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.