What I found was a bit odd. After a little digging, I learned that until early 2025, the website of McCrery Architects, the original commissioned firm, included the typical things found on most firm websites: a description of services, bios of team members, notable projects, accolades, etc. Around April, the site became a landing page with a slide show—renderings of the ballroom front and center, a few photos of other completed projects—and nothing else. This almost complete redaction of anything useful was baffling until I realized it was right around the time that the firm received the ballroom commission. Was this the reason for the pullback? My next step was to visit the website of the successor firm, Shalom Baranes Associates. Although it’s pretty robust, including several federal and civic projects, it doesn’t mention the White House project at all.

What is an architect’s duty to the public? My experience has been that architecture has always had a highly regarded profile without most people fully understanding what we do. Our mandate includes initiating a discourse where outreach and active listening to people we may disagree with is required. We’re not elected to represent any particular social or political point of view, but it’s our role to consider a wide range of opinions and even stereotypes when designing. Our process combines technical skills with creativity, budgeting, redirection, acceptance, and persuasion to create something transformative. We seek a unified truth, something that elevates the human experience. Collaboration is required by all constituents; whether one agrees or disagrees with the end product becomes a matter of perspective: Is it good? More important, did the community feel heard? 

Regrettably, the architects working on the White House ballroom appear to be avoiding any attempt to present a cohesive narrative on why it should be designed and built to replicate a Greek temple. The president has demanded a return to a classical aesthetic, evoking the wishes of our founding fathers (free white men), who sought to portray the democratic values of Ancient Greece (free white men in togas) as they hammered out an inchoate form of government that is still trying to find its footing. What no one at the White House is willing to openly acknowledge is that, despite the implied moral authority classical architecture has conveyed over the centuries—an argument either of the firms could have offered in support of the design—the building style chosen to represent our nascent democracy actually reflected by default the preferences of a ruling class that did not regard slavery, untethered expansionism, or the brutal repression of Native Americans as social injustices warranting concern.

In the U.S., where fracturing social norms has literally become a blood sport, the highest-profile government project deserves some sort of effort toward justification and community support. Is constructing a building that will house events that usually take place in tents on the White House lawn a good idea? Probably, but in this case size, context, and history also matter, and as much as the president would like you to think he owns the property, he doesn’t. We do. As he literally bulldozes his way forward, the architects are staying silent. Every firm can pursue its passion while paying the bills, and is certainly not required to advertise. However, we don’t have an implicit right to step away from an effective discourse. Retreating from that sows distrust, even when it appears to be more benign in nature.

(For other reasons, I recently visited the website of Sanaa, the Pritzker Prize–winning firm. As with McCrery Architects, there isn’t much to learn. I decided to click on one of the emails on the otherwise blank landing page and request a portfolio. Sanaa responded with a reciprocal query about my purpose, which I answered in detail. Despite a couple of reminders from me, the firm went silent, as McCrery and SBA have been from the beginning. With little apparent interest in sharing points of view when designing in the public eye, doesn’t this reinforce the old stereotype of architecture being an ivory tower profession?)

Fortunately, there are many examples of firms who openly embrace and share their civic responsibility. One of them is the nonprofit firm Troy Architecture Practice (TAP), in Troy, New York, home of my alma mater. Elizabeth Rodriguez, a former classmate and friend, has worked there since we graduated. After she told me recently about their nonprofit status, I was curious enough to visit TAP’s website. There are no highbrow projects or thesis-level proclamations, but there is a great narrative about what TAP has been doing since the 1960s to support its community, particularly the disadvantaged and low-income. The firm presents how it engages with clients; shares details of the placemaking process; describes in refreshingly plain language the arcane aspects of working on a project; links to resources; advertises living quarters in buildings they’ve designed and helped develop; and includes a historical timeline from TAP’s inception. Architects should take note of this approach, because we bring value to any conversation if our intentions to the community are clear.

Navigating various constituencies is exhausting, but when officials in charge desire symbols of oppression while demonstrating ineffectiveness and incompetence, they effectively pull the plug on a robust and safe public arena for debate. The result is a critically impoverished ability to deliberate together. For someone riding the crest of populist rhetoric, the president is essentially turning his back on his political base and offering the country his middle finger: “Trust me to do the right thing, because I certainly don’t need to hear what you think.” He demands that his columns and architraves project power and remain beyond reproach, while unarmed civilians protesting in our streets are murdered by masked men carrying out his orders. When public spaces become sites of sanctioned state violence rather than democratic assembly, that’s not just a political problem—it’s an architectural one. It is a corruption of what the built public realm is meant to be for.

If we reach out and engage with a social purpose as TAP has done, we convey cohesiveness and professional maturity to our community. While architects rightly seek clients that are mission-compatible, rest assured that every government organization, commercial interest, community group, nonprofit, etc., in a project’s sphere of influence has its antagonists. For our efforts to be successful, we should desire to explain our point of view and connect with those who we disagree with; after all, there may be some common ground that is ripe for exploration. This might make us uncomfortable. If it does, then we’re probably learning something new. 

Featured image courtesy of the author. 

What is lost, then, when a building is torn down? New York City, where my firm is based, has a dismal track record of preserving its buildings. Thanks to 20th century urban renewal projects, many of the city’s greatest architectural achievements no longer exist; in the past couple decades alone, New York has torn down dozens of century-old buildings. Longtime residents of downtown Brooklyn no longer recognize their neighborhood, once rich with cultural and architectural heritage. Eclectic swaths of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Harlem have been erased and redrawn, their stories lost.

Yet we’re at an inflection point. Our country desperately needs to build roughly 3–4 million homes beyond normal construction in order to reach affordability, according to a report issued by Goldman Sachs in October 2025. In cities, many decisionmakers still see demolition as a prerequisite; they are incentivized to. A luxury highrise is worth far more than a five-story prewar apartment building. While I don’t begrudge real estate owners for building luxury condominiums (they tend to hire architects), choosing to erase our collective history comes with consequences—for those who live and work here today, as well as the inhabitants of tomorrow.

When I was a student in the late 1970s, architecture training was rooted in modernism. Originality was the hallmark of  “genius,” and a building’s success was measured by formal aesthetics. A few early voices—Ken Yeang, Sim Van der Ryn, and Edward Mazria among them—advocated for architects to consider ecological impact, environmental performance, and community engagement in design, but they were on the fringe. It would be years before those terms entered the profession’s general lexicon.

Having practiced architecture for over 40 years, I’m encouraged to see the discipline moving in the right direction. Advanced city-mandated sustainability requirements are now commonplace, and certifications like LEED and WELL push the marketplace toward designs that are better for the environment and for people. Our generation redefined quality to include not just Italian marble and fine decor, but energy efficiency, sustainability, and wellness. Today’s early voices are advocating for nature-positive cities, another term I hope soon enters the dialogue. This doesn’t change the fact that global warming–fueled disasters cost the U.S. hundreds of lives in 2024, not to mention the extraordinary economic toll. We still have a long way to go. As New York and other American cities endeavor to build, those of us who are in the business of altering the city’s skyline and streetscape must act as stewards, not demolitionists. Preservation and adaptive reuse are essential to that ethic and should become central to the way we build.

