I was invited to attend the Hollin Hills House + Garden Tour this May. It was a blast.

For the unfamiliar, Hollin Hills is a Post-War Era community / development / neighborhood just outside Washington DC. The community started taking shape in 1949 when developer Robert Davenport acquired the land and hired architect Charles Goodman along with landscape architect Lou Voigt to design a contemporary residential neighborhood.

Mid-Century homes typically standout in suburban communities. So much so that it was a rare treat in the sea of neo-colonial 4-square homes that is the American Suburb. It was even more special when you found a collection of three or four, sometimes designed by a local architect who may have developed a lore in their community. But these collections pale in comparison to the vastness and uniformity of the Hollin Hills development. Without exaggeration, every single house belongs to the Mid-Century style and the resulting effect is surreal.

The tour was self guided and consisted of a series of private homes who’s owners generously opened their doors for tour-goers. It was organized through the Civic Association of Hollin Hills, a nonprofit org which runs social events, publishes a newsletter, and sells merch (essentially a fan-club for the neighborhood from what I gathered).

This tour encouraged me to re-examine my opinions about Mid-Century design, suburbs, and community. Below are my observations.

Thank you for reading.

- David 🦆

I've been intrenched in the design world for a few years now, attending architecture school, teaching, working in large and mid-sized design offices, making friends and networking with furniture dealers around the country. In general, there has always been a culture of elitism occupying certain corners of the discipline. Some milieus possess less of this ethos, but it nonetheless remains. I first discovered this as an undergraduate student. Some classmates decided who to be friends with based on the quality of their work. They wouldn't talk to you if your drawings weren’t up to their standard. This continued in graduate school where I met professor's who behaved the same way, not giving certain students the time of day, avoiding them during guest lectures and so on.

Today, my interactions with elitism come mostly in two forms, first in my own office and second, in showrooms or exhibitions. Certain teams within offices possess higher-status roles and are often willing to make that known. Additionally, showroom employees will only engage with people who look like they 1. know about the furniture in the room, or 2. Have the means to purchase said furniture. As a young student, I would often get ignored until I sufficiently in-grouped myself by demonstrating knowledge or asking questions related to what I already owned.

Maybe it is controversial, but I don’t have an issue with this gatekeeping per se. True communities with implicit social contracts and genuine connections between members necessitate a certain amount of exclusivity. In the design profession, the elitism I encounter feels like the toxic version of such gate keeping and it only serves to alienate the design community. I am not interested in throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but the profession does have a serious elitism problem.

Anyways, when attending the Hollin Hills tour, I expected to see the same elitist design crowd with their weird all black outfits, New-Yorker tote bags, and rolled up beanies. This is not the crowd I encountered. It consisted of mostly older people dressed in graphic tees and cargo shorts. They didn’t seem super into contemporary design culture, or at least in the contemporary design culture I was familiar with. The elitism I was familiar with was nowhere to be found. People smiled at strangers, sparked up random conversations, and were perfectly willing to mingle outside their already large circles.

The owners of the homes participated in this warmth as well, often greeting tour-goers as they entered their homes. They weren’t dressed up and there was no attempt at the social signaling I was used to seeing at design events. Many of the owners filled their homes with dupe furniture, but there was no judging or scrutiny directed at them for such sins. In fact, very little social capital was attached to possessing the “correct” objects. People were proud of their homes, but not performatively so. The focus was on the houses themselves, the neighborhood, and the lives being lived within them.

This critically differs from the way Mid-Century architecture had been portrayed in popular culture. Much of the imagery that defines our understanding of the style comes from one of two photographers, those being Julius Shulman and Slim Aarons. Their photographs often depict beautiful homes occupied by affluent, attractive, and carefree people. The architecture appears inseparable from a larger image of aspiration, and this has shaped our understanding of the architecture, who it is for, how it should used, and who isn’t welcome in these spaces.

Hollin Hills obscures this image. The neighborhood was full of Mid-Century homes, but it lacked the exclusivity and class that often accompanies representations of the style. The community felt as though it was organized around stewardship rather than aspiration. It maintained the aesthetic without the gross hedonism portrayed in Aarons’ or Shulman’s photography.

As mentioned earlier, The community even has their own Civic Association: A fan-club focused around stewardship and mutual appreciation for the community. They run events, share local news, and even sell merch. Nowadays, genuine communities feel lost, and many people turn to the web to build connections. These online ‘communities’ lack the immediacy of living near your fellow community members. I can’t ask my graduate school friends to look after my cat because they don’t live near me. But I’m sure such requests are common in Hollin Hills. For this reason, I wish such associations were more common.

In retrospect, I think this was what surprised me most about Hollin Hills. Before the tour, I had come to associate Mid-Century Modernism with a particular social aspiration and elitism. Hollin Hills felt almost entirely divorced from that image. What remained was ordinary people who cared about their homes, opened them to strangers, and took pride in maintaining a shared architectural heritage.

It was lovely and I hope to return in the near future.

Philip Johnson’s library, designed for himself in New Canaan, CT, at his Glass House campus.

I’ve never been to the Glass House campus, but from its photos, I am reminded of an animal sanctuary: a diverse collection of exotic yet flawed creatures (buildings) accompany your sightline as you meander through the complex. Each project, designed by Johnson, represents a personal experiment, removed from a potential context and placed here, together, with other strange creatures.

Each creature barely qualifies as a building. They are more like shacks or pavilions. They are small, enclosed rooms with a few carefully placed apertures, a door, and maybe with a function besides dwelling. They would not survive outside of the sanctuary because they lack practicality, scale and efficiency. They are the result of a scientist personally experimenting with and producing beautiful, yet unfit, species that only serve his desire to produce and live amongst his imaginations in New Canaan, where students, faculty, and amateurs of zoology come and experience their spectacle.

Among the bunch, there is one specimen that catches my eye more than the others. Perhaps this is the result of my personal inclinations and biases, but also, could there be something special about this one? Regardless, exploring this inclination would be useful, as it would develop an understanding of my own tendencies, or it would develop and share an understanding of something beautiful.

Johnson’s Library / Studio was designed in the 80s.

Its formal reading from the exterior comes from the arrangement of four parts: the truncated cone, the chimney, the cavity, and the mass.

The mass is the one-story form that is occupied. It is a right trapezoid, with its acute angle filleted (or rounded) to an excessive degree, so much so that the fillet, from some angles, reads as its own volume: a cylinder joined to a rectangular prism. As one meanders around the construction, a flickering between a cylinder/rectangle reading and a rounded trapezoid reading occurs.

The truncated cone sits atop the rounded edge of the trapezoid. The larger, lower radius of the truncated cone matches that of the rounded cylinder and becomes narrower at the top. There is a very subtle reveal at the top of the cone, which communicates a skylight from the exterior.

The chimney is the same height as the cone, but much thinner. Formally, it is simply a square extrusion extending from the right-angled corner of the trapezoidal mass, opposite the cone. It is maybe 30 inches both width and length. Unlike the cone, there is no visible detailing or tectonic expression; the volume simply ceases as it reaches its desired height. Its two outer walls blend into the walls of the mass below with no visible joint.

Next to the entrance is a small staircase, lifting you off the path and bringing you to a small landing with an overhang. The overhang is not an added form created through addition, but a carving into the building, leaving an overhead slab and forming the cavity. The stairs partially exists outside of the plan of the mass.

The interior is laid out as one would expect based on the exterior. Upon entry, one is greeted by a single rectangular room, with one corner occupied by the cylinder. We can confirm that the cone is, in fact, a skylight. The thin rectangular extrusion, which sits opposite the cone, is a chimney that provides much-appreciated thermal comfort and visual warmth to the interior. The warm light from the fireplace contrasts nicely with the cold sunlight emanating from the skylight. Along the three remaining flat walls are inset bookshelves. Johnson has placed a large square table under the conic skylight, presumably for reading or drawing. Today, the table is curated with coffee table books and sketchbooks that Johnson would theoretically be using. The table is accompanied by two Cross Check Chairs, designed by Frank Gehry for Knoll.

On the whole, the project formally reads as a collection of geometric “primitives”, solid and simple geometric shapes incapable of further reduction. They are the basic building blocks of complex geometry. The primitives are precisely arranged to form tangencies that obscure the readings of such geometries.

My interest in this creature has little to do with the library itself, how it is used, or its proximity to Philip Johnson. The library isn’t particularly well known either. Even on the Glass House campus, there are projects that have been studied much more.

My interest is in the library’s predictive qualities and its relation to the field at large.

At least retroactively, there existed a canonical narrative in Western architectural theory from the 1970s until the early 2020s. This canon ended either because we lost the ability to assess our present-day situation, because assessing a present-day canon simply isn’t possible, or because our field has become so diverse that a canon no longer exists. The field seems to believe that it is just too diverse these days. I still believe that, in the future, we will look back and grossly simplify the present condition into a canonical structure.

Any who, from my understanding of this canon, the 1970s were dominated by a rejection of modernist and late-modernist ideals in favor of the paths created by a few postmodern designers, most notably Robert Venturi and John Hejduk. Postmodern architecture developed in a myriad of ways, but most notably in its affinities for complexity and composition, and phenomenological readings of signs.

Beyond the mostly agreed upon canon, In architectural history, a possible framework for analysis is to explore the flickering between moments of avant-garde (radical newness, exploration, move fast and break things) and refinement (simplification, development of what we already have). It is difficult to identify these time periods, as our current framework for identifying styles works in opposition. That is, most of the era categories we use to define styles/epochs/eras begin with an avant-garde period and are bookended by simplification. This point will become relevant later in this essay.

In the 90s, advances in technology further complexified the form of architecture, as we no longer needed to fully comprehend geometry to communicate its construction. Architects looking for ways to design more complex forms were unlocked by the proliferation of 3D modeling software.

Some have argued (persuasively) that form, as the result of a process involving specific tools, is thus inextricably and deeply derived from the tools themselves. This is rather self-evident to designers proficient in the typical suite of tools used today. It isn’t difficult to look at a project and almost immediately know which software was used in its design process. Occasionally, the connection between software tools and physical building is so clear that especially proficient designers can identify the specific commands used to generate a project, or even at what stage BIM tools were implemented.

I would like to push back on this assertion slightly.

To me, this obsession with software was slightly misplaced. I believe we became so interested in what software allowed us to do that we stopped asking if these are even things we should be doing. The formal and phenomenological tendencies of the 70s–80s were lost as a result.

It was only after the folding generation began teaching, and their students decided to rebel, that the 70s were revived. Firms like Young & Ayata revisited the 1985 O. M. Ungers text on planar analysis in 2021. In the 90s, Stan Allen wrote Field Conditions, clearly influenced by Lynn’s Folding in Architecture and Deleuze’s Leibniz and the Baroque. In 2021, Allen published Situated Objects, refocusing his work on post-modern ideals such as composition and discretion of form, as opposed to the metaphysics and continuity of Field Conditions.

This shift from wholeness and parametric modeling to discretion and part-to-part composition should not be interpreted as a positive and novel development of the canon, but instead as a regression to postmodern, pre-folding ideals.

After such a regression to an avant-garde Venturian postmodernism, what follows is a refinement period, which we know naturally follows the avant-garde, resulting in the current milieu. That is, refined postmodern composition.

The publishing of Folding in Architecture began the software craze in 1993, and it appears that 2021, the publishing of Young & Ayata’s revisiting of Ungers, and Allen’s Situated Objects, represents its end.

Strangely, these dates line up perfectly with Kyle Miller’s diagram last year, which sought to track the contributors to today’s architectural canon. The diagram can thus be reinterpreted as our discipline’s attempt to reconcile Greg Lynn’s Folding and rediscover the works of Venturi and Hejduk today. The work of practices such as Forma, Almost Studio, SSC, Present Forms, SSM, LADG, and Ames best represent this rediscovery.

Returning to Johnson’s library.

This library was produced only a few years before the digital turn. And yet, it seems to already resolve many of the questions that would later occupy the discipline for decades. As I mentioned earlier, styles or projects seem to undergo a process of development and then refinement. Postmodernisms refinement took place only after our tangent of the digital turn. The reason Johnson’s library feels special is because it represents what the field would become. It predicted the postmodern refinement of the 2020s and simplified Venturian composition to its most practical, economical, and digestible form. For these reasons I believe this was very ahead of it’s time.

Additionally, This was a pattern for Johnson. His work was rarely original, but he had a talent for identifying the essence of an epoch and producing which represents its most developed form.

Thank you for reading.

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I have avoided discussing AI on this Substack for a few reasons. For one, there is already a rich discourse around AI on this platform, much of which I already agree with. Ignoring the tech-stackers, most writers and readers here agree on the serious environmental, artistic, and copyright issues that AI possesses. Critiquing AI further would be preaching to the choir and thus, I did not mind letting better, more experienced writers tackle the subject.

However, silence on this issue, especially as an art/design-oriented creator, unfortunately communicates a satisfaction or at least a tolerance of the ways AI has been used throughout the industry.

It is also difficult to discuss AI generally because its applications are so broad. In some domains, AI is genuinely productive, such as its use in medical research, accelerating scientific discovery, and improving accessibility tools. In others, its implications are ethically inexcusable: expanding surveillance capabilities, intensifying military technologies, displacing workers, enabling large-scale plagiarism, and destabilizing educational infrastructure.

To add complexity, some people choose to gatekeep the conversation further. For example, a common point I hear from the tech-stackers is that artists and designers love to critique AI but they themselves do not understand how AI works or they ‘admit’ to not using it. Thus, their opinions are invalid. Understanding how AI works does not equate to grasping its effects in other industries. I trust artists’ and writers’ opinions of AI because this technology affects them more directly. It makes no difference to the validity of their experiences if they understand how AI works or not. For example, I don’t need to understand the precise workings of the U.S. health care system to have been denied necessary medical care.

From what I have observed, tech people find AI fascinating, useful, or even beautiful. Similarly, one may find viewing a tornado from afar to be beautiful. An ecologist may even consider the potential ecological benefits of tornadoes such as seed and nutrient dispersal, or forest health. A physicist may be fascinated by the visual play of forces in nature. An artist may find tornadoes fascinating for their formal gestures and sublime qualities. But finding a tornado visually beautiful, or being fascinated in how they work, or even their ecological benefits does not change the fact that tornados kill people in their paths.

That being said, I occasionally see specific uses of AI within my domain to which I feel comfortable discussing. This article is one of those case studies. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy.

🦆

- David

Today, I will be discussing Chicago’s new Cultural Stadium (CS) development project. According to the CS website, CS is “a collection of initiatives—united by one vision: to inspire, guide, and harness the power of arts and culture to shape a downtown that unites people, sparks creativity, and embodies the heartbeat of the city.” The team behind the CS insists that the projects will evolve to meet future needs as well.

