






































Architecture Philosophy is the journal of the International Society for the Philosophy 
of Architecture (ISPA). The society was founded in 2009 by Carolyn Fahey, and 
the journal was first published in 2014 by Tom Spector, Carolyn Fahey, and Stefan 
Koller.

Architecture Philosophy proudly acknowledges the financial support from the 
Oklahoma State University School of Architecture and the College of Engineering 
Architecture and Technology that makes free distribution of print copies possible. The 
journal also acknowledges the support from the Oklahoma State University Library 
for making the submission management software, the journal’s online presence, and 
its indexing in academic search engines a reality. 

Architecture Philosophy (ISSN 2372-0883) is published semiannually. Two 
parts form a volume. The subscription is free for digital copies, and print copies 
are available to society members. Visit isparchitecture.com for digital access to the 
journal’s content. 

The graphical layout of the journal and the cover design are by Carolyn Fahey. 

Copying
This journal is copyrighted by Oklahoma State University. For permission requests 
please contact the ISPA at isparchitecture@gmail.com.

© Oklahoma State University

Printed in the United States by Oklahoma State University.



The Future of Modernism: Architectural Intention and Adaptive Reuse
Frank Mahan & Van Kluytenaar

Design-Politics: How Buildings Mean
Lawrence J. Vale

Koolhaas’ Revision of Foucault’s Panopitcon
André Patrão

Useless Speculation: Architectural 
Obsolescence and the Micro-Parcels of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates 

(1973)
Rick Fox

Designing a Common World: Public Responsibility and the Aim to 
Objectify Architecture

Hans Teerds

Book Review

the journal of the International Society 

for the Philosophy of Architecture

volume 5

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This volume of Architecture Philosophy derives 
from the 4th biennial conference of the International 
Society for the Philosophy of Architecture held for 
two days at the United States Air Force Academy 
in Colorado Springs, Colorado in July, 2018. The 
conference theme “Building as Service: People, 
Politics, and Governance,” and the three keynote 
speakers, attracted a wide variety of papers including 
presentations on state architecture, representations 
of power, and symbols of politics from 30 additional 
presenters. The papers also ranged geographically: 
case studies from architecture in Nazi Germany to 
informal cities in South America were presented.
 One of the chief attractions for conferees 
was the opportunity to explore the grounds of 
U.S. Air Force Academy: itself one of the 20th 
century’s distinguished achievements in state 
architecture. The Academy is notable for coherence 
and completeness as an exemplar of International 
Modernist style. Its lead architect, Walter Netsch, 
and his firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, were 
at the forefront of this movement. Netsch’s vision 
was built almost entirely as he intended and it was 
finished in less than 10 years: the Academy was 
created on April 1, 1954 and the last building of 
the initial plan; the celebrated Academy Chapel, 
was completed in 1962. Amazingly, the Academy 
still functions largely in accordance with its original 
design plan, thus Netsch’s vision, together with 
the Air Force’s intent for the campus, continues 
to inform the life of the institution today—some 

Modernism, 
theyargue, 

poses special 
challenges to 

accepted historic 
preservation 

values

“

”

editorial:  BUIlDING as service

Mark Jensen & tom spector 



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60 years later. In addition to exploring the buildings themselves, visitors 
observed the ways in which cadets, faculty, and other personnel pursue 
their institutional objectives in concert with the supporting architecture. 
Conferees were treated with a tour of the campus led by the Air Force 
Academy’s resident architect, Duane Boyle, who knew Netsch personally 
(Netsch died in 2008) and who shared details of both the architect’s 
thinking and intent in designing the campus.
 The conference was convened in the newest addition to the Air 
Force Academy, Polaris Hall which opened in 2016, also designed, like the 
rest of the main campus, by SOM. Polaris Hall houses both the Academy’s 
Center for Character and Leadership Development and serves as a 
conference center just outside the secure boundaries of the “cadet area,” 
where cadets live and learn and train. Its signature element is its skylight 
tower, which telescopes toward the pole star. The conference opened with 
a keynote from one of Polaris Hall’s lead architects, Frank Mahan, whose 
contribution, fittingly, opens this volume of Architecture Philosophy.
 In their piece, “The Future of Modernism,” Frank Mahan and 
collaborator Van Kluytenaar discuss the architectural challenge of restoration 
in the context of restoring modernist buildings. Modernism, they argue, 
poses special challenges to accepted historic preservation values according 
primacy to a building’s “literal materiality,” first theorized by Ruskin 
and Morris, when a modern building is more driven by the “fathomless 
depths of its concept,” better served by the idealistic preservation values 
of Viollet-le-duc. Drawing on the resources of Merleau-Ponty, they argue 
that plans for restoration and reuse must be recognizably continuous with 
the narrative behind the building or else risk losing important, albeit less 
material, qualities that make the building what it is. They illustrate this 
theory with a discussion of three case studies: Lever House, Manufacturers 
Hanover Trust, and Polaris Hall itself. It will not be lost on conference 
participants that these exact issues are at stake in the restoration of Cadet 
Chapel. 
 In his piece, “Design-Politics: How Buildings Mean,” the 
conference’s final keynote Lawrence Vale develops a set of distinctions first 
proposed by Nelson Goodman to examine the gap between what a building 
means and how it communicates its meaning to its audience. Through a 
series of case studies, Vale undercuts the possibility of a simple relationship 
between the meaning of a building and what it communicates. He points 
out that notable historic events, digital media, and temporary installations 
add layers to what it communicates that are not directly mappable to the 
meaning of the building itself. This recognition leads him to conclude 
that contemporary design cannot hope to slide underneath the political 



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dimensions of life: public buildings are not just 
neutral backdrops for political contests but actually 
part of the contests themselves.
 In the next essay in this volume, “Koolhaas’ 
Revision of Foucault’s Panopticon,” André Patrão 
explores the relationship between the disciplines 
of architecture and philosophy through Koolhaas’ 
apparent, yet denied, appropriation of Foucault’s 
philosophy in his proposal for a renovated 
panopticon prison. The panopticon, originally 
designed by Jeremy Bentham, is a prison in which 
the cells are arranged around a central guardhouse 
such that the prisoners are always under the 
impression that they are being watched, even 
though the guards themselves are unobserved, 
e.g., by means of one-way glass. Foucault uses the 
panopticon as a metaphor for the destructive power 
of the feeling of constant surveillance. Koolhaas, 
on the other hand, is faced with a real opportunity 
to renovate an actual panopticon prison. He 
proposes to eliminate the central guard tower and 
makes other changes that will contribute to the 
humanization of the prisoners inside. It would 
seem that Foucault must have had an influence on 
Koolhaas, but as Patrão argues, the genealogy is not 
straightforward. Foucault is never mentioned by 
Koolhaas in connection with the proposal and yet 
its aims are consistent with a serious appreciation 
of Foucault’s widely disseminated critique. Patrão 
employs this case to examine the question: Can we, 
should we, to what degree and for what end assert 
intellectual influence when ideas are “in the air”?
 Rick Fox’s “Useless Speculation: 
Architectural Obsolescence and the Micro-Parcels of 
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates,” uses the work 
of artist Gordon Matta-Clark to draw attention 
to the situatedness of buildings inside a public 
geography that may be marked by disorganization, 
confusion, and incoherence. In the 1970s, Matta-
Clark acquired 15 very small parcels of land in New 
York City at public auction. That these parcels even 

      Vale 
undercuts 

the possibility 
of a simple 

relationship 
between the 
meaning of a 

building and what 
it communicates

“

”



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existed was an indication of errors in surveying, zone, and land contracts. 
Some of these parcels were completely surrounded by private property and 
hence inaccessible to the owner without the permission of an adjacent 
property owner. While Matta-Clark never constructed an art installation 
around his land parcels, Fox reconstructs the underlying critical perspective 
Fake Estates intended to make about the waste and obsolescence endemic 
to contemporary architecture and city planning.
 In our final essay, “Constructing a Common World: Architectural 
Craftsmanship and Public Responsibility,” Hans Teerds reconfigures 
Hannah Arendt’s distinction between work and action for the architectural 
enterprise. For Arendt, work is the act of building something; action is 
civic and political engagement. Yet contemporary trends in architectural 
production towards the seeming objectivity provided by machines and 
algorythms tend to place the architect at an increasing remove from both. 
True engagement, he contends, must be found in subjectivity. While 
work is the natural home for architectural activity, Teerds argues that 
architects must be attentive to action as well, insofar as action takes place 
in the context of the buildings that architects design. Drawing upon the 
phenomenological tradition, Teerds describes the interplay between the 
design and craftsmanship of the architect in the world of work and the 
contested and deliberative environment of action. Architects today must 
design and construct in partnership with their clients and stakeholders—a 
community that, in the world of action, may not be coherent. In this way, 
the judgment and work of the architect today is inescapably political.
Our volume concludes with a review by Mark Jensen of Timothy Hyde’s 
new book, Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye. Hyde’s 
book provides both a delightful and frustrating tour through hundreds of 
years of British architecture, city planning, and the public and political 
responses to the series of poor design choices and ugly buildings that these 
architects and planners have produced. Unfortunately for the philosophical 
reader, Hyde does not supply an analysis of ugliness that might be of use 
to architects and planners alike in order to avoid despoiling the urban 
landscape.
 We hope that, in this volume of Architecture Philosophy, you will 
find the variety, nuance, novelty, and interest that we have all come to expect 
at the intersection of architecture, design, philosophy, and politics. The 
next biennial conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of 
Architecture will be held in Monte Verita Switzerland. We hope to see you 
there!



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AIR FORCE ACADEMY 
CADET CHAPEL, 2018



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the future of modernism:
architectural intention and
adaptive reuse

frank mahan, AIA and van kluytenaar

Prelude

What does it mean for architecture to engage 
an existing building? The pages that follow address 
the singular importance of intention in the practice 
of adapting and preserving modernist architecture 
in the twenty-first century. There is a matrix 
of forces common to nearly every architectural 
project that shapes the final built object. Financial, 
programmatic, structural and environmental 

the 
preservation 
of an original 
design intent 
requires the 

extension and 
maturation of an 
original idea into 

a future that 
both maintains 
and reinvents 

the original. 

“

”

A man is judged by neither intention nor fact 
but by his success in making values become 
facts.When this happens, the meaning of the 
action does not exhaust itself in the situation 
which has occasioned it, or in some vague judg-
ment of value; the action remains as an exem-
plary type and will survive in other situations 
in another form. It opens a field. Sometimes it 
even institutes a world. In any case it outlines a 
future. History according to Hegel is the matu-
ration of a future in the present, not the sacrifice 
of the present to an unknown future; and the 
rule of action for him is not to be efficient at 
any cost, but to be first of all fecund.1

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Lan-
guage and the Voices of Silence”



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constraints along with client objectives and tastes are all meaningful 
considerations that must inform the conceptualization of a new building. 
The aged building in need of restoration, however, contains an additional 
constraint: the need to engage with its unique history. The tradition of 
storytelling must be employed to synthesize time and place, bridging past 
and present. 

The practice of adaptive reuse—the preservation, renovation and reuse 
of an existing structure for a new purpose—links the building’s past with 
the contemporary world. It requires understanding a preexisting narrative 
as well as the crafting of a new narrative, one that both continues and 
extends the original.2 Existing buildings function as complex formal 
entities that develop over time and space, accumulate human experience 
and produce unique historical richness. This accumulation of experience 
must be accounted for in the building’s preservation and reuse. The 
significance of these experiences must be recognized and acknowledged. 
The narratives must be sorted and evaluated. Should nostalgia, for 
example, be a protagonist in the historical narrative of a building? Did 
historically significant events take place at the building? Did the building 
undergo alterations over its lifetime? Is the building considered significant 
in the eyes of the architecture or preservation community? Does the 
building occupy a place of pride in its community? A rigorous analysis 
and deep understanding of these existing narratives and the complexity of 
experiences they point to must provide the groundwork for the building’s 
future. This requires research into the building’s history. The historical 
context, the original design intentions, the building’s programmatic and 
construction history, its social and cultural associations, all contribute to 
its existing narrative and must form a fundamental constraint relevant to 
all adaptive reuse projects. The narrative must be told. And by reimagining 
this narrative, adaptive reuse links the past with the present. It creates an 
urban touchstone that is both history and invention. The preservation 
of an original design intent requires the extension and maturation of an 
original idea into a future that both maintains and reinvents the original.

