Architecture, Lowercase

I’ve been wondering lately whether there is really that much new in architecture anymore.

That sounds more pessimistic than I mean it to.

I still see buildings I love. I see things that are incredibly well done. But it is rare that I see a building and genuinely don’t know where it came from. Most of the references are legible. You can see the lineage, the architects being looked at, sometimes even the particular projects.

Maybe it was always like this. Architecture has always borrowed from architecture. The difference now is that we all seem to be looking at the same things at roughly the same time.

A house gets published in Mexico City and everyone sees it. A restaurant in Copenhagen. A hotel in Japan. A detail in Belgium. They get saved and reposted and eventually separated from the buildings they came from.

Our clients see them too.

People come into the office now with an extraordinary amount of visual information. Fifty images on a phone isn’t unusual. Sometimes it’s hundreds. They know the kitchen they want. They know the windows. They know the material palette. They know the house in Australia they saw three years ago and have been thinking about ever since.

There is something great about that. It makes certain conversations much easier.

But there is something else happening at the same time.

More and more, people come to an architect because they need plans.

They already know what they want. They need somebody to draw it, get it through the city and hopefully not charge too much for doing it.

I don’t really blame anyone for thinking that way. In some ways the profession has spent the last twenty years teaching people to think that way.

We mostly communicate architecture through finished images. We show the house when the landscaping is new and nobody has moved in yet. We show the detail, the material, the perfect afternoon light.

What we almost never show is the part that actually took the time.

We don’t show the first plan that wasn’t very good. Or the fifth one. We don’t show the zoning interpretation that changed the project. We don’t show the conversation where the client said something almost in passing that caused us to rethink half the building. We don’t show the contractor telling us something is going to cost twice what everyone thought and the project getting better because of what happened next.

Most of architecture is actually that stuff.

The image is just where it ended up.

And now, of course, we can generate the image without the building.

I can describe a fairly convincing piece of architecture to AI and have something back before I could have sketched it. The image may be derivative, but that isn’t exactly a disqualification anymore. A lot of architecture is derivative. Some of it is very good.

So I keep coming back to a question that I don’t have a particularly clean answer to.

If everyone has access to the same references, and images are becoming almost free to produce, what exactly are architects bringing to the equation?

It can’t just be drawings.

And I don’t think the answer is originality either.

Maybe originality has been given too much importance in architecture anyway. There are only so many ways to put rooms together, make openings in walls, bring light into a building or put a roof over something. The desire to constantly produce something new has generated plenty of bad architecture along with the good.

I’m becoming more interested in specificity.

The projects that hold my attention aren’t necessarily the ones doing something I have never seen. They are the ones that feel as though they couldn’t quite have happened anywhere else.

The site did something to the building.

The client did something to it.

The budget did something to it.

The city probably did something to it.

And the architect took all of that and found something in it.

That is very different from starting with an image and working backward.

It is also surprisingly difficult to explain to someone shopping for architectural services. A drawing is easy to understand. A rendering is easy to understand. A permit is definitely easy to understand.

Thinking is harder to put a price on.

Maybe that’s the larger problem.

Architecture has become incredibly accessible as an image at exactly the moment it has become harder to explain as a process.

We can all see more architecture than ever before. We know what things look like. We know what we like. We can probably generate a reasonable approximation of it ourselves.

But knowing what you want something to look like isn’t the same as knowing what it should be.

There is still some distance between those two things.

I think that’s probably where architecture is.

Mark Bittoni