On Architecture As Political

Architecture is political. Full Stop. Not political in the party politics sense of the term, but political in the original sense of the word in that it affects the lives of citizens… we need to understand that the more insistently the flag of ideological or political neutrality is waved, the more the winds of spatial control are generated beneath it. The prioritizing of physical space over social space allows a certain reading of space to develop by default: emptied, simplified, and thus more manipulable. (p.124)

Till holds a harsh critique for architects when it comes to its reticence toward anything to do with the political or ethical dimensions of their work. He points to architecture’s persistent elevation of aesthetics and tectonics as a method of retreat from real questions of how architecture impacts the lives of people. For example, on the hype around new media approaches to form:

There is something desperate in the belief that generating formal complexity in the computer is necessarily going to lead to occupational and social complexity in the final building...The argument appears to be that there’s lots of new media and technology out there, so let’s represent them. Well, there’s also lots of poverty out there, but I don’t see much of that informing contemporary architectural discourse. Poverty doesn’t look good; media and technology do. The problem is that in the aestheticization of this freshness, the architect uncritically celebrates the conditions associated with the dominance of media and technology; on the one hand the saturation of private lives by corporate capital, on the other issues of the environmental crisis brought on by the decadent exploitation of natural resources through technical means. (p.88)

You can feel Till’s frustration through his writing. The book takes a manifesto-like tone as he calls for a more earnest approach to ethics in architecture. In contrast to professional codes of ethics which tend to focus on economic and business protections for the architect and his client, he looks to a broader social grounding for his definition of ethics.

Ethics, to go back to my understanding of it, is the responsibility for the other; it is, at its core, to do with social relations. For the architect to engage in the ethical field therefore means to engage with how these (social) relations are played out in (social) space. The phony ethics of aesthetics and tectonics freeze that dynamic and place all the attention on the contemplation of the object beautiful and refined, a state of removal for both viewer and viewed that can be reached only away from the flux of everyday space. (pp.176-177)

I think, in part, the field of interaction design and the idea of “design thinking” was borne from similar sentiments of people in the fields of graphic and industrial design. They too felt a growing responsibility to design in ways that were more sensitive to the social and ecological contexts in which they were placed. This, along with factors like the development of systems thinking and the rise of network technology, are core influences of interaction design (as I would define it).

Till ties ethics to his main thesis about the value of contingency in architecture by pointing out that denying contingency (often cast as what is “other,” wrong, or something to be fixed) usually has the side-effect of marginalizing the people architecture is meant to serve.

The war on ambivalence and the ridding of contingency are not benign processes. It might appear that the normalizing pursuit of order and certainty is self-evidently sensible… But in fact the normalizing disguises a stealthy process of the marginalization of difference… (p.39)

One last point from Till on ethics that I felt worth calling out, since it’s something I’ve thought about in situations at work:

A client may argue that they are not paying for an architect to address these broader ethics, and an architect may say that the whole idea of wider responsibilities smacks of idealism. But the point is that issues of social ethics are inherent in the design of any building, and just to ignore them does not mean that they will go away. (p.182)