Introduction

In 1952, the same year that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) built 
the watershed Lever House skyscraper (fig. 1)—thereby heralding a new 
synthesis of modernist ideals in architecture—the French philosopher 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty published “Indirect Language and the Voices 
of Silence,” one of the most important reflections on modern aesthetics 



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in twentieth-century philosophy.3 The essay 
describes the way in which the individual elements 
of an aesthetic object bestow significance on one 
another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition. 
Their rigorous, rule-based arrangement produces a 
matrix of meaning which corresponds to the lasting 
quality of the work. Strikingly, important aspects 
of the enterprise of modernist architecture—
particularly as expressed in the work of SOM—
invite understanding in terms analogous to those 
found in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.4 Moreover, 
this understanding has farreaching implications 
for what it would mean to preserve the kind of 
aesthetic objects that modernist architecture sought 
to produce. These objects—like language itself—
bear meaning by means of an interrelationship 
of parts, the efficacy of which creates a seemingly 
unending world:

We always have to do only with architectures 
of signs whose sense, being nothing other 

This efficacy 
of the object 

depends 
primarily on 
the density 

of decision—
that is to say, 

intention—
inherent in 

the work’s 
conception.

“

”

figure 1: Lever house 
(prior to renovation)



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than the way in which the signs behave toward one another and are 
distinguished from one another, cannot be posited independently of 
them.5
And further: 
It is as if each step taken called for and made possible another step, or 
as if each successful expression prescribed another task to the spiritual 
automation or founded an institution whose efficacy it will have 
never finished experiencing.6

This efficacy of the object depends primarily on the density of decision—
that is to say, intention—inherent in the work’s conception. Its commanding 
logic, or grammar, is everywhere present. For Merleau-Ponty, the lateral 
relations between elements born from the initial intention produce a world 
or matrix of almost infinite meaning. In contrast to the importance of the 
literal material of stone and craft—the literalism that is the theoretical 
foundation for contemporary theories of preservation—the meaning of 
modern architecture is found in the rigor of arrangement and relationship 
of its parts. The juxtaposition and relational positioning of architectural 
elements give meaning to the work.7 It is thus in the idea of the elements 
and their interdependence—rather than the materiality of the elements 
themselves—that modernism finds its value. And it is precisely this kind 
of value, this modernist ideal, that SOM sought to produce in the second 
half of the twentieth century.8

In 1935, three years after Henry Russell-Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s 
“Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” at the Museum of 
Modern Art in New York City—and as Le Corbusier visited the United 
States for the first time—Gordon Bunshaft was in Europe as a Rotch 
Travelling Scholar, absorbing the ideas of early European modernism.9 
Less than a year later, Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings began a 
partnership that would become Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and, by 1950, 
the firm had completed several large projects including Manhattan House 
in New York, the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, and the Brooklyn 
Veterans Hospital. It was the corporate headquarters for Lever Brothers 
Company on Park Avenue, however, built in 1952, that was to shape the 
image of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as a notable proponent of postwar 
modern architecture. Following the Lever House project, SOM would go 
on to design a number of the most representative buildings of modernist 
architecture in the United States including the Manufacturers Hanover 
Trust building in New York City and the United States Air Force Academy 
campus in Colorado Springs. These projects proposed design concepts 



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that were grounded in the modernist sensibility 
of the time. Based on rigorous conceptual models, 
modern architecture no longer found its meaning in 
the literal materiality of stone and brick, but rather 
in the almost fathomless depths of its concept. 
This understanding of the modernist enterprise 
is particularly significant to the preservation of 
modernist buildings. The rejection of the literal 
and the material in favor of matrices of ideas and 
rules require novel approaches to the practice of 
historic preservation more adequate to the objects 
of interrogation.

Victorian Era Preservation

In 1849 John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps 
of Architecture where, in a section called “The Lamp 
of Memory,” he develops his now-famous attack on 
the practice of architectural restoration: “Do not let 
us talk then of restoration,” he writes. “The thing is 
a Lie from beginning to end.” For Ruskin, the act of 
restoration is primarily an act of destruction:

the old building is destroyed, and that more 
totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a 
heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay […] 
But, it is said, there may come a necessity for 
restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in 
the face, and understand it on its own terms. 
It is a necessity for destruction. Accept it as 
such, pull the building down, throw its stones 
into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or 
mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not 
set up a Lie in their place.10

What is of primary significance for Ruskin in his 
understanding of 19th century architecture is the 
literal materiality of the structure, the craft of its 
production and the process of its aging. Particularly 
with respect to medieval stone buildings, Ruskin 
and other English Romantics found aesthetic 
meaning in the material’s weathering and decay, “in 

 Based on 
rigorous 

conceptual 
models, modern 

architecture 
no longer found 

its meaning in 
the literal 

materiality of 
stone and brick, 

but rather in 
the almost 
fathomless 

depths of its 
concept.

“

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walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.”11 As 
England was in the initial throes of industrialization, it became increas-
ingly fascinated by its preindustrial past. 12 Four years after publishing The 
Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin published the second volume of The 
Stones of Venice, his three volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture. 
In a section called “The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin emphasizes the impor-
tance of medieval and gothic craft arguing that, in previous epochs, art was 
the expression of man’s pleasure in labor. It was this sentiment that lead 
the protopreservationist William Morris to reprint “The Nature of Gothic” 
in 1892; helping to create the theoretical basis for the contemporary pres-
ervation movement. Morris described Ruskin’s paean to medieval labor 
and craft as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the 
century.”13 Both Ruskin and Morris—the theoretical grounding behind 
contemporary preservation theory—insisted on the virtues of high quality 
hand labor, and the importance of the material in considerations of archi-
tectural preservation.                                   
       This romantic response to the industrialization of Victorian England 
took more definite shape in the Arts and Crafts movement toward the 
end of the 19th century, heavily influenced by Ruskin and Morris, which 
advocated the traditional craftsmanship of medieval arts and architecture. 
In 1877 Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 
an organization that came to be called “Anti-Scrape” for its insistence that 
the materiality of historic structures be preserved without alteration. Any 
work on the building was “a feeble and lifeless forgery” and “deaf to the 
claims of poetry and history.”14 The Anti-Scrape movement sought to resist 
all tampering with the fabric of a given structure and to “treat our ancient 
buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners, that 
modern art cannot meddle with without destroying.”15 This approach, 
born of an era in which the character found in the literal and the material 
were of primary importance, indeed remains appropriate and necessary for 
a premodern architecture. In this context, the preservation of the literal 
suppresses the precise boundaries of time and place, combining history, 
memory and architecture to link the discarded and the fragmentary with 
new beginnings. And while the intended concept remains significant for 
Ruskin, this prioritization of the literal material of the building contrasts 
sharply with the idea that the significance of modernist architecture lies 
wholly in its concept, allowing for a preservation approach radically 
different from that of Victorian architecture.

Postwar modernism, however, requires a preservation approach more 
adequate to its purpose. While the preservation of premodern architecture 



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finds its meaning in the literal and the material, in 
addition to the idea of the building, the muse of 
postwar modern architecture is located primarily 
in the conceptual. And it is this distinction that 
has extensive and far-reaching implications for 
the preservation and restoration of modernist 
architecture. For if, in contrast to the valuing of 
the literal materiality of the structure, the meaning 
of postwar modernism is located primarily in the 
rigor of the concept, its preservation requires an 
approach radically different from that of Ruskin 
and the Victorian Romantics who would not have 
distinguished between the idea of a building and 
its material execution, understanding one as a mere 
extension of the other.

A notable counterpoint to Ruskin’s nineteenth-
century approach is that of his contemporary 
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc whose unique 
preservation ideas have remained anathema to 
preservation thinking for nearly two centuries. In 
contrast to Ruskin’s emphasis on the significance 
of materiality, Viollet-le-Duc sought to maintain 
a fidelity to the original design, “to re-establish it 
to a finished state, which may in fact never have 
actually existed at any given time.”16 For Viollet-le-
Duc, whose work focused primarily on the Gothic 
and Romanesque, preservation finds its adequate 
expression in re-establishing an original idea. Such 
an approach functions as a kind of precursor to 
the modernist emphasis on the importance of the 
conceptual. His studies of nineteenth-century iron 
structures contributed to his interpretation of the 
Gothic as comprised of a rational scheme of skeletal 
forms designed to bear the weight of increasingly 
taller vaults. On this view, aesthetic value is to be 
found, above all, in the visual expression of structural 
elements—ribs, arches, and vertical supports—that 
compose the logical structural system. Preservation 
warranted modification to this logical system when, 
in the example of the Vézelay Abbey, the changes 
preserved the appearance of the original structural 

For Viollet-
le-Duc, [...] 

preservation 
finds its 

adequate 
expression in 

re-establishing 
an original idea.

“

”



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intention.17 Although a relevant precursor to the modernist emphasis on 
the conceptual in its eschewal of materiality, Viollet-le-Duc’s attempt to 
recreate an original intention was often based primarily on an imagined 
fiction. The emphasis on the conceptual in the preservation of modernist 
architecture, however, benefits from advances in technology that allow 
for a more accurate understanding of a building’s original design intent. 
The greater the understanding, moreover, the more potentially radical the 
intervention. Knowing the entirety of the original design intention allows 
for a preservation approach that articulates that intention in ways more 
adequate than Viollet-le-Duc and more appropriate to the contemporary 
world. In contrast to Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc and the Victorian belief in 
the equivalence of ideal intention and material articulation, the meaning 
of modern architecture is expressed in its idea, thus requiring a radical 
rethinking of its preservation.

Lever House

Consider, for example, New York’s Lever House (fig. 1)—an architectural 
icon heralding “the beginning of a new wave of American skyscraper 
construction and a new synthesis of modernist architectural ideals”—was 
restored in 2001 and its famous glass and stainless-steel curtain wall was 
completely replaced.18 Built in 1952 and designated a historic landmark 
by New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in 1983, the 
building is exemplary of postwar American modernism. Situated on the 
west side of Park Avenue between East 53rd Street and East 54th Street, 
Lever House is a 24-story glass and stainless-steel clad office building 
composed of a vertical slab rising above a horizontal base. Taking 
advantage of a unique zoning provision, the project broke the tradition of 
“shaped tower” skyscrapers that predominated in New York City. Its glass-
sheathed façade and novel design concept became dominant elements of 
contemporary architecture. Its structure consists of two counter-posed 
volumes, balanced in proportion but contrasting in shape. And in contrast 
to the traditional commercial lobby, the ground floor is a two-story open 
plaza with a paneled glass gallery. The project introduced a number of 
innovations in skyscraper design including an integrally designed window-
washing mechanism and the concept of the ground floor public courtyard.

