Recently, the entire staff at CnT Architects, the firm in which I am a partner, gathered for a collective brainstorming on the criteria on which we should found our critique of architecture. This text emerges from that discussion. As it lays out what we will do in our practice, it is positioned as a manifesto rather than an academic treatise.

A resolution of this question is important to us given we seek to define CnT as a practice that is passionate about design but is not personality centric. The profession has conventionally defined its cutting edge in terms of the names of creative personalities. While many of these personalities have created wonderful architecture, this model of practice has not served the profession adequately as it breeds a culture of heroes and followers rather than a deep and widespread culture of critical creativity. It also breeds a self-referential culture where the laudatory celebration of star architects within the profession and architectural press does not find an echo in public appreciation.

The reason for an eschewing of personality as the core of practice is simple. Imagine two demographically similar groups. In the first group, every person has a conscience, has strong internal ethical anchors that derive from this conscience, and the culture of the group is a weave of the ethical discernment of the individuals who constitute it; a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second group, only the leader has a conscience, and the rest of the group follows the ethics prescribed by the leader. It is evident the first group lives at an existential level that is richer, more resilient, and with a higher capacity for empathy.

This demands the entire practice, as a culture, must hold the capacity to rigorously critique architecture in a mode that transcends the preferences of any individual. This culture must contain clarity on the standards of critique by which one can look beyond the work’s appearance to assess its quality and underlying values, choose between design alternatives, make commitments to designs as deserving of further detailing, and appraise the worthiness of the work before release into the public domain. 

The reason for the discussion we held, and its ensuing manifesto, is to make this critique explicit and broad-based within the practice.

Our manifesto on architectural criticism posits four frames for critiquing architecture, and all four must be deployed.

Frame 1: INTEGRITY

As a basic threshold, architecture must establish its own integrity as a discipline. A failure to do so has led to a reliance on defining itself through other disciplines: art, engineering, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, and so on. The core of our discipline is the ordering of space and material for inhabitation: it is only the spatial design disciplines that accept this challenge as their calling. This leads to four dimensions of integrity:

Spatial Integrity: Louis Kahn referred to architecture as “The society of rooms…..the place where it is good to learn, good to live, good to work.” The elements of a design should belong to a harmonious society, each supporting and respondying to the other, each in balance to the other without claiming undue attention to itself. No element should be out of place or disproportionate to the other, and the spatial order suggested by any one element should find its echo in others.

The organisation of the entire ensemble of spaces should reflect an exactitude that easily evokes its own image within the inhabitant’s mind and body, offering a feeling of belonging to the design and a sense of orientation to one’s place within the universe. 

Hierarchies of Inside: Architecture should not be slotted into a binary of inside/outside. As Juhani Pallasmaa has pointed out, architecture has privileged the visual at the cost of the other senses, that too, a particular kind of vision: central, focused vision. This gaze creates a distance, a separation between spectator and object. In contrast, it is peripheral vision that immerses us within space.

A consequence of this bias is that architects tend to privilege the precise delineations of forms that focused vision picks up over the subtle gradations of scale, texture, colour, and shadow that underpin peripheral vision. This creates a bias toward a heroic formalism that stands apart from its context, conceived for a compelling perception from a neutral position of ‘outside’. 

This assumption of a neutral ‘outside’ has done great damage to urbanism and ecology, instilling a lack of concern for anything beyond the boundaries of a project. Architecture should realise that whatever it touches is implicated in what surrounds it by the mere fact of it being on earth. 

Architecture has no outside; there are only hierarchies of inside. A failure to recognise this destroys the integrity of what architecture is meant to be.

Tectonic Integrity: Every material has an inherent nature. For example, each species of wood has inherent structural properties, behaves differently when cut along the grain versus against the grain, and has its unique aura. This is the same with all materials, whether metal, stone, concrete, glass, or plastic. Architecture must respect the integrity of its tectonic components, with a full appreciation of their inherent behaviour, constructional logic, and aura. 

Ecological Integrity: Architecture is always located within an ecosystem, even in the most urban contexts. It should respect the integrity of the ecosystems it enters, rather than violating them through disregard. Architecture should draw its aura from the consciousness of the sun, wind, rain, earth, vegetation.