Our firm manifested that ideal two decades ago at Historic Front Street, in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport historic district. In 2003, 11 empty warehouses—dating to the 18th and early 19th centuries—were on the verge of collapse. Herman Melville set the opening scenes of Moby-Dick there, but when we made the first site visit, many had been vacant for decades.

Our approach prioritized both the buildings’ physical preservation, as required by NYC’s landmark preservation laws, as well as their nontangible assets. That meant keeping what others might have viewed as imperfections: chipped bricks, a patina of peeling paint, and “ghost buildings” inscribed on surviving facades. In other words, the qualities of a building that can’t be designed, that only accumulate over time. In addition to restoring the original warehouses, we added penthouses and three new buildings that were designed as modern interpretations of the site’s historic scale, texture, and proportions. Facade details recalled a whale’s tale, and lines from Moby-Dick were emblazoned on wall placards. The result was 95 apartments and over a dozen retail spaces that helped catalyze the area’s revitalization. Melville might not recognize the tenants, but he would recognize the streetscape.

At St. John’s Terminal, we achieved a similar transformation on a larger scale. The 1934 rail-freight terminal, once the terminus of the High Line, wasn’t historically designated, nor particularly beautiful. It was massive and obsolete—a prime candidate for demolition. But the huge floor plates were attractive to contemporary users, like Google, which ultimately purchased the development. Reuse was also the most environmentally sustainable option. By avoiding demolition, we saved an estimated 78,400 metric tons of carbon emissions, along with noise, dust, and other adverse impacts. We also unearthed train tracks that had been covered for decades, exposing the Hudson Square neighborhood to its own history.

The developer, Oxford Property Group, wagered that the unique identity of the building would be a strong selling point to potential users, a bet that paid off. Google could certainly have afforded a new skyscraper, but it chose reuse because this aligned with its corporate identity and commitments to environmental and urban stewardship. Other corporations should follow Google’s lead if they want to call New York City home.

Two recent landmarked projects show how policy can influence adaptive design. Terminal Warehouse—a former 1890s freight terminal turned self-storage center and night club—has now become over a million square feet of workplace and retail. Nearby, Liberty Landing reimagines an Art Deco building that was once a sailor’s boarding house, then a women’s prison, as deeply affordable housing. These buildings serve contemporary needs while keeping the stories of our city alive: Liberty Landing was originally designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, better known for the Empire State Building.

There are signs New York is inching in the right direction. The Adams administration helped establish tax incentives for conversions, new zoning tools under City of Yes, and an Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force. But Mayor Zohran Mamdani will need to be even more ambitious.

One policy City Hall should adopt are reuse-first development incentives. Implement a floor area bonus for all adaptive reuse projects. We should also be thinking of reuse in the broadest terms. Disassembly and reuse of materials should be incentivized to preserve a building’s embodied carbon while maximizing the range of possible new designs.

For much of history, when humans built, they built for posterity; they couldn’t afford otherwise. The Colosseum in Rome entertained spectators for centuries. Today, the latest “state of the art” football stadiums are considered obsolete after just three decades. Although we’re capable of incessantly rebuilding, the cost is enormous: buildings account for 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions. In cities like New York, that share is closer to 75%.
What will become of America’s skyscrapers, convention centers, and strip malls in a century? If we continue on the current cycle of demolition, many of those buildings won’t exist. That would be untenable. Those buildings still have stories to tell. Let’s think twice before consigning them to rubble.

Featured image: Terminal Warehouse, Photo by Alex Ferrec/COOKFOX.

Original Choices

I grew up in Rocket City USA, otherwise known as Huntsville, Alabama. Jan Davis, one of the first American women in space, graduated from Huntsville High School seven years before me. Within this atmosphere where anything seemed possible, my parents ran a groundbreaking health food store and brought in a steady stream of speakers about all things natural, holistic, and sustainable. Their principles became strong ideals for me in my teen years.

My work in architecture school built on these principles. Two years before graduation, I discovered the beginnings of New Urbanism, and so began thinking about the sustainability of a community, not just the buildings. Upon graduation in 1983, I realized I had a choice to make: focus on the urban scale or building scale. After much deliberation with my wife, Wanda, we chose to build a self-sufficient homestead and practice these principles at the level of the family and the scale of a single plot of land.

We found an acre in a rural community marketed as family farms, but which in reality became an exurban subdivision. We thought we’d follow the original promise of the place and not only live on the food we raised there, but also reduce our resource consumption to unheard-of levels. This was our first mistake.

The Appraisal Problem

We designed the house around a central courtyard shaded by four maples in summer, but which admitted full sunlight after they dropped their leaves in the fall. The house did all the right passive solar things and was superinsulated, with 12” double walls and 16” of insulation in the roof, plus lots of thermal mass in the floors and two Russian fireplaces. In other words, it was built far better than almost everything around it—and at greater expense. Banking was much different back then, and the early 1980s were frothy days in our area, so the banker made the original construction loan based on my too-optimistic estimate (having never estimated a job before) and my job with a prominent local architect.

When we inevitably had to go back for more money, the bank sent out the appraiser that would change our world. By this time, the house was pretty far along but by no means finished. And when he took a look at everything we were doing, he had no idea how to process it and started discounting all the things that were actually extras. His appraisal came back at $27 per square foot, a ridiculous number by any standard. Regular subdivision sprawl houses were selling for at least twice that amount at the time.

But by that point we were stuck. And so we did the only thing we could: keep doing as much of the work as possible ourselves and get a bunch of credit cards to finish the house. It was brutal. We and our parents would work on the house until after midnight most nights to save money. And after we moved in, I remember knowing for several years exactly what I’d be doing as far into the future as I could see: working as many overtime hours as possible get to keep the credit card companies at bay. (Read more about the house here.)

The Time Problem

As anyone who has ever had a garden knows, fruits and vegetables don’t grow themselves. We had a double row of apple trees and plum trees around the outer courtyard, and they took some time, but the vegetables obviously took much more effort.

And then there was the problem of living 20 minutes from work, on a low-traffic day; the round trip was usually more like an hour. But it didn’t stop there. When we moved into the house in April 1987, there were still many things unfinished, and there wasn’t a bit of anything other than grass and gravel once we stepped outside. When you’re young and building things you’ve never built before, trips to the lumber yards 30 minutes or more away are likely to produce about half of the parts and tools needed to eventually finish the job. During those years, we totaled about 50,000 miles per year between our two cars. You do the math.

The Culture Problem

Add up all that time, and you can probably guess what happened to the garden we planted each spring. I had counted on our two young sons helping a lot, because I remembered how much I and my sisters loved working in our family’s garden as kids.

But one thing I missed was the fact that our parents had created a culture of loving to raise fruits and vegetables since the three of us were very young, and they did it with us. Growing up, our garden was by the lake on a nearby mountaintop where they hoped to build someday, so we were never there without them, and it became a family thing.

But we weren’t all just working together; they laid out a plot for each of us within the garden that became our own, and that’s where we spent most of our time. So we took ownership and learned to love it, and so when they needed our help in the larger garden they tended, we were happy to assist.