 The density or intensity or weight of decision—which is to say 
intention—in the making of its form is everywhere evident. The work 
is saturated with traces of artistic intention. And this intention is 
articulated by the lateral relations among its parts; in the language of 



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Merleau-Ponty, “in the eloquence of arrangement 
and configuration” that “implants a meaning in 
that which did not have one.”19 The entirety of 
the structure articulates a sureness of concept that 
made it a pioneer in American architecture. To 
begin, the plan features an open, colonnaded space 
flowing into the width of the Park Avenue sidewalk. 
Only one third of the ground floor is indoor space 
which is primarily enclosed by glass panels. The 
second floor then hovers over the entire site taking 
the form of a horizontal slab wrapped around the 
open courtyard below. The ground floor column 
grid is set back from the plane of the second-floor 
façade, giving the second floor slab the appearance 
of a weightless floating volume. The just 53-foot-
wide tower, a vertical slab set perpendicular to 
the avenue, is entirely glazed on three facades (as 
well as the returns on the rear façade) giving the 
building a crystalline and volumetric quality. Its 
exterior walls are a grid of stainless-steel mullions, 
anchored to the structural skeleton at each floor, 
which hold in place large and small panels of fixed 
glass. The large panels, functioning as windows, 
are green-tinted heat absorbent transparent glass 
and the small panels are tinted wire-glass spandrels 
concealing the floor slabs behind. These darker 
bands give the structure a horizontal emphasis that 
provides a delicate counterpoise to the verticality of 
the building’s columns and metal framing. And this 
juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal in the facade 
thematizes the vertical and horizontal volumes of the 
building more generally. It is the purposeful mutual 
inflection of elements throughout—its syntax—
that gives meaning to the building. That is to say, 
its meaning is found in the internal consistency of 
its concept. And it was to the appropriateness of its 
concept that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s 2001 
curtain wall replacement sought to respond.

In 1952 the building’s glass curtain wall was 
at the cutting edge of a new technology. Almost 
half a century later, it required restoration. Due 

It is the 
purposeful 

mutual 
inflection 

of elements 
throughout—its 

syntax—that 
gives meaning 

to the building. 
That is to say, 

its meaning 
is found in 

the internal 
consistency of 

its concept.

“

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to construction material limitations, fabrication limitations, and weather 
conditions, the curtain wall experienced severe deterioration. The 
corrosion of the curtain wall resulted in the bowing of the horizontal 
mullions and thebreakage of most of the smaller spandrel glass panels, as 
well as some of the larger window panels. The Landmarks Preservation 
Committee designated the building a historical landmark in 1982—
noting it as “outstanding for its spatial clarity, scale and beauty of form”—
and allowed for a full replacement, in kind, of the building’s curtain wall 
assembly.20 This “radical facelift” has significant implications for a theory 
of the preservation of postwar modernist architecture.21 It suggests that, 
in contrast to Ruskin’s emphasis on literal materiality, certain buildings 
are characterized less by their physical instantiation than by the concept 
of the design. And therefore, any attempt to preserve and restore such 
buildings must determine its original grammar—the rules of its design—
in order to preserve the meaning of a given structure. The logic of its rules 
will determine the appropriate degree to which restoration and alteration 
can occur without altering the original meaning of the design. Thus the 
entirety of Lever House’s literal glass curtain-wall could be replaced with 
new, updated materials while maintaining the integrity of the initial design. 
The original tinted wired spandrel glass, no longer manufactured, was 
replaced with as close to a match to the original as possible. The original 
steel subframe was replaced with a concealed glazing channel, reflecting 
a state of the art solution in today’s curtainwall technology. Throughout 
the restoration process, the materials were replaced—either in kind or as 
closely as possible—so as to reproduce the quality of the idea.

Manufacturers Hanover Trust

Consider also the Manufacturers Trust Company Building, the 
preservation of which goes even further in extending the original design 
intention. Often seen as the very model of modernism (fig. 2), It was built 
in 1954, two years after Lever House, at 510 Fifth Avenue on the southwest 
corner of West 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. It is a steel and glass cube 
with an unbroken glass façade featuring a seven-foot-wide circular metal 
bank vault visible from the street. Breaking all modes for bank architecture 
of the time, these elements opened what had been a cloistered world 
more commonly housed behind masonry walls and produced a novel 
relationship between architecture and city. Evoking the claim that the idea 
is paramount, Architectural Forum referred to the building as “the first big 
building truly to fulfill architects’ immaculate drafting board idea of glass 



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as an invisible material.”22 Particularly notable is the 
sense in which the meaning of the design is precisely 
the appearance of the building’s materiality, rather 
than its materiality as such. In contrast to the 
formidable stone and shuddered fortresses of the 
premodern, the building’s guiding design concept is 
the impression of an extreme, unparalleled lightness. 
“If it is characteristic of the human gesture to signify 
beyond its simple existence in fact, to inaugurate a 
meaning,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “it follows that 
every gesture is comparable to every other. They 
all arise from a single syntax.”23 Almost everything 
in the syntax, or grammar, of the Manufacturers 
Trust building contributes to its meaning, to the 
unparalleled appearance of lightness. Supported by 
eight interior columns set eleven feet from the Fifth 
Avenue building line and twenty feet from the West 
43rd Street building line, the secondfloor concrete 
slab cantilevers off the columns and is set back from 
the clear glass curtain wall façade. Accordingly, the 
main banking areas appear to be contained within 
one forty-foot-high space and the second-floor 
slab seems to float. Both the concrete slabs and the 
external metal skeleton were kept extremely thin, 

Particularly 
notable is the 
sense in which 

the meaning of 
the design is 

precisely the 
appearance of 

the building’s 
materiality, 

rather than its 
materiality as 

such.

“

”

figure 2:

Manufacturers 
Hanover Trust



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enhancing the building’s appearance of lightness. Finally, cathode tube 
lights concealed behind thin plastic panels dematerialize the surface of 
the ceiling producing an impression of weightlessness. A true landmark 
in the delineation of space—and an arrangement of elements far beyond 
mere existence in fact—its design completely transformed our concept of 
the glass wall creating an entirely new relationship between interior and 
exterior.24

More than a half century after its construction, the building’s striking 
formal clarity and rich history remain. The evolution of the city, however, 
has rendered its technical efficiency and programmatic relevance 
obsolete. 510 Fifth Avenue was optimized to the standards and ideals 
of its day. But by 2010, its original owner had closed its bank branch, 
the building’s technological innovations were long outdated, and it no 
longer met the standards of contemporary architecture. In 2012 SOM 
adapted the building for retail, allowing old forms to meet the demand 
for new functions. Beyond the mere replacement of the structure’s 
existing materiality, the adaptation required more significant changes that 
would work within the logic of the original concept. By means of subtle 
architectural alterations that tailor the space for an alternate purpose, they 
preserved the formal ingenuity of a unique and historic architecture while 
simultaneously producing new relationships between architecture and city. 
Drawing on archival research and guided by the original design intentions, 
SOM preserved the building’s architectural meaning by preserving or 
restoring its primary elements including the glass curtain wall facade, the 
vast luminous ceilings, the Bertoia-designed screen, the white marble piers, 
and the celebrated circular stainless-steel vault door. The renovation and 
restoration of its glowing ceilings and polished plate glass façade brilliantly 
maintain the building’s lucid grace and almost complete erasure of the 
threshold between architecture and city.25

To adapt the building for new uses, the architects integrated entrances 
into the building’s east façade, divided the first floor to allow for additional 
tenants, and rotated the escalators to run parallel with the new partial-
glass demising wall. By preserving the original architecture while adapting 
certain of its features for programmatic change, the renovation produces 
a kind of urban monument, one that is simultaneously both retrospective 
and prospective. On the one hand, the building’s preservation brings forth 
layers of accrued implication deposited by time and human experience 
into contemporary urban life—almost Victorian in its materiality. On the 
other hand, the vitality of adaptive reuse lies in its essential engagement 
with the precise demands of the present. It allows for an architecture 



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that takes on new and disparate functions thereby 
producing new meanings. It directly mediates 
between past and present in an ever-changing 
world of shifting values—and, in this instance, it 
is precisely by virtue of this juxtaposition of past 
and present that the mutual inflection of elements 
bestow significance on one another.

United States Air Force Academy

The idea of preserving architectural intent reached 
an apex in 2016 with Polaris Hall, SOM’s addition 
to the United States Air Force Academy campus 

(fig. 3). With a scope far beyond that of Lever 
House or Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the project 
sought to extend the extreme rigor of the original 
concept into a completely new structure. It found 
in the depth of the initial concept the possibility for 
a building that would preserve the meaning of the 
original while begetting new meaning, born of the 
established relationships between already existing 
elements. This, in extreme contrast to the literalism 

figure 3: Polaris 
Hall



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of the premodern Romantics, implies a theory of preservation at its most 
speculative, in which we locate the maturation of a future in the fecundity 
of the present. Its original design concept contained futures within its 
logic, allowing for precisely the kind of addition conceived almost a half-
century later. 

Begun in 1954 after the establishment of the United States Air Force 
Academy by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the project is located at an 
elevation of 6,500 feet along the foothills of the Rampart Range of the 
Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Given the scope of the project—both a 
university and flight training academy, nine buildings in total—the concept 
not only addressed individual buildings but both the natural landform and 
the interrelationships between buildings.26 By creating artificial terraces at 
the ridge crest with a series of concrete retaining walls, the plan allows the 
spaces between buildings to open into the larger landscape, maintaining 
the expansive character of the site.27 The buildings in the Cadet Area—
sited on the highest ridge and the symbol of the Academy to the public—
were nestled into the mesa, allowing the structures’ monumentality to be 
apparent from outside the complex while maintaining a human scale and 
smaller perceived-size from the pedestrian level. The entire area is based on 
a seven-foot module that produced the relationships and proportions of 
the buildings throughout. It produced the sizes of the beams and structural 
bays in the Cadet Quarters, as well as the width of the rooms, windows, 
spandrel panels and the detailing of the facades. Delineated rows of marble 
tile on the Terrazzo produce gridlines that reflect the module, a twenty-
eight-foot organizing grid. The module organized the buildings and the 
space, but never restricted them resulting in “an extraordinarily sensitive 
composition of built and natural forms.”28 The corners of the grid were 
intentionally left open and implied, creating breaks in the horizontal plane 
that mirror those on the vertical plane, in the upper level loggias and height 
drops of the Academic Building and Cadet Quarters. The lengthwise 
visual momentum of the buildings—themselves floating on pilotis above 
open space—elevated above its surrounding terrain produced sensations 
of expansive soaring. Set against this backdrop of horizontality and the 
dramatic vertical peaks of the Rampart Range, the Cadet Chapel—the 
focal point of the Cadet Area—is intentionally distinct. Visually separated 
from the Court of Honor by its unique surface treatment, its wide ramp, 
and its dissimilar landscaping, the Chapel functions as the virtuosic 
punctum of the composition.

A half-century after its opening, the United States Air Force Academy 
sought an addition to its campus. Serving as an education and research 



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center and situated opposite and offset from the 
Cadet Chapel, Polaris Hall functions as the new 
home of the Academy’s Center for Character 
and Leadership Development. Built in 2016 and 
designed by SOM, the addition’s puzzle-like fit is 
as if the idea of the building were embedded within 
the concept of the original design. And in a sense, 
it was. It is a future that grew out of the outline and 
fecundity of the initial design. It is in this sense that 
the addition of Polaris Hall preserves the original, 
articulating the survival of its concept in another 
form.