They continue by arguing the power of arts and culture as a tool for renewal, citing precedents such as Bilbao’s Guggenheim by Gehry, the transformation of ‘overlooked spaces in Melbourne, and the elevation of Glasgow’s ‘creative legacy.’ The website does not elaborate on the Melbourne or Glasgow precedents so I can only guess what they are referring to. I found some evidence of a Melbourne urban revitalization project from the 1980s, but I cannot be certain this is what the CS is referencing. In the case of Glasgow, I have no idea.

The CS has an absolutely stacked line-up of directors, including: Lou Raizin (President and CEO of Broadway in Chicago), Joe Ferguson (President of the Civic Federation), Michelle Boone (Pres. & CEO of the Poetry Foundation), Tony Karman (Former Pres. of EXPO Chicago), and lastly, the capitalist behemoth, Cary McMillan (Chairman at True Partners Consulting, Independent Director at Hyatt, and Independent Director at AMERICAN EAGLE OUTFITTERS INC.)

The project also has a series of ‘advisors,’ including Terry Clark (UChicago), Reed Kroloff (Dean of IIT’s Architecture College), Phil Enquist (UIC), Greg Cameron (Pres. & CEO of Joffrey Ballet), and Meredith O’Connor (Executive Managing Director JLL).

Many design firms are involved in some way (unclear how exactly as of yet) including seven large design offices, most notably SOM, and Perkins&Will. Both firms are considered industry leaders.

Included at the bottom of the page is a collection of 105 notable partners: Rick Bayless, Tom Ricketts, Maurice Cox, Edwin Eisendrath, Sarah Herda, Susan Manilow, Rebekah Scheinfeld, David Schwimmer, and Phil Enquist, among others. I am unsure how Friend’s cast member David Schwimmer is contributing to this development project, but considering genAI’s systematic erasure of artistic and creative provenance, I am glad to see he is credited.

Behind the partners and the mission, The CS website lists a collection of projects, which in theory carry out the above stated mission. Each project page is identical, including a single image, a general project location, a 2-3 sentence description, a listed partner/designer, and a short grading table which lists the benefits of each project. The projects are graded on four parameters:

1. Increases tourism

2. Improves quality of life

3. Engages community

4. Creates jobs.

Each parameter is graded on a scale from 1 to 3, 3 being the best.

The CS project has been covered extensively by mainstream media sources (all positively) since its public introduction back in January 2025, including multiple stories in the Chicago Tribune, MSN, and CBS News.

According to insiders at various development firms in Chicago, many of the projects listed are remarkably close to getting funding, and other development firms are using proximity to the CS to acquire city funding for other projects, not listed on the website. Thus, as a preliminary development project, it has already been quite successful, given the partners involved and the likelihood of funding.

Now onto AI.

It is hard to find anything on the CS website that was not fully generated by AI. Every piece of text, the diagrams, the renderings, even the grading table. The images were not even slightly cleaned up after their generation and still possess many obvious problems.

For example, The Pause project, depicted above, shows a new public bathroom, on the infamous Chicago Lakefront Trail. The location shown in the ‘rendering’ does not exist. There is no place along the lakefront where the skyline is visible from across the lake. Additionally, the bathroom signs were not even edited after generation to show a men’s and women’s bathroom. The rendering also shows the sun high in the sky in the north-west. This sun location is impossible for Chicago. In addition, the design, if one can call it such, is hardly controlled. What has dictated the nature of each curve? Does each contour follow a specific radius? Typically, these questions are answered during the design process to ensure buildability and usability, but such workflow was ignored. Anyone who has played with Midjourney for any amount of time has produced similar forms. The project is partnered with architecture firm Perkins&Will.

Next, the above project depicts some sort of park space with what appears to be a restaurant below. The structure looks like it is floating in the river, given the wide-open space, its proximity to Marina City Tower complex, and the bridge seen in the lower right corner of the image. But when looking behind the ‘park’ it appears this intervention was placed in the middle of a highway?

The point is that these images were produced so lazily that it hardly feels worth it to deconstruct them. To call them designs or renderings feels insulting to the entire design profession. These images are slop in its most archetypal form: lazy, noisy, generated images with zero substance or rigor.

Additionally, the projects have serious conceptual issues. For example, the ‘PARKing’ project aims to add “life, foot traffic, and artistic value to overlooked spaces” by reimagining the upper levels of parking structures as cultural destinations. They are expecting tourists to climb parking garages to look at art on their roofs. This is obviously dangerous and impractical. Despite this, according to the projects grading, the project will:

How will the project accomplish these goals? No one knows, and there is no elaboration. What do these numbers even mean???

Bogglingly, the Design Museum of Chicago has decided to partner with the CS for this project.

Every single project is like this. There is some generic AI-generated mission, a grading chart which makes zero sense with no elaboration, an undeveloped, Midjourney-generated image, and some high-profile partner/architect who has attached their name to it. Yet somehow, the CS initiative has generated significant media attention and coverage for its importance and aesthetic quality.

This, of course, raises the questions: What importance? What aesthetic quality? In design school, it is taught that the production of drawings and images IS the design process, and thus, a critical step in making real-world progress. We learn through creation of images. Developers and clients trust architects based on the images and drawings we produce because of the effort required to produce a complex rendering with thoughtful, comprehensive consideration of form, function, scale, context, lighting, detailing, and countless other parameters.

This is not the case with genAI, and especially with these images which were generated with little care or refinement. The images remain complex on the surface, but the design process has been removed.

Are clients and developers not yet awakened to this sleight of hand? Do they not understand the disrespect to and destruction of an artform? Regardless, It doesn’t matter if they are aware or not. They are incentivized not to care. Our markets prefer speed and ROI.

Perhaps it is a tall request to ask people who are not artists or designers to understand the importance of the process, of participating wholly in the act of creation, of learning by doing. We still shouldn’t let them off the hook for lazy thinking, but perhaps it is more understandable why the deficiencies of genAI wouldn’t immediately turn them away.

But, given all this dysfunction, lack of design process, and grossly childish analysis, why have some of the most important names and institutions in Chicago’s design scene chosen to partner with them? Why is SOM, a leading design firm, who with Gordan Bunshaft is responsible for masterpieces such as the Yale Rare Manuscript Library, willing to partner with the CS?

Additionally, why is the Dean of IIT’s College of Architecture, Reed Kroloff, named as an advisor? I have had brief conversations with him, and I can sense his sophistication and understanding of the field. I do not understand why he would associate himself and, by proxy, The Illinois Institute of Technology Architecture School with such lazy and dangerous design practices.

These projects are far more likely to get funding than their competitors in Chicago or any other urban city center. They have managed to partner with large offices, who when approved, will move forward with the actual design of these interventions. Will the interventions look or work as intended? Definitely not, but funding will already have been achieved.

I am reminded of the lofty marketing practices of Bjarke Ingels as I write this. In the mid to late 2010s, Ingels revolutionized how architecture was communicated to the public, catapulting himself to the pinnacle of our field in the public eye. He communicated architecture through logical diagrams, which showed how his works had been designed. The result of these diagrams and his process would supposedly produce buildings which were formally novel, functionally strong, and most importantly, easy to digest for the public.

The diagrams, however compelling they may have been, are not architecture. Not even close.

They represent a romantic potential for the marrying of form and function, nothing more. As a student, I was entranced by such propositions. Today, I understand that the success of an architectural product is dependent on much more, and that a compelling story does not equate to a successful building. Architecture becomes a success or a failure during the detailing process. The VM house by Bjarke Ingels Group from my observation has not aged well. But it’s too late. Funding had been secured and the project was built.

It is common knowledge that BIG constantly over-promised with their diagrams, renderings, and budgets early in the firm’s history.

We were warned about this about 70 years earlier. Philip Johnson observed a modernist culture which was becoming increasingly interested in the production of picturesque drawings and renderings.

“But the next one is still with us today although, here again, the Crutch of Pretty Drawing is pretty well gone. There are those of us—I am one—who have made sort of a cult of the pretty plan. It’s a wonderful crutch because you can give yourself the illusion that you are creating architecture while you’re making pretty drawings. Fundamentally, architecture is something you build and put together, and people walk in and they like it. But that’s too hard. Pretty pictures are easier.”

- From his essay: “The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture”

Today, the production of pretty images has become increasingly accessible and economically expedient due to advances in computing and the introduction of AI products.

My argument here is that one cannot simply remove the design process and expect a high-quality product. AI is not a tool being used within the design process. It is eliminating the design process. This lack of rigor will hurt the city. Because such little analysis takes place before the securing of funding, these projects are destined to be over budget, delayed, and dysfunctional to its mission. The design process is slower, is more laborious precisely because the production of the images itself is, in part, the analysis needed to define, understand, and justify the project.

“Through tectonics, the architect may make visible, in a strong statement, that intensified kind of experience of reality which is the artist’s domain-in our case, the experience of forces related to forms in a building. Thus, structure, the intangible concept, is realized through construction and given visual expression through tectonics.” - Sekler

Tectonics is a term that gets thrown around in the discipline often. I still do not understand what it means exactly.

It is typically defined as ‘the way architectural elements come together/intersect/join.’ okay, fair enough I guess, but as far as architectural definitions go, this is extremely weak. There are so many unanswered questions here. Is there such a thing as good or bad tectonics and if so, what makes it such?

Take a similar architectural concept such as ‘composition’ as a counterpoint. Composition refers simply to the arrangement of things, but the term has been broadly explored in the field. So much so in fact, we understand how compositional trends have changed throughout history and most designers can intuitively distinguish between good and bad composition. We understand the various types of compositions, and we have assigned terms for them such as linear, radial, dynamic, static, loose, clumsy, or rigid. When talking with designers, I implicitly expect a mutual and rich understanding of the term and its complexity.

The same could not be said about tectonics. Designers are not expected to understand the term beyond the shallow definition given above. This is especially problematic because tectonics is one of the only aesthetic categories to which architecture is uniquely suited for exploration. Painting, digital art, graphic design, and most relief work have no tectonic expression. Even sculptures which necessarily have tectonic expressions are limited due to their scale. Architecture, however, is large and complex, with massive structural systems and rigorous construction techniques, thus requiring a deeper tectonic reconciliation.

I hope to explore ‘tectonics’ in a series of posts analyzing various texts on the term to better understand it myself and to make the term more accessible to those who share my confusion.

I will be starting with Sekler’s 1965 essay “Structure, Construction, Tectonics”. This essay underpins most contemporary discourse on tectonics and thoroughly pulling from classical sources. I hope to expand both forward and backward in time until I feel comfortable with my understanding of the term. If you have suggestions on other readings, please dm me, or list them in the comments. Thanks, and take care.

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There are a few sections of the Sekler essay, the first is an explanation of the relationship between architectural experience and linguistics. Included was a reasoning for the essay itself, expressing that developing an understanding for the term ‘tectonics’ as it varies from similar concepts like structure or construction would “increase clarity in a very limited area.”

To Sekler, these terms represent distinct components in the way architecture interacts with the physical world and how we perceive this interaction. These terms are also dependent on one another and act in sequence.

Sekler chooses to define these terms intuitively, by analyzing how these terms are used, and how their uses differ from one another. This is not common in architecture theory for a few reasons. First, defining words based on how they differ from other words is an oversimplification of a structuralist analysis and architects are generally too practical to bother with such sophistication. Second, referencing how words are used colloquially is also uncommon in the discipline as we remain quite insulated and prefer to use our own terms. In fact, you will often see theorists appropriating or sometimes even inventing words to fit a desired and pre-proposed definition.

For example, the word “elegance” has been borrowed by individuals such as Schumacher, Picon, and Scott Cohen, who were looking for a term which fits a specific definition, a definition that is far richer and complex than what is colloquially used. Elegance was the closest word to what they needed, so it was used, mostly disregarding its colloquial usage.

The same could be said with Lynn and Deleuze’s, use of “Fold”, Venturi’s expansion of the word “Contradiction”, Semper’s use of “Bekleidung”, or Burke’s unfolding of the “Sublime”. Many more examples exist, in architecture and in philosophy, I promise.

Back to Sekler.

Sekler noted that the use of term ‘construction’ seems to refer to a ‘realization of a principle or system,’ often constructed by a person. ‘Structure’ on the other hand, is the abstract concept, system, or principle, of arrangement of forces or contexts. A structure could be an arch or a vault. Notice how structure does not necessarily refer to a specific vault or arch, just the abstraction notion of one. This could not be said about construction which refers to specific manifestations.

The quality of an architectural intervention is dependent on both the structure that is chosen and how it manifests as a construction. A well-chosen structure does not imply proper construction and vice versa.

Sekler then uses this framework of definitions to define tectonics:

“When a structural concept has found its implementation through construction, the visual result will affect us through certain expressive qualities which clearly have something to do with the play of forces and corresponding arrangement of parts in the building, yet cannot be described in terms of construction and structure alone. For these qualities, which are expressive of a relation of form to force, the term tectonic should be reserved.”

I apologize for bringing Kant into yet another post, but the precedent set in his aesthetic writing is too useful to ignore (sorry to those who have commented on this, and thanks for reading). Kant’s writing on aesthetics sets a useful precedent for the categorization of various aesthetic attributes. Kant focused on the beautiful, sublime, good, agreeable, and more. I discuss more about these distinctions in my last post.

Sekler’s ‘tectonic’ interestingly fits neatly into this framework as new aesthetic attribute which acts independently to the other terms Kant proposes and is mostly unique to architecture.

To outline these terms clearly according to Kant with the addition of Sekler’s Tectonics:

Good: Good is what pleases through its ethical argument or utility without an appeal to beauty, often based on empirical studies. In architecture, one can imagine that a concept may be morally noble and this is pleasing to observe.

Agreeable: The agreeable is that which pleases the senses completely devoid of a cognitive judgment. This is more subjective than the other terms, including people’s inclination to certain colors or textures.

Beautiful: The beautiful pleases universally without bias by the perceiver, devoid of concept. beauty is not a property of objects but a judgment: it is the experience of disinterested pleasure produced when form induces a free and harmonious play between imagination and understanding, felt as universally valid despite having no rule, concept, or purpose.

The three terms given above represent independent parameters useful for judging an object. For architectural analysis, Sekler’s tectonics fits nicely into this system.

Tectonic: The pleasure that arises from observing the play of forces and corresponding arrangement of parts.

Today, tectonics differs from the other terms because it does not include an inherent value distinction. The beautiful, good, and agreeable are all positive terms. Tectonics refers to a category and is too complex for a simple good-bad, agreeable-disagreeable, beautiful-not beautiful spectrum. This was not always the case, as in antiquity, a firmness or plausibility in structure was seen favorably. Thus, tectonics was explored only in its goal to make architecture appear strong and stable.