This is a far cry from what Wanda and I did, which was to tell the kids to “weed the garden” while we worked on one or more of the countless unfinished house projects. You can guess how well that went, with garden work being nothing but chores to elementary school boys. Thus, by June each year the garden was choked with weeds. Years later, we finally gave up and seeded the area with grass.

The End of the Line

I opened my own firm August 1, 1991, and it immediately started sucking up 80-plus hours of my time each week. It quickly became apparent that our dream of a functioning homestead was over. Yes, the house still mostly conditioned itself, with utility bills sometimes as low as $17 per month. And yes, the poorly pruned fruit trees were still producing. But the ideal of living off the land just wasn’t going to happen; we would have died of sleep deprivation. We ended up selling eight years to the day later, on August 1, 1999.

What to Do Now?

One of the biggest changes in the professional world in recent years is the ability of some people to work from home. That’s mediated, of course, by whether young children are part of the mix. I’ve worked at home, or within walking distance of home, ever since 1999, and I love it. So some things work today that didn’t work then. But in any case, look at your life and try to figure out how to get as much of it as possible within the self-propelled distances of walking and cycling. Using biointensive methods, you can raise a lot more food on much less land than row-croppers ever dreamed of. These days, an urban homestead is no longer an oxymoron; it’s something you might actually consider.

Then, try to figure out how to begin with your home as small as possible. We built 3,000 square feet because the expectation back then was building your complete home, rather than starting small and adding on as needed. Through the Katrina Cottages Initiative and the subsequent Project: SmartDwelling, we’ve learned that the smarter thing is to start much smaller.

So it all comes down to this, three keys to homestead survivability: (1) Acknowledge the time it will take in real life to do the things you want to do on your homestead. (2) Build a culture in your family that will get your children involved as happy and willing partners. (3) Get the money correct, both on the income side and the expenses side. Our homestead dream was a comprehensive failure at all three. Get them right, and you can do far better.

Featured image by the author. More essays by him can be found here.

We’re in a housing crisis in the U.S., literally everywhere. Cities, suburbs, and rural areas are, together, millions of units short of what is needed, for a variety of reasons: zoning, construction costs, the vagaries of the free market, neighborhood opposition. Developers seem unable to produce anything but housing at the top of the market, where it’s least needed. And the little bit aimed at the middle they do manage to build is uninspiring and unloved—like a restaurant with “bad food, and small portions,” as one of our guests puts it. 

How do we break free of this stalemate? Duo Dickinson and Martin C. Pedersen talk with Gerhard W. Mayer and Lindsey Stirman, co-founders of the Livable Communities Initiative, a Los Angeles–based organization dedicated to creating a new paradigm for housing development. They reject both NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) and its knee-jerk opposite, YIMBYism (yes to any sort of housing, regardless of quality), arguing instead for an altogether different mode: QUIMBY (Quality In My Backyard). Because when housing developments include elements like walkability, green space, gentle density, and access to transit, opposition tends to dissipate. 

Lindsay Sturman, a television writer and producer, is co-founder of the Livable Communities Initiative, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit dedicated to promoting 15-minute neighborhoods through a holistic approach to housing, traffic, and mobility solutions. She’s also the co-host of Bike Talk, a podcast and syndicated radio show that explores sustainable transportation and bike advocacy.

Gerhard W. Mayer  is an architect who embraces a paradigm shift toward walkable, equitable, and sustainable high-quality urban living. Originally from Vienna, Austria, he emigrated to the U.S. on a Fulbright Scholarship in Sustainable Design and Architecture. A cofounder of the Livable Communities Initiative, he initiated California’s Social Housing Study trips to Vienna, which have prompted a rethinking of how to provide attainable housing in our own cities. He is also a prolific writer and has started several local initiatives and nonprofits in an effort to create a better Southern California.

For Spotify users, listen in HERE.

    For Apple users, listen in HERE.

Our guest for the next episode of Our Buildings, Our Selves will be the legendary architect and artist James Wines.

The problem is not a lack of engineering. It’s a lack of alignment.

We continue to treat environmental performance, civic governance, and everyday urban life as separate domains. Sustainability is handed to technical experts. Public engagement becomes a procedural requirement. Architecture delivers compliant buildings. Each discipline optimizes its siloed piece.

But cities are not mechanical assemblies. They’re living systems, comprising features that include water and energy infrastructure, nature, buildings, institutions, and human relationships. When those systems fail to reinforce one another, resilience strategies stall—not because the technology fails, but because coordination does.

Climate adaptation is not only a technical challenge. It’s a civic one.

Dignity Is a Design Decision

City leaders speak frequently about equity and inclusion. But dignity is not secured by policy language. Instead, it’s reinforced when residents can clearly see how decisions are made, where public money goes, and how they can influence outcomes. When processes are opaque, participation feels symbolic. Distrust follows.

In his book Conversations for Action and Collected Essays, organizational theorist Fernando Flores describes institutions as networks of commitments—promises made, and kept over time, that build trust. Cities function the same way: agencies commit to maintain infrastructure; developers commit to provide public access; officials commit to transparency.

When those commitments are unclear or inconsistently honored, coordination weakens. Maintenance is deferred, public space deteriorates, and environmental systems suffer because responsibility becomes diffuse.

The physical environment signals whether those commitments are real. A clearly marked public entrance invites participation; a blank façade discourages it. Visible stormwater systems suggest competence and care; neglected infrastructure communicates indifference.

Rotterdam’s water plazas illustrate this well. Public squares such as Benthemplein have playgrounds and gathering places that double as stormwater basins during heavy rain. Instead of hiding flood control underground, the city made it visible, civic, inviting. Residents can see how their neighborhood manages water. They can take pride in it. 

In the U.S., Philadelphia’s Green City, Clean Waters program has taken a similar approach. Rather than rely solely on buried pipes, the city invested in visible rain gardens, tree trenches, and greened schoolyards. Stormwater management became part of the daily experience and a vital part of civic pride and the greening of the city, not hidden machinery.

Design communicates whether dignity is performative, or real.

Behavior Follows Environment

We often assume that better policy produces better behavior. But behavior responds more reliably to context. If sidewalks are narrow and unshaded in a hot climate, fewer people walk. If cars and bikes are comingled, few people will choose to put themselves at risk. If stormwater vanishes underground, residents have little awareness of how risk is managed. If crossing the street feels unsafe, pedestrians disappear.

The environment trains us.

Shaded streets reduce heat stress and increase pedestrian activity. Protected bike lanes increase cycling because they feel safe. Visible rain gardens help residents understand how flood mitigation works as they move through their city. Walkable neighborhoods increase everyday contact between neighbors, strengthening informal trust.

Climate strategies that ignore lived experience become compliance exercises. Strategies that reshape daily conditions shape culture.

Trust Is Designed

Trust is often described as political or cultural. But it is also environmental.

When flood mitigation systems are understandable, when public maintenance is consistent, and when street design makes safety intuitive, residents experience institutional competence. Clarity reduces anxiety.

Hidden flood risks, confusing traffic patterns, and contradictory design cues—such as crosswalks that lead into fast-moving traffic—create uncertainty. Uncertainty breeds withdrawal.

Trust accumulates when governance, infrastructure, and physical space align. It erodes when they contradict one another.

Cities that ignore this will continue to struggle, not because residents are apathetic, but because the conditions for cooperation are weak.