Given the sensitivity necessary in adding to the 
sacred ground of the existing Academy, the Air 
Force proposed a competition between the three 
principal offices of SOM: San Francisco, Chicago 
and New York. The design jury consisted of Air 
Force officials Lt. General John Regni and Lt. 
General Ervin Rokke, architecture historian and 
critic Joan Ockman, Cornell University School 
of Architecture dean Kent Kleinman, and Robert 
Nauman, whose On The Wings of Modernism is 
widely considered to be the standard work on the 
architecture of the Air Force Academy. SOM began 
with a site visit and the design process took shape 
immediately. Weaving through the surrounding 
hills and valleys to approach the existing campus, 
the buildings came in and out of sight as a kind 
of dramatic foreshadowing of the intensity of 
experience induced upon arrival. Seen as a kind of 
ancient citadel recalling a modern Acropolis, the 
monumental scale of both site and architecture 
produced an almost spiritual effect. The low, long 
orthogonal lines and overwhelming consistency of 
the architecture stood in stark contrast to the raised 
rugged mountaintops and expansive blue sky of the 
surroundings. Significantly, the team noted that the 
architecture is raised on pilotis throughout to create 
cinematic, framed letterbox views of thenatural 
landscape. These framed views, moreover, align with 
the grid of the campus that is everywhere present, 

   This, in 
extreme 

contrast to the 
literalism of 

the premodern 
Romantics, 

implies a theory 
of preservation 

at its most 
speculative, 

in which we 
locate the 

maturation of 
a future in the 

fecundity of the 
present.

“

”



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inscribed in the very ground on which the cadets march. It was this visit to 
the site—and the attendant recognition of its monumental, quasi-spiritual 
character—as well as what SOM saw as the inescapable necessity to engage 
with the logic of the existing grid, that began the process of conceptualizing 
Polaris Hall.

The SOM design team underwent a period of sustained research into 
the existing architecture of the Air Force Academy as well as the self-
understanding of the institution it houses. It became clear that the discipline 
of the existing architecture—the omnipresent grid, the perfect orthogonal 
lines, the exactness of framing—corresponded in important ways to the 
discipline of the cadets. And central to the Academy’s mission (as to its 
crest), embedded in its conceptual framework like the buildings in the 
terraced plinth, was the Polaris star. The brightest star in its constellation, 
Polaris is known as the North Star, and functions as a symbol of the core 
values of the Academy. SOM used this guiding symbol as the basis of 
their design, seeking to embody Polaris by means of architecture. The 
idea to create a structure that emerged directly from the gridlines of the 
original thickened, rectilinear landscape with a skylight aligned toward 
Polaris came early. The initial design of the campus addition resembled a 
telescope, a long shaft extending diagonally from the ground toward the 
sky. To complement the telescopic form, SOM considered a collaboration 
with the artist James Turrell, with whom SOM had already collaborated 
on two other academic buildings. An intermediate design review with 
Air Force officials, however, caused a subtle but significant change.29 
Concerned that the initial design could be too easily read as a military 
instrument of violence, the design team added volume to the thin shaft, 
extending its base to encompass the entire form. This allowed for a more 
iconic, wing-like shape while bringing light and air into the entire space. 
The logic of the design follows almost naturally from its origin point of 
North Star alignment: its sunken form allows for clear views at ground 
level, glass demising walls bring the skylight as far as possible into the 
building, and the structure aligns the existing grid with the diagonal angle 
of Polaris.

The final design, a 105-foot glass-and-steel skylight aligned toward 
Polaris—the Academy’s metaphorical guiding principle—emerges almost 
inevitably from the existing landscape. Like the Academic Building and 
Cadet Quarters, its auditorium protrudes into the Terrace level mimicking 
the stepped terraces of the original design. It follows the straight lines of the 
campus, preserves crucial sight lines and adheres to the original masterplan 
grid. It references the materials of the original campus including the colorful 



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Murano glass tiles that line the entry walls and the 
granite for the main exterior stairs which was cut 
from the same quarry used for the Cadet Chapel in 
1954. Its structure, diagonal steel plates composed 
in a triangular grid calibrated to resist lateral forces, 
directly alludes to the Chapel’s triangular repetition. 
The meeting and seminar rooms surrounding the 
central space below the Terrace level are comprised 
of glass storefronts adapted to the campus’s seven-
foot grid. And yet the building provides its own 
additional metaphors. Its protruding skylight works 
as a metaphorical moral compass, a reminder of 
the Academy’s core values. The size and shape 
of the oculus align precisely with the North Star, 
signifying the Academy’s guiding values. It serves 
as a source of natural light, and creates a precise 
optical alignment with the respondent’s seat in 
the Honor Board Room, where investigations into 
the cadet honor code take place. The details of the 
building mirror the logic of continuity and break 
found in the horizontal momentum of the site plan. 
Shaped like an aircraft tailfin, the building eschews 
the muscularity of the Cadet Chapel, preserving the 
campus’s existing hierarchy of importance.

An open, transparent nexus of interaction, 
the terraced levels of the building accommodate 
gatherings at a variety of scales and levels of formality. 
Its glass-walled collaboration rooms surround 
the central space emphasizing and encouraging 
collaborative, forward-looking research. The entirety 
of the largely transparent structure is an architectural 
interpretation of the Academy’s moral aspirations 
more generally, aspirations of communication, 
transparency, and openness. Embedded within 
the constraints of the original campus design, 
Polaris Hall converts morality, sincerity, implicit 
hierarchies, and guiding principles into physical 
spatial conditions. Revisiting, renovating and 
adding to architectural icons requires that the 
original narrative be considered. And the revisiting 
engenders its own narrative, related to and born 

     Polaris 
Hall, however, 

actively 
reinterprets 
the original, 

extending and 
adapting the 

idea of its grid, 
its hierarchy, 

and its 
materiality into 

a bridge that 
bonds past and 

present.

“

”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

of—but different from—the original.30 Polaris Hall, for example, can be 
seen as a kind of secular corollary to the original Cadet Chapel; a temple of 
research and learning more adequate to the cultural mores of the twenty-
first century. In this sense, it is a project that exists in the unique, liminal 
space between past and present, a portal connecting one to the other.

It is this unique condition that the practice of adaptive reuse engages 
more broadly. Its ability to preserve an existing building while replacing 
materials (Lever House), repositioning the program (Manufacturer’s Trust) 
or adding to the original (Polaris Hall), challenges certain widely accepted 
notions of historic preservation. Because of modernist architecture’s 
unique focus on the rigor of concept, its preservation requires a shift in our 
understanding of what it means to preserve, which has typically focused on 
the preservation of the literal. In the case of Lever House, for example, the 
very materiality of the original object was wholly replaced while retaining 
its Landmark status, thereby shifting the framework of what it means 
to preserve modernist architecture. In a kind of response to Theseus’s 
Paradox—the famous thought experiment in which the ship of Theseus, 
the mythical king and founder of Athens, has been completely replaced 
over time thus questioning whether the restored ship is the same object 
as the original—the renovation of Lever House expresses a determinate 
position. The complete replacement of its curtain wall assembly suggests 
a radical break in how we approach the historic preservation of modernist 
architecture. And just as the founder-hero of Athens is associated with 
major cultural transition and the establishment of a new social order, the 
preservation approach to Lever House, 510 Fifth Avenue and Polaris Hall 
heralds a new and radical approach to the practice of preservation more 
generally.

Viollet-le-Duc’s attempt to recreate an original intention based primarily 
on an imagined fiction, while a radical approach for its time, foregoes any 
meaningful connection between past and present, as if existing on opposite 
sides of an unbridgeable gulf. Polaris Hall, however, actively reinterprets 
the original, extending and adapting the idea of its grid, its hierarchy, and 
its materiality into a bridge that bonds past and present. Merleau-Ponty 
claimed that in a successful aesthetic object, its meaning does not exhaust 
itself in the moment that has occasioned it, but remains as an exemplary 
type and survives in other situations in other forms and in other times. 
The United States Air Force Academy does exactly that. The depth and 
originality of its original conception outlined a future in its origin. The 
rigor and logic of the design almost included within it the birth of Polaris 
Hall. It instituted a world unto itself pregnant with transformations to 

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come. “History,” Merleau-Ponty reminds us, “is 
the maturation of the future in the present, not the 
sacrifice of the present to an unknown future.”31 
The Air Force Academy was decidedly not sacrificed 
to an unknown future. The fecundity of its original 
design inaugurated an institution. Its extreme rigor 
and depth of intention established a future within 
the logic of its present; a present that called for 
and made possible its next iteration. Rather than a 
complete departure from the initial design, Polaris 
Hall is the maturation of the original conception of 
the Air Force Academy campus into an inevitable 
future.

endnotes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language 
and the Voices of Silence,” Signs, trans. Richard C. 
McCleary (Evanston, Ill., 1964), pp. 39-83. The 
original essay in French, “Le Langage indirect et les 
voix du silence,” was first published in Les Temps 
Modernes in 1952 and was included in Merleau-
Ponty, Signes (Paris, 1960).
2. As Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of American 
architectural criticism, writes in The New York Times 
in 1968, “What preservation is really all about is the 
retention and active relationship of the buildings of 
the past to the community’s functioning present.” 
Ada Louise Huxtable, “Where Did We Go Wrong” 
in Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 
223.
3. Ibid. Notably, the work of Merleau-Ponty is 
at the heart of some of the most important art 
criticism of the 20th century, in particular the 
writing of Michael Fried whose seminal essay “Art 
and Objecthood” was published in Artforum 1967. 
He cites Merleau-Ponty throughout his writing, 
and “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” 



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in particular. See Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” 
Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1998), 28-31.
4. The paper does not claim that SOM architects were explicitly reading 
Merleau-Ponty’s writing. The claim, rather, is that Merleau-Ponty’s 
understanding of how meaning is produced by the interrelationship of 
parts can help us think productively about the early work of SOM and 
what it means to preserve that work today.
5.Huxtable, “Where Did We Go Wrong,” 223.
6. Ibid.
7. So Merleau-Ponty writes, “The primary operation which first constitute 
signs as signs, makes that which is expressed dwell in them through the 
eloquence of their arrangement and configuration alone, implants a 
meaning in that which did not have one, and thus—far from exhausting 
itself in the instant at which it occurs—inaugurates an order and founds 
an institution or a tradition.” Ibid. p. 7. Michael Fried further echoes 
this sentiment in his description of the English sculptor Anthony Caro: 
“Everything in Caro’s art that is worth looking at—except the color—is in 
its syntax.” Commenting later on these lines, and citing Merleau-Ponty’s 
essay in particular, he writes, “I associated the notion of syntax with that 
of abstract gesture, but what I saw was that the entire expressive weight of 
Caro’s art was carried by the relations among the girders, I- and T-beam 
segments, and similar elements out of which his sculptures were made, not 
by… the industrial, modern-world connotations of his materials.” Fried, 
“An Introduction,” 29.
8. This approach is notably different from the more standard approach 
to Merleau-Ponty within architecture which prioritizes Merleau-Ponty’s 
writing on phenomenology. For an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty and 
the role of phenomenology in the rise of postmodernism, see Jorge Otero-
Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the 
Postmodern, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
9. Bunshaft joined SOM in 1937 where he remained for more than forty 
years as lead design partner. He is credited with ushering in a new era of 
modernist skyscraper design and corporate architecture.
10. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: George Allen, 
1903), 244.
11. Ibid., 177.
12. See, for example, Charles Dellheim, The Face of the Past: The Presentation 
of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge 



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University Press, 1982).
13. William Morris, “Preface,” The Nature of Gothic 
(Kelmscott Press: London 1892, p.i).
14. William Morris, Philip Webb, et al, “Manifesto 
of the Society for the Protection of Ancient 
Buildings,” first published 1877, accessible on 
the society’s contempoary website: “The SPAB 
Manifesto” at
https://www.spab.org.uk/about-us/spab-manifesto, 
accessed 10 Oct 2019.
15. Ibid. For discussion of these lines, see Andrea 
Elizabeth Donovan, William Morris and the Society 
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (Routledge: 
London 2008), pp. 24 ff.
16. Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 
“Restoration,” from Dictionnaire Raisonné de 
l’Architecture Française du XIe au XVIe Siècle 
(1854-1868), English translation as On Restoration 
(Sampson Low, Marston: London, 1875).
17. See, for example, Kevin D. Murphy, Memory 
and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (Penn State 
University Press, 1999).
18. Landmarks Preservation Commission 
(November 9, 1982); Designation List 161, 
LP-1277.
19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language 
and the Voices of Silence,” 67.
20. Ibid.
21. Suzanne Stephens, “The restoration of New 
York City’s Lever House is not so same-old, same-
old, as architects SOM and William T. Georgis 
demonstrate,” Architectural Record, March 2003, 
Vol. 191, Issue 3, p. 122.
22. Landmarks Preservation Commission October 
21, 1997; Designation List 285 LP-1968. 
According to Nathaniel Owings, the designers “were 
encouraged to come up with whatever popped into 
their heads, and the history and tradition of banking 