Nowadays, designers are more interested in a broader range of tectonic expressions, including precarious looking arrangements of structural elements to evoke a more diverse set of feelings.

Take the postural studies of Jimenez Lai, or the clumsy tectonics of Kyle Troyer’s thesis work for example. Jimenez Lai is deeply interested in tectonics and manipulates structural elements to mimic various human postures. Most designers who have used Pareidolia do so with form, but using this technique to develop tectonics is fertile territory.

Additionally, the uniqueness of Troyer’s tectonics comes from the reconciliation of an informal or clumsy construction detail, with a spatial organization based on Venturian juxtaposition. That is, overlapping and contradictory parts and spaces with clashing wills. The result is a tectonic reading not based on physics or structural principles, but instead, derived from compositional and construction techniques.

Tectonic expression is sometimes concealed as well. For example, The use of the baby in the below video is evidence of concealment of tectonics. This technique was used in sculpture but was only later adapted for architectural use. Today, I am reminded of the House of Horns, by WOJR, where rounded marble sculptures are used to hide structural function (I think).

On Phenomena

Sekler is quite clear that tectonics is not a simple attribute of architecture, but something that emerges in the act of perception from the legible relation between structure and construction. Today, however, such experiential interpretations are often frowned upon in architecture. Designing for specific effects or phenomenon is often dismissed as theoretically unreliable. This occurs for a few reasons, but from my understanding, it boils down to experience itself being understood as historically conditioned, culturally mediated, and impossible to stabilize as a foundation for architectural meaning.

During the time that Sekler published this essay, many prominent theorists were displacing experience from architectural discourse. Whether or not they were correct in doing so is a different question that I do not feel comfortable attacking in this essay. Nevertheless, it occurred and this anti-phenomenological sentiment persists today. The figures I associate with this trend approached this differently, but their effects were the same. Peter Eisenman is the first name that comes to mind. He was willing to consider architecture as pure formal exercise, displacing the subject from its privilege.

Eisenman writes in his description of his “House IV 1971” Project

“In House IV, a limited set of rules (shift, rotation, compression, extension) was applied to a limited set of elements (cubic volume, vertical planes, spatial nine-square grid). This transformational method establishes a code of spatial relationships within the syntactic domain of architectural language. The set of diagrams thus produced is recorded as both substance and indexical sign, which shift the focus away from existing conceptions of form in an intentional act of overcoming materiality, function, and meaning.

The transformational methods employed in House IV were specifically constructed to be largely self-propelling and therefore as free as possible from externally determined motives. A “logical formula,” that is, a step-by-step procedural model, was established. Then basic elements such as line, plane, and volume were set into motion, resulting in an object that appeared to “design itself.” Whether the result would be architecture or would have architectural features such as plan or façade was not a consideration of the process or a criterion for evaluation. In this sense, the problem was not to design an object but to search for and establish a transformational program free from traditional authorial constraints.

In House IV in addition to the investigation of an autonomous process, the challenge to the hierarchical nature of configurational systems was extended to a certain dialectical relationship in architectural form, specifically the implicit hierarchy of the “favored partner” in dialectical pairs. Thus, if frontality/obliqueness is taken to be one such dialectic, with frontality the preferred point of view of modernism, in House IV the oblique view was equalized in importance with the frontal. Similarly, the simultaneously perceived was equalized with the sequentially perceived.”

This formulaic process became even more popular in the nineties when the discipline because obsessed with software. The process has remained popular today especially within certain academic programs, specifically, Penn, Sci-arc, Pratt, RPI, USC, and certain camps at the GSD. This has also been pushed forward in the theoretical writing and work by Mark Foster Gage, Graham Harman, and others under the camp of OOO.

Additionally, figures like Koolhaas also played a hand in the devaluation of experience in architecture, focusing more so on program, infrastructure, politics, and economics, treating buildings not as instruments of experience but as condensers of global, organizational, and demographic forces.

All of this to say that the study of tectonics to Sekler requires an engagement with the human subject and its experience which is unpopular today.

Troyer’s work is particularly interesting because it tries to develop a tectonic study devoid from experience.

From his thesis description:

“While the project capitalizes on the usage of the terms clumsy and odd, these two aesthetic categories are meant to be interrogated on a technical level to guide material explorations as well as uncommon spatial and organizational principles; the project is less interested in their ability to provoke feeling and affect. The thesis explores the design of a technique rather than a finished building.”

What this brief survey suggests is not that Sekler’s conception of tectonics is obsolete, but that it occupies an increasingly uncomfortable position within contemporary architectural discourse. If tectonics, as Sekler defines it, requires an engagement with experience, then it inevitably reintroduces the question of the subject at precisely the moment when the discipline has worked hardest to displace it.

This Substack is by David Perrine. I write about architecture, aesthetics, design theory, and philosophy. If you enjoy my work, please consider subscribing.

I was engaged in a discussion with the Dean of IIT’s architecture program (Reed Kroloff) where he noted that ‘Architectural Theory’ as an institution has recently been destabilized, or I guess restabilized depending on which side of the aisle you occupy. He suggested that there used to be a time when architecture could be discussed disembodied from architectural production or formal technique. Today, such discussions are unpopular (at least at his institution).

In an attempt to ensure I understood his point, I proposed that Greg Lynn’s “Folding in Architecture” seemed to be a manifestation of this more contemporary ethos. In Folding, Greg pulled from the purely theoretical metaphysics of Deleuze, and other Baroque notions, but connected these disembodied ideas with a real technique for architectural production, showing an actual path for an architectural product. This varies from older, more abstract, theories that made no real attempt to relate to architectural technique. The example given by Reed was the linguistic and structural analysis of Eisenman. Reed confirmed I had understood him correctly and noted that Greg represented a potential inflection point in the discourse of theory.

I regret not asking for his opinion on this shift. In the past, I have argued that an architecture theory which remains isolated from construction has utility when appropriately used.1

That being said, the idea that an architectural concept can remain disembodied from architectural production sounds strange or impractical, but I would argue it isn’t too rough to stomach if one keeps an open mind. As a provocation, one may be familiar with a parallel idea brought up by legendary theoretical physicist, Paul Dirac in his essay “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature” published in Scientific America 1963. There, he applying a similar argument in the realm of theoretical physics—outlining the utility in beautiful in not-yet-practical mathematics.

Additionally, Stan Allen has been perfectly willing to explore ideas which to him have questionable merit. For example, the last sentence in his introductory paragraph to Field Conditions:

“Field conditions cannot claim to produce a systematic theory of architectural form or composition. The theoretical model proposed here anticipates its own irrelevance when faced with the realities of practice. These are working concepts derived from experimentation in contact with the real” (Allen 2).

Thus, I argue that an architectural idea can be both beautiful and useful while paradoxically being unfeasible or under-developed for construction.

My most clear recollection of such theory in the realm of the arts came from Kant’s “The Critique of the Power of Judgment”. There, he delineates between the various types of aesthetics one can perceive. Specifically, concepts like agreeable, pleasing, tasteful, beautiful, and others were of interest. To Kant, these are all distinct concepts with their own complex definitions and connotations.

It is unclear if understanding the precise definition of these terms helps architects produce better architecture. The field has long ago strayed from the precision and clarity of a dogmatic, transcend goal such as beauty, or even function. Architects do what they themselves find interesting with the clients that afford them the right to do so. This classical notion of beauty doesn’t exist.

Additionally, the sensations of ‘pleasing’ and ‘agreeable’ to Kant are similar when experienced but come from different places (both are experienced as positive inclination towards something but ‘pleasing’ comes from an assumed intersubjective harmony or beauty while ‘agreeability’ comes from subjective preferences). Thus, understanding the difference when the experience is the same for the client isn’t too useful

That being said, Reading Kant, Allen, and Dirac have been personally very useful. These concepts have personally affected how I interact with media, and this has utility.

In an attempt to replicate such use(less/ful) theory production, I wanted to discuss other aesthetic terms and their structural relationship to beauty.

Enjoy and I hope you are doing well.

- David 🦆

Kant defined beauty as “the judgement of taste without interest.”2 Interest refers to the subjects individual feelings, biases, and contexts. A person judging something to be beautiful should also assume that others find that object beautiful as a result, and thus, beauty is a property of that object as opposed to a subjective characterization. Kant describes this as an assumed subjective universality.

In this text, Kant does not initially define beauty beyond an inter-subjective state of pleasure without judgment. This account describes an affective condition rather than a determinate aesthetic category. Beauty only becomes structurally intelligible once Kant introduces the sublime, at which point beauty is clarified relationally. While this does not constitute structuralism in the historical sense, it nevertheless mimics a structural logic, insofar as meaning emerges through opposition.

He associates beauty with an expression and articulation of limitation, while the sublime is the expression of vastness. Sort of like the differentiation of quality and quantity, of order and chaos.

Placing sublime as the binary opposition to beauty as opposed to ‘ugly’ is very provoking, but Kant isn’t the only figure who defined the terms as such. Burke also placed sublime and beauty as opposites.

“The most obvious point that presents itself to us in examining any object, is its extent or quantity. [...] A great beautiful thing, is a manner of expression scarcely ever used; but that of a great ugly thing, is very common. There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible; the latter on small ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance. In short, the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so different, that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in the same subject, without considerably lessening the effect of the one or the other upon the passions. So that attending to their quantity, beautiful objects are comparatively small.” (Burke)

“But notable differences between the two (the beautiful and the sublime) also strike the eye. The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, by contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it, or at its instance, and yet it is also thought as a totality: so that the beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, but the sublime as that of a similar concept of reason. Thus the satisfaction is connected in the first case with the representation of quality, but in this case with that of quantity. Also the latter pleasure is very different in kind from the former, in that the former (the beautiful) directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life, and hence is compatible with charms and an imagination at play, while the latter (the feeling of the sublime) is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being generated, namely, by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them; hence as an emotion it seems to be not play but something serious in the activity of the imagination.” (Kant)

Using texts by Burke and Kant, we can develop an understanding of beauty through its relationship to the sublime. They are opposites in some ways, but both possess a high status in the art world and therefore share certain attributes and privileges. Each is associated with pleasure, and each has historically been understood as a legitimate ambition of the arts. The beautiful is however predicated on limitation, refinement, and quality, while the sublime, on vastness, exhaustion, and excess.

Due to this privileging of terms, it is hard to argue that they represent pure opposites, but instead, operate in a more network of terms. An addition of two more aesthetic concepts succinctly completes our analysis.

The first term I would like to introduce is the banal. Banal aesthetics is based on limitation, like the beautiful, but lacks transcendence. It is minimally harmonious and lacks elegance and intricacy. The formal language of banal products are most similar to minimalism but must not be confused with sublime minimalism. Minimalist art often speaks to a scaleless whole or something larger than itself. Rothko’s work for example, feels close to the banal, but presents a heaviness of which is clearly sublime.

This banality in architecture is somewhat repetitive and un-aspirational. Its compositional attributes supposedly come from it’s adherence to programmatic efficiency. It lacks the purity and abstraction of Modernism, while keeping its simplicity. It is sometimes clumsy and often inexpensive.

A purely repetitive architectural language sometimes appears banal but risks becoming sublime because repetition resists limitation. Such concept is echoed in Stan Allen’s “Field Conditions, where Stan notes that large repetitive systems speak to an indefinite (infinite) whole.

In Cordoba, for example, independent elements are combined additively to form an indeterminate whole. The relations of part to part are identical in the first and last versions constructed. The local syntax is fixed, but there is no overarching geometric scaffolding. Parts are not fragments of wholes, but simply parts. Unlike the idea of closed unity enforced in western classical architecture, the structure can be added onto without substantial morphological transformation. Field configurations are inherently expandable; the possibility of incremental growth is anticipated in the mathematical relations of the parts (Allen 2).

Achieving banality requires a healthy repetition (to avoid complexity) with only a small twist. A twist that is too large risks becoming too complex, but not a big enough twist won’t break the repetition and the project becomes too repetitive or abstract.

Practitioners of banal architecture include Studio Ames and Manthripragada, along with many GSD professors. It approaches the still life aesthetic discussed in my last piece here.

The introduction of banality to beauty and sublime can be represented with such diagram:

Beauty and sublimity represent two poles in this aesthetic matrix. The banal shares an interest in limitation but lacks status. Such diagram begs the question of an additional fourth term—One that shares an interest in the limitless like the sublime, and possesses the low status of the banal. In this position, we will use the term grotesque.

Grotesque aesthetics are based on exhaustion, like the sublime, but without its privileged status. It is dense, offensive, overwhelming, and sometimes comedic. The grotesque occasionally produces intimations of elegance before distorting it.

The grotesque shares many attributes with camp, though the two are not identical. Both operate through excess and both undermine transcendence through exaggeration and vulgarity. Camp is occasionally self-aware but the grotesque rarely is.

In architecture, the grotesque emerges when complexity or semiotics is pursued past legibility. It was first seen in Neoclassicism, when various Greek and Roman patterns were mashed together, forming strange results. Today, Grotesque-ness in architecture is best recognized the deconstructive work of Gehry or Daniel Libeskind.

I should note that the banal or grotesque are not dirty words and my characterizing of architectural work as such should not be confused as a cast of dispersion. Architecture that is banal or grotesque has certain freedoms not afford to other aesthetic projects. If anything, the existence of the beautiful and the sublime are dependent on their counterpart terms.

One of my favorite examples of a usage of the grotesque in media comes from the 2024 Body-Horror film, The Substance, where distortion, pressure, and exhaustion are necessary to its message on feminine beauty standards and the entertainment industry. Similarly, banal design was necessary for the capitalist critique seen in the hit show, Severance.

What matters here is not whether architecture should pursue beauty, sublimity, banality, or the grotesque, but that these categories still structure how architectural work is received. Even when rejected, they continue to operate and naming them only clarifies the discipline.

Still life describes an art typology in which found, often mundane, objects are arranged in a controlled environment to be painted, drawn, or photographed. In part, The unique opportunity of the style comes from both the freedom of the artist to use whatever objects they desire, regardless of the traditional use of the objects themselves, and the viewers unquestioning acceptance of the artists choices in said objects. In other words, No where in art do you see such strange adjacencies in texture, and form, (lobsters with human skulls, rotting fruit and leather bound books).

Two compositional strategies are applied across most still life paintings which seem to categorize it’s specific style of organization. The first is the clarity and autonomy of the part. Each element in the composition maintains it’s own character. Other compositional strategies allow for objects to distort one another, producing inflections, large gestures, or postures. In still life, there is an intentional lack of inflections. Objects relate to one another only through juxtaposition. Still lifes are therefore visually static and often clumsy. Objects are placed in an unorganized or even discordant fashion, rejecting a simple and ordered composition.

