Erosion of Architectural Types

 The project of modernity was, in part, a project of liberation: from tradition, from the load-bearing wall, from fixed plans and from inherited forms of construction. Architecture sought greater freedom to organise space according to the new social and technological possibilities of the twentieth century, shaped by—and, in part, demanded by—the post war socialist project.

Yet the freedom gained from these constraints produced another kind of constraint. As architecture became detached from the social institutions, civic structures and state that had helped generate architectural types, generic buildings became easier to transfer from use value to exchange value. Homes, workplaces and civic buildings could increasingly be abstracted from their particular uses and reduced to as transactional “assets”. What began as a liberation from construction gradually became a constraint of finance.

The story that follows is therefore not simply one of technological progress or architectural style. It is a story of how one form of freedom created the conditions for another system of constraint: from construction to flexibility, from flexibility to genericity, and ultimately from genericity to financial viability.

THE GIFT OF PROMETHEUS // FROM CONSTRUCTION TO GENERIC:

The terrace, courtyard house, townhouse, mansion block and mews were not simply formal inventions. They emerged from combinations of structure, climate, land, culture and patterns of inhabitation. The type was knowledge accumulated into form. Before the modern structural frame, construction and architectural type were deeply intertwined. The masonry wall determined the depth of the building, the size of openings, the relationship between rooms and the way buildings met the street. Construction generated architecture.

Dom-Ino disrupted this relationship. By separating structure from enclosure, it made the plan potentially free: walls could move, façades could become independent and interiors could be reorganised without fundamentally altering the structural system. What had once been a specific architectural type could increasingly become a generic container.

But this liberation did not begin with Dom-Ino. The elevator had already begun to transform the economics of the city. In 1853, Elisha Graves Otis introduced the safety brake that made passenger elevators viable; in 1857, the first permanent Otis passenger elevator was installed at the E.V. Haughwout Building in New York. The elevator did more than liberate the city from height. It transformed height into value. By making upper floors accessible, it allowed a fixed plot of land to support an expanding quantity of rentable or saleable space. Chicago and New York became laboratories for this new vertical economy, as technological advances and rapidly rising land values encouraged increasingly tall buildings. The elevator therefore removed not only a physical ceiling but an economic one. Once height could be converted into value, the limit was no longer the plot but how high capital could build.

The structural frame extended this transformation from the scale of the city to that of the building. If the elevator made vertical accumulation possible, the frame made the resulting volume increasingly flexible: structure could be separated from enclosure, plans reorganised and façades detached from the logic of load-bearing construction. The subsequent development of reinforced concrete, steel frames, mechanical systems and curtain walls intensified this separation. Structural grids could be repeated, services concentrated and envelopes applied independently. From Berlin to Beijing, London to Riyadh, buildings could increasingly be produced through variations of the same underlying proposition: grid, core, slab and envelope.

This is where Rem Koolhaas's Generic City becomes significant. Writing in the 1990s, Koolhaas recognised that globalisation was producing cities increasingly detached from the burdens of history, identity and particularity. The Generic City was not simply an accusation of architectural sameness; it was an attempt to understand a new urban condition in which genericity itself became an advantage.

THE TROJAN HORSE // FROM GENERIC TO AN ASSET

As cities became increasingly integrated into global systems of finance, property became more than a physical necessity. It became a principal vehicle through which capital could be stored, invested and reproduced. Reinier de Graaf has written extensively about this transformation, particularly the position of real estate within contemporary capitalism. The building acquires a second identity: not simply as a place, but as an asset.

A home, office or hotel can simultaneously be land value, an income stream, collateral, an investment product or a development opportunity. Once architecture enters this financial system, its characteristics are evaluated through a different vocabulary: floor area, efficiency, yield, rental value, construction cost, finance, risk and residual land value.

The present day shell-and-core building is the perfect expression of this condition. Its value lies in its neutrality: a structural frame, core, envelope and basic services can be delivered without determining precisely who will occupy it or how it will ultimately be configured. That neutrality makes the building transferable. It can be sold, leased, fitted out, subdivided, reconfigured or converted. The more standardised the floorplate, the easier it becomes to price, compare and finance.

The separation of structure from architecture produced the flexible building. Globalisation extended this logic into the generic city. Financialization discovered the value of buildings that could be transferred, adapted and reproduced with relatively little friction. The free plan became the flexible floorplate; the generic building became the financial asset. The building becomes something that can be modelled financially before it is built. And this changes architectural selection.

THE CURSE OF MIDAS // FROM ASSET TO VIABILITY

No one needs to outlaws the terrace, abolish the courtyard house or declare the mansion block obsolete. Land value, construction cost, finance, yield and risk quietly decide what gets built. A type that requires more circulation, a less efficient floorplate or more complex construction becomes harder to finance—and eventually harder to build. Nothing is prohibited. It is simply made unviable. This is the market’s quiet “coercion”: it does not tell architecture what it cannot be. It determines what can afford to exist.