Relationships Are Infrastructure

Cities invest billions in roads, pipes, and electrical grids. These things are essential. But during extreme events, informal networks often determine how quickly aid spreads. Social capacity is a form of risk mitigation.

Resilience also depends on relationships: who checks on whom during a heat wave, who shares information during a flood, who alerts neighbors of the threat of fire, who trusts official guidance in an emergency.

Urban form influences whether these kinds of relationships can be established. Public squares, shaded sidewalks, accessible ground floors, and active parks and greenways create the conditions for repeated encounters. Gated developments and isolated office parks reduce those opportunities. When everyday spaces discourage interaction, coordination weakens.

Ecological systems reinforce this dynamic. When water, trees, and shade are visible and shared, residents are more likely to value and protect them. When systems are hidden, they become someone else’s responsibility. Resilience is relational.

The Missing Layer

We cannot reduce emissions without changing behavior. We cannot change behavior without reshaping daily context. We cannot reshape context without building trust in the institutions leading that change. And we cannot value and protect what we do not understand. 

Climate resilience is not only about carbon reduction or engineering capacity. It is about whether residents believe the systems around them are coherent and fair. It’s not enough to design greener buildings. We must design environments that:

• Make civic commitments visible.
• Make ecological systems legible.
• Make participation meaningful.
• Make cooperation easier than withdrawal.

Sustainability metrics measure carbon; they rarely measure trust. Yet cities facing extreme heat, flooding, rising insurance costs, and migration pressures cannot adapt without trust. Cities do not collapse because they lack innovation—they collapse when the conditions for coordination and care are weak. Design shapes those conditions.

If climate adaptation is to succeed, it will not be because we perfected the technology alone. It will be because we built cities where trust is reinforced daily through space, systems, and shared responsibility.

That is not an aesthetic adjustment. Alignment is a structural correction.

Featured image: Green City, Clean Water program, via the Philadelphia Water Department.

But did they?

Physically, the city was still a mess; nothing had improved. Residents were leaving, and many stores were empty. Some city officials even suggested abandoning entire neighborhoods, closing the fire and police stations and declaring them finished. Planned shrinkage, it was called.

But a funny thing happened. While all eyes were on City Hall, on the money men and the experts, the real action, the grassroots action that eventually saved and rebuilt the city, was happening in the neighborhoods. People started moving back into the abandoned areas and purchasing empty and undervalued brownstones, tenements, lofts, and apartments. Attracted by the architectural flourishes, finely crafted plaster interiors, carved wood wall coverings, solid oak floors and spacious rooms, a new generation of New Yorkers repopulated the buildings and neighborhoods that the experts had deemed hopeless. 

Urban pioneers, they were called. Many of them had grown up in the suburbs and wanted the urban alternative. Some had grown up in the city and had no intention of abandoning it. People started noticing, and press attention followed. Neighborhoods like Park Slope and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, and Chelsea and the Upper West Side in Manhattan, were re-emerging. Newly formed block associations organized neighborhood watches, held parties, planted flower boxes, staged house tours. Nothing was organized from above; it was all organic and local. It became known as the Brownstone or Back-to-the-City Movement, and it required hard work and deep commitment. It happened in the South Bronx, too, where landlords walked away from buildings and the residents took ownership and rebuilt from the bottom up. There they actually got help from the Koch administration, which realized the city had no alternative but to help let the people do it themselves.

What many of these urban homesteaders valued were the qualities of the old, well-constructed, eminently-viable existing urban fabric built over time. Out of this trend emerged the historic preservation movement, whose central ethic was not to freeze the city or stop change, but to shape growth in layers of change that added to, but didn’t replace or overwhelm, the strength of the past. This is urban regeneration that adds and strengthens without wiping out and replacing with huge, inflexible insertions.

Historic preservation was the concept that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis championed during the 1970’s legal fight over the future of Grand Central Station. It gained credibility for localities all over the country. Historic preservation took hold in cities whose strength rested on layers of growth. But now a new era is upon us, one in which advocates of new construction at all costs claim historic preservation and cumbersome building procedures stand in the way of progress and affordable housing and that advocates of preservation are simply NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard). 

In truth, thousands of units of affordable housing, much of it rent regulated, are protected from demolition because of their location in designated historic districts. Private owners living in part of a house often rent remaining floors at more reasonable rents than developer-built apartment houses. In designated districts, developers are prevented from buying, forcing out residents, and demolishing a building in order to replace it with large-scale luxury housing. 

In contrast, in undesignated historic neighborhoods, developers are tearing down buildings similar to those in designated districts and evicting tenants from affordable apartments. Those tenants are the ones leaving the city, because affordable options are drastically fewer (and certainly not to be found in the new luxury high rises replacing the older structures). This is happening in older unprotected neighborhoods, such as Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Gowanus in Brooklyn. This is a clearance and redevelopment approach similar to what Robert Moses used to do, but on a smaller scale. The replacement apartments, mostly condos, are vastly more expensive than rent regulated units.

These disappearing apartments are precisely the affordable units whose rent Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to freeze. And here it’s worth repeating: Thousands of affordable housing units are protected from demolition because they exist in the city’s 157 historic districts. While it sounds like a lot of districts (some are barely a block in size), that’s less than 4% of all the properties in the city. Rather than stopping development of affordable housing, historic preservation is protecting more of it than could possibly be built to replace it.

Older buildings are being demolished almost weekly in the undesignated neighboring districts. Most of these brownstones and small apartment houses are filled with existing affordable units, many of which were happily occupied until developers bought, emptied them out, and tore them down. In some instances, especially in Yorkville, multiple brownstones were replaced by a single tower, resulting in increased height and lower density, a lose-lose proposition for everyone but the developers. Recognizing this unpublicized reality should make everyone a NIMBY. But with a difference: these developments should not be in anybody’s backyard.

The transformation of New York City started in the neighborhoods. Some of those neighborhoods are now designated historic districts. Without those designations, even more existing affordable housing would be lost to the wrecking ball. Sadly, that is the real estate industry’s goal. It should not be the city’s.

Featured image via NYC.gov.

Gaudí was certainly involved in the design of Xalet del Catllaràs (built 1901–1908), located just outside the town of La Pobla de Lillet. During the early 1900s, he was busy in the area creating housing for workers in factories owned by his primary benefactor, Eusebi Güell. He is also credited with designing the nearby Artigas Gardens (1905–1906) for another one of his supporters.

But there are complications to declaring the unassuming chalet an official Gaudí, even though it has been commonly referenced as such for decades. For one, Gaudí was involved in the initial design only. He was a busy man at the turn of the century: Park Güell (1900–1914) and Casa Batlló (1904–1906) were in full swing, and the architect was becoming increasingly obsessed with the Sagrada Familia (1882–?), the basilica that would consume his later years. By all accounts, Gaudí didn’t supervise construction of the chalet and reportedly didn’t like the final result, which left out many of the more complicated aspects of his original design.

In very Gaudí-like fashion, he refused to formally sign the project’s final paperwork and didn’t include it in any of his professional portfolios, according to published reports. Gaudí was well-known for balking when his designs were altered, most famously when the owners of Casa Milà, aka La Pedrera (1906–1912), his landmark work on Passeig de Grècia, didn’t want to put a 4-meter-tall statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the house.