The second compositional attribute of still life is a flatness of scale. Most objects in a still life are similar in size, maintaining a presence and autonomy in the composition without overpowering one another. Such an organization resists hierarchy and emphasis. Objects are on equal terms with one another. Thus, the viewers eyes bounce around the composition, focusing on details within the elements, such as texture, figure, or color, as opposed to larger distracting gestures. In this way, a simple, single-order composition is produced.

To illustrate, one can observe the contrast between still life, and more dynamic compositions in Renaissance and Baroque paintings. For example, the work of Piero della Francesca embodies compositional strategies of still life with human subjects (Fig 1). All forms are of similar size and they hardly relate to one another. This can be contrasted with the dynamic output of Peter Paul Rubins, in which the human subjects are violently warped to conform to the holistic gesture, and parts greatly vary in scale (Fig 2).

Still lifes possess a subtle brutalism in this way. Their forms are unapologetic and their object selection is often unremarkable. So much so that many of these paintings read as mere drawing exercises, whose sole purpose is developing the technique of the artist.

I discuss this art typology because many of the characteristics of still life composition have recently become popular in a subset of elite bespoke architecture offices and academic programs. This architectural project uses mundane materials with obvious structures. It accepts an unfinished and clumsy appearance and rejects cohesion. It is both inexpensive in appearance and in cost. It reads as a cute, cheeky, playful, tacky, defamiliarized, and sometimes unserious arrangements of found fragments from a construction site.

There are many attributes that make still life architecture visually and formally potent. First, it subverts our expectation of what architecture should look like. This occurs both with material and form. Novelty is a powerful method for poetic potency in aesthetic endeavors and these practices take advantage of such human proclivity. Furthermore, construction is simple when the traditional values of concealment (hiding construction artifacts) are dispensed with.

In this essay, I hope to explain more of the styles origins in architecture, why it has become popular in certain circles, and other things.

I hope you enjoy, and I hope you have been well. 🦆

- David

There are two components of still life architecture. The first is compositional, the second is material.

The compositional techniques of still life architecture are not new, and in some sense, represent some of the oldest formal techniques in architecture. To reiterate, there are two compositional principles for still life architecture, the first is the autonomy of the part, the second is a flatness in hierarchy. These techniques were applied in the planning process of Greek and Roman cities. Take the Acropolis in Athens for example (Fig 4).

Each temple remains a rectangle. They are undistorted by their orientation. There is still a holistic structure, but the structure doesn’t impair the purity of the the temples’ specific proportions. The temples themselves remain autonomous and the angling of each temple honors it’s own desires as opposed to a wholes.

A rich library of such disheveled relationships can be found drawings by Piranesi as well (Fig 5).

In contemporary discourse, such clumsiness was first rediscovered in chapter eight of Venturi’s seminal book, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” published in 1966. In this text, Venturi discusses the architectural utility of these discordant adjacencies and interestingly, pulls his references almost exclusively from premodern architecture and painting. This text was instrumental in recomforting designers to the idea of non-modern composition.

The material conditions of still life architecture are not new either, but their origins appear to be more recent. Peter and Allison Smithson first pointed to an architecture in which materials are presented in their inherent qualities, without concealment or an appeal to traditional aesthetics. This quality in part defines their notion of the warehouse aesthetic of new brutalism.

Harvard GSD Faculty member Emmett Zeifman has based his recent identity on such ideas, teaching seminars at the GSD and Columbia on New Brutalism, editing a LOG edition on the topic, and a few other activities.

Zeifman sees in the contemporary epoch an opportunity New Brutalism. To Zeifman, Architecture in the American context is heavily stressed by economic factors, forcing young designers to be comfortable with lower budgets, building with crude construction techniques in creative or cute ways.1

Other GSD faculty have been known to implement such techniques as well, including Andrew Holder, Jennifer Bonner, and Sean Canty to a lesser extent. Below are some examples. This style is also all over the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which happened to invite a high density of Harvard Faculty.

The use of this ‘home depot aesthetic’ to borrow a term from the Mixed Signals Podcast, possesses a double function in my cynical estimation. First, it justifies inexpensive construction costs which in certain cases increases the profit for the designer. Second, it produces a aesthetic humility, a sort of ‘dressing down’ that seemed to be quickly adopted by elite institutions like Harvard. I believe that this crudity as a social posturing, isn’t the primary function of these design choices, but instead, a convenient externality. Elite Institutions which appear un-elite are in many ways safer from scrutiny from below, and are thus more powerful. To be completely fair, I believe these home depot practitioners genuinely see this aesthetic not as a cultural pandering, but as a sincere engagement with construction reality and material honesty.

There are also market forces pushing design in this direction. Today, it feels that programs are shifting from a drawing culture to a prototyping culture. For example, at a recent Chicago Biennial event, The Dean on the Illinois Institute of Technology, Reed Kroloff, mentioned that he has trouble getting student’s to take theory courses because all they want to do is build. The result is students building what they can with what they have. In other words, crude, compositional construction with cheap materials.

To be honest, I’m not sure where I am going with this. I’ve made this observation and due to it’s emergence from material and economic conditions, I don’t see a way for the discipline to move forward until those material and economic conditions change. Furthermore, this trend only exists at a few small elite institutions and it is currently unclear to me if this aesthetic will spread. I think, the worse case scenario, is if economic conditions were to change, but we become too attached to the tools of still like architecture to move on. The style is visually compelling and cheap, which makes it tough methodological competition.

Luckily, our discipline is so diverse today that there are enough practices doing other things. This situation has suspended my fears for the time being. I hope to cover these other things happening in future articles.

This Substack is by David Perrine. I write about architecture, aesthetics, design theory, and philosophy. If you enjoy my work, please consider subscribing.

A few weeks ago, The Architect’s Newspaper published this diagram by the Associate Dean of The Syracuse Architecture School, Kyle Miller.

This figure is organized as both a Venn diagram, grouping architectural “projects”, and a timeline which shows the how they have developed overtime. Inside the bubbles are names of firms, exhibitions, and texts differentiated by typeface, font, and size.

At the very least, the diagram serves as a resource to young designers and students looking to identify the major contributors in recent architectural discourse. The text that accompanies the diagram is also accessible and a great read for architecture students.

However useful the diagram may be, it has blown up in an artificial manner.

Many of the firms included in the diagram have large social media followings and the heads of these firms have taken advantage. Being included substantiates a designer as being part of the canon. This proved too tempting not to milk despite the fact that the concept of an articulable canonical narrative in architecture is heavily criticized these days. Nevertheless, many of the included practices have re-shared this diagram to their large social media followings while firms not included have kept mostly quiet.

This critique is by no means saying the included firms are not exceptional or that the diagram itself is undeserving of it’s popularity. I hold much admiration for most of the listed firms. But its instant popularity is undoubtedly misleading.

The explosion of this diagram and lack of nuanced commentary has encouraged me to write about it. I will be go through a few observations about the diagram and it’s surrounding discourse.

Read Kyle Miller’s full piece here.

Enjoy.

Kyle makes a few essential claims in his text.

First is his point on the canon. Miller asserts that there has been a shift in the ‘dominate’ architectural theories in recent years. He claims that for the past three decades, architecture and architecture education have been focused on digital techniques, fueled by advances in computing technology and modeling capabilities. More recently however, architecture has shifted and now solely focuses on its political, social, and environmental roles.

Second is his point on education. Miller states that architectural education has become distracted from it’s core function: to train student’s in “the essential skills that enable architects to create and manipulate form, space, and material with control and intention.” This lack of focus on architecture’s core problem limit’s students’ ability to meaningfully contribute to the field through the creation of ‘projects’. This problem is further exacerbated because schools do not host individual projects anymore as they have chosen to prioritize inclusivity of thought and broad appeal rather than exclusivity and ideological consistency.

Third, is his point on how projects are to emerge today. If universities are not hosting projects, where are they to generate? To Miller, the internet has enabled projects to generate across geographical barriers while others will argue that density of information and it’s continual flow in today’s internet age works contrary to the creation of projects.

Lastly, He hopes that the publishing of this diagram will encourage the members of the diagram to take responsibility for curating and cultivating productive conversations in the field. In other words, the intended audience of the diagram partially is paradoxically the members of the diagram itself.

On The Diagrams Reception:

There is no comments section the article’s main place of publication, but there is one on the Instagram post that promotes the diagram. Unfortunately, the moderator of the @archpaper Instagram account has been quick to delete critical comments. Before it was deleted, one comment read:

Two things architects love to do: elitist gatekeeping and self congratulation; the narcissistic navel-gazing in the diagram is grotesque. It evokes the persistent obsession with delimiting an elite that is often subject to groupthink and tunnel vision, and largely excludes practices from regions that are underrepresented in Western academia and institutions... - Kristopher Thomas Swick

Fortunately, Eric Höweler reshared the diagram and hasn’t curated the comments from what I can tell (I could be wrong). His post hosts similar but more mild critiques.

The bias is academic, formalist, generational, and U.S.-centric — privileging those who frame architecture as a conceptual discipline rather than a civic or material practice. - Mario Madayag

this kind of cool-kids-junior-high tribalism does little service for our profession. and what made monica and nader such outcasts, anyway? - Garrett Martin

A few other places have garnered similar critiques but they all share the flavor of the earlier comments: The diagram is unfairly exclusive and a bit pretentious.

Three RPI faculty members (Christianna Bennett, Caleb White, and Walaid Sehwail) discuss the diagram in the first episode of their Mixed Signal Podcast on September 30th (listen here).

They share the above sentiment but add a few more comments. White adds that the diagram is very useful for figuring out where we came from but is ‘inadequate’ for talking about the future of architecture. Bennett notes that the discipline of architecture has continually held an obsession with clarifying where it is, who belongs to what faction, etc., and that such genealogical projects are no longer needed. Sehwail discusses the lack of utility in the diagram as an educational tool because it’s use requires too much research and is thus, too slow for today’s students (There were a few more comments but I am keeping this brief for now, please listen to their full conversation for more).

On Similar Categorization Attempts and Their Critiques:

Interestingly, I remember seeing similar critiques of Andrew Holders and Michael Hays’ 2018 exhibition “Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech”. In this exhibition and book, Hays and Holder attempted to articulate the landscape of contemporary architectural discourse using a series of binaries as fragmented as it was at the time and still is today. Inscriptions was based on a visual connection of various contemporary architecture projects and defines them using a semiotic Greimas square. Find their exhibition lecture here.

Furthermore, Andrew Atwood’s: “Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture” published in 2019 presented it’s own landscape of architectural work, this time, in the form of an XY coordinate plane. This text anchors off the fields obsession with the word “interesting” as one quadrant, developing it’s semiotic opposites similar to the Inscriptions exhibition. From what I could tell, Atwood’s diagram did not come under much scrutiny. Because there was no real attempt to assert certain projects or figures as being more relevant than others. This can not be said about the others.

Both the Holder/Hays and the Atwood diagrams lack a timeline. The Holder/Hays is explicitly about contemporary architecture but one could easily apply their map historically. For example, the Revealed Originals category includes the more formally procedural and experimental projects which contradicts found-ness of the top left category. Much of that category plays with techniques of projection and anamorphosis. (Read about anamorphosis here)

I’m sure many members of this camp would argue that the work of Baroque masters Borromini and Guarini fit neatly in this category. Noted, Deleuze did assert that the Baroque transcends it’s epoch so it’s fitting in with contemporary discourse isn’t too odd (I believe this was Deleuze’s first sentence in the first chapter of his seminal work “The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque”).

Furthermore, other historical figures could be added to the other ends of the graph. The Encountered category which is characterized as bodily, creaturely, or figural could include the work John Hejduk, namely his study of characters. The Transcendental category, defined by, form, structure, and type, has it’s contemporary roots in the work of Eero Saarinen. The Immanent category can be traced back the early brutalism of Allison and Peter Smithson, and as mentioned, the Revealed category, to the Baroque.

The above diagrams do not begin to scratch the surface of the prevalence of such images. We can find many more looking back. For example, below is Charles Jencks’ “Evolutionary Tree” diagram which reads almost identically in structure to Kyle Miller’s diagram but with different categories. Notably, Jencks’ diagram was published in 1970 so from then onward in the diagram depicts his own speculations. On the left end of the diagram present attributes such as “logical” or “activist” to further specify the various styles. This diagram presents an interesting provocation to White’s assertion that these diagrams are unhelpful in producing new architecture.

Furthermore, There are other methods to tracking theory. For example, Roxanne Williamson’s 1991 diagram provides a similar map, this time focused on a master-apprentice narrative. Williamson connects architects and designers based on their relationship with other designers whether it be employer, collaborator, or mentor. Here, ‘style’ is completely left out and only a mess of loose potential influences remain.

There are plenty more diagrams to go through and maybe another post will be made documenting these. Now is not the time, I’m afraid.

All of these diagrams with exception to the Atwood and the Williamson are organized based on an abstraction of observed phenomena. The authors observed projects in their field and pulled from it a logic and/or narrative about the practice at large, Thus they always work retroactively and their usefulness in future creation is always questioned. The Atwood is more of a linguistic exercise and could be generated without knowledge of contemporary projects. Furthermore, The Williamson is more so a rigorous documentation as opposed to a deliberate abstraction.

Commentary

I am not sure that the diagram will succeed in it’s stated mission: to encourage younger names on the diagram to lead conversations and projects to advance the field. I am not even sure it succeeds in it’s other goal of clarifying the field.

To be completely honest, the elite academic universities are small and few in numbers. They don’t represent the American architectural academy. Most universities are not interested in pushing forward an abstract discipline of architecture. They are interested in producing licensed architects. An honest attempt at articulating the academic field would be far less theoretically dense. Only a small handful of schools are interested in projects and I think this is what the diagram misses. The diagram represents the colorful and provocative tip of what is a banal, grey, and massive iceberg.

I currently work at a massive architecture firm with dozens of offices around the world. These firms are the reality for so many young architectural designers who need experience before starting their own practice. I’d bet almost none of my cohort of colleagues has read “Field Conditions” or “Folding in Architecture” or have heard of "Matters of Sensation” or “Possible Mediums”. These works are very obscure for most architectural designers and students, yet they are implied to be seminal works in the diagram.

I think addressing this disconnect between the theoretical machine that exists in a network of a few ‘elite’ universities and the reality of most architecture students is critical. To be completely frank. The most influential book for architecture students is probably “101 things I learned in Architecture School” (which is assigned to every first year for some reason) or one of Francis Ching’s books on representation or construction. It would be comical if these texts were included in the diagram because they clearly don’t belong. The projects of negative/positive space from 101 is still a concept most students grapple with. Almost no one has time for Architecture as precise geometry despite what the diagram would have you believe.