Nothing is prohibited. It is simply priced out of existence. This may be one of the most powerful force shaping the contemporary city because it operates without appearing to make an architectural decision.

HOUSE OF CARDS // WHAT DO WE LOSE?

Consider the terrace. Its value does not lie simply in the repetition of individual houses, but in the relationship between party walls, front doors, gardens, street frontage and density. Courtyard housing, mews, perimeter blocks and mansion blocks similarly derive much of their value from relationships between building, street and collective space. These forms are not necessarily inefficient. They are simply efficient according to a different logic.

That distinction matters because the development model can privilege the measurable efficiency of the generic floorplate over qualities whose value is distributed across the urban whole. When that happens repeatedly, types can disappear without ever being declared obsolete. The financial model has therefore become an architectural editor. It does not merely determine whether something can be built; it increasingly influences what kind of building is worth building.

Can a courtyard compete with the tower? Can a terrace achieve contemporary densities? Can the perimeter block, mansion block or mews be made compatible with contemporary construction and finance? More fundamentally, can the value of a street, a threshold, a garden or a particular relationship between public and private space be recognised when it does not translate neatly into a development appraisal?

Perhaps this is the deeper tragedy of the contemporary city. The problem is no longer simply that certain forms are unfashionable or inefficient. The economic system increasingly determines the limits of architectural possibility and imagination before architecture even begins.

SISYPHUS // END OF HISTORY

The trajectory from Dom-Ino to the Generic City and finally to the financially optimised building is therefore not simply a history of technology or style. It is a history of increasing abstraction: first architecture from structure, then the city from place, and finally the building from architecture itself.

Here Manfredo Tafuri’s (Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development 1976) darker reading of modernity becomes relevant. For Tafuri, architecture’s heroic claim to transform society increasingly collided with the realities of ever assimilating Capitalist development. Its critical ambitions were absorbed into the very system it sought to challenge. What appeared as architectural freedom could become another instrument of production.

The load-bearing wall constrained architecture; the modern frame liberated it. Globalisation made genericity desirable. Capital made it profitable. And perhaps, in Tafuri’s terms, this is where architecture confronts its own “end of history”: not the disappearance of architecture, but the exhaustion of its claim to produce radically different possibilities outside the logic of the market and in service of society.

 Architecture escaped the constraints of construction only to encounter the constraints of capital.

Post Babel: Death of Craftsman

One of the important texts in the history of modern architecture is Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime,” written in 1908. Loos argued that ornament had become unnecessary — and, more importantly, that it represented a waste of human labour, material and time. Architecture should no longer be burdened by the decorative traditions of the past simply because they had been inherited from previous generations.

His argument can be understood through five central ideas:

1. Ornament was economically wasteful. Decorative details required additional labour, craftsmanship and material without necessarily improving the function of an object or building. For Loos, this was not merely an aesthetic problem; it was an economic one. A society should not continue investing enormous amounts of labour into things whose primary purpose was decoration.

2. Ornament represented an earlier stage of civilisation. Loos suggested that as societies developed, their need for decoration diminished. The modern individual should not need to surround themselves with elaborate ornament in order to express status, identity or cultural sophistication.

3. Architecture needed to respond to modern life. The world in which Loos was writing was changing rapidly. Cities were expanding, industrial production was transforming economies, new materials were becoming available and objects were increasingly being manufactured rather than individually crafted. Architecture could no longer simply reproduce the visual language of the past.

4. Architectural quality did not require decoration: Architecture could derive its richness from proportion, space, material, construction and composition, rather than from applying ornament as a superficial layer.

5. Architecture should express its own time. A modern society equipped with modern technologies and new systems of production should not continue dressing its buildings in the architectural language of previous centuries.

What I find particularly interesting about Ornament and Crime is it sits at a fascinating moment in history when industrialisation was fundamentally changing the relationship between society, production and the things we used every day.

The emergence of mass production created an entirely different logic. Instead of producing an individually crafted chair, lamp, door handle or building component through hours of skilled labour, industry could increasingly produce thousands of identical objects efficiently and cheaply. Standardisation became an economic advantage. Repetition became a virtue rather than a deficiency.

In that context, Loos's rejection of ornament aligned remarkably well with the emerging industrial economy.

• The simpler the object, the easier it was to standardise.
• The more standardised it became, the easier it was to manufacture.
• The easier it was to manufacture, the more widely it could be distributed.

And suddenly, architecture was no longer simply about designing individual buildings. It became part of a much larger transformation in which the entire material environment of society could be designed, manufactured and distributed at scale.