The chalet’s architect was officially listed as unknown. Over the years, the building was renovated and abandoned several times, leaving little trace of anything resembling a Gaudí project. (The website Nessy Messy has a good look at the building’s history.)

For years, the chalet and its provenance have been a source of debate among local experts, who felt it deserved the full Gaudí recognition. In 2020, a major restoration helped return the chalet to something resembling its original plan. (ROA Arquitectura studied the project a few years ago.)

New research commissioned by the Catalonia Department of Culture confirms Gaudí as the “author” of the design, the agency recently announced. The study, by architect Galdric Santana, professor at the Barcelona School of Architecture, acknowledges that Gaudí did not direct construction and “never publicly claimed authorship because the work was not built according to his design.” However, the study concludes that the chalet “contains unique methodologies and techniques by Gaudí that attest to its authorship.”

Several elements were pure Gaudí, the study found. Designs for arches and vaults—including some not actually used in the final design—and the arrangement of the rooms, were all typical of Gaudí at the time and would later appear in other buildings of his.

The researchers moved into new territory in terms of creating a technical model for analyzing a designer’s influence on a project. The focus on “geometric, structural and compositional evidence,” included 3D studies and extensive analysis of historical documents and photographs

According to the Department of Culture, “The study details, one by one, all the details that have led it to conclude, affirmatively, that Antoni Gaudí was the author of the Xalet del Catllaràs project.”

The announcement dances around the issue of calling the project a Gaudí design when Gaudí didn’t want his name on it. It was not unusual at the time for busy architects not to sign the paperwork for projects that didn’t match their initial design. However, the department acknowledges, “the author of this work (Santana) concludes that Gaudí did not direct its construction, and that it was executed and modified by third parties, losing its initial formal and structural meaning.”

In an interview, Santana said the project represents Gaudí’s work and illustrates his way of thinking at a crucial time in his career, even if not all the elements of his design are in the final building. “What’s most important is that it shows the new architectural approach that Gaudí had,” Santana, who is also director of the Gaudí Chair at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (BarcelonaTech), told Reuters.

Announced as part of the Year of Gaudí, the celebration commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the architect’s death, the conclusion is certainly good news for area tourism agencies, which have a new site to market. The Berguedà region will now be included on maps of Gaudí destinations, Minister of Culture Sònia Hernández announced at the press conference. “Today we celebrate news of enormous value for our cultural heritage,” she said.

However, nothing in the announcement or interviews answered two questions: Would Gaudí have been happy with the result? Would he have wanted his name on the building?

During his lifetime, Gaudí answered that question, based on the historical record. He wasn’t shy about claiming his work or disassociating himself from stuff he didn’t like. Now, a century after his death, his name is back on the chalet, whether he likes it or not.

Featured image: Gaudi’s Xalet del Catllaràs, built 1901–1908. Photo: Catalunya Department of Culture. Visit the author’s Substack on Barcelona here. 

After talking to a number of people about AI and the future of architecture, experts who’ve spent considerable time pondering the uncertainties, the famous quote from the great screenwriter William Goldman came to mind: “Nobody knows anything. … Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” 

The same almost certainly applies to predictions about AI and the future of architecture. Educated guesses might be the best we can do for the moment, since whatever we can say about AI right now (It can’t draw a damn floorplan!) might be out of date in a month, a week, a handful of days. Architect Randy Deutsch, author of The Agentic Architect: AI and the Resurgence of Practice (Routledge, 2026), has long grappled with the challenges of charting the progress of new technologies. “I’ve written seven books,” he says. “All of them involved design technology, all of them referenced AI. In order to extend their shelf life, I don’t mention specific tools by name, because by the time the book comes out, the tools have been usurped by other tools, they become menu items, they merge with other products, other tools.” 

This is the wobbly state of AI-enabled design now, but it comes with a caveat: Whatever it can and cannot do is a temporary condition. Today AI struggles to reason, weigh alternatives, and capture nuance—things human designers constantly do as part of their job. It’s still a blunt and powerful collector, a predictive machine producing stiff but serviceable prose and surprisingly tuneful, if hollow, music, much of it improving in real time. (Its firmer grasp on music is largely because rhythm and notes are predictive mathematical components.) But AI doesn’t yet think spatially; it turns images into two-dimensional pixels. In truth, AI doesn’t actually think at all. “At this point in their development, these systems are fairly primitive,” says Jacob Ward, former technology correspondent for NBC News and host of the podcast The Rip Current. “The diffusion [generative models used for image creation] and large-language models [LLMs] are remarkably good at gathering everything that’s been written, talked about, drawn, and photographed, and compressing all of it and then spitting out a new answer based on that. But that’s not what designers do. They take all of that stuff and synthesize it.” 

The Larger Context

Before making additional educated guesses about AI’s impact on the future of architecture, it’s important to frame the larger context. As much as architects would like us to believe that the profession leads the economic and cultural charge, the truth is more complicated than that. Because architecture is capital-intensive, often moves slowly, requires clients and patrons, and usually has to meet some sort of practical need, architects must constantly adjust and react to a number of contingencies, many of them completely beyond their control: the economy, cultural shifts, labor issues, supply chains, volatile clients, flows of capital, emerging technologies. And yet, even with those constantly shifting contexts and constraints, architecture is, somehow, created. 

While architects tinker with the emerging tools (Midjourney, Firefly, Claude, etc.), global investment in the technology continues to explode. This spending involves two things: products and applications (this is AI’s version of the dot-com boom, but exponentially larger) and physical infrastructure. Between the two of them, it’s a mammoth outlay of capital. Much of the recent growth in the somewhat stagnant world economy is currently tied to investments in AI. In fact, a number of economists believe that without this capital stampede—some of it quite irrational, much of it unlikely to return any profit—the U.S. economy would likely be in a recession. 

And yet for some observers, this frenzy feels, to paraphrase Alan Greenspan, irrationally exuberant. In the Ringer article “How Catastrophic Is It If the AI Bubble Bursts? An FAQ,” Brian Phillips writes:

The hype around AI insists that it’s a world-transforming technology that will revolutionize every aspect of human society. The reality … is that AI companies are burning through staggering amounts of money (and fossil fuels) with no clear plan to profitability. … Worse yet for the industry, the biggest players are increasingly tied up in time-bomb deals that look disastrous for their futures in any but the rosiest of best-case scenarios.

What Phillips elegantly describes are the makings of a bubble, set to burst. For the sake of the world economy, let’s hope that AI is indeed a planet-alterating phenomenon capable of defying the laws of fiscal gravity. 

As AI hucksters pitch and run, the large tech companies are undertaking a massive buildup of physical infrastructure. “There are currently 5,437 data centers,” says Frank Stasiowski, a leading management consultant for the AEC industry. “The prediction is that by 2030 there will be about 25,000 data centers.” But this buildup is in no way benign; it will come with a steep price, for everyone. Data centers use huge amounts of electricity and water. Some proposed centers are so large that they will require their own power sources. (Google has plans to build three nuclear reactors.) Most will tap into already stressed local grids and force communities to help foot the bill. According to the New York Times, analysts predict that electric bills around the country are projected to increase by 8% by 2030, and by as much as 25% in states where the AI boom is leading to more data centers being built, such as Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. And make no mistake: these structures are ecological disasters, 21st century smokestacks that pose an even graver threat to planetary survival than the belching towers of the Industrial Revolution. 

