The right to privacy is one of the most important values that is at the core of democratic societies. Therefore, it is important that you have a space which is your own; which is anonymous; which is private; from which you can form ideas about what you believe is the right way to engage with society. The problem with big data at the moment is that it’s being used to undermine the right to privacy of individuals. And architects can certainly have a role to play in terms of how we manage those data-sets, and then how we translate them into built form in order to promote the possibility of being unobserved.
As building industry and construction jobs are made redundant by automation, are architects obliged to take a principled stance in defence of those whom that transition is disadvantaging?
The future of automation is highly problematic. Automation is happening in a way that it hasn’t happened in the past. Previously, new technologies destroyed old industries but created new jobs that tended to be better paying, and often there were more jobs as a result. That’s no longer the case. Automation is reducing the number of total productive hours in society, and this a global first. Previously, when you replaced the horse and cart with the car it created huge new industries of many kinds, everything from drive-in cinemas to road infrastructure, new models of housing and transport and so on. But the self-driving car doesn’t do that. It doesn’t create new work.
As technology advances in the built environment we have to be very careful that, in engaging with these technologies, we’re not disadvantaging not only the general public, but also the architectural profession ourselves. Any augmentation to our previous mode of working is great, but when a CAD program makes the architect as designer obsolete that becomes a more problematic question. That’s another danger that’s inherent in labour automation. Therefore, there needs to be a social argument that goes along with it. The pursuit of technology in itself is not an end.
We can always move ourselves towards greater efficiency, but I don’t know where that gets us.
Well, we just end up working longer. Technology is actually accelerating the amount of work that you have to do. Work days are getting longer. The blurring between public and private activities is of particular concern, because it means you’re always working. That undermines a non-commercial sense of ourselves. I don’t even know if I have any personality left, actually; there is really only my work.
So you become this kind of abstracted vector within a system, which is driving you towards ever more work and ever more involvement with these systems. I would say that we have to resist them, and find ways to resist them in our daily life. The day is probably the largest amount of time that any human can realistically hold in their head as a prospect. Therefore, if you alter your daily patterns, you alter your entire life. And therefore, habits become very important.
The work of architects and designers seems to be largely dictated by market forces. Addressing issues like social inequality seems out of our reach. As a result, many of us will move into risk-averse corporate firms. Conversely, your work attempts to question the underlying forces which govern the property market. Is this part of a wider strategy?
At the level of an ideological strategy, I don’t know to what extent it’s moving outside of architecture for me. Architecture already is a discipline which involves a huge variety of different data sets as part of the design process. It’s one of the most sophisticated forms of design. If we’re thinking already about environmental conditions, historical context, technology, planning, legal considerations, regulations, materiality, the politics of space, then extending that to include an understanding of financial systems and the real estate market seems quite integral.
The wider strategy is simple but also extremely ambitious, which is to understand whether it’s possible to resist capitalism from within the world of architecture. It is my firm belief that the only existential threat to capitalism has to do with altering real estate markets. It’s only through changing the way in which housing is valued—or particularly the way in which land is valued—that we can have any impact on the current economic system.
Max Mein, 2018. Photograph, Melbourne. Image reproduced with author’s permission.
Can this change be initiated by architects, or can it only occur through a combined efforts with some other industries or actors?
The architect has always orchestrated other industries and agents, and is subject to other agents as well. I would question the idea that an architect is the author of a building, because the architect is only one part of an entire mechanism. The majority of the built environment is not generated by architects, so I’m not so sure the architect can make broad systematic changes.
My hope would be that the architect as a designer is able to see the opportunities and the weaknesses from inside the system itself. This is why I’m also not hugely interested in the design of one-off buildings. I’m interested in what I would call the model: the idea of the building as something that can be imitated and replicated at scale. It’s only through leading by example that architects can have any influence.
Do you think that the conditions exist at present for the architect to assume that role? It seems to us that the building industry is increasingly focussed on producing private wealth rather than proposing alternative models.
We can’t be nostalgic for the historical relationship between the state and private enterprise when it came to the built environment that existed during the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s. That type of relationship is not going to come back. However, when we think about the economic situation we’ve arrived at today, there’s an assumption that through deregulation the state has passed off its responsibilities onto the private sector, who have not taken up any social ambition with that. They’ve just pursued private wealth gains. But the state was massively involved in that. There is no such thing as deregulation. It’s just regulation for a different purpose.
The generation of people who were in their early adulthood during the boom and who experienced the 2008 crash have been quite rapidly and radically politicised when it comes to questions of wealth equality and social equality.
Society generally is thinking a lot more about gender, race, as well as discussions around environmentalism that were absent 15 years ago. My instinct is that the demographics in most Western societies are generally positive, and that the recent kick to the right is a temporary one. Whether or not that results in a kind of permanent shift to a new relationship between state and private enterprise, I couldn’t say. In a way in doesn’t matter, because there will never be the perfect moment to decide to engage in these types of activities.
A lot of your work is focussed around the act of critique. In particular, you seem to position your architectural work at odds with the status quo. Do you think the standing of criticism is being harmed by the expectation that critics should simply be telling people whether something is worth their time?
Whether I’m writing, designing a piece of furniture or working on a housing project, hypothetical or not, I always try to pursue the methodology of the architect, which is that the essence of ‘architecture’ is the project, and that means proposition. It’s fine to be critical, but criticality in itself is not enough to form good critique.
I think it’s important to understand why I do those hypothetical projects. For example, each of the five projects in the Derivative Architecture series has been moving towards a higher level of resolution in terms of how it deals with the pragmatics of planning systems and the reality of finance. Each of those projects is trying to rapidly test out a different type of financial model in order to see what the consequences of that would be for the built form. For me personally they’re very useful, and they represent a continuation of my education.
But I don’t think they could be built, and so there is a question about what the value of the ‘building-as-criticism’ or the ‘building-as-metaphor’