The future ain’t here

What should architecture aspire to be?

Where does the natural environment end and where does architecture begin?

What does sustainable architecture mean?

How can architects make technology relevant to a design context?

What is and isn’t a public amenity?

How does architecture go beyond spectacle?

How does architecture deal with gentrification?

These were some of the questions I asked myself as I read The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings , by Marc Kushner, published recently as a TED Original book. In 2009 Kushner brought about a revolution in the architectural community by co-founding Architizer — a social media platform for the community to communicate with the world at large. For the last three years, the Architizer A+ Awards have been decided by a jury “comprising equal parts architects, designers, cultural thought leaders and developers (the people who actually hire architects!)”. The 100 buildings this book talks about come from the awards process and have been “supplemented by exhaustive research, conversations and personal experience” of the author.

The premise of this book is Kushner’s TED talk titled ‘Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by... you’. Kushner argues that the process of receiving feedback on a design idea has traditionally been a slow process for an architect. A building takes much longer to build than it does to design. Once built, it takes time for people to inhabit a building, experience it and form an opinion about it.

Multiple opinions coalesce into a general impression about the building that ultimately determines if the architect’s initial idea is deemed a success or a failure. Kushner explains how social media short-circuits this traditional process of feedback. With design software, an architect can produce photo-realistic renderings of a building before it is built, and receive feedback by disseminating these simulated images on social media. This, according to Kushner, brings architects closer to the general public that uses their buildings, and allows the lay person to influence design, thus making architecture more democratic and transparent.

Kushner’s speech is full of irreverent jokes, personal anecdotes and examples of innovation in contemporary architecture. His talk checks all the boxes that Benjamin Bratton — in his TEDx San Diego 2013 talk titled ‘New Perspectives: What’s Wrong with TED Talks?’ — lists as making for a good TED Talk.

Unfortunately, Kushner’s talk and book also check all the boxes of Bratton’s lists of things that are wrong with TED as a forum — namely, that they are often about “My work, my new book. Usual spiel.”

Bratton continues to say, in his deadpan tone, that the TED framework promotes oversimplification to the point of being “middle-brow, mega-church, infotainment” that incites “a fleeting moment of wonder, a sense that maybe it’s all going to work out after all, spiritual buzz...” in the audience. Can people really instantly evaluate and affect design through their ‘re-tweets’ and ‘Likes’?

Kushner’s book takes one hundred buildings (each of which has taken a team of architects and engineers a significant amount of time and effort to design, and even more to construct), and reduces them to a few pictures and a short paragraph with inane conclusions, such as “Architecture gives you wings” or “The line between art and architecture can be a curvy one.”

While the book could have been a concise survey of innovative contemporary architecture, its origins in the internet are what lead to its downfall. The fundamental difference between a webpage and the printed page of a book is the hypertext in the former. Hypertext, in the form of clickable web links, connects one piece of information to other pieces of information — which can be more hypertext, images, video, or any form of multimedia — on the internet. This is what ultimately creates the World Wide Web.

Architects posting their projects on Architizer generally have links to their own websites as well as those of contractors, consultants, clients and building component manufacturers. If you click on a thumbnail image on Architizer it will enlarge to fill your screen and show viewer comments and discussions. The 5”x7” pages of Kushner’s book, however, contain only plain text and images that will fit on the screen of a phablet, but without the ability to pinch-zoom. The result is an artefact that is born of the internet but squanders its heritage. Sloppy editing in the form of factual errors and text that is often rendered unreadable as it merges into background images don’t help either.

The selection of projects in the book lacks diversity. While there are projects from Mumbai to Beijing to the surface of the moon, most examples of non-Western buildings are designed by Western architects. Still, there are some gems hidden in the pages of this book, such as a proposed retirement community in Florida with undulating floors that challenge its ageing residents to stay mentally and physically fit (building #28), or the canopy collaboratively woven by robots and silkworms (building #91) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The most compelling projects in the book are those in which the complexity of the design comes through even in the few sentences and images describing them — like the Metropol Parasol (#20) — Google it! — or the floating, water-filtering public swimming pool (#72).

Returning to the questions that I asked myself as I read the book, I asked them because the projects in the book compelled me to, and because of what the book suggested through its omissions.

While this book may not point to it, architecture does seem to have a future.

( Ayodh Kamath blends craft, design and digital technologies at Kamath Design Studio, Delhi, and teaches at LTU, Michigan, US)