So, how much money is riding on this? A staggering amount. Here’s a fun fact: When I asked Google’s AI-powered search engine how much money is being invested in data centers, the bot replied, “Over the next five years, global data center infrastructure investments (excluding IT hardware) could total nearly $7 trillion by 2030.” And while you can’t always trust the accuracy of Google’s search engine (it’s often comically unreliable), I managed to find the same $7-trillion number cited in a McKinsey report. 

It’s logical to think that way too much of this crazy, speculative spending seems untethered from reality. But buried beneath the hype, greed, and giddy excess lies a looming certainty: computers are about to get a lot more powerful, rendering Moore’s Law obsolete, even quaint. “Quantum computing is coming down the line,” Stasiowski says. “Scientists predict that by 2029, all of our laptops will be replaced by quantum computers at 400 to 600 times the speed of today’s computers.” All of these supercharged tools will filter into architecture studios and affect how the work is done. Exactly how remains an open question, but it’s why—despite the noise, pollution, and distinct possibility of a market “correction”—architects must take AI seriously, even if the contours of it are likely to change, and then change again, and again. 

How AI Is Currently Being Used

Here’s a dirty little secret about architects and technology: For all of its glitzy renderings, slick marketing videos, and polished multimedia presentations, the profession has traditionally been a late and reluctant adopter of emerging tech. There are a number of reasons for this that are specific to architecture: cost (new technologies are risky and expensive), liability, and competitive advantage. Architect and author Phil Bernstein, deputy dean at the Yale School of Architecture, cites what he calls the profession’s basic principle of technology adoption: “When you figure out a technological advantage, you keep it to yourself for as long as you can, until somebody else catches up. It’s not as if, for example, there were firms out there helping each other adopt building information modeling.“ 

“[Construction is] even more tech-regressive than architecture, because it can be,” Eric Cesal says. “It doesn’t have the incentives to do deep digital adoption, because such adoption wouldn’t enhance their margins the way that it would in a law firm, or a car factory.”

According to author and futurist Eric Cesal, architects are also slow to innovate because they exist in a supply chain that’s a step directly behind construction, which is full of activities that can’t be sped up by technology. “It’s even more tech-regressive than architecture, because it can be,” Cesal says.“Construction doesn’t have the incentives to do deep digital adoption, because such adoption wouldn’t enhance their margins the way that it would in a law firm, or a car factory. Consequently, architects don’t have much incentive to innovate, either, because if they did, they would just end up creating a backlog, finishing drawing sets faster than the local contractors can execute them.”

So, despite the immense hype, a similar trepidation is occurring now with AI. According to Pratt News’ Alison C. Meier:

A study released this year by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) … found that while just 6 percent of architects surveyed are regularly using AI tools in their work (including chatbots, image generators, and tools for analyzing grammar and text), 53 percent have experimented with AI, suggesting a modest but growing level of adoption as questions about its usage remain.

In other words, they’re using it in the same tentative, exploratory, and often clumsy way everyone else is. But since this is a 21st century technology phenomenon, there is a distinct corporate and generational divide at work. “My sense is that AI is being used tepidly at the firm level,” says Cesal. “I would suspect that a lot of the use is covert. I think you’ve got people in their 20s who are using it much more aggressively than they will let on to their superiors, because the firms are paranoid about liability.” 

In truth, many firms are using AI for everything but design. “Everybody is screwing around with the diffusion models and large language models, the two things that are widely available, creating marketing materials, business plans, generating renderings,” Bernstein says. “The question is: Where’s the innovation?” 

Bernstein is in many ways the perfect source for measured skepticism here. The author of several books, including Machine Learning: Architecture in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, he spent the early part of his career working for César Pelli’s firm, where he managed a number of large projects; served for years as a vice president at Autodesk; and is now deeply involved in the education of tomorrow’s architects, all of whom will use AI in unforeseen ways. And though he’s very much a tech realist and a healthy skeptic, he feels the ground shifting beneath him, too. Bernstein talks about watching a video with a chart showing how long it took different technologies to reach 100 million users: the telephone, Facebook, and DeepSeek. “It was 100 years for the phone, four years for Facebook, and two months for DeepSeek,” he says. “Things are moving quickly, almost too quickly.” 

The question lurking behind all of the AI talk is a simple one: If the technology continues to improve in exponential leaps and bounds, where does that eventually leave the rest of us? Human architects and designers? “I don’t know that it’s inevitable that machines could design an entire building,” Bernstein insists. “There are many places where AI is useful. Where it begins to collapse is when it’s operating in a multivalent environment, trying to integrate multiple streams of both data and logic.” In other words: essentially any architectural project (even a bathroom remodel). 

“Certain streams may become more optimized,” he continues. “If I were a structural engineer, for example, I’d be worried, because structural engineering has clear, robust means of representation, clear rules of measurement. But these diffusion models right now can’t draw a damn floor plan with any degree of coherence.” He describes floor plans as “an abstraction of a much more complicated phenomenon” and thinks it will be some time before these systems can execute the most important things that architects do: make judgments, weigh tradeoffs, exercise experience, take responsibility for what they do.

There’s another limitation as well: the gap between the aggregated nature of current AI data and the disaggregated nature of architectural data. “Maybe, eventually, someone will build something that’s sophisticated enough, multimodal enough, that can operate with language, video, three-dimensional reasoning, analytical tools, cost estimates, all the things that architects need,” says Bernstein. “But it won’t happen in the foreseeable future, unless somebody comes up with a way to train these things on much skinnier data sets.” 

Architectural data, he says, is spread out all over the place, and because it involves risk, no one is keen to share it: “When the Yale Medical School has 33,000 patients enrolled in a trial, they’re getting lots of highly curated, accurate data that they can use to train their AIs. Where’s our accurate data? I can take every Revit model that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has ever produced in the history of their firm, and it’s not nearly enough data to train an AI. Not nearly enough.”

All of Bernstein’s skepticism feels sharp, on point, and somehow vaguely reassuring (the robots aren’t taking over anytime soon!). And yet, about a week and a half after I posted an interview with him, wherein he complained about AI’s inept floorplans, I received an email from another ardent tech-follower, with breaking news: “I tell people every day, ‘It doesn’t pay to be a Doomer and bet against AI.’ There is now an AI-generated CAD model (editable in AutoCAD) that can accurately draw floor plans. It’s becoming contextual, increasingly able to interact with the real world (built environment). ‘AI can’t draw a damn floor plan?’ Just wait 10 days!” 

A Tentative Glimpse at a Tentative Future

During the course of reporting this essay, Cesal pointed me in the direction of Patrick Chopson, co-founder and chief product officer of Cove Architecture, an Atlanta-based shop billing itself as “the world’s first AI-powered firm.” The obvious question: What exactly does that mean now? Initially, it meant that Chopson and his co-founder, Sandeep Ahuja, were successful in raising more than $36 million in venture capital, a somewhat insane sum for an architectural startup, albeit one with a unique wrinkle. “We began by doing software,” Chopson says, “and then we’ve transitioned in the past couple of years into doing the architecture.”