These principles eventually proliferated into furniture, interiors, products, graphics, transportation, appliances and virtually every other aspect of the designed environment. The modern world increasingly became a world of standardised objects: chairs, lights, windows, kitchens, cars, telephones, appliances and eventually entire building systems. Thus rejection of ornament therefore became intertwined with something much bigger: the industrialisation of design itself.

Architecture moved away from the idea of the building as a unique, handcrafted object and towards the idea of the building as something that could be rationalised, systematised and potentially mass-produced.

And here, for me, lies the great irony. Loos was attacking ornament partly because he saw it as a symbol of wasted labour — yet his rejection of ornament arrived at precisely the moment when industrial capitalism was developing the capacity to produce the material world at unprecedented scale.

What began as a cultural and architectural critique of ornament consequently became part of a much larger transformation in the relationship between architecture, technology, economics and society. There is something almost paradoxical about this trajectory.

Loos was, in many ways, arguing for less: less decoration, less waste, less unnecessary labour, less attachment to the past. Industrial modernity took that principle and turned it into more: more objects, more buildings, more production, more consumption and ultimately more of the same designed environment reproduced across society.

In parallel, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in the 1930s, looks at a related transformation, but from the perspective of art rather than architecture. His concern was not simply that technology could reproduce artworks; it was that mechanical reproduction fundamentally changed what an artwork was, how it was experienced and what gave it its cultural authority.

The consequence was not simply that there were more images. It was that the relationship between production and consumption had fundamentally changed. The artwork no longer necessarily needed to be experienced as a unique object created through the hand of an individual maker. It could become an image, a reproduction, a commodity and a mass cultural experience. And I think this is where Benjamin's argument begins to speak directly to architecture.

Because architecture was undergoing a remarkably similar transformation- of the building itself was increasingly becoming detached from the individual act of making it.

• The craftsman was gradually replaced by the industrial worker.
• The workshop was replaced by the factory.
• The individually made component was replaced by the standardised product.
• The knowledge accumulated through generations of making was increasingly separated from the person who designed the building.
• A building could now be conceived in one place, documented in another, manufactured somewhere else and assembled by hundreds of people who might never have met the architect — or even understood the building as a complete work.

This was an extraordinary gain in productive capacity. But it also represented a profound cultural loss.

The medieval or traditional craftsman was not simply a pair of hands executing somebody else's instructions. Their knowledge was embedded in the material itself: knowing how stone fractures, how timber behaves, how a joint should be made, how ornament relates to structure, how a particular material should be handled. The act of making was itself a form of knowledge.

In this sense, I see the crisis of modern architecture as part of the same crisis Benjamin identified in art. Mechanical reproduction did not merely change the appearance of things; it changed our relationship with the act of making them. Architecture, perhaps more than almost any other discipline, embodies this contradiction. Modernism gave us extraordinary possibilities: standardisation, efficiency, affordability, new materials, new construction techniques and the possibility of providing better environments to millions of people rather than a privileged few. But the same process also progressively displaced the craftsman from the centre of architectural production.

The building became a product of systems rather than the expression of a continuous chain of human making. And perhaps this is the deeper story behind the transition from ornament to modernity.

We often tell the history of Modernism as a story of liberation — liberation from historical styles, unnecessary decoration and outdated conventions. And there is truth in that. But I think it can also be understood as a story of displacement.

We displaced ornament. Then we displaced craft. Then we displaced the craftsman. And replaced them with an alienated workforce, separated from the material, process and final product of their own labour.

And perhaps that is the real crisis that both Loos and Benjamin, in very different ways, help us see: the transformation of culture from something made through human hands and embedded in particular places into something that could be reproduced, standardised and distributed at scale across the globe (goods, services and labour).

Architecture did not escape the crisis of mechanical reproduction. It became one of its largest and most permanent expressions. The modern environment was no longer simply designed. It was manufactured.

who MAKES?

Increasingly architects are told within the academic as well as professional sphere to imagine architecture as a collective effort, similar to an orchestra, where through the collective efforts of multiple specialists who shoulder no responsibility towards the ACT OF MAKING a manifestation / condensation of all the input, all the feedback, all the data, constraints, opportunities, stakeholder engagements, policy compliance etc each Specialist / Social Scientist / Stakeholder / Client and Investor even will claim merit for MAKING "it" happen and therefore MAKING it...according to me ludicrous situation, similar to say a Paint manufacturer or Gallery owner or the Buyer can claim merit for works of the Artist. 

An excerpt from interview by an upcoming practice SER Architects:

"What needs to change in the field of architecture according to you?