The purpose of this point is not to cast dispersion on my cohort or the ‘elite’ universities, but rather, to note that these diagrams capture an immensely small cross section of the field.

I would argue that the diagram is still very useful for another mission. It is more compelling if you understand it as an argument of what the field ought to be instead of what it is. I would love it if students were given complimentary LOG subscriptions upon enrollment in architecture school. I would love it if students read “Notes Around The Doppler Effect” instead of “Analysing Architecture” by Simon Unwin. I would love it if the name Stan Allen or Kipnis or Greg Lynn, or Sean Canty came up a SINGLE TIME in my undergraduate university. If I ever teach a theory course, I will surely reference the texts and exhibitions in this diagram because they poses ideas that are super interesting yet obscure.

This is how I use the diagram and I hope you do as well. Within it are beautiful buildings and interesting ideas. Exploring the diagram turns your search history into a gallery. Please look through the firms :)

Rarify is hard to define because they do so much. They are a digital gallery. They sell vintage and new designer furniture direct to consumer. They consult and provide design advice. They design their own products and collaborating with designers to make the world a more beautiful place. They offer FFE services for large scale architecture and design projects, and they have what is probably the largest collection of vintage designer furniture ever collected.

David Rosenwasser is an invaluble resource to the design community and I learned a lot speaking with him. I hope you learn just as much.

Transcript coming soon!

Best,

David

Hi Everyone,

I made a chair. Below are my thoughts on it.

Thank you for opening, and I hope you enjoy.

Guest Editor: Kimberly Rooney 高小荣

My first impulse to create a chair came from a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where I came across Frank Gehry’s rocking chair designed for his “Easy Edges” Series.

Upon seeing this device, I was struck by a series of observations roughly in this order.

I first noticed its accessible construction.

The Easy Edges rocking chair looks easy to build. The chair itself is simply glued laser-cut double-walled corrugated cardboard panels which alternate in their orientation (imagine that every other panel is rotated 90 degrees before being cut so the ‘squiggly’ edge points in different directions). That is all there is to this chair. Despite what you might have heard, none of the cardboard pieces by Gehry possess any internal reinforcement. The chair is simply cardboard, wood glue, and two layers of 1/8th hardboard on each end to protect the edges from denting.

Not only do I have access to double-walled cardboard, I have used a laser cutter before so I understand the triviality of this process.

I then noticed the chair’s precarious appearance.

There is no way such a cantilever could support the weight of most adults, right?? Across most of the chairs in Gehry’s Easy-Edges Series, each cardboard panel is only two inches wide. This feels quite unsubstantial for the various bending loads. This specific chair seems especially structurally impractical, but I doubt I will ever know how it structurally performs for sure as it isn’t sold anymore. Furthermore, I have yet to find any evidence that anyone actually used one as a permanent piece of furniture. This cannot be said about other pieces in the same series. Vitra still sells the Wiggle Chair and Stool, two pieces from the Easy Edge Series both with some sort of cantilever, which relies on the rigidity of cardboard to resist bending. I spoke with a representative at Vitra who told me that despite its appearance, these chairs are incredibly rigid (when dry).

I have a guess as to why he chose this thin two-inch thickness. The material is surprisingly strong naturally, so using a thinner width communicates and honors the intrinsic properties of the cardboard well. Any unnecessary thickness reduces the spectacle of such an interesting structural feat.

I then noticed its form.

The figure is quite friendly and strange. So strange, in fact, that I didn’t read this object as a chair when I first saw it. It looks more like a sculpture with chair-ish qualities. I only differentiate the seat from the backrest because the smaller loop near the top resembles a head. Without this, I worry the reading would be unclear.

The fluidity of the geometry is possible due to the construction process. Laser cutters can produce almost any precise two-dimensional figure effortlessly. Thus, there is much potential in this method of construction as means of formal and design exploration. Gehry shows this with the diversity of shapes in his whole Easy Edges Series. That being said, most laser cutting services charge based on the time spent cutting due to equipment wear. Therefore, Gehry was incentivized to eliminate any unnecessary curves or extensions. I feel that I can read this in the form of his rocking chair. The seat quickly transitions to the base of the rocker, which becomes the backrest with minimal ornament (besides the smaller curve which resembles a head). In the middle of the chair where the backrest and the seat approach, there are two cardboard posts that turn down towards the base, presumably to support the seat and backrest if the chair deforms too much.

Notice that Gehry also designed the chair as a straight extrusion, which means every single layer of cardboard is identical. This was done because designing each section individually could maybe produce a more comfortable seat, but would have been overly labor intensive and inaccessible as a commodity. Part of the efficiency of this chair is that a single shape could be designed and replicated until the chair reaches appropriate thickness.

I was always interested in furniture, but after coming across this piece, I felt inclined to produce a chair of the same technique. This opportunity felt like a way into a design field I have never felt comfortable participating in.

Design Process

I first asked myself if another chair were to be added to the Easy Edges Series, what chair would that be?

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In graduate school, a professor of mine assigned me to read excerpts from Georges Bataille’s “The Accursed Share”. The text puts forward an unconventional theory of economics based on surplus as opposed to scarcity of capital. Bataille argues that our society, over time, generates a buildup of excess potential energy, which is inevitably released through luxuries, artistic, or violent expenditures.

I found the text provocative, but I was still irked by my professor’s choice to assign this reading. Although I thoroughly enjoyed exploring these theories in my mind, I was confused about why I was reading them for a required architecture studio in a professional degree program.

Professor Klein would later clarify this choice with a claim I continue to hold dear today: Designers must equip themselves with the ability to justify ambitions and difficult or seemingly unnecessary design work.

This line of thinking led me to think about ornamentation.

Ornament is a tough word to define in architecture. Most people understand the term as constructed elements that serve an aesthetic or symbolic function. This definition is too vague for architectural application because many elements hold aesthetic value while serving a non-aesthetic function. Are objects which possess both functional and aesthetic value ornament? What if an object is functional but painted to provide a visual contrast to other elements? Is said element suddenly ornamental? At what point is an object too functional to be considered ornament?

The Alamillo Bridge presents a wonderful thought experiment on the matter. On one hand, the bridge does not appear to possess any ornamental elements. The cables are necessary for structure, and so is its lone slanted column. However, the river's span would have been better served by a conventional suspension bridge. Such structure would have been far more structurally and materially efficient, simpler to build, and cheaper. Calatrava chose this form for its aesthetic quality. Does this make these structural elements suddenly ornament? Is the bridge itself a small ornament at the scale of the city? To me, this question is by no means simple, and digging into interpretations of the word “ornament” is beneficial.

I am generally against citing dictionary definitions of words. But in this case, it further unravels the concept as opposed to clarifying it. Thus, I am willing to share.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ornament is “An object that is beautiful rather than useful.”1 They also comment that ornaments are usually small, and thus, elements that define or organize compositions do not qualify.

Merriam-Webster defines the term in a few different ways, first as “something that lends grace, beauty, or festivity.”2 They also list its archaic definition as “a useful accessory.” In music, the term can refer to “an embellishing note not belonging to the essential harmony or melody.”

Some definitions mention ornaments’ potential for function, while others say a use value rules out an object as a piece of ornament.

The musical definition is fascinating. It calls ornament an unnecessary embellishment. Something that a musical piece can stand without. If something being removed from a composition fundamentally changes the composition, then the thing being removed is not ornament.

This definition doesn't apply well to architecture because it is simultaneously too specific and complex. For example, the effect of the Wallfahrtskirche Basilika Birnau is produced by an aggregation of small ornamental parts that inflect towards a whole. If any individual part is removed, the composition has not fundamentally changed, just as sentences are still readable if a single lettr is removed. In this case, each piece fits the definition of an ornament. However, an elimination of every piece destroys the composition, as the collection of individual inflections of each part generates the composition. Each piece of ornament is simultaneously expendable yet necessary.

The most useful definition of ornamentation in architecture I have seen was formulated in Farshid Moussavi’s The Function of Ornament, published in 2007. Moussavi understood the importance of specificity, which is evident in her choice to differentiate the term from décor.

To Moussavi, ornamentation is simply a form that produces an effect. It is inseparable from an object. No object, no matter how austere, is without an ornamental quality. It comes from a material’s chemistry, context, construction, shape, and even growth. This differs from décor, which is directly representational and doesn’t affect all forms. Décor is directly symbolic. Ornament is abstract. Moussavi does not attempt to separate ornamentation from function.

Moussavi’s words:

“Ornament is the figure that emerges from the material substrate, the expression of embedded forces through processes of construction, assembly and growth. It is through ornament that material transmits affects. Ornament is therefore necessary and inseparable from the object. It is not a mask determined a priori to create specific meanings [as in Postmodernism], even though it does contribute to contingent or involuntary signification [a characteristic of all forms]. It has no intention to decorate, and there is in it no hidden meaning. At the best of times, ornament becomes an ‘empty sign’ capable of generating an unlimited number of resonances.

Whereas décor and representation promoted by Postmodernism correspond to a self-limiting movement from the possible to the real which cannot create anything new, ornament is in line with non-representational thought and the creative actualization of the virtual. Decoration is contingent and produces ‘communication’ and resemblance. Ornament is necessary and produces affects and resonance.” (Moussavi, 8)

This definition is particularly useful because it allows us to discuss ornamentation during architectural epochs in which ornamentation was supposedly dead.

Historically, the 20th century is often regarded as the end of ornamentation in architecture. This death started with the denouncing of ornament as a mechanism for architectural communication and ended with the complete elimination of ornamentation from architectural discourse. Ornamentation (décor) was ‘revived’ in 1972 by Denise Scott Brown and her husband, Robert Venturi.

This moment, sparked by the aforementioned authors in the 70s, was revelatory. We were now supposedly free from the dogmatic austerity of Modernity. In reality, the majority of the field still rejected Brown and Venturi’s contributions and continues to do so. Only a few practices have integrated their ideas and have developed upon them. Thus, this story of a revolution is generally overstated. Just speak to an American university professor about these two. You are likely to hear a particular set of objections such as “they are interesting but impractical” or “their theories work better as experiments.”3

Furthermore, this revival wasn’t simply a theoretical justification for the return to ornamentation/décor as we once knew it. Two main arguments were being made on this front. First, they argued for a new style of formal communication that could be married to the Modern Architecture of the previous few decades. This concept was first articulated in their book Learning From Las Vegas (1972) and primarily advocates for the reintroduction of décor into contemporary architecture.

Essentially, they argued that using symbolism through a cladded décor could be a tool of architectural expression. To Scott Brown, décor didn’t need to relate to a building’s structure or program. Décor was a form of signage that acted independently of a building’s other functions.

If Learning From Las Vegas was an argument for décor, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” was an argument for a new language of Moussavian Ornamentation. Pre-1966, ornamentation was still a part of architecture, but people weren’t really discussing it. Modern architecture (1929-66) was theoretically interested in material, construction, and structural simplicity. The Moussavian ornamentation of the time followed suit, appearing brutal and rigorously logical.4

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture argued that a more complex epoch requires a more complex architecture and that we shouldn’t be worried about this expression. Venturi spends the text outlining the ornamental effects of this new complex architecture.

The lesson’s of Complexity and Contradiction are best demonstrated in the student work of Cooper Union during the 1970s as seen in this text. I wrote a bit about this student work here:

Also, some notes on Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture:

The implied argument by Moussavi is what I value most from her text. This argument runs contrary to the conventional understandings of ornamentation and décor. Conventionally, ornament and décor are dead. We don’t discuss the grammar of form and aesthetics because we have no reason to. Architecture needs to solve problems.

This argument misses Moussavi’s implicit claim. Whether intentionally or not, all objects have ornamentation value. It is “necessary and inseparable from the object.” It emerges from materials regardless of intent, and it will be poor in quality if not considered. A neglect of the ornamental conversation doesn’t eliminate it. It simply kills our ability to produce good ornament. It is here whether we want it to be or not. Moussavi would argue that today’s architecture doesn’t lack ornament, but that it lacks good ornament.

Therefore, we must consider the aesthetic qualities of our architectural interventions. Our structures will make aesthetic and cultural arguments whether we want them to or not. It would be irresponsible of us not to consider what our buildings are saying.

I hope you enjoy this piece on ornamentation.

Thanks,
– David

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They’ve become a cultural shorthand for everything wrong with contemporary architecture. But most of the criticism I see gets it wrong. In the full post, I talk about why these buildings exist, why they look the way they do, and why blaming architects misses the point. I also get into why the same buildings are being attacked from both the political left and right and what that says about how we talk about design, capitalism, and responsibility.

If you want to understand what’s actually going on with these buildings, and what isn’t in approximately 1500 words, this is the post. I’d love to have you on the other side of the paywall.

Thanks,

David E. Perrine

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Hi,

Thank you all for the support on this newsletter. We are a few days away from surpassing 5,000 readers which is astounding.

For this occasion I thought I do something different: a Q&A!

Everyday, I interact with architects, architecture students, architecture professors, critics, and other members of the design field. We are quite insulated and I’m sure most people outside the profession can sense this. The insulation accounts for a lot of confusion and questions among those excluded. Questions like: Why do contemporary architects build like that? What were the brutalists thinking? Why don’t we build like we used to? Why do architects get paid little money? What is architectural education like?

I hope I can use Q&A to build a better understand of the architecture profession for my readers.

Beyond this, I haven’t really introduced myself..

My name is David, I currently work as an Architectural Designer for HOK in Chicago. On the side, I write this newsletter and I teach a course on architectural 3D modeling at the College of DuPage. I’m also doing some independent facade design research, pursing my architect license, and building chairs. Additionally, I have given lectures and workshops on portfolio design at a few universities and I hope to continue.

I studied architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and then at the University of Pennsylvania where I finished my Masters. My education was hyper-contemporary and formalist. My degree finished as AI was heating up so of course this was apart of my education as well. Most of my research was in conversation with architects like Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, and John Hejduk, as these were my professors’ bosses before they started teaching. You can see more of my academic work in my portfolio here.

So please feel free to ask any question you may have! It can be as personal or as professional as you’d like. Happy to answer anything about architecture, architecture theory, aesthetics, design, art, or even Substack growth.