Chopson makes a point of positioning Cove as “AI-powered but human-centered,” which in practical terms means that the firm’s 10-person software department works in tandem with the architects on staff, applying AI to each part of the design process. In fact, a significant piece of their explorations up to this point have been about analyzing those parts of the process. He calls it the “ontology of design,” adding, “we’re not trying to produce the outcome. We’re designing the process of using AI.” As an example, he takes a five-story garden apartment building. They’ve identified the roughly 87 steps involved to create one, from concept to construction drawings, and mapped out which ones can be executed by computers and which ones must be done by humans. “You always want to keep both things happening at the same time,” Chopson says. “The quantifiable stuff, the details, are what we want the machines to think about, and the unquantifiable stuff—design excellence, beauty—is what we want the humans to think about.” 

Curiously, he’s every bit as skeptical about the current limitations of AI as Bernstein. “We don’t believe that a generalized LLM is capable of thinking about the problem the right way, because it’s based on previous knowledge,” Chopson says. “It’s why only about 10% of our system uses LLMs. The rest of it is code we’ve written ourselves. Obviously, if you have AI generate something based on the most-likely statistical outcomes, then everything will look the same … if you only use AI.” And, perhaps curiouser still, Chopson talks about feeding hand drawings into the model, combining the details handled by the machine with the intangibles often required by architects. “That way,” he says, “you’re not shunted into a particular workflow by an AI image generator that’s trained on the average building of that type.”

“One of the things we’ve learned from the owners is, they’re paying the architect to manage the risk in the coordination of the building,” Patrick Chopson says. “The more you can deliver on derisking their investment, the more they’re willing to pay.”

All of this sounds perfectly plausible and appears to have a logical endgame: significantly reducing the amount of time between a building’s conception and the completion of accurate, finished drawings. Some architects understandably fear that big reductions in that time frame will inevitably result in lower fees and a race to the bottom, once everyone has the same AI tools, but Chopson, as you might expect, remains a tech-optimist. “One of the things we’ve learned from the owners is, they’re paying the architect to manage the risk in the coordination of the building,” he says. “The more you can deliver on derisking their investment, the more they’re willing to pay.” Currently, owners often hire a squadron of consultants to test and validate all of the assumptions made in drawings, essentially acting as backup, tasked with avoiding all of the costly complications of building construction. 

“Speed is also an essential function of how much they’re willing to pay,” Chopson adds. “They’re often taking on big construction loans that have high interest rates. The cost of holding the land while the design process is happening is pretty substantial. For a $50 million or $100 million project, it dwarfs the architecture fee. So you can essentially pay for yourself, and more, if you’re able to execute the job a month or two faster.” 

Chopson’s tech-optimism even extends to what an evolving AI might mean for young practitioners. Even in its awkward iterations, AI is exceptionally efficient at accomplishing, in seconds, what entry level architects have long been tasked with (those pesky details, the grunt work). When I ask him if he had any concerns about that, Chopson’s response is part marketing spin, part messianic belief in the cleansing power of technology (a long-held belief by futurists of every era). “To be honest, I would really like to eliminate entry-level grunt work,” he says. “I would rather have people think about beauty and design, and how the building fits together—the things we learned in school. I would rather our job look a lot more like school and a lot less like ‘I’m drawing bathroom details for the one-millionth time.’ I feel like we’re restoring the soul of architecture and bringing back that kind of master apprentice model from the late 1880s. That’s my goal.” It’s certainly an inspiring aspiration, but not an entirely convincing one. In the immediate term, it’s hard to see how the total obliteration of entry-level work, via AI, helps young people at the start of their careers. 

To Infinity and Beyond

It seems inevitable that at some point soon, two critical aspects of architecture will undergo significant change due to AI: how the actual work is done, and then, in turn, how architects get paid to do that work. The challenging financials are not a new discussion; the traditional business model for architects has been under siege for some time now, and that pressure is likely to intensify. Tools that drastically reduce the cost and delivery time of drawings will force a reckoning. “The business model of AEC firms, which is based on selling hours, is terminal under this new AI-driven condition,” Cesal says. “If the value of production drops, it’s naive to think that all of those savings will be plowed back into design.” 

Bernstein, Cesal, and Stasiowski have all long preached the virtues and utter necessity of what they call “value pricing,” encouraging architects to charge fees based on the financial return of good design rather than the time spent making it. The profession has not heeded this advice, but as technology continues to compress the time required to make drawings, AI might force a long-overdue change. And where does all of this ultimately lead? The Utopians envision a world where architects master, rule, and oversee the emerging AI tools, allowing them to greatly expand both their purview and the market for designed buildings. (The dream of Total Design dies hard.) The Dystopians fear that AI will be co-opted by construction companies and real estate developers, as a fully automated design process is overseen by a mere handful of human designers, who stamp the drawings and cut out the architectural consultants entirely. 

Some tangled combinations of both seem possible. 

As for the actual work? In the past, architects might typically present a fully realized schematic and then enter into a discussion with the client about the pros and cons of each aspect. In five years’ time, AI powered firms might present 10 viable options along with precise schedule and budget calculations for each one. “The actual job is going to be quite different,” predicts Cesal, who envisions a much more managerial role, with architects overseeing the process as a sort of art director guiding multiple intelligences. We are, however, nowhere near that now. “Can AI design a building in its current iteration?” Cesal asks. “No. I don’t think it can replace what an architect can do, especially good architects. But the AI in five or six years, if trends hold, will literally be a million times more powerful than what we have today. Could an AI a million times more powerful do so? I think we’re going to find out.”  

Featured image created by Chatgpt. No AI tools were used in the composition of this work. However, interviews were transcribed by Notto, an AI transcription tool. The completed transcripts required review and revision by the author to ensure accuracy and clarity.

Architecture 2030 senior fellow and founder of the Climate Positive Design consultancy Pamela Conrad led the research behind the study, which analyzed over a dozen U.S. coastal projects using a new performance-based methodology. The findings are striking: nature-based solutions delivered up to 91% lower embodied carbon and averaged 30% cost savings compared with conventional approaches. I sat down recently with Conrad to discuss what this means for designers, policymakers, and coastal communities navigating the urgent need for adaptation that protects both people and the planet.

The Architecture of the Handmade

A handmade architecture composed of natural materials is a signature of the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. What is so important about handmade architecture? “An architecture shaped by human hands gives us comfort and rich experiences,” Kuma says. “I believe that such architecture is more like a living creature than an artificial object. Human hands give life to the building and people are nourished by it.” For Kuma, a wooden railing shaped by human hands, or buffed again and again by the hands of others, takes on a luster akin to long, silken hair lovingly brushed over and over. A stone wall that bears the marks of the mason’s chisel, an iron gate shaped with the blows of the metalworker’s hammer, reveal the personalities of those who wrought them. “I emphasize the emotions that humans can get from natural materials,” explains Kuma, “which can create a sense of delight and comfort, or even change one’s perception of the world.”