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be damned. Nathaniel A. Owings, The Spaces in Between: An Architect’s 
Journey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 103.
23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 
68. 
24. Architectural Forum, “Modern Architecture Breaks through the Glass 
Barrier [Manufacturers Trust Co. Branch, N.Y.].” Architectural Forum 
101 (December 1954): 104-11.
25. For additional background and context to this project (510 Fifth Ave), 
see Evan Bindelglass, “LPC Chair, Top Architects Review NYC’s Adaptive 
Reuse Projects”, New York Imby (Dec 23, 2015), at https://newyorkyimby.
com/2015/12/lpc-chair-top-architects-review-nycs-adaptive-reuse-projects.
html/, accessed October 10, 2019.
26. Robert Bruegman, Modernism at Mid-Century. The Architecture of the 
United States Air Force Academy (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 
1994), 47.
27. As Hegel points out in his Aesthetics, “Works of art enchant us not 
because they are so natural but because they have been made so natural.” 
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1975), 164. The artificiality of the landscape is yet another 
articulation of the project as willed intention. Architectural Forum declared 
that the architects “shaped the slopes as powerfully as the Babylonians, 
the Incas, and the Greeks once did.” Architectural Forum, “The Air Age 
Acropolis”, Architectural Forum 110.6 (June 1959), 158-65.
28. Bruegman, Modernism at Mid-Century, 53.
29. Meeting attendees included Lt. General Regni, Dr. Rokke, Colonel 
(ret) Tom Berry, and Colonel Ackerman.
30. As Nicholas Adams writes in Casabella, “it respects everything around 
it and yet it offers something completely original.” Nicholas Adams, 
“Polaris Hall, Center for Character and leadership Development, Air Force 
Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado,” Casabella 871 (March 2017).
31. The logic of the present unfolds into its future. “It is as if each step 
taken called for and made possible another step, or as if each successful 
expression prescribed another task to the spiritual automation or founded 
an institution whose efficacy it will have never finished experiencing.” 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 
54.



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design-politics:
how buildings mean

lawrence J. vale

         19th century Prussian general Carl von 
Clausewitz famously stated that “War is the 
continuation of politics by other means.”1 The 
same might be said about the architecture of public 
buildings. But if public architecture is also an 
extension of politics by other means, what—more 
precisely—are those means?
       Philosopher Nelson Goodman is among the 
few to pose this question directly. In his essay “How 
Buildings Mean,”2 Goodman rightly points out 
that we must consider the prior question of how 
a particular work of architecture conveys meaning 
before we are able to address the issue of what the 
building may mean. Goodman, writing in the late 
1980s while based at Harvard during the latter part 
of his career, thereby inserted himself in a debate 
starting to percolate in the more rarified precincts 
of architectural education—such as the Harvard 
Graduate School of Design—about the extent that 
architecture constituted an autonomous practice. In 
his essay, Goodman aims to identify the categories 
of meaning that the built environment may convey 
as well as to elucidate the mechanisms by which 
these meanings are transmitted. This sort of analysis 
is crucial for understanding the boundary between 
properties that are intrinsic to works of architecture 
and those properties ascribed to architecture that 
are central to its reception in a politically-driven 
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      In this paper, I consider both the strengths of Goodman’s formulation and 
its limitations–as viewed three decades later in an era when digital media 
have dramatically reoriented the ways that architecture is both presented 
and represented. The enhanced attention to the role of media makes it 
increasingly difficult to sustain much practical sense of architecture as an 
autonomous or even quasi-autonomous practice. Rather—in an era of 
programmable facades, highly-charged urban contexts, and countervailing 
artistic interventions and augmentations—it seems increasingly impossible 
to isolate Goodman’s ideas about “denotation,” “exemplification,” 
“metaphorical expression,” and “mediated reference” from a building’s 
political reception. The result, I argue, is a kind of conjoined design-
politics. In what follows, I explore the power of that design-politics 
hyphen through a set of examples that range from the Lincoln Memorial3 
to Donald Trump’s hotels.

Goodman’s Ideas about Architectural Meaning: An Example

Denotation
     The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Figure 1) provides an 
especially good example of Goodman’s first type of meaning—denotation—
because it is, literally, full of texts. In this sense, its meanings are intended 
to be read directly, at least for those who can read English and Roman 
numerals. The entablature and upper setback of the building contain 
carved names of the forty-eight contiguous states that comprised the 
United States at the time construction of the Memorial finished in 1922. 
(Awkwardly, but understandably, a separate plaque in front of the structure 
discontiguously adds Alaska and Hawai’i, which were added as states only 
in 1959.) Continuing the denotative content, the building façades feature 
a total of thirty-six columns—one pillar for each of the states in the union 
in 1865 at the close of the Civil War. Through the deployment of these 
columns, the states of the union that Lincoln saved directly structure the 
proportions of the building—twelve on the long sides, eight on the short 
sides (That adds up to forty but the corner columns are seen from two 
sides, so that is why it totals thirty-six.)
     The denotation continues on the inner walls of the building, with 
parts of two Lincoln speeches literally carved into stone. Importantly, the 
two speeches chosen—the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural 
Address—are both centered on the role of Lincoln as preserver of the 
union of states. By contrast, architect Henry Bacon (and, presumably, 
his clients) chose not to highlight other famous texts that may well have 
carried far greater political or policy significance, such as the Emancipation 



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Proclamation. The Civil War may well have been 
fought over the future of a southern slave economy, 
but the Lincoln Memorial—at least in its denotative 
sense—was centered on reminders of union, not on 
freeing slaves.

Metaphorical Expression
The Lincoln Memorial also nicely conveys 
Goodman’s second type of meaning—the notion of 
metaphorical expression. The building is not just a 
rectangular object with columns, but a metaphorical 
temple, with Lincoln as a seated deity. Here, a 
public building conveys meaning because of widely 
shared cultural notions (at least in Western culture) 
about Greco-Roman practices of deification and 
worship. And just in case the metaphor might be 
lost on some visitors, architect Bacon and his team 
also made use of Goodman’s first type of meaning—
denotation—by carving a more literal reminder 
just above Lincoln’s head: “In this temple, as in the 
hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, 
the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined 
forever.” We are thereby shown a metaphorical 
shrine and temple, and also reminded about what 
we are seeing.

Exemplification
     The Lincoln Memorial is also a prime site for 

the building 
is not just a 

rectangular 
object with 

columns, but a 
metaphorical 

temple

“

”

figure 1: 

lincoln memorial



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observing Goodman’s third mechanism of meaning: exemplification. 
Goodman observes that every work of architecture exemplifies certain of 
its properties in ways that draw particular attention. In the case of this 
Memorial, it is clear that the building serves as the termination of an axis, 
and emphasizes bilateral symmetry, both as a building and as a work of 
urban design. As a composition, the building itself exemplifies a clear 
pattern of solid-void-solid, as a way to draw attention to the statue of 
Lincoln at the center. And, at the same time, the form of the building 
emphasizes the gleaming white materiality of its marble, in contrast with 
the darker interior.

Mediated Reference
      Finally, the Lincoln Memorial helps us understand Goodman’s fourth 
type of architectural meaning—what he terms a mediated reference. 
Here, beyond the notion of metaphor, the building asks those who view 
it to associate it with broader conceptual references—notions that could 
be about such things as worship, democracy, freedom, or unification. 
Construction of the building had been controversial—from lingering 
sectional disputes about the role of Lincoln to the idea of constructing 
this temple on a former swamp— so project proponents needed to do 
everything possible to remind visitors about the ideals of unification and 
unity. They did so in 1923 by having the American Institute of Architects 
use the building to stage a pageant honoring Henry Bacon, keeping the 
focus on neoclassical design and worshipful display.
      A decade and a half later, however, the mediated reference of this 
monument began to shift. In 1939, famed African-American contralto 
Marian Anderson was denied the opportunity to perform at Washington 
DC’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, 
due to her race.4 At the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, secretary of the 
interior Harold Ickes arranged for Anderson to sing instead from the steps 
of the Lincoln Memorial. A mixed-race audience of 75,000 people showed 
up. The mediated reference altered again on August 28, 1963, when the 
building served as the terminal focal point of the March on Washington, 
(Figure 2)one hundred years after Lincoln had signed the emancipation 
proclamation. Marian Anderson began the program by leading the singing 
of the National Anthem. Memorializing the events of the day and adding 
to the mediated reference of the building itself, the federal government 
authorized placement of a carved stone added on the platform from which 
King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” Speech. In this way, the mediated 
reference had shifted from Saving the Union to Securing Civil Rights. In 



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its late-20th-century 
messaging, the 
building was less 
about political union 
than about the 
pursuit of racial and 
economic equality. 
The metaphor was 
still that of a temple 
and its god, but 
now Lincoln was to 
be deified for other 
reasons. 
      In 1968, the Lincoln Memorial consolidated 
its relationship with Martin Luther King, when 
King’s Poor People’s Campaign was granted a 
permit to construct Resurrection City adjacent to 
the memorial. In this way, the mediated reference 
of the building as a representation of both civil 
rights and economic rights reached full fruition. 
It was thus no surprise that Barack Obama chose 
to celebrate part of his inauguration in 2009 at the 
Lincoln Memorial.

Beyond Goodman’s Quartet of Meaning Types

Clearly, the notion of a mediated reference starts 
to take the meaning of a building into a larger 
realm of applied ideas, more so than do notions 
of denotation, metaphor, or exemplification. 
Yet Goodman is still content to view mediated 
references as part of the way that buildings mean 
as works of architecture. That said, he also readily 
acknowledges that buildings may also have non-
architectural meanings—things that he considers to 
be more arbitrary, with no intrinsic connection to 
design. Goodman writes:

A building of any design may come to stand 
for some of its causes or effects, or for some 

 
the building 
asks those 
who view it 

to associate 
with broader 

conceptual 
references

“

”

figure 2: 

Lincoln memorial, 1963



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historical event that occurred in it or on its site, or for its designated 
use; any abattoir may symbolize slaughter, and any mausoleum, 
death; and a costly county courthouse may symbolize extravagance. 
To mean in such a way is not thereby to function as an architectural 
work.5