I’d just like to start a conversation, I will do my best to answer every question. :)

Thanks,

David E. Perrine

We are seeing a return of a raw, construction, authentic, proletariat aesthetic within high design culture. This condition is peculiar because high design often relies on sign value as a form of social communication (often perceived as inauthentic) while the proletarian aesthetic appears to express authenticity through its utilitarian presentation. However, this contradiction persists nonetheless. One of the trendiest tote bags as of writing this is the Trader Joe's canvas tote. Men who’ve never worked with their hands wear Carhartt jackets and leather boats. Kitchens on Pinterest are filled with Mason jars and natural grain wood islands. In a world full of marketing, networking, and corporate jargon—authenticity has becomes a sought-after capital, and the raw, construction aesthetic has become method of signaling it.

The upper echelons of architectural academia seem to agree. Harvard’s GSD recently closed an exhibition entitled “Towards a Newer Brutalism” in which it explored contemporary architecture’s proclivity towards authentic material expression along with other brutalist tendencies. The forthcoming Log Magazine issue is on the same topic.

Furthermore, young designers are faced with an ever inaccessible design field in which luxurious expenditures feel more and more rare. We are looking for ways to produce deep poetics on a budget, and thus, a brutal and constructed aesthetic is the result. Cost has become architects and designers main concern,.

Thus I argue that our current design landscape yearns for new material and aesthetic solutions.

Paper and cardboard as a material for construction meets all the tendencies listed above. It is aesthetically flexible, sustainable, durable, cheap, accessible, and materially honest.

If you are a young designers and you find that you can’t convince your wealthy friend’s parents to let you design their fourth summer home, you can always design and build the next best thing! A cardboard lounge chair.

This option was utilized to incredible success by one of America’s most prolific contemporary architect which will be discussed later!

To many, the use of cardboard or paper seems like a gimmick, some sort of goofy trend from the 70s that rightfully died in the past. It is not a material for high art or pretentious expression.

This contention is misguided. Paper products, have a rich history in the design profession dating back to the Victorian Era. This weeks post will cover the rich history of the use of paper and cardboard in high-design. and why it deserves a resurgence.

Enjoy,

- David Perrine

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“The Vessel gives nothing back to the city – it only extracts from it”

- Matt Shaw

The Vessel is a monument constructed in Hudson Yards that opened in March 2019.

Unlike most monuments which often commemorate people or events, The Vessel has no real purpose. According to Heatherwick Studio, the design architect of the structure, the Vessel functions as a ‘public centerpiece for Hudson Yards.’1

The Vessel is not a traditional centerpiece. Most happen to be small, and placed upon a dining table. They are quite complicated and require a delicate design sensibility to produce. This is because centerpieces, are decorative, but functional. They occasionally holding candles, flowers, or fruits. They must be large enough to garner attention and generate a poetic affect but not be too large to distract from a dinner conversation.

The Vessel accomplishes none of the delicate tasks centerpieces normally do. It doesn’t contain an aromatic or light source. You can’t see over or around it. It makes no effort to support the social activities happening around it.

In fact, it does the contrary. It distracts. The Vessel is cladded in a bronzed colored steel, which contrasts strongly to the concrete and glass plinth that is Hudson Yards. It is impossible to ignore.

It implodes rather than explodes. Even the diagrams produced by Heatherwick Studio imagines it as a magnet, relentlessly attracting attention, akin to a cultural blackhole.

Furthermore, centerpieces are usually relatively inexpensive compared to the estimated 200 million dollar price tag of the Vessel.2

The project was destined to fail from conception but the lore of the Vessel got worse and worse after its construction.

Eleven months after the Vessel opened, a 19-year-old man tragically jumped from the sixth floor and died. Eleven months after that, a 24-year-old woman committed suicide in the same way. The structure temporarily closed after a third suicide, which occurred only twenty days after the second.

The developer behind the Vessel, Related Companies (very weird name for a company. I am guessing the choice is a weaponized SEO unoptimization scheme) reopened the Vessel just four months after the third suicide, without any new safety measures. There were discussions of adding netting or raising the current glass barriers, but those plans were abandoned. Instead, the developers reopened the structure with a ban on solo visitors; anyone wanting to climb the Vessel would have to do so with company. An anonymous source in Heatherwick’s office mentioned that higher handrails were designed, but unfortunately never implemented.

Despite these ‘efforts’, a fourth suicide occurred just two months after the reopen, resulting in the Vessel's closure for the next three years. In October 2024, the Vessel finally reopened with newly installed safety nets approved by Heatherwick Studio and Related Companies.

Why the hell did this happen? Why the Vessel?

It’s speculated that the architecture is partly to blame. The safety railings are only four feet tall (about waist height) and the geometry offers constant visual and physical access to a straight drop to the concrete below.

This was not an oversight; its openness was an intentional disregard of human safety in exchange for an idealistic fever dream where tragedies never occur.

More than just a design flaw, the Vessel had become a spectacle. Its cladded in a bronzed-toned steel and is situated in one of the most expensive and controversial developments in Manhattan. Its construction garnered immense media attention and tourist traffic. The visibility of the site likely generated symbolic potency for individuals seeking a dramatic exit.

In cases like this, the phenomenon known as the suicide contagion effect is especially relevant. Defined as “the process whereby one suicide or suicidal act within a school, community, or geographic area increases the likelihood that others will attempt or die by suicide,” the Vessel became an example of this terrifying concept.

Generally, The project’s design and its subsequent changes revealed the disgusting stubbornness of the architects and developers in prioritizing their own vision over human life.

Many people already know this part of the story. The suicides collected loads of media attention.

However, there is a second disturbing story about the Vessel that isn’t told as often. A story of the theft of public funds intended for those most in need.

In 2019, Kriston Capps reported that Hudson Yards and the Vessel siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars meant for underserved neighborhoods with high unemployment.

Yes, really…

The money came from the EB-5 Visa program where foreigners can essentially buy American visas by investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in American real-estate.

Those dollars are supposed to develop underserved areas with high unemployment, but the legislation which regulates this process is quite exploitable.

There were many neighborhoods in New York City that qualified for such investments, but boundaries used to define these neighborhoods were strategically gerrymandered to include Hudson Yards as an area of high unemployment.

Absolutely deplorable..

So if you are looking for a quote to restack, Here you go ;)

The Vessel in Hudson Yards is the result of a reverse Robin-hooding scheme, in which funds were stolen from marginalized communities to produce the ugly fever dream of a billionaire which resulted in a preventable sequence of deaths.

I am frustrated that this story doesn’t get the media attention that the suicides garnered. I understand the mechanisms why but this knowledge doesn’t make the facts any less enraging.

The reason why this reverse Robin-hooding scheme didn’t get the attention it deserved is because the human brain struggles to understand what our friend Freddy Engels called “Social Murder”.

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, [...] knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”3

Was life lost in Harlem due to this mis-use of funds? If not now, then certainly in the future. These types of investments, when implemented properly, do save lives or at least extend them (Is there much of a difference?).

These suicides may have been social murders as well, but they occur in quick events with plenty of horrified bystanders.

The effects of the misappropriation of funds is harder to click-bait and thus, doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

A parallel occurrence brought to light the exploitation of the health insurance field.

Someone killed UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson, and whoever did it seemed to understand that the health insurance industry is responsible for thousands of social murders each year. Yet the moment a CEO linked to this systemic harm was shot, the media paid far more attention to his death than to the suffering his company inflicted on countless others.

It is vital that we combat this quiet tragedy of social murder.

I believe the best bet we have without killing CEOs is to continue discussing it and to use proper Russell Conjugation. That is, using words with appropriate emotional connotations.

Instead of saying “funds were redirected”, say “funds were siphoned from the poor.”

Instead of “a tragic pattern of incidents”, say “a preventable sequence of deaths.”

Instead of saying “Architect was firm”, say “He was pig-headed.”

Thank you for reading. Please share if you feel inclined. I feel this topic is very important and not widely known.

I am happy to own a few nice pieces of furniture myself which I have been collecting since getting a fulltime job after graduate school. My chairs mean a lot to me because they are a way for me to connect with the history of the design field.

Healthy or not, furniture has become an in-grouping mechanism for designers and architectural educators. Even if you care for your design profession, it can be valuable to demonstrate it with your purchases. My firm’s Philadelphia office, for example, uses Eames Soft Pad Manager Chairs in their conference rooms, and a set of Cherner Armchairs in the lobby. Is this necessary to spend this much money on office chairs? It is not, but it certainly communities loads to our clients. The Chicago office has quite a few George Nelson Pedestal Side Tables, a Platner Coffee Table which sits front and center in the lobby, and a Wood Slat Nelson Bench which sits in one of the hallways.

To be honest, I wouldn’t trust an architectural office if they had poorly designed furniture or low-quality dupes in their office. Having designer furniture communicates your firm’s respect for the history of design. I am not saying that one needs to spend a boatload of money to be respected, just that attention to detail, craft, and history matter.

Furthermore, many academic institutions have high-end furniture in their spaces. Harvard’s Gund Hall (Graduate School of Design Building) cafe is filled with Bertoia chairs and benches. Yale’s architecture building is filled with the furniture design of Thonet, Knoll, Breuer, Bertoia, and Saarinen.

As many of you know, most of the writing has nothing to do with myself. I generally write about the field as it exists as opposed to my exploring my own subjective biases. As my platform has grown, I felt it may be time to talk about my own interests and tastes.

With this in mind, I thought it would be nice to list the furniture I own as well the furniture I love and hope to acquire in the future.

Thanks and please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my newsletter <3.

- David Perrine

I own sixteen beautiful objects of note:

I own an LC4 Chaise Longue, produced by Cassina and designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand in 1928. It measures about 63 inches long, 22 inches wide, and 31 inches high, constructed of chrome-plated steel, cowhide, and a black lacquered base. My example has an engraving of Le Corbusier’s signature with a four-digit serial number which implies it was constructed in the late 1960s. The chrome has developed a light patina and the cowhide is shedding in the center of the pad. it was purchased from a resale shop in the Chicago suburbs called The Perfect Thing, and is currently on loan to my mother, who uses it in her office and reports that it is extremely comfortable for her back, which is not the best.

I own a Diamond Chair which was produced by Knoll and designed by Harry Bertoia in 1952. It measures 33.5 inches wide, 28.25 inches deep, and 30 inches high. It has a black powder-coated steel frame and is fully upholstered in an original red and orange Prestini pattern, it was purchased used from a former Knoll employee outside of Philadelphia along with two Cesca Chairs, and is now used as a side chair in my bedroom. It formerly served as my laundry chair but now mainly functions as a bed for my family cats Oslo and Nemo. The chair has a sewed in discolored Knoll International tag and a sticker which reads “Knoll International 745 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10022. The sticker has since fallen off and i keep in it a small Ziplock baggie.

I also own a Victoria Ghost Chair. This chair was produced by Kartell and designed by Philippe Starck in 2002. It is made of smoke grey-colored, injection-molded polycarbonate and measures 15 inches wide, 19 inches deep, and 36 inches high. Mine has minimal clouding and light surface scratches and was also purchased from The Perfect Thing a few months prior to the LC4, and is currently stored in my crawl space due to a lack of room. I’ve attempted to convince other family members to stage it in their space with no success. As mentioned earlier, I own two Cesca Armchairs, produced by Knoll and designed by Marcel Breuer in 1928. Mine were manufactured in August 1974, measure 18.5 inches wide, 23 inches deep, and 31.5 inches high, and are made of beechwood, tubular steel, and cane. they were sold as a set of 4 that was split into two sets of two by myself and my friend, . They sit in the corner of my living room next to my families Eames Turned Stool which we use as a side table. One of the chairs leans back slightly more than the other, suggesting heavier use by the previous owner.

I own a Transit Folding Trolley, produced by Magis and designed by David Mellor in 1999. It measures 33 inches high, 28 inches wide, and 17 inches deep, and is made of chrome-plated steel with grey polymer trays. Mine was won at an auction and handed down to me by my parents. I currently use it as a side table for my desk where I keep miscellaneous objects to maintain a clear work surface.

My Falcon Chair was produced by Vatne Møbler and designed by Sigurd Ressell in 1971, measures 30 inches wide, 32 inches deep, and 37 inches high, with a stained beech bentwood frame, brown canvas sling, and light brown cushion, it has two small holes in the canvas, missing three buttons in the back row and two in the front row of the seat, and two missing buttons on the ottoman—front right and back left—the wood frame has a few small chips but is otherwise in good condition, the ottoman is tagged but the chair is not. It was purchased from a kind woman outside of Washington, DC, and was held in a friend’s storage unit until a business trip allowed me to retrieve it, it’s ideal for reading or taking breaks while working remotely, although Nemo has claimed the ottoman as his preferred nap spot. My primary desk chair is the Aeron Chair, produced by Herman Miller and designed by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick in 1994. It is all-black, Size B, roughly 27 inches wide, 27 inches deep, and 41 inches high, with Pellicle mesh and PostureFit support. This one was handed down from my family (source unknown). I own a Flat Bar Brno Chair, produced by Knoll and designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich in 1930 which measures 22.75 inches wide, 22.5 inches deep, and 31.5 inches high, made of stainless steel with black leather upholstery. My example is likely from the 1980s, features a torn original Knoll tags and visible sloppy weld marks underneath the seat which telegraphs that this example was produced in stainless steel. The more modern version are plated with chrome The foam is collapsed, the leather is deteriorating, and I plan to replace both It was purchased from a vintage clothing store in Philadelphia called Stickball and transported with help from a friend due to its 50-pound weight and the store being a 40-minute walk from my apartment at the time It previously served as my desk chair before I moved to Chicago and received the Aeron It’s now stored in the crawl space with the Ghost Chair. My Tizio Lamp, produced by Artemide and designed by Richard Sapper in 1972, is a 1990s model measuring roughly 30 inches tall when fully extended, made of aluminum and plastic with a halogen light source. I know my model is not Sapper’s original design as it includes a guide stick and a glass shield which protects the halogen casing. It flickers slightly when the head is adjusted. The lamp was sold to me by a seemingly kind woman in NYC who claimed it was “like new,” it was not, and I carried it back to Philadelphia on an Amtrak train despite Amtrak’s luggage policy. It now functions as a task lamp on my Room & Board Parsons desk and lights my face during video calls with friends and colleagues.

