, from gentrification to zoning policies. Future-oriented, the progressive politics of this moment were rooted in the need to remake the world in a better image, whether through racial and gender parity, environmental justice, or labor rights.

The lessons these past 25 years have taught us remain important. As the pandemic reoriented life around the interior, as new technology aims to keep us there, and as the state expands into every crevice of our lives, it is easy to become complacent toward the built environment, to see architecture as a frivolous game played by the world’s wealthiest.

But the political landscape of architecture is changing, not in terms of stylistic development but in its role as a manifestation of power and as a revealing statement of the way things are going. This is the architecture of the border camp, the logistics hub, the prison. In an age of AI slop, nostalgia poisoning, “return to tradition” narratives, revivals of old-school imperialism in the form of triumphal arches and gilded ballrooms, it becomes imperative for architecture, and architects, to look ever forward, especially now, when it hurts.