      Applied to my example of the Lincoln Memorial, there still seems 
good reason to attach the mediated reference label—whether “Union” or 
“Civil Rights”—to the building itself, since the associations are clearly 
not arbitrary. Still, it is possible to imagine other events happening on 
the site—a plane crash, say, or a murder—that would, indeed, bear no 
relation to the Memorial’s meaning as a work of architecture. Goodman—
presumably prodded by his nearby colleagues at Harvard’s Graduate 
School of Design—wanted to cling to the possibility of an autonomous 
realm for architecture, or at least to lay claim to what MIT architectural 
historian Stanford Anderson first called “semiautonomy” and later “quasi-
autonomy.”6 But, increasingly, quasi-autonomy just leaves me queasy.
      We now seem clearly in a world of queasy autonomy, one where 
the public and the media insist that public buildings be seen as inhabited 
places and as parts of cities. This may understandably threaten the 
professional self-esteem of some designers, especially if they expect their 
work to communicate their own design intentions. Yet we are long past 
any era where architects can hope to control the received meaning of their 
designs. We are in a world where public buildings are experienced not 
just as objects but as productive processes engaged with human labor, 
material supply chains, financial tradeoffs, and community impacts. It 
seems increasingly harder to preserve a separate realm of meanings that are 
intrinsic to architecture qua architecture, separate from some presumed 
set of overlaid meanings that are somehow non-architectural. Especially if 
one looks at buildings at the scale of urban design, this implicates them in 
their surroundings and, accordingly, asks us to consider ways to account 
for their associated meanings.
       Increasingly, I argue, the power of what Goodman would consider 
“non-architectural meanings” has become so predominant that there is 
little practical value in declaring them to be non-architectural. In short, just 
as the boundaries between architectural and non-architectural meaning are 
harder to maintain, so too it is harder to maintain a separation between 
the world of design and the world of politics. Instead, especially with the 
burgeoning of digital media in the three decades since Goodman tried to set 
categories and boundaries for ”how buildings mean,” all public buildings 
have become what I have previously termed “mediated monuments.”7 Such 



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public buildings are inseparable from the media 
campaigns conducted to construct (and constrict) 
their interpretation.
       In what follows, I will take Nelson Goodman on 
something of a world tour in search of what he may 
have missed. I will stick with his four terms, but 
probe how they may be altered by externally imposed 
agendas. Building from Goodman’s nomenclature, 
this means that denotative meaning can now be 
temporarily—or permanently—annotated with 
additional texts, and thereby altered. It means that 
the expression of metaphors may stray far from 
the positive associations predicted by architects. 
It means that buildings may exemplify certain 
properties, but that the aesthetics of these properties 
are increasingly inextricable from political economy. 
Finally, taking Goodman forward means that, 
with burgeoning forms of new media, mediated 
references proliferate and shift. We can see this even 
in the Lincoln Memorial, depending on how we 
view it. Seen obliquely from above on a summer’s 
day, the monument may seem a forested object 
rather than a temple at the end of an axis reminding 
us about civil rights. Or, if one looks beyond the 
Memorial to the northwest, we see yet a different 
context. Instead of locating Memorial within the 
artifice of Washington D.C. with its Mall and its 
height limitations, we are confronted with broader 
realm of capitalist investment that has jumped 
the Potomac to build high-rises in less restrictive 
northern Virginia, Amazon’s future new hub. The 
meaning of buildings clearly varies depending on 
the viewpoint of the observer, and the scale of 
environment being observed.

Beyond Goodman, Toward Design-Politics

       Taken together, I am arguing for a convergence 
of design and politics, and propose that they be 
conjoined by a hyphen. Seen this way, how buildings 

Goodman [...] 
wanted to cling 

to  cling to the 
possibility of 

an autonomous 
realm for 

architecture 
[...]  but, 

increasingly, 
quasi-

autonomous 
architecture 

just leaves me 
queasy

“

”



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mean is inextricably linked to what, why, and where buildings mean. We 
can begin by taking on Goodman’s notion of meaning by denotation. 
Once denotation gets tied in with marketing, toponymic alteration (aka 
name-changing), and annotation, the denotation gets engulfed by its 
design-politics.

Denotation Gets Trumped
      One prominent place to start is with Chicago’s Trump International 
Hotel and Tower, the city’s second tallest building—even if this is a place 
that would initially seem to have little to offer students of Goodmanian 
denotation. When first opened, in 2008, the building appeared as a vast 
composition of soaring blue glass, with minimal signage. But in 2014, 6 
years after completion, the Trump Organization added five 20’ tall letters 
spelling out T-R-U-M-P 141-feet wide, lit at night with LED fixtures 
(Figure 3). The designers located this lettering 200 feet above street level 
for maximum urban visibility at a distance. Initially proposed to cover 
3,600 sq. ft., Chicago’s planning and development department insisted 
that it be down-sized by 20 percent, still leaving it at 2,891 sq. ft. A pre-
presidential Donald Trump assured Chicago Tribune architecture critic 
Blair Kamin that the backlit LED lighting “will be more subtle”–to which 
Kamin responded: “as subtle as Godzilla.”8 At night, the signage stands 
out not just as the terminus of north-south streets, but as the dominant 
presence of the east-west view along the Chicago River. Trump, apparently 
a scholar of architecture and of philosophy, is clearly into deal-making 
dialogue with Nelson Goodman when he commented that the sign is “part 
of the architecture of the building.” He also knowingly enters into the 
realm of semiotics when he adds that “the people in the building” (who 
of course are the only ones who don’t actually have to look at the signage) 
“love it as an identifier.”9 Trump told an interviewer that he expected the 
sign to become an important part of the cultural landscape of Chicago 
in the manner of the Hollywood sign.10 Importantly for Trump, the sign 
covers part of the building occupied by air conditioning vents and other 
mechanicals, so it doesn’t restrict views or revenues from interior space.  
That, too, is part of the building’s design-politics.
       In gaining its new signage, Trump’s eponymous Chicago tower is, 
arguably, now not the same building. Its new denotative layer, though, 
adds more than mere explanatory lettering; it also adds a new kind of 
exemplified property, and it shifts the mediated reference of the work, 
linking it to a global brand associated with ostentation. And, in both the 
run-up to the 2016 presidential election and its presidential aftermath, 



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the billboard-bold presence of the Trump name on 
the city’s most storied skyline could not help but 
be polarizing. Any effort to analyze this edifice as 
merely a tall structure of glass and steel, devoid 
of other associations, now seems fruitless—and 
certainly bears little relationship to how the 
building is received on the ground. It is also another 
reminder that buildings exist as urban artifacts not 
just as isolated structures. In urban design terms, 
this one does more than terminate an axial vista; it 
trumps it.
       Chicago’s Zoning Committee belatedly realized 
what it had inadvertently 
permitted, and duly 
established a “Chicago 
River Corridor Special Sign 
District.”11 Still, this did 
nothing to undo the design-
politics of denotation that 
had already been allowed to 
occur. The new ordinance 
just meant that TRUMP will 
have no future competition 
for visual attention.
       The chief recourse has 
come via the work of artists. One such interpretive 
designer simply de-pixilated the first letter--
removing the ‘T’ to alter the meaning. Another 
artist sought a permit to float a series of gilded 
pig-shaped balloons, strategically aligned, as new 
form of editorial erasure.12 Other editing (and 
editorializing) photoshoppers proposed a quick 
demise for the structure as a whole.13
      Following Trump’s election as president, the 
denotative meaning of his eponymous structures 
underwent pointed alteration in some locales. In 
2018, the majority owner of the Trump Ocean Club 
in Panama City had the TRUMP part of the name 
removed, and then grandly performed an anti-
fascist song in the lobby to mark the occasion.14 In 

figure 3: 

Trump  International 
Hotel and Tower 



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terms of shifting the scope of Goodman’s notion of “denotation,” perhaps 
the most sustained commentary has come from video projection artist 
Robin Bell, who has been annotating Trump properties in both New York 
and Washington, DC.
       On the evening of August 7, 2017—one week after reports surfaced 
that special counsel Robert Mueller had impaneled a grand jury as part 
of his investigation into Russian interference with the election and any 
possible collusion with Trump campaign staffers—Bell projected a huge 
Russian flag onto the street-facing front of the TRUMP SOHO property. 
In turn, the middle blue stripe of the flag was annotated with a sequence 
of matter-of-fact advertisements in English and Russian: “Follow the 
Money”—“Laundering Services Available”—“Happy to help, Bro!,” along 
with an image of Vladimir Putin. Accompanying this, a retinue of five 
uniformed militarized marchers in red hats and mock Russian Army garb 
strode toward the building to the strains of the Russian national anthem. 
A projection project that lasted less than 15 minutes in real time quickly 
went viral on social media posted by onlookers, leading to widespread 
coverage on everything from the New York Daily News to Huffington Post 
to Business Insider to Artnet.com.15 The Trump Soho hotel would never be 
the same. By December, the hotel was renamed The Dominick.16
     Bell’s most publicized work has happened in Washington, DC. At 
the Trump International Hotel, a building with a long history of shifting 
denotation and meanings. Taller than either the Washington Cathedral or 
the U.S. Capitol, the Old Post Office and Clock Tower along Pennsylvania 
Avenue—originally completed in 1899—clearly appealed to the Trump 
Organization. Shortly before Trump entered the presidential race, his 
company won the right to redevelop the Old Post Office site as a luxury 
hotel. In 2016, they put up a massive construction sign in front of the 
building that echoed the coloration of the campaign bumper sticker and 
read “Trump: Coming 2016.”17 The Trump International Hotel opened 
shortly after Trump was elected president in 2016, and Robin Bell was 
quickly on the scene to annotate its façade using video projections from a 
truck parked just across the street, generating substantial press coverage in 
such outlets as CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles 
Times.18
       As legal challenges arose regarding the issue of whether profits from 
the hotel violated the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution,19 Bell’s 
annotation elided Goodman’s notion of denotation with other modes 
of meaning, especially mediated references. The post-election backlash 
entered the realm of design-politics though efforts to turn the building 



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into a meme about corruption: “Pay Trump Bribes 
Here” and “Emoluments Welcome” featured an 
arrow pointing to the hotel’s arched entrance. At 
the same time, through a new form of denotation, 
the installation sought to remind the public about 
the actual text of the emoluments clause.
       Bell also flashed façade dialogues that engaged 
other emergent news items, including proposed bans 
on certain terms at the Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention such as “diversity” “entitlement,” 
“fetus” “transgender” and “science-based.”20 On 
another occasion, he annotated the headquarters 
of the nearby Environmental Protection Agency 
with a warning: “Don’t let a climate denier take 
over the EPA.” In addition, Bell annotated the 
Department of Justice building with an image of 
Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a Klansman, with 
an illuminated “#SESSIONSMUSTGO.”21

The Politics of Metaphors
       Next, it is worth examining how Goodman’s 
ideas about metaphorical expression are also 
inextricable from the politics embedded in such 
metaphors. The messages may not be as angry or 
partisan as the Trumpian annotations, 
but metaphors, too, intertwine design 
with politics. Metaphors are not neutral; 
classic phrases such as “A Man’s Home 
Is His Castle,” are famously gendered. 
Since at least the early 17th century, 
this notion has been part of English 
Common Law, later transmitted to the 
United States, where it conveyed the 
right to forbid entry. This has been used 
as a way to assert individualism and 
anti-government views. Another image, 
from a promotional booklet produced 
by the National Association of Real 
Estate Boards in 1922, (Figure 4) underscores 
the ways that home-as-castle is a deeply gendered 

Bell’s 
annotation 

elided 
Goodman’s 

notion of 
denotation with 

other modes 
of meaning, 
especially 

mediated 
references.

“

Figure 4: Home Owning 
Breeds Real Men



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notion, rooted in differentials in power and access to resources.22
      This is not “man” as in “mankind”—rather, as explained here, 
“Home owning breeds REAL men”—"It is what puts the MAN back in 
MANHOOD”. Such metaphors mean not just as works of architecture 
but as acts of politics.
      Sometimes the metaphor has less serious overtones, as in the notion 
of Hotel as Palace. There are places named Palace Hotel across the world, 
often in cities long past ties to any actual royal rule. The opportunity to 
be temporary royalty may be little more than a frivolity of the wealthy, 
yet it may reveal deep-seated anxieties or jealousies or, alternatively, just 
an exaggerated sense of self-worth. More prosaically, in suburban Boston 
during the 1980s the architect Robert A.M. Stern fancified a postmodern 
speculative office building into a faux-Renaissance palace. It is really no 
more than a mini office park in an auto-dominated zone of malls, multi-
lane highways, and vast parking lots; inside is no palace. Still, Stern and the 
developers correctly deduced that it would be possible to market the palace 
metaphor more than the reality.

