Positive Social Agents

We strive for buildings to be positive social agents. Unfortunately, architecture’s potential to socially engineer has been weakened over the last 100 years through a false tension between form and function. This unfortunate dialectic has created either formal buildings that vaingloriously ignore rationality, or “functional” buildings which tend to look rational, but are not due to their over-dependence on convention in lieu of problem-specific thought. We proffer a third option: performance-based architecture that maximizes anything at its disposal – including form – to find constraint-specific, bespoke solutions. The measure of high performance is relative to each client’s aspirations and each project’s constraints. This third option enables architects to resurrect their agency.
 

We describe our design process as “productively losing control”. We return to root problems and doggedly explore them with a critical naiveté. Unprejudiced by convention, we expose solutions that transcend those we would have initially or individually imagined. Sometimes we discover uncharted territory; sometimes we rediscover forgotten territory that has renewed usefulness; sometimes we reaffirm conventions with assured conviction. Engaged intelligently, “contextual” challenges such as site conditions, budgets, schedules, codes, and politics are opportunities that can catalyze the most innovative solutions. Architectural concepts that capitalize on our clients’ constraints will surpass any vision that resists intractable realities. We produce specific designs that are highly effective, not universals diluted in application.
 

We design using the Socratic Method, a negative technique of hypothesis elimination often used in philosophical debate whereby stronger hypotheses are deduced by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. The Socratic Method demands we value the act of critique over the act of creation. We don’t care from whom an idea originates. When designing, our entire team puts forward concepts. We collectively attack them to see which withstand the assault and which fall apart. We then regroup, split the team up to develop the surviving ideas further, and repeat the process.
 

As mentioned before, seemingly rational solutions tend to bear an enormous amount of convention. We are committed to authoring processes that take rational exploration to its – almost absurd – limit. We have often labeled this dogged exploration as “hyper-rationality.” Prioritizing authorship of processes over authorship of things will unearth two new problems for which I am not sure our profession is prepared to engage. First, the term ‘authorship’ is singular, whereas processes usually germinate from a nucleus of people all of whom could rightfully claim ownership. Authorship (as we know it) will die. We will have to invent a new method of crediting: “We did it.” Second, as curators of processes, we must be prepared for ideas to develop out of our control. When architects invest in the making of genius sketches, they sleep in the comfort of knowing the realm of possibilities has been fully determined. If we put our faith in processes, we must enjoy the danger of things evolving. Following this line of argument, architects must paradoxically regain control precisely so that we can productively lose it again (hence, “productively losing control”).
 

To say REX “emphasizes process over form” misses the point. We employ a process that aspires to maximize everything at our disposal – including form – to attain high performance. To be clear, beauty is an extremely important tool for us; we just don’t preference it over any other potent tool. We don’t preference any tool. It is important to note that the aspiration of “hyper-rational” buildings is not only to perform unlike anything you have seen before, but – because they are one-off responses to a specific set of constraints – to not look like anything you have seen before, too. Their uniqueness gives them iconic power. Within our decision-making tree, beauty, aesthetic individuality, recognizability, and iconography are usually the final litmus tests for whether a hyper-rational design has maximized its potential.
 

Your question goes back to the root of REX’s assertion that architecture should do things again, not just represent things. Architecture increasingly “reflects” societal complexity with formal complexity. Architecture is reduced to being an anemic metaphor. By contrast, we believe architecture should be an agent in addressing the needs of growing societal complexity. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry mused, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” We agree. Ironically, by this logic, if architecture is successfully addressing the needs of growing societal complexity, it will do so in ways that “read” as edited to its essence. It is important to note that “edited to its essence” is not necessarily the same thing as “simple”; sometimes the most pure, distilled product of a set of complex constraints is similarly complex.
 

Massive development projects increasingly involve complex program mixes and/or public-private ventures, where design by a single architect is arguably not advantageous or even possible. Furthermore, the political processes surrounding these projects are complicated and vague, often requiring architectural solutions and imagery prior to determining the overall programmatic mix or commencing design on any individual program. Architecture’s prevalent responses to this scale have failed to adequately consider multiple authorship and programmatic indeterminacy. Strategic loss of control has been limited to “visions” and “critiques” that do not take implementation seriously (e.g. the megastructures of the past), or to promiscuous contraposition of programs in single-authored Big Buildings. Although the latter may attain iconographic status, they rarely succeed in actually “engineering the unpredictable” as promised. Urban design more openly navigates this territory with multi-authored, seemingly-heterogeneous “Mini-Cities”. However, the Mini-City is usually little more than an architectural zoo: an accretion of screeching signature works, each trying to be unique but ultimately just different in the same way. As market forces render program and authorship less determinate, these typologies’ already-limited efficacy is only further diminished. If architects overcome the profession’s imperative to jealously determine all aspects of a design, they can explore the potent ground beyond Big Buildings without surrendering large-scale development to urban design’s Mini-Cities of non-identical sameness. A new typology – the “Strategostructure” – must be pioneered that retains conceptual coherence and credibility even if parts change and size demands multiple authors.
 

It depends on where the architect currently lives. In America, extreme partisanship has rendered political discourse impotent. I am more confident in an American architect’s ability to positively impact the world – to socially engineer – through the built environment than by being a politician. In the Middle East, however...