The places in which Kuma builds speak. As he has worked on sites farther afield from his native Japan (he currently has projects in about two dozen counties), his approach to the design of place has evolved with a consistency. He concludes that a country as an architectural entity is an abstraction. What is meaningful and rewarding is to make architecture in each locale using materials and talent unique to the location. His approach is to walk the site—slowly. “It is not easy for architects to be humble,” Kuma reflects, but good design demands a certain humility. Kuma must touch the ground with his own feet, touch the trees with his own hands, to feel the reality of a locale. “That is the start of the conversation with a place,” he says. 

To achieve a handmade architecture, Kuma collaborates not only with his colleagues at Kengo Kuma and Associates, but also with those who craft his designs. His method is to work closely with craftspeople who are indigenous to whatever place he is designing for. He describes such home-grown craftspeople as “the bridge, or the medium between the architecture and its location. Craftspeople can give a soul to an artificial structure.” How does he discover these gifted fabricators? Kuma employs a variety of methods: Conversations with the client and local people often uncover these creators. (Kuma likens the process to that of a good Buddhist priest, who gently visits a place and spends time honestly speaking with the people of that place.) But sometimes even an internet search might uncover potential collaborators. “When I work with the craftspeople, I would never force or insist on my idea with them,” says Kuma. “I try to know their work as much as possible and bring out their skills and ideas to the maximum.” In a sense, Kuma uses the design to conjure the best work out of the native craftspeople that he works with. 

Kuma collaborates with craftspeople in many ways, but never through words alone. A turning point in his evolution as an architect was to relocate his practice in the early 1990s from Tokyo to the countryside. For a decade he worked intimately on small-scale projects with craftspeople, which changed his work and how he collaborated with “native geniuses” (to use Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s term). “I often draw new sketches specifically for them to show what sort of details we aim for,” Kuma explains. “At a certain point in the construction we build a full-scale mock-up and check it carefully with them.” He is wary of using three-dimensional computer renderings or models in this process—he views them as abstractions that do not reveal the soul of the design in its details. Full-scale fabrications in the materials to be used are Kuma’s preferred way of collaborating with colleagues and craftspeople. Of the five senses, he relies most on visual and tactile sensibilities.

The Architecture of Small, Gentle, Soft 

Kuma came of age as an architect in Japan as the figures of Modern architecture reached their apex—architects such as Kenzō Tange, Arata Isozaki, Fumihiko Maki, and Tadao Ando—whose works were often hard-edged and unrelenting, made of anonymous materials such as steel, glass, and concrete. As Kuma matured, he came to perceive such architecture as disconnecting people with nature, cutting them off from life-giving qualities that can be found in such materials as stone, paper, textiles, and especially wood. “Wood is always small, gentle, and soft,” Kuma says. “Wood is humble.” 

Such natural materials were also the setting of Kuma’s childhood, particularly his home in the suburbs of Tokyo. In the late-1950s and ’60s he was brought up in satoyama—small, hilly woods that exist in suburban areas of Japan. He grew up next to a farm, feeling close to the animals the farm family kept there, and the surrounding woodlands. Kuma relates that as an architect he has benefited from these memories. His own family’s home was a 1940s traditional house, a single-story wooden structure, to which over the years his father added a series of extensions. “My father asked me to design and even build the structure together with him,” Kuma reflects, “so we shared the process of house-making, which eventually contributed to the way I work as an architect.”

It was a house of wood, paper, and tatami, and even today he recalls the scent of its materials, their textures—memories that can be triggered in the olfactory aftermath of a rainstorm. In Kuma’s recollection one cannot help but hear echoes of childhood recollections that shaped other designers, such as the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, who wrote in his book The Eyes of the Skin, “I cannot remember the appearance of the door to my grandfather’s farmhouse from my early childhood, but I do remember the resistance of its weight, the patina of its wood surface scarred by decades of use, and I recall especially vividly the scent of home that hit my face as an invisible wall behind the door.” 

The Architecture of Gentleness and Shadow

Kuma’s increasing attention to humble, natural materials has yielded a theoretical posture that embraces what he has called “Defeated Architecture,” one in opposition to the “Victorious Architecture” that characterized 20th century Modernism. Such architectural heroism, writes Kuma, resulted in buildings that used “the hard, strong, heavy material of concrete as a means of defeating the environment.” While I accept Kuma’s dichotomy of “defeated” versus “victorious,” and its architectural implications, I believe that better descriptors are at hand: an architecture that is compliant; an architecture of gentleness; buildings of compromise; environments of surrender. 

Kuma believes that when he wrote his book Architecture of Defeat more than 20 years ago, his theory and thought outpaced his actual work. Today he believes that projects completed in the past two decades reflect in one way or another an architecture that bends to touch the human spirit in tender ways, that has a spiritual dimension no matter what its function. We see abundant evidence of this in Kuma’s work, such as Mêmu Meadows, an experimental residence of textiles and wood, designed to safely respond to local seismic threats; Coeda House, made of randomly stacked cedar boards that appear to grow into a single, spreading bough supporting a delicate, sheltering pyramidal roof; the Portland Japanese Garden Cultural Village, a congeries of deferential pavilions gently inserted into the existing, wooded natural environment, to create a courtyard that opens on one side to gardens; and the Community Market Yusuhara, a farm market enclosure with a façade of thatch that recalls the roofs of traditional Cha Do tea houses that long ago provided hospitality to weary travelers.

As related to environments of compromise and the architecture of gentleness, Kuma detects a connection between such buildings and how they influence the people who encounter them, inhabit them, work and play in them. “It is often said that the people who you’ve met make you who you are,” Kuma notes, perceiving his buildings as persons. “You are shaped by the people surrounding you … if you have family and friends who are gentle and kind, you should naturally be influenced by them, and that is the same for architecture. That is one reason I tend to choose soft and weak materials for my projects.” 

Kuma’s architecture of gentleness, compromise, and servitude is infused with the qualities of wabi-sabi—the Japanese esthetic “of things modest and humble, imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” as described by the writer Leonard Koren. “Things wabi-sabi are usually small and compact, quiet and inward-oriented. They beckon: get close, touch, relate.” Koren notes that such qualities reduce the psychic distance between people and objects, as well as between people and nature. In its soundless directness, Kuma’s architecture is enveloped in mystery, things implied and not seen, merely hinted at. In this way, shadows play an important role in his work. Often Kuma creates a weave of solids and voids, light and shade, material nets that capture the magic of shadows like fish. The Sunny Hills Japan Taiwanese cake shop is such a weir—its intricate wooden members employing a jigoku-gumi construction technique. As do other projects by Kuma, Sunny Hills Japan manipulates light and shade to create dappled patterns on floors, walls, and the people who move through the stippled cascades. The delicate wooden façade bathes the interior in patterns of light, creating a sense of hamorebi—light filtered through the leaves of trees. You find yourself in a virtual forest clearing, with sunlight and shade sifting through layers of wooden slats. Kuma cloaks these spaces in the mystery of shadow and shade, creating what the late author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki described in his book In Praise of Shadows as the “beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.” Kuma observes of his own architecture: “No shadow means no spirit.”

Featured image: The elegantly spreading Coeda House is supported by a single central support of stacked cedar members. Photo: Kawasumi-Kobayashi Kenji Photograph Office.