The Politics of Exemplification

       Turning next to the design-politics of exemplification it is also clear 
that architectural properties—even basic constitutive issues such as height, 
color, materials, and symmetry that very much seem to be confinable to 
the realm of aesthetics—are nonetheless more complex socio-cultural 
products and, therefore, are embedded in politics. Consider the long-
standing aim to construct tall buildings as an index of power. It is certainly 
possible to isolate the aesthetics of a building as a tall shape from any 
other of its properties, and to see such buildings, in Goodman’s terms, as 
exemplifying the property of height. It is also true that some buildings are 
made taller in order to convey that property. But height-mongering has an 
agenda; the ‘how’ of its meaning seems increasingly inseparable from the 
‘why’ and ‘where’ of its meaning.

The Design-Politics of Height
       The height of buildings, throughout the history of architecture, 
has been inseparable from its institutional presence, whether as funerary 
pyramids or as church spires, mosque minarets, victory arches and columns 
or capitol domes. Especially since the late 19th century, with enhanced 
global communication, the height of a building has become a comparative 



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and competitive phenomenon.
       Even so, the competitive design-politics of 
tall buildings began much earlier. Bruges boasted 
an early non-religious tall building as early as 1240, 
an observation tower constructed on top of the 
market building, which included spaces serving 
the city’s major cloth industry 
and the municipal archives. An 
octagonal part added was added 
in the 1480s, bringing the tower 
to 83m (272 feet), and, with its 
former wooden spire, it used to 
be even taller—354 feet (Figure 
5).
       The height was clearly about 
conveying the economic power 
of Bruges. In other words, the 
exemplification was not just 
about the physical properties of its tower and spire, 
but about the city leadership seeking to exemplify 
(and thereby market) its financial prowess. At the 
same time, it means through metaphor, by serving 
as a prototypical “cathedral of commerce.”
       Sometimes, such marketing served primarily 
internal domestic purposes but sometimes the 
visual statement was intended to be understood 
internationally. Spiro Kostof notes that drawings 
from Gustave Eiffel’s office showed height of his 
famous tower as, quite consciously, larger than 
adding together Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, 
and the Statue of Liberty. It also mattered that it 
eclipsed the Washington Monument as tallest 
manmade structure in the world (and almost 
doubled it).23
Until 1889, New York’s the spire of Trinity Church 
was that city’s highest structure, though it faced 
competition throughout the 1870s and 1880s as 
the Empire State’s media struck back. An irrational 
obsession over building height along New York’s 
Newspaper Row (with towers all eclipsing the 

figure  5:

bruges market 
square tower



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adjacent City Hall) led to protracted battle among the New York Times, the 
Tribune, the Sun and Pulitzer’s World. By 1909, however, the Metropolitan 
Life Insurance Tower outdid both church and press and, at 700 feet, 
became the tallest occupied building in the world. With a 50-story tower 
on top of 11-story base it resembled the campanile of St. Mark's in Venice. 
The tower also featured a clock that was visible a mile away and was topped 
by a beacon: “the light that never fails.” As a company pamphlet put it, 
“High and lofty, like a great sentinel keeping watch over the millions of 
policy holders and marking the fast-fleeting minutes of life, stands the 
Tower.” Geographer Mona Domosh explains that the tower conveyed 
“a civic as well as a commercial message,” revealing the new economic 
power and prestige of insurance companies. Life insurance, the product of 
19th-century prosperity and the availability of a new immigrant market, 
helped calm a family’s fears that its breadwinner might die young.24 The 
multivalence of meanings for tall buildings continued to develop with 
completion of New York’s Woolworth Building in 1913. Not just content 
to express the fact that it was the world’s tallest building, it needed the 
additional “Cathedral of Commerce” moniker to stake a metaphorical 
claim as well. Church and state stood recombined in a spire that conveyed 
capitalist triumph.
       Sometimes, though, the use of exemplification and metaphor in tall 
building has taken more traditional forms. The Chicago Temple, designed 
by Holabird and Roche in 1924, is a United Methodist church on top of 
skyscraper. It was the tallest building in Chicago from 1924-1930. And, 
at 29 stories and 568 feet, it remains the tallest church building in the 
world (still outdoing the Côte d’Ivoire’s Yamoussoukro basilica, which 
soars a mere 489 feet).25 Two U.S. states—Nebraska and Louisiana—have 
skyscrapers as their capitols, but these were exceptions to the growing 
subjugation of government to private corporate towers.
       Other planned towers participated into geo-political competition. The 
Russian communists proposed a mammoth Palace of the Soviets in the 
1930s, intended to overshadow both the past achievements of the adjacent 
Kremlin and to handily out-do America’s Empire State Building. The project 
remained unbuilt. Elsewhere, the use of building height as an extension of 
international political tension reached a particularly memorable moment 
in the urban staging of the national pavilions of rival powers at the 1937 
Paris World’s Fair. Here, arrayed across a grand court constructed adjacent 
to the Eiffel Tower, the German pavilion was allocated a site immediately 
opposite the spot offered to the Soviet Union. In his rather self-serving 
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revealed the true 
d e s i g n - p o l i t i c s 
impulse behind 
his design for the 
German side of 
the urbanistic 
c o n f r o n t a t i o n . 
“While looking 
over the site in 
Paris,” Speer writes 
with a degree of 
implausibility, “I by 
chance stumbled into a room containing the secret 
sketch of the Soviet pavilion;” sculpted figures 
33’ tall striding toward the German pavilion. “I 
therefore designed a cubic mass, also elevated on 
stout pillars, which seemed to be checking this 
onslaught, while from the cornice of my tower an 
eagle with the swastika in its claws looked down on 
the Russian sculptures.”26  (Figure 6)
     During the early years of the Cold War, Stalin 
proposed a series of large towers intended to house 
(and thereby highlight) a series of non-capitalist 
achievements, such as universities. Clearly, 
building heights had become not just a matter of 
an exemplified architectural property but a tool 
for geopolitical competition—a way for Russians 
to contend with the Americans at their own game. 
In that context, the specter of a much-discussed 
Trump Tower in Moscow, whether constructed 
from partnership or collusion, would have carried 
an additional layer of import.
      Overall, though, the design-politics of 
skyscrapers has long since shifted away from either 
an intra-American or Cold War enterprise, and 
long since become an international phenomenon. 
Cities in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Malaysia have 
put national, and often nationalist, stakes into the 
ground through aspirations to build tallest. Then, 
before “peak oil” might come to pass, Middle 

   Clearly, 
building heights 

had become 
not just a 

matter of an 
exemplified 

architectural 
property but 

a tool for 
geopolitical 
competition

“

”

figure 6: postcard, 
1937 Paris Exposition



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Easterners joined the game with peaks of their own. Dubai’s leadership 
willfully invented a high-rise corridor, culminating with the world’s 
tallest building in 2010, standing 828 meters (2716 feet). When under 
construction, it was known as Burj Dubai to highlight its location—even as 
Dubai faced considerable economic difficulties. But at the opening, which 
was timed to coincide with the 4th anniversary of Sheikh Mohammed bin 
Rashed al-Maktoum’s rule in Dubai, the name was announced as the Burj 
Khalifa, in honor of the emir of its neighbor and rival, Abu Dhabi, which 
had lent money to cover Dubai’s debts.27 So, in Goodman’s terms, the 
Burj does indeed exemplify height, but renaming Dubai’s apex for an Abu 
Dhabi emir also reveals the heights of chutzpah—though I doubt that was 
the word they used to describe it.
       By the early 2020s, the home of the world’s tallest building—intended 
to rise at least 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) will likely have migrated to Saudi 
Arabia, another place seeking the global recognition for its Kingdom in a 
manner that is more visible—and visualizable—than hidden oil reserves.

The Design-Politics of Color
       If the architectural property of height also exemplifies politics, so 
too does the property of color, especially if that color can be strategically 
manipulated. Increasingly, whether through interior lighting or through 
projections, architectural faÇades have become re-programmable. Buildings 
are often lit to commemorate particular holidays or sports facilities, but 
sometimes the use of color can deliberately carry a design-politics. As one 
example, following the tragic shooting of Coptic Christian pilgrims near 
Cairo in May 2017, the Mayor of Tel Aviv honored the victims by lighting 
the Tel Aviv municipal building in the colors of the Egyptian flag. This 
act of symbolic solidarity action was repeated in November, following 
an attack that killed more than two hundred worshippers at a crowded 
mosque on the Sinai Peninsula known to be frequented by Sufis.28

The Design-Politics of Materials
       Similarly, even the actual materials of buildings can sometimes be an 
expression of design-politics. Albert Speer, aided by some sketches provided 
by Hitler himself, planned and designed the gargantuan Germania to 
replace the center of Berlin with a grandiose North-South axis. Speer reports 
that Hitler insisted that the vast dome of the Great Hall be constructed 
of masonry without any steel reinforcement. Accordingly, Speer’s highly 
dubious “Theory of Ruin Value” promised that the resultant building, 



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once rendered into ruins after a thousand years, 
would have no aesthetically displeasing protrusions 
of rebar.29 Just as the city was to be an extension of 
the Nazi politics of global conquest—the word in 
stone—so, too, the materiality of the unreinforced 
stone itself was meant to convey power and control.
       But this is not the most striking way that the 
very materiality of stone exemplifies design-politics, 
and not just design. Martin Kitchen’s trenchant 
biography, Speer: Hitler’s Architect, notes that in 
Nov. 1938 some three thousand Jews were forced to 
leave Berlin every month; they were “evicted, forced 
into exile, terrorized or rounded up in concentration 
camps.” Speer wanted to do this not just to free up 
well located apartments for others but also to build 
up an ex-urban workforce that could be used for 
Germania. As Kitchen argues,

       In close collaboration with the SS, he 
ruthlessly exploited the labour of concentration 
camp inmates in quarries, brickyards and 
factories producing building materials, they 
worked under appalling conditions and the 
mortality rate was shockingly high. Speer made 
thousands of Jewish families homeless, most of 
whom were handed over to the Gestapo to be 
shipped to what was delicately described as ‘the 
East.’ 30

     The Mauthausen (Austria) and Flossenbürg 
(Bavaria) camps established in 1938 were explicitly 
sited to provide high quality stone for Berlin 
rebuilding. Sachenhausen (near Berlin) supplied 
labor for brickworks at Oranienburg, which was 
also built at Speer’s request in 1938. Specialized 
stone for other projects led to siting of Gross-
Rosen (in Polish Silesia) for bluish-grey granite, and 
Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace for reddish granite. 
In this way, the material needs of rebuilding Berlin 
and other monuments caused Speer and his team 
of planners and architects to be intimately involved 
in the ‘Final Solution.’ This chilling account 

   This chilling 
account 
provides 
further 

evidence that 
architectural 

properties 
such as stone 

may exemplify 
far more than 

their literal 
materiality.

“

”



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provides further evidence that architectural properties such as stone may 
exemplify far more than their literal materiality. Nazi architecture and 
Nazi urbanism were not just violations of scale and distortions of neo-
classicism in aesthetic terms; their material origins also inextricably linked 
them to violations and distortions of human rights. In short, the siting 
of concentration camps and the building of cities were part of the same 
nefarious complex of design-politics.