I use a Double Feather Lamp, produced by George Kovacs and designed by Robert Sonneman in the 1970s as the primary floor lamp in my bedroom. It stands about six feet tall, made of chrome with halogen light sources. It is in perfect condition, and was purchased from an elderly woman outside Chicago who tried to convert me to Christianity by handing me a fake one-million-dollar bill with scripture on the back that I still keep in my coat pocket for reasons I cannot explain. I own an Enetri Shelf, produced by IKEA in the 1990s, measures 78 inches high, 35 inches wide, and 14 inches deep, made from steel with wood veneer shelves that sag and will be replaced with custom ebonized ash slabs, was purchased from a young couple outside of Philadelphia for $200, it was not labeled as an Enetri and they likely didn’t know its resale value ($800-$1200 at the time of purchase), it is currently in storage until I have enough space to construct and stage it, I plan to display several objects on it, three of which I already own: the Bob Desk Organizer, which i will stage on the lowest enetri shelf, produced by B-Line and designed by Joe Colombo in 1970, measures 11 inches wide, 5 inches deep, and 3 inches high, in ice-colored plastic, was a Christmas gift from my dad, who calls it a “desk hotdog,” and currently sits to the right of my mouse on my desk, where it holds my Mondaine Swiss Railway watch with a black and red rubber wristband (the same colorway as the original leather strap), my Coach wallet (a gift from my mother), my iPhone with a black rubber case, white wired Apple earbuds, and my glossy black Lamy Safari fountain pen with EF nib and extra cartridges. The second object is a Tivoli Audio Radio with Bluetooth capability and an ebonized wood case, approximately 8.4 inches wide and 5.2 inches high, a Christmas gift from my partner, and the third is a Tubo Bookend by Bi-Rite Studio, approximately 5 inches tall, with a chrome metallic finish, sculptural and solid (I am buying one for myself this May.

I also own a Modernica Ceramic Vase, approximately 9 inches tall, with a moss green glaze and stained wood stand, it currently sits empty but I enjoy looking at it because it’s beautiful on its own, it was purchased from a kind man in New York and carried back to Philadelphia on a bus. My Parsons Table from Room&Board measures 60 inches long by 30 inches wide, with a maple veneer top and black metal legs, was purchased for me by my family when I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school and now serves as my primary surface for remote work and writing. Finally, I own a George Nelson Pedestal Coffee Table, produced by Herman Miller and designed in 1954, measures 28.5 inches in diameter and 16 inches high, with a black laminate top and aluminum base, has a few chips along the underside but remains structurally solid, it was purchased secondhand from a kind gentleman living in the gentrified part of Kensington, Philadelphia, and I brought it home in an Uber XL, I am 95% sure the driver gave me a four-star passenger rating because I had the table.

24 Beautiful objects I hope to acquire one day

1. Thonet No. 30 Armchair (ca. 1900)
   Designer: Michael Thonet
   Manufacturer: Thonet

2. Biagio Table Lamp (1968)
   Designer: Tobia Scarpa
   Manufacturer: FLOS

3. Womb Chair (1948)
   Designer: Eero Saarinen
   Manufacturer: Knoll

4. Noguchi Akari Floor Lamp (1951)
   Designer: Isamu Noguchi
   Manufacturer: Vitra / Ozeki & Co.

5. Lehnstuhl Lounge Chair (2004)
   Designer: Egon Eiermann
   Manufacturer: Wilde + Spieth

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Composition - a thing composed of various elements

To many, the word composition feels suspicious when used to discuss the organization of architectural spaces. The term feels at home when used to describe formal relationships in the more pure aesthetic fields. It feels off when used in design disciplines, where the organization should be dictated by function instead of the vague, subjective, or indulgent tendencies of composition.

Still, composition has remained an enduring idea in architectural theory beyond the design of ornament or facades. It has served as a valuable tool in designing spatial sequences, massings, floorplans, sections, and other part-to-whole relationships in the design of spaces and objects.

Different eras have developed their own strategies for composition, and understanding the various shifts in compositional theory speaks a lot to each epoch's culture and aesthetic tendencies.

This essay will focus on one of the more recent developments in the discourse of architectural composition, namely Venturi's 'Difficult Whole' which was first mentioned in his history book "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" Published in 1966. The book argues that the Modern era is defined by complexity and contradiction and that contemporary architecture should reflect these traits. It then notes that the ideas of complexity and contradiction are not necessarily new but could be found by looking back in time and in different mediums. The book uses a vast library of precedents to demonstrate the effects of the techniques of complexity and contradiction.

Paying subscribers can read my analysis of the first half of the book here:

Before jumping straight into Venturi's waiting arms, I will first discuss a brief history of composition in architecture. This is necessary because Venturi's ideas combine borrowed premodern concepts he synthesizes.

Classical Composition

Venturi's text draws mainly from Renaissance and Baroque theory. Although both artistic eras occurred close to each other in time, they are aesthetically antithetical.

In Renaissance theory, forms and figures are organized around the principle of order. Geometry is always proportionally logical, clear, and controlled. Symmetry, repetition, and hierarchy are dogmatically followed.

The theory of the Renaissance design ethic was best articulated by Heinrich Wolfflin in his seminal work "Renaissance and Baroque":

“Renaissance art is the art of calm and beauty. The beauty it offers us has a liberating influence, and we apprehend it as a general sense of well-being and a uniform enhancement of vitality... Each form has been born easily, free and complete. Its arches are pure semicircles; proportions are broad and pleasing. Everything breathes satisfaction”

(Wölfflin 38).

A noteworthy example of Renaissance composition in architecture is the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio by Donato Bramante.

It’s arches are semicircles. It’s plan and elevation is symmetrical on two axes. It’s form is stable and clear. Each element is symmetrical to itself and this can stand alone. The parts themselves compose a greater whole through hierarchy.

The Baroque on the other hand, maintains many of the same tools—symmetry, axiality, proportion—but directs them to different ends.

"Baroque aims at a different effect. It wants to carry us away with the force of its impact, immediate and overwhelming... It does not convey a state of present happiness, but a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfilment... This general effect... results from a certain treatment of form which we shall now describe under the two main headings of ‘massiveness’ and ‘movement’”

(Wölfflin 38).

Circles are stretched to ovals. Parts are distort and inflect towards one another. In the Baroque the parts themselves compose a greater whole through inflection and distortion.

Take Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. This Roman chapel resembles it’s Renaissance counterparts but it is stretched along it’s central axis.

More of my words on the Baroque can be found here:

As well as my discussion of the Borromini Chapel above:

The shift from the Renaissance to the Baroque marked a compositional shift from harmony to distortion. By distorting classical forms, architectural composition opened up to unimaginable complexity. Parts no longer stood alone, only to be united by hierarchy. Parts could now bleed together or inflect towards a common axis, implying an organization through the independent posture of parts.

More images are shared below:

Modern Composition

As was seen above, there were rich theories of composition and aesthetics throughout architecture's canon. But things changed in the early 20th century. It is difficult to describe the composition theory of Modern Architecture because composition almost didn't exist. The classical language of parts, wholes, or inflections seemed outdated to many modern architects. The arrangements of architectural elements were to be dictated by function instead of any formal or aesthetic principles. When the Renaissance and Baroque designers sought expression of form, modernists pursued abstraction. Architecture aspired to be neutral, efficient, and rigorously logical. Any formal expression was reserved for communication and function legibility.

The result was an architecture of formal efficiency.

Even the architectural drawings reflected this change. Plan drawings which are used to communicate spatial organization used to display it’s poche with a thick black shading to communicate the figural qualities of form. In the Modern era, poche became a tool to communicate wall materials and construction.

Postmodern Return to Composition

“An architecture of complexity and accommodation does not forsake the whole. In fact, I have referred to a special obligation toward the whole because the whole is difficult to achieve. And I have emphasized the goal of unity rather than of simplification in an art ‘whose . . . truth [is] in its totality.’ It is the difficult unity through inclusion rather than the easy unity through exclusion.”

By the mid-20th century, the cracks in modernism's dogmatic logic had begun to show. Its rhetoric of exclusion and simplicity clashed with the specific, layered, and often contradictory realities of actual building programs and urban contexts.

In response to such a condition, Robert Venturi wrote Complexity and Contradiction, which reponed the conversation around the composition.

Venturi wasn't necessarily calling for a return to the Baroque or the Renaissance, but rather, a new kind of composition that could accommodate contemporary society's complexity.

Venturi lays out his theory most directly in the penultimate chapter of his book. It rejects the idea that the whole should be simple or clean. Instead, it calls for an architecture that accepts complexity and contradiction and composes them into a meaningful, but sometimes difficult, whole.

Venturi's central claim is relatively straightforward: the architect has an obligation toward the whole, even when that whole is difficult to achieve. In modernism, wholeness was often pursued through simplification. Mies van der Rohe avoided the complexity of buildings and thus made architecture abstract. Venturi, instead, insists that unity gained through exclusion is incorrect. The real task is to create unity through inclusion—of difference, contradiction, and parts that don't easily fit.

Venturi speaks of three main ideas that were suppressed during Modernity: duality, inflection, and superposition.

Below are quotes on all three, but I recommend reading the whole chapter, which can be found in this PDF.

On Duality:

“Our recent architecture has suppressed dualities. The loose composition of the whole used in the ‘binuclear plan’ employed by some architects right after the Second World War, was only a partial exception to this rule. But our tendency to distort the program and to subvert the composition in order to disguise the duality is refuted by a tradition of accepted dualities, more or less resolved, at all scales of building and planning—from Gothic portals and Renaissance windows to the Mannerist façades of the sixteenth century and Wren’s complex of pavilions at Greenwich Hospital.”

On Inflection:

“Inflection in architecture is the way in which the whole is implied by exploiting the nature of the individual parts, rather than their position or number. By inflecting toward something outside themselves, the parts contain their own linkage: inflected parts are more integral with the whole than are uninflected parts. Inflection is a means of distinguishing diverse parts while implying continuity. It involves the art of the fragment. The valid fragment is economical because it implies richness and meaning beyond itself.”

On Superposition

“A more difficult unity can also result from the superimposition of two or more diverse orders, sometimes spatially, sometimes in different aspects of the same element. The resulting duality can be confusing and ambiguous, or it can be tension-producing and dramatic.”

A few years after this book was published, it was already impacting the student work of various architecture programs in the US. The program most strongly affected by this was The Cooper Union. Below are some photos and a link to my words on the Pedagogy.

Venturi’s theory of the difficult whole is not purely about aesthetics and composition. It is the recognition that architecture reflects the layered, unresolved, and often contradictory realities of the world. Today, as architects confront cultural multiplicity, ecological urgency, and urban complexity, the difficult whole remains a sharp and generous alternative. It is an ethic that holds things together without flattening them. I hope that like me, you can find a great relevance in this philosophy.

Two weeks ago, I published this post sharing events, exhibitions, and conversations happening in the architectural discipline today. In the paywalled section, I mentioned an exhibition that recently closed at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design entitled Towards a Newer Brutalism. In it, curator Emmett Zeifman argued for a return to Brutalism, or at least the Brutalist ethic, in contemporary architecture.

Emmett is also teaching a seminar of the same name at two Ivy League universities (Harvard and Columbia) and is the guest editor of the 2025 summer issue of Log magazine, widely considered the leading publication of theoretical discourse in architecture. The subject of the issue is, you guessed it: New Brutalism.

I imagine this is horrifying to many. How is a style so controversial being seriously discussed at the world’s leading research institution for design? Why does Brutalism need to be revived?

Zeifman provides a relatively ‘straightforward’ (lol) answer to this question:

“Today, amid a constant hum of 21st-century crises, a newer brutalism is in the air. Design studios and digital media platforms overflow with projects that transparently express building structures and systems, a resurrected functionalism rendered in the earthtones of low-carbon construction. Younger American architects are perfecting the art of assembling everyday materials into self-evident forms, while historians provide material accountings of architecture’s everyday assemblies. After a half-century in which various theories and practices of architecture’s autonomy were often literally hung as cladding over an unperturbed modern substrate – of structural frames, stacked floors, open plans, electrical and mechanical systems, industrialized light framing, etc. – the field of architecture is increasingly committed to methods that reveal, and materially transform, these stubborn “facts” of construction.”1

Given the return of Brutalism in academic discourse and the influx of conversations on the topic thanks to a certain Hollywood film, I thought it was time I wrote something about the style.

The motivation behind this post comes from a simple observation: online, I see many people discussing Brutalism. They talk about the style’s origins, aesthetic tendencies, goals, values, effects on society, and whether or not it aligns with people’s tastes.

In most cases, people are confused and I see more factually incorrect information than factual.

My goal in this post is to address the following questions factually:

1. What is Brutalism and what are its origins?

2. What purpose does Brutalism serve?

3. What are the values Brutalist Architecture?

4. Does this style have any business being revived?

Feel free to drop a question if you have any.

Thank you for your support.

- David Perrine

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This Substack is by David Perrine. I write about architecture, aesthetics, design theory, and philosophy. I share new posts bi-weekly for free subscribers and weekly for paying subscribers. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting :).

Architecture is a strange art form. Among many attributes, it possesses aesthetic qualities akin to art, and functional qualities akin to engineering. Architecture is both functional and artistic.

Before modernity, these two primary attributes were balanced whenever a project was given sufficient time and budget. Buildings were constructed with logical and functional plans but were decorated with ornament and color.

In the late 1920s, a shift occurred. Architects devised an elegant way to marry these attributes. They asked themselves: “What if the enrichment that comes from aesthetics and ornament could be generated from the pure pursuit of function?”

The idea, in theory, has some merit. There is an elegance to objects that function well. The iPhone, for example, is widely known as a beautiful product when it is essentially an austere prism housing an effortlessly simple UI. No one would argue that adding classical ornamentation to an iPhone would make it better. Its aesthetic richness comes from its rigorously functional design approach. Ornament would be discordant.

This was the goal of architecture in the 1920s and onward. Le Corbusier called homes a machine for living. Peter Behrens taught Mies van der Rohe that simplicity and refinement could be preferred to the styles of antiquity.

The first person to crystallize this idea in words was Louis Sullivan when he coined the phrase “Form follows function” in 1896. From then onward, his words have been used to justify an architecture of simplicity and austerity.

What many don’t understand is that this reading of the quote is a misinterpretation. To Sullivan, the idea that ‘form follows function’ is more of a natural law than an axiom by which to follow:

“Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds—over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.”
(From "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," 1896)

“All things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are, that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other. Unfailingly in nature these shapes express the life within them, the character of the creature. Unfailingly it is the pervading law of all things—organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman—of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul—that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”
(From Autobiography of an Idea, 1924)

This quote has nothing to do with how designers should design, but rather, a condition in nature.

Furthermore, we know that Sullivan loved ornamentation based on his own design work.

So what the hell happened??

I find this discussion of form and function thought provoking. On one hand, people like ornamentation. Form without a function is appealing to many in the field of architecture and the general public. Look through any forum on architecture if you are in need of evidence.

On the other hand, architectural drawings that show spaces organized by aesthetic composition rather than functionality are criticized in public discourse. Whenever a floor plan that prioritizes composition is posted online, it is relentlessly criticized for its cost and lack of functionality.