From our point of view architecture needs to change starting from the figure of the architect. By eliminating the common understanding of a mastermind seeking the next masterpiece that will become an icon in history, we believe that architecture could find its way into the background of life and become an enabler and a guide rather than an imposer. We should be offering spaces of possibilities, rather than forcing the signature of a person onto the lives of other people. We think that architecture should be rather understood as a matter of relations than as matter of objects."

Their response above captures the current position architects increasingly find themselves in and often, like here start believing in what is being virtue signaled.

In an orchestra one only imagine the absence one would feel if the pianist or the violinist didn't show up! Ofcourse every musician would lend their own personal touch to the the composition through their presence and years of practice, but will they claim credits to the composition itself? or would one walk up to a Composer and say it is a collective effort and try not to make music as if its your next masterpiece and a milestone in history instead blend with the ambient sounds of the forest or better still let the musicians compose. Before a smartarse says "Jazz!", the musicians there play the role of composers that need probably significantly more discipline and ability to play a dual role of playing music and simultaneously composing in real time...they haven't relinquished the ACT of MAKING, they still PLAY and CREATE music.

Architecture as a profession still MAKES and it needs to take and be given credit for that. We would often lean on the expertise or specialisms or knowledge of others but the intentionality or compositional decisions or hierarchy of priorities are being pulled together by Architect. If anything, going by the abysmal quality of our buildings, cities and world we need some solid mastermind hero architects who take pride and confidence in putting pen to paper and calling out shit.

Work

When Gregor Samsa woke up transformed into an insect, his first concern was not to be late for work, Kafka's Metamorphosis (1915), summing up human existence, or specifically working class human existence.

Bombay / Mumbai

I left Bombay 16 odd years ago. So every visit, is a snapshot in time. I witness Bombay transforming into Mumbai, a different city from the one I fondly remember growing up in. I often find myself searching for familiarity, an accidental artifact omitted by the wave of reconstruction, a compound wall, a tree, an edge, a gutter, a road, a building even, embedded like shrapnel within the new, accumulating dust, soot and memories. Like China Mielville’s The City and the City, the two cities coexist one renewed other in decay. The street I grew up in has changed from four storeys to twenty storeys, spaces in between reduced to mere offsets. The building that has my childhood home lies in ruins, abandoned and uncared for in light of imminent reconstruction. Views of the surrounding tropical landscape once afforded by these four storey buildings, have been replaced by collage of windows. Windows that bombard you with varying shades of light and sounds from lives of others that look towards you as voyeuring, co-witnesses of an imminent, deliberate, collective tragedy...Only place where my beloved suburban Bombay survives is in my friend, Kiran's home in a small gifted painting, preserved in time for us to reminisce and savour nostalgia of spaces lost.

Nice Quote

Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe said, "Architecture is the Will of an Epoch translated into Space".

Christmas and Architecture

Robert A. Scott in the book “The Gothic Enterprise: A guide to understanding the Medieval Cathedral” writes “We might also imagine that the long time required to build Gothic Cathedrals added to the depth of the collective identity they engendered. It almost seemed to serve their purpose that they should not be completed too quickly. It takes time for collective identity to form, develop and harden. The knowledge that Canterbury Cathedral, for example was 365 years in the making is very important part of the collective identity that has developed around it.

We are accustomed to asking how communities of people managed to build cathedrals, but we can turn the questions around and ask how cathedrals built communities. The sheer scale of the undertaking, which engaged generations of people as workers, witnesses and monitors, proponents and skeptics for periods of time measured not in decades but in centuries, strengthened existing forms of communitas and collective identity, and gave rise to new ones.”

Robert A. Scott above explores the connection between time, collective identity, and cathedral construction. The prolonged timelines of Gothic Cathedrals, like Canterbury, where 365 years were invested, contributed significantly to the depth of the collective identity surrounding them. Scott suggests that the deliberate pace of construction allowed for the gradual formation, development, and solidification of collective identity.

Shifting perspective, we contemplate not only how communities built cathedrals but also how cathedrals, through their monumental scale and multi-generational engagement, played a pivotal role in shaping and reinforcing existing forms of communities. 

The enduring construction site of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona exemplifies this evolution, where the Cathedral continues to be constructed through technological advancements afforded by passage of time.

The 2019 Notre Dame fire served as a contemporary example, revealing how the restoration efforts galvanized a global community. The swift mobilisation of funds, the involvement of over 1000 workers, and the use of centuries-old oak trees from across France underscored the enduring relationship between buildings and the communities they symbolise.

This dynamic interplay between communities and structures extends beyond cathedrals to encompass various religious and institutional buildings worldwide. The lesson for modern designers and patrons aspiring to create transformative urban spaces or “symbols of excellence” is clear: time is indispensable. The rush to achieve ambitious goals devoid of temporal investment risks rendering projects mere follies, devoid of the profound impact that the passage of time can bestow.