The Design-Politics of Symmetry
      So, if seemingly innocuous aspects such as height, color and materials 
are implicated in design-politics—and cannot be left to inhabit some 
wishful quasi-autonomy of architectural design—are there any exemplified 
architectural properties that might still remain apolitical acts of aesthetics? 
One possibility for this might be the notion of symmetry. Surely something 
as quintessentially aesthetic as this can occupy a place safely removed from 
politics? Well, perhaps not—or at least not always. Architectural symmetry 
is not just the solid-void-solid of the Lincoln Memorial. It can also convey 
implications of equivalency, with parallel weights given to each side of 
some central point. In turn, however, it also matters what (or who) is 
being weighted and aesthetically presented as parallel and equivalent. And 
symmetry also draws particular attention to whatever is signaled out as 
the center of the composition, be it a front door or an entire highlighted 
realm.
       Sometimes, as in the case of the almshouse developed in 1800 to house 
Boston’s poor, symmetry is about more than visual balance; it also can 
encode a sense of separated but equal that carries a social, or even political 
meaning. What we see here is symmetry used to accommodate and enforce 
the institution’s gender separation—indigent men on one side, indigent 
women on the other. And, importantly, the middle part is not just some 
attractively articulated A-B-A aesthetic rhythm, but is instead generated by 
the need to provide a chapel at center, as a source of moral judgment and 
redemption for the benighted denizens of the almshouse. (Figure 7)

The Design-Politics of Mediated References: Freedom, Security, Democratic Access, 
Exclusion

      If even the most intrinsically architectural elements can be bound up 
with politics—Goodman’s category of exemplification—it is even easier 
to return to the case for finding a design-politics in the other categories 

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of denotation, metaphor, and 
mediated reference. Denotation, 
especially when it can be altered 
or augmented through the actions 
of others, seems easily bound 
with politics. And, similarly, 
metaphors—simply because they 
are already rooted in culturally 
freighted language—also seem 
particularly malleable to political 
manipulation. This leaves mediated references, 
already the part of Goodman’s quartet that seems 
furthest from architectural purity. Using two final 
examples, I aim to show how designers deliberately 
shape the intended conceptual resonances of their 
work, while also demonstrating just how easy it is 
for such mediated references to shift—just as the 
Lincoln Memorial moved from “Union” to “Civil 
Rights” as its primary referent.
      Following the destruction of the twin towers 
in the 2001 9/11 attacks--themselves a deliberate 
targeting of exemplified architectural properties 
(height) and metaphorical expression (capitalism 
and world 
trade)—Daniel 
L i b e s k i n d ’ s 
c o m p e t i t i o n -
winning urban 
design plan for 
the ground zero 
site memorably 
entered the world 
of mediated 
references because 
he dubbed his 
central structure the Freedom Tower. Moreover, 
Libeskind gave it symbolically resonant height of 
1776 feet—a number that had culturally-encoded 
American meaning as a mediated reference for 
“independence” even if it could not be a palpable 
measurement of height. Underscoring the designer’s 

figure 8:

freedom tower and 
lower Manhattan

Figure 7: Almshouse



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intent—just in case the conceptual resonance of the building might be 
lost—Libeskind’s competition rendering showed the form of the seemingly 
abstract building to be anthromorphically mimicking the raised arm of the 
Statue of Liberty.
      The design-politics of the urban design scheme and the building 
were as much about the concept of American-style freedom as a direct 
counterpoint to the restrictive politics of terrorists as it was about the 
form of buildings. Sadly, the mediated reference to “independence” and 
“freedom” was not to last; instead, as built, the blockier One World Trade 
Center building designed by David Childs exhibits far greater attention to 
issues of security than freedom; its fortified base is designed to withstand 
the impact of a truck bomb (Figure 8).
       Turning now to Canberra, Australia, it is possible to explore other 
struggles over mediated reference in the contested terrain of this capital 
city designed by American Walter Burley Griffin. Griffin’s competition-
winning plan featured a “land axis” that included a triangular district 
of government buildings culminating in a “capital hill,” as well as a 
perpendicular water axis along an artificial lake. The Australian government, 
slowly but surely, executed many aspects of Griffin’s plan despite many 
alterations, yielding a long axis of power stretching from the Australian 
War Memorial at the base of Mount Ainslie southwest to Parliament 
House. (Figure 9) The result is both a dominant narrative about “garden 
cities” and democracy—but also a counter-narrative promulgated in the 
same central space by Aboriginal activists who regard the very site of the 
capital as an illegitimate usurpation of “sacred land.” Intermittently since 
1972, and consistently since 1992, these activists have maintained an 
“Aboriginal Embassy”—an informal settlement placed directly athwart the 
country’s most iconic political space.31 (Figure 10) In addition to tents 
and signage that conveys reminders about “stolen children,” “native title,” 
and “genocide,” a ceremonial flame has been kept alight since 1998. In 
other words, there is no shared mediated reference; one group’s strong 
association is the negation of the other.
       It took three-quarters of a century, but eventually Griffin’s plan for a 
capital hill with a capitol building yielded an unusual hybrid—a parliament 
building carved into the hill, seemingly there to symbolize the people’s 
freedom to walk over the top of the hill and look down upon the halls 
of the legislative representatives. Yet security concerns quickly ended the 
access to the summit, thereby shifting the mediated reference. Meanwhile, 
parliamentarians drive their cars directly into underground parking and, 
unlike the provisional parliament house that preceded this one, there is 



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no longer any intermediary 
outdoor space where 
lawmakers can be stopped 
to confer with journalists.32 
And for some aboriginals, 
the building still seems closed 
off.
       Politicians celebrated the 
role of the aboriginal artist 
who designed the mosaic 
forecourt but the official 
Royal Institute of Australian 
Architects booklet about 
the building treats the entry 
sequence as a calculated 
symbolic spatial sequence 
that narrates the “advent of 
European civilization.”33 
With entry through a 
detached trabeated portico, 
(Figure 11) it is as if indigenous 
culture has been trampled 
over and left outside. Clearly 
this Parliament House is a 
building, like all good public 
structures, that means in multiple and 
complex ways.

Conclusion: Building a Design-Politics

       As these examples from around the 
world have shown, there is increasing 
convergence between design and 
politics—enough, I think, to warrant a 
hyphen. The mechanisms of meaning—
the 'How?' sorts of questions about 
the meaning of buildings that Nelson 
Goodman asked us to try to isolate—are 
inextricably linked to what, why, and 
where buildings mean. Is the building on 

figure 9:  canberra

figure 10: Aboriginal Embassy

figure 11: parliament house



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sacred land? Does acquiring its materials depend on conscripted labor? 
Do its metaphors allude to oppressive rather than emancipatory practices? 
Will artists annotate the faÇades with contentious messages? Agendas for 
public buildings are set not just by architects, or even by their clients, 
but by a variety of contested actions and personal, subnational, national 
and international priorities. The architecture of buildings matters, but it is 
their larger design-politics that richly renders them as central to the human 
experience.

The author wishes to thank Dr. Suzanne Harris-Brandts for her excellent 
research assistance.

endnotes

1. This phrase, from On War, is sometimes translated with the word 
“policy” replacing “politics” and with the word “by” replaced by “with.”
2. Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean” In Goodman and Catherine 
Elgin, eds., Reconceptions in Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 
31-48.
3. Earlier attempts to deploy Goodman to explain the Lincoln Memorial 
appear in  both editions of Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and 
National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 and New York: 
Routledge, 2008).
4. This exclusionary policy was dropped in 1943. At about this time, 
Maryland artist Mitchell Jamieson created a 12’ by 7’ mural, called 
“An Incident in Contemporary American Life,” which adorns a wall in 
basement of the Interior Department Building. On Feb. 1, 2018, to mark 
the beginning of Black History Month the Interior Department held a 
ceremony to mark the mural’s 75th anniversary. This resulted from the 
activism of a Massachusetts high school student who wrote an op-ed in the 
Washington Post, as well as letters to federal officials and Oprah Winfrey; 
Elise Takahama, “Westwood Student Wins Recognition for Forgotten Civil 
Rights Mural,” Boston Globe, 1 February 2018; https://www.bostonglobe.
com/metro/2018/02/01/westwood-student-wins-recognition-for-
forgotten-civil- rights-mural/RLb65wWYVbOLGuMr6WV4nK/story.
html
5. Goodman, 43-44.
6. Stanford Anderson, “Critical Conventionalism in Architecture,” 



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Assemblage 1 (October 1986), 6-23; Stanford 
Anderson, “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The 
Search for an ‘In-between,'” Perspecta 33 (2002), 
30-37.
7. “Mediated Monuments and National Identity,” 
Journal of Architecture 4 (Winter 1999), pp. 
391-408.
8. Blair Kamin, “Donald Trump: Giant Sign on his 
Chicago Tower is Like Hollywood Sign,” Chicago 
Tribune, 5 June 2014; Blair Kamin, “Donald 
Trump’s Sycophantic, Vitriolic Treatment of 
Architecture Critics,” Chicago Tribune, 7 October 
2016.
9. Micah Maidenberg and Ryan Ori, “Trump to 
Sign Maker: You’re Hired,” Crain’s Chicago Business, 
21 February 2014.
10. Trump quoted in Kamin, “Donald Trump: 
Giant Sign...”
11. City of Chicago, Office of the Mayor, “Mayor 
Emanuel Announces Proposed Ordinance to 
Establish a Chicago River Corridor Special 
Sign District,” 17 September 2014; https://
www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/
press_releases/2014/sep/mayor-emanuel- announces-
proposed-ordinance-to-establish-a-chicag.html; “City 
Bans Big Signage Along River, But Trump’s Sign 
Stays,” Curbed, 14 November 2014.
12. Corey Mueller, “Will Trump Tower Sign Be 
Obscured by Flying Pigs?” Chicago Tribune, 4 May 
2017.
13. Kelly Bauer and David Matthews, “Throw 
Trump Tower Into the River? 7,000 Chicagoans 
to Join Symbolic Dumping,” The Block Club, 
13 January 2016; https://www.dnainfo.com/
chicago/20160113/downtown/want-toss- trump-
tower-into-river-theres-event-for-that/
14. Ana Cerrud and David A. Fahrenthold, “Trump’s 
Name is Stripped from Panama Hotel,” Washington 
Post, 5 March 2018; Kirk Semple, Steve Eder and 



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Ben Protess, “Panama Hotel Owner Declares Victory and Trump’s Name 
is Removed,” New York Times, 5 March 2018.
15. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/protesters-project-
pictures-putin-trump-soho-hotel-article-1.3393395; https://news.
artnet.com/art-world/trump-soho-hotel-russia-ties-1045406; 
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/artist-projects-trump-soho_
us_598a19f7e4b0449ed50622b1; https://www.businessinsider.com/
trump-putin-meme-russia-trump-soho-hotel-new-york-2017-8
16. Christopher Brennan, “Trump SoHo Signs Come Down at Newly 
Christened Dominick hotel, though Checkered Past Remains,” New York 
Daily News, 21 December 2017.
17. The “Trump – Coming 2016” sign received considerable press 
coverage during the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. D.C. city 
council members proposed investigating its removal, but ultimately, the 
Federal Election Commission said that the sign was not a violation. Aaron 
C. Davis, “Trump’s ‘Coming 2016’ Sign Stays on Federal Building Near 
White House,” Washington Post, 20 July 2015; Perry Stein, “That Huge 
‘TRUMP’ Sign Between the White House and Capitol is Being Removed,” 
Washington Post, 18 August 2016.
18. Nicole Chavez and Emily Smith, “’Pay Trump Bribes Here’ Sign 
Projected Onto Trump’s DC Hotel,”CNN.com, 16 May 2017; Christopher 
Mele and Daniel Victor, “”’Pay Trump Bribes Here’ Projected on Trump 
Hotel in Washington,” New York Times, 16 May 2017; Carolina Miranda, 
“Meet Robin Bell, the Artist Who Project Protest Messages Onto Trump’s 
D.C. Hotel Last Night,” Los Angeles Times, 16 May 2017; Maria Chu, “The 
Artist Projecting on to Trump Hotel,” BBC News, 7 June 2017; Associated 
Press, “Anti-Trump Images Become Big Business for DC Projectionist,” 21
August