But when I post images of highly ornamented architectural elements, I see very little criticism when the ornamentation does not get in the way of functionality.

This can be contrasted with a cabinet detail that received a few surprising comments about the difficulty of dusting.

I don’t know about you, but if this was in my space, I would not care AT ALL how hard this is to dust. I could not care less. I can’t express how much I DON’T CARE about the added dusting effort this cabinet would require. I don’t mind if ornamentation gets in the way of function.

Based on these comments, it seems people like ornamentation as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the pragmatism and functionality they have become accustomed to in modernity. People prefer a cheap, beautiful wallpaper over an architectural formal gesture which causes construction or use inconveniences.

I believe this view is fundamentally wrong. If one is open-minded, they can find enjoyment in adapting how they use a space based on its nonfunctional formal gestures. It becomes a way of caring for your space and products. I don’t mind if it is harder to dust. Dusting this cabinet becomes a display of appreciation and love for beauty and craft itself. I reject the Modernist expectation of a convenient lifestyle in which nothing must get in the way of my dusting my cabinets or using my bathroom, and I think you should too.

I was lucky enough to experiment with such ideas while studying at UPenn’s architecture school. Many professors have developed a workflow in line with the ideas I have laid out. Note that many of these workflows seemed incredibly strange when I arrived, but I learned to love them by the time I graduated.

A conventional “Form Follows Function” design workflow might look like this:

1. Identify who your client is

2. Understand all the ways they intend to use their space.

3. Design the space that best allows the client to do such activities in the cheapest and simplest way possible.

This is nice, inexpensive, and supposedly serves the client’s needs the best. However, I bet this client will still gush about classical ornamentation on Reddit as many of us do.

Here is an alternative “Function follows form” workflow.

1. Develop a beautiful formal, spatial, and aesthetic system that is pleasing regardless of its supposed use value.

2. Identify your client and understand their potential uses for the proposed space.

3. Negotiate the relationship between how the geometry wants to be used and how the client needs the space to perform.

A healthy and sane client will be more than willing to adapt their needs if the aesthetic idea is compelling.

This leads me to some of my own design work from my time at UPenn. I will start with a brief blurb about a studio, a project, a design process, and then show some images.

Enjoy:

On The Studio

The studio explores the adaptive reuse of the historic Corbin Building in New York City’s Financial District. The project combines inclusionary housing with adaptive reuse strategies to transform the 1888 Romanesque Revival structure, designed by Francis H. Kimball, into a mixed-use residential building. The studio leverages the building’s historic value to create new residential units while preserving its unique architectural qualities. Students refine strategies for market-rate and social housing and develop public common spaces that promote equity and inclusion. Partnering with Martha Kelley from Goldman Sachs’ Real Estate Principal Investment Area (REPIA), the studio aims to integrate innovative architectural solutions addressing equity and inclusion challenges through adaptive reuse.

On My Project

Advection refers to a specific interaction between a fluid and an aggregation of objects. The action of advection occurs continually around us through the form of vapor molecules and frost. Take a flower for example; as a gust of wind flurries into warmer climates, its vapor molecules deposit and graft onto its petals, forever changing the quality of the air around it, while simultaneously creating deposits of a translucent ice, changing the figural and textual qualities of the flower, until the climate can no longer sustain its careful aggregation.

It is this process which perfectly performs a model for architectural re-use; the atmosphere is changed through a seemingly effortless process leaving behind something new; the character of the frost and of the flower have been altered due to their adjacency, but neither beauty is compromised.

On Process

The studio started with an intense exploration of the diagram. In this case, the diagram does not refer to its typical notion of a simplified representation. Rather, a diagram is an aesthetic machine. It unfolds and generates emergent formal gestures that get appropriated into architectural ideas.

The studio was deeply interested in the concept of “New Elegance”. The adjective “new” is used to distance itself from traditional notions of elegance. According to Hina Jamelle, “New elegance holds that the reconsideration of form and design must be done from a place of philosophical and aesthetic integrity.” Schumacher discusses new elegance as such, “In everyday life, elegance suggests sophistication, taste, and refinement... Elegance in our terms achieves a visual reduction of an underlying complexity that is thereby sublated rather than eliminated... Attributed to a person elegance suggests the effortless display of sophistication.”

We approached elegance using diagrams and systems theory. We started by analyzing part to whole relationships found in nature. In our case, the formal properties of ice crystals on two-dimensional planes governed by physics. We developed studies of individual ice crystals and studied its curvature and other physical properties. These properties were then used as drivers for the formal diagrams and then the building itself.

“Architecture is too important to be left to architects”

- Giancarlo De Carlo

There is a lot going on in the field of architecture nowadays. In fact, the field of architecture including practice, theory and criticism is always rich with new lines of discourse, events, and exhibitions. Many of these resources are known by architects, designers, faculty members, and students, but never break containment into public discourse.

I see a few reasons why this condition could be preferred and a few reasons why it is problematic.

On one hand, the general public does not need to know everything that happens within the discourse. Just as research labs may keep certain discovers ‘in house’, there is value in an insulated architectural profession, experimenting with strange, uncomfortable ideas with the freedom that comes from a lack of public surveillance until a refined product is ready for the market.1

On the other hand, the separation of architectural discourse and popular culture leads to architectural products that do not properly respond to public need or current cultural climates.

How the discipline disseminates information, theories, and products to the public needs to be calibrated with care in order to ensure we are a properly avant-garde, pretentious, and cutting-edge field that still practically engages with the challenges of the time.

Today, the discipline is too disconnected from the public. No one really understands what is happening in the field, partly due to the self isolation of the discipline. This self isolation, initiated by academics, granted us freedom to explore and develop the ideas we wished to, but in return, we traded our cultural relevance.

In an attempt to fight this trend, I would like to start a series in which I discuss various contemporary resources and trends that are relevant in the current discourse of architecture but not to the general public.

Please let me know if you would like more posts like these in the future.

Thanks,

David

1: The Graduate School of Design at Harvard recently finished an exhibition entitled: Architecture as an Instructions-Based Art in which Curators Farshid Moussavi and Abby Kuohn displayed architectural construction drawings. These types of images are typically not displayed in academic settings because they are not useful for academics who typically use drawings to communicate conceptual or formal ideas. To Moussavi and Kuohn, architecture is a unique aesthetic endeavor because the primary output of architects (drawings) is not the end goal of our creative output. These drawings are interpreted and used as instructions for others to actualize our vision. The exhibition was an attempt to re-focus architectural images back to its rightful niche: as building instructions.

Below are some photos from the exhibition.

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When the sun is warm on my face and the breeze cool, I know it is good to be alive.

- Lisa Heschong

A few ideas have possessed me since finishing my graduate degree in architecture. Many of them were obvious continuations of my academic research, but some of them occupied corners of the architectural discourse that I was discouraged from exploring.1 One of these forbidden topics was the design of temperature.

Temperature was discussed briefly during my environmental systems course. The Professor mentioned temperature wasn’t merely something you regulate with an iron fist. Pleasure could be derived from a composition of temperate used in spatial sequences. Supposedly, the thermal sense was as valuable as any other at registering poetics.

Nothing much came from this claim. There were no design exercises exploring it or further readings. Instead, we moved onto other course requirements such as calculating energy usage based on wall insulation—something much less interesting. Graduate school continued without any more mentions of thermal variation as an aesthetic tool.

Last week, I put together a comprehensive reading list for architectural theory, during my research for this list, I came across a book entitled “Thermal Delight in Architecture” written by a Lisa Heschong, which reminded me of this idea.

The book makes a compelling argument for the reintegration of thermal experience into architectural design.2 There is a delight in various thermally related sensations and architects have the ability to play with them.

“As with all our other senses, there seems to be a simple pleasure which comes with just using the sense, letting it provide us with bits of information about the world around, using it to explore and learn, or just noticing. The stone is cool; yes, it feels cool when I touch it, perhaps it has been in the shade for a while. The coffee cup is warm, it warms my hands. There is something very affirming of our own life in being aware of these little pieces of information about the world outside us. When the sun is warm on my face and the breeze cool, I know it is good to be alive” (Heschong 18).

“…in spite of the extra physiological effort required to adjust to thermal stimuli, people definitely seem to enjoy a range of temperature. Indeed, they frequently seek out an extreme thermal environment for recreation or vacations. This must explain in large part the love of the Finns for their saunas, and of the Japanese for their scalding hot baths. Americans flock to beaches in the summer to bake in the sun, and travel great distances in the winter to ski on a frosty mountain top. People relish the very hotness, or coldness, of these places” (Heschong 21).

I am reminded of certain sections of “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander when reading this. This text presents solid design guidelines for successful space making.

“The Area immediately outside the building, to the south—that angle between its walls and the earth where the sun falls—must be developed and made into a place which lets people bask in it” (Alexander 758).

To Heschong, there is an enrichment in thermal contrast, not unlike music, where aesthetic richness comes from the flickering between a tension and release.

Balanced thermal variation not only inspires delight, but community and intimations of the sacred.

“The image of a Southern lady nervously fanning herself is that of a coquette using the fan as a for flirting, rather than a woman merely trying to cool herself. Europeans have the custom of using furniture, chairs and beds, which conveniently raise them above the cold air that accumulates at the floor level. Hindus, on the other hand, use no such furniture, but sit directly on the floor, where they benefit from the extra coolness held in the ground. Christmas is known as a religious festival. Yet the notion of celebrating Christmas in the southern hemisphere at the height of mid-summer heat is slightly unsettling to us in the northern hemisphere. In spite of its religious rationale, Christmas has strong connotations of being a warm, cozy time set in contrast to mid-winter cold. Similarly, in every culture, each season has its set of rituals, customs, and special activities associated with it” (Heschoung 31).

“The ostensible function of the fireplace, to provide a source of heat for the house, has long been taken over by far more efficient central heating systems. When a fire is lit, it is likely to be a ceremonial event: as a way to make the house feel especially "homey"; as a treat when guests come to visit; as a way to give an added air of celebration to a holiday such as Christmas or New Year's…

The meanings which the fireplace holds are an extremely important element of ‘what it is’. This, the hearth is a symbolic center of the home as much as it is a place for burning wood” (Heschong 30).

“The fire of the hearth, and the steam of the sauna, were rather mysterious phenomena for our ancestors, which they explained in terms of their theory of how the world worked: a cosmology comprised of spirits and gods” (Heschong 54).

“In Finland, the sauna holds a very important place in national custom. Many a child was born in the sauna and many an old man and woman carried there to die. The sauna was a place for the worship of the dead, who were supposed to return gladly, even after death, to so pleasant a place” (Heschong 53).

Reading these passages for me was less of a learning experience, and more of a remembering of something I once knew. I experience thermal delight often, but I rarely take the time to appreciate it for its aesthetic value.

Musicians practice active listening to better understand and appreciate a composition. People go to art museums with the intent to experience and enjoy art. Since reading Heschong, I have started to approach the experience of thermal variation with a similar intentionality.

The flicking of light and shadow is pleasant when paid attention to during my forest walks. Stepping from my carpeted bedroom to my tile bathroom functions as crisp glass of ice water in the morning. A cracked window on drives is more pleasant than the AC. Drinking hot tea on a cold morning feels special as a ritual. These activities transcend their habitual nature when embraced and savored.

How Architecture Was Robbed of Thermal Variation

Conversations of thermal variation and it’s potential are not occurring in most architecture school or firms. Not because we don’t want to, but because we aren’t really allowed to.

Architects are beholden to building codes which regulate the temperature and humidity spaces need to be for human comfort.

I am saddened by the use of the word “comfort” in this way, for a few reasons:

First, comfort is never a successful design goal without an antagonist. A world devoid of uncomfort is monotonous and hellish.

We all love having our world full of colors, every color in the rainbow and then some. Even if studies have shown blue to be the most restful color, I doubt that anyone would put forth an argument for a monochromatic world.

And yet a steady-state thermal environment is the prevailing standard for office buildings, schools, and homes across the United States.

Second, what is thermally comfortable for one person, will not be thermally comfortable for others. It has been well documented that standards for thermal comfort were set for men wearing suits.3

Beyond this, the standards for thermal comfort are very rigid, essentially requiring comprehensive air condition and heating in most of the US.4

This is terrible for the environment and our aesthetic sense of thermal delight. Before the widespread usage of air-conditioning, offices, for example, needed to be smaller, with high ceilings and large operable windows. Residential design followed suite as well.5

The introduction of air condition allowed architects to design bigger offices with lower ceilings and less access to natural ventilation and natural light.

What a dream…

Furthermore, air-conditioning was not necessary in most of the US but AC manufacturers convinced consumers that having an AC unit functioned as a status symbol.6

With all of these negative externalities that come with strict temperature building codes, you have to wonder who was arguing for such legislation.

As it turns out, it was the same assholes who were making and selling the AC units…7

In fact, people have argued that the whole idea of ‘thermal comfort’ itself was a constructed metric invented by HVAC manufactures to sell their products.8

So could one say that these companies successfully convinced the US Government to put in place strict temperature building codes, making it practically illegal to not use their products which intern made architectural design more unpleasant, less environmentally friendly, and uglier?

Yes. Yes you can. But at least it created a lot of wealth for some already rich people. :)

What Do We Do Now?

Today, we find ourselves in a world in which we cannot count on architecture to provide us with thermal variation. We must rely on nature to provide such experiences, or our own agency in customize our spaces despite the architects intentions. In the spirit of providing useful information to my readers, I’ve researched a criminally effective way to employ thermal variety in your own spaces. That is, the implementation of materiality.

Everyone understands that different materials feel warm or cold. Wood is warm. Most woven fabrics are warm. Metal is cold. Plastic is cold-ish. Understanding this is vital for proper space design.

It is for this reason (amongst others) that I have an affinity for Bauhaus furniture. Many Bauhaus pieces use warm and cold materials, meaning I can control the thermal experience of the chair depending on where I make contact with the chair.

One technique I think about often is placing cold furniture in places of warmth. You can put a chrome chair in the sun and suddenly, it’s more practical.

Warmer furniture on the other-hand can afford to be closer to the center of a home, away from natural light.

One of my favorite digital creators has a beautiful space in which temperature is composed well. Below are a few images of their space. You can check out more images here.

Above, a Siesta chair and Wegner sofa (Warm) are contrasted with a marble Tulip side table and a USM coffee table (Cold).

Nesso Lamp (Warm) on a USM Credenza (Cold). Candle (Warm) on a USM coffee table (Cold),

Eames Chair (Mixed) serves as a thermal bridge between the USM (Cold) and the Wegner Sofa and wooden shelves (Warm).

Cesca Chair (Cold) Paired with a wooden shelf, and what appears to be a halogen Artemide task lamp (Warm).