Frame 2: EMPATHY

While architecture must protect its autonomy as a discipline, this should not lead to an inward-looking self-referential culture. Architecture is an inherently public art in the way it forces itself into people’s everyday lives. This places ethical constraints that limit the didactic freedoms afforded to other arts that have the luxury of being more private. An architect is ethically bound to demonstrate empathy to the inhabitants who enter the constructed work, and the work must be substantively shaped by this empathy. This implicates the following dimensions:

Empathy to the Human Body: The first measure of architecture is taken by the inhabiting human body, and architecture should respect this measure. Firstly, it should offer an exactitude through which the body can orient itself within the world. Secondly, the measures of its composition should respect the scale of the body. This was done as a matter of course in most older traditions of architecture: the smallest element in a façade could always be linked to the scale of the body, and the jump from this scale to the next higher scale was never too large. It is only in architecture of the last century that we find a single material being stretched unbroken across multiple floors, or a wide prevalence of imposing forms whose scale intimidates the experiencing body. 

A deep respect for the experiencing body should form the foundation of architectural composition.

The Inevitable Silence of the Architect: Architects tend to believe that it is primarily their creative intentions and abilities that inject meaning into the work. This springs from the way we are trained. In architecture schools we are always standing next to our work and talking about it: explaining it to a teacher in a studio crit, defending it to an end-of-semester jury. 

In contrast, in actual practice, once the construction of an architect’s design is completed and handed over for inhabitation, that architect is forever silent. From that moment on, the work must speak for itself in the absence of the architect. Unlike performing arts like music or dance, that are most alive in the presence of the artist, architecture is an art that must be alive in the absence of the artist.

No architect should begin a practice without first acquiring the humility to come to terms with this inevitable moment of silence. 

Inhabitation and the Aesthetics of Absorption: Citing Adolf Loos, David Heymann points out that architects usually design as if their work must be interpreted before it is experienced. This not only leads to a tendency to desecrate landscape, but it also divorces architecture from the importance of inhabitation in producing architectural meaning.

Acts of inhabitation produce their memories that become associated with the spaces that shape them. With the passage of time, a space becomes inextricably woven with memories of experiences it has catalysed, and these memories become as much a constituent of the space’s aura as the organisation of its physical materials and proportions. Architecture must design to catalyse memory, and this goal changes one’s design approach: for example, in designing a house with an eye toward catalysing memory, attention becomes attracted toward the presence of, and relationship between, verandas, steps, bookshelves, niches, bay windows and other tectonic elements that are innately sticky to memory.

This is an aesthetic that accrues over time, an aesthetic of absorption, that stands in sharp contrast to the aesthetic of expression that most architects pursue. If meaning in architecture was primarily dependent on the ideas of the architect, how would the power of a communicated idea survive the boredom of repetitive daily inhabitation that most architecture is subjected to? The aesthetic of expression is biased toward the consideration of first impressions, a bias that works only within the formats of publications and lectures, leading to a self-referential culture where architects are primarily designing for other architects, and the constituencies they are ethically obliged to serve receive insufficient recognition.

Architecture must recognise how it is energised by human inhabitation. The test of good architecture rests less on the power of first impression than in the deep affection induced and accrued by many years of the quality of inhabitation it has enabled.

Frame 3: EMANCIPATION

Habit tends to be an anaesthetic. When we repeat a habit unthinkingly, such as driving on the familiar route between home and work, we tend to do it on autopilot with our mind elsewhere and can complete the task with no memory of the process of undertaking it. We may have missed a beautiful and unexpected experience or sight because of our preoccupation. 

Architecture must never become habitual, with design merely reproducing the familiar. Architecture must transcend the status quo to be an emancipatory art. The architect must cultivate a faculty of critical discernment so that creative design transcends mere novelty to offer to the inhabitant a foothold for enriching life.

The Knight’s Move: Close to a century ago, the Russian literary critic, Viktor Shklovsky, remarked that all art is like the knight’s move in chess: it is always one straight move plus one crooked move. The straight move offers empathy so that art is recognisable, but the crooked move ‘makes strange’, so that it displaces habit to makes one see the world with fresh eyes.

The straight move of architecture offers an exactitude that constructs the inhabitant’s sense of belonging to a place, to the world. The crooked move is one that enriches that belonging by provoking new prospects for existence. All architecture must make both moves.

Ambiguity and Hierarchies of Scale: Architecture must offer an ambiguous hierarchy of scales that enable multiple perceptions that respond to the inhabitant’s varied quests and desires in being on this earth. ‘Ambiguity’ is not to be confused with ‘vagueness’; vagueness means that no precise perception or reading is possible, whereas ambiguity offers multiple readings, each one of them precise, overlaid in a kind of palimpsest.  As Robert Venturi has argued, architecture must avoid the simplistic binary of ‘either/or’ and embrace the richness of ‘both/and’. 

The spatial integrity that architecture offers, the exactitude of spatial articulation by which inhabitants orient themselves on earth, should never be singular; it should be layered so that there are multiple possibilities at any one point in space and time. A person may be in an introverted mood and architecture offers a spatial articulation that allows that mood to be associated with the intimacy of a single room. The mood shifts to be more expansive, and without moving one’s body, it should be possible to now relate to a wider set of spaces. Then the orientation could change further, one that could even include the landscape that surrounds architecture.

The spatial articulation of architecture – in plan, section, and elevation – must always offer a layered hierarchy of scales that enable a rich multitude of possibilities for inhabitation.

Possibilities of Being: Architecture must always offer new ways of coming together as humans, new modes of collaboration and conviviality, new ways of relating built and natural space, and much more. It should avoid the tired repetition of the habitual and the familiar, realising that it is a fundamental human impulse to reach for the stars and aspire for a better life. Each act of architecture must be a quest for new possibilities of being.

Frame 4: TRANSCENDENCE

The philosopher of religion, Huston Smith, in a quest to identify the primordial tradition that underpins all religions, identifies three dimensions of such a tradition:

  1. Reality is not at a single level and is multi-layered. Smith identifies four levels found in major faith traditions: (i) the terrestrial level of physical reality; (ii) the subliminal level of ideals, dreams, emotions, archetypes; (iii) the celestial level, that knows the sacred through form and attribute; and (iv) the infinite level, where awareness of the sacred is beyond form or attribute. 
  2. These levels are not separate entities, they are different dimensions of a greater unity.
  3. These levels are not abstract constructs, there is anecdotal evidence of people experiencing all four levels.

It is not necessary that we subscribe faithfully to Smith’s analysis, but his argument brings focus to bear on the fact that it is inherently human to be moved by a reality that is greater than the mundane or individual, that we are drawn toward greater realities like a moth to a flame.

Architecture must honour this inherent human impulse by always offering the experience of transcendence, whatever building type it seeks to construct.

The Joy of Existential Anchors: The first level of transcendence is the fact that we inhabit a cosmos whose reality is greater than that of our individual lives, and this must be reflected in our architecture. The dance of light, the movement of the sun, the feel of breeze on one’s skin, the variegated and seasonal rhythms of landscape, the fall of rain, the flow of water, the sound of birdsong, and so many other features of the world we inhabit serve to contextualise our lives, making our existence meaningful by anchoring it within a wider web of life.

The writer on nature, Michael McCarthy, argues that ecological understanding is usually promoted through a scientific discourse, weighed down by the immobilising language of statistics. We will become ecological only when we find joy in nature. Joy is different from happiness, fun or delight, which can be self-absorbed in their orientation, whereas joy always looks outward to something greater than the observer. It paradoxically weaves joyfulness with a seriousness that underpins our sense of being with moral weight.

Architecture must absorb all this within its aura so that it can offer us the joy of existential anchors. 

Recasting the Boundaries of the Project: Given that every architectural project has its spatial boundary, for a connection with infinity, that boundary must by constituted by markers of infinity such as: spatial interlock with a context to acknowledge a reality greater than the project; the presence of light; the presence of nature; a vista to the horizon or a landscape of distance; a rescaling of depth to emphasise awareness of the sky.

The Presence of Stillness: Transcendence is subtle, and its recognition demands a stillness of mind. Architecture must express self-similarity across a hierarchy of scales. The aura of details, the aura of subsets of the project, the aura of the whole project, must all resonate with each other such that stillness is evoked because the same aura is seen irrespective of how a body, or its gaze, moves across the project.

The Quest for Beauty: Displacing an earlier tradition of the master-builder, architecture, as a specialised design profession separated from the act of construction, emerged in the early 15th century during the Italian Renaissance. So, it has a history of about six centuries. In close to five out of these six centuries, a quest for beauty was central to architecture. The birth of modern architecture displaced this quest in the early 20th century, rebelling against the then conventions of defining beauty in terms of divine will, seeking a creativity unfettered by tradition so that it could leverage the latest offerings of technology and innovation and liberate architecture into being an agent of history who would play a crucial role in ushering in social progress.

This messianic zeal of early 20th century modernism has since fallen out of favour, but the discipline has never sought to replace this loss by recovering the quest for beauty, and currently lacks a philosophical core of idealism that stabilises its sense of purpose.

Beauty need not be defined either by the strictures of religion or the codifications of secular philosophy. It can be envisaged in experiential terms where inhabitation of the earth is imbued with the joy of being embedded into wider existential anchors.

One of the best definitions of beauty is by the German philosopher Gernot Bohme, who said, “Beauty is that which mediates to us the joy of being here.”  The architect bears a responsibility to cultivate a personal mastery of crafting space whose central quest is to offer us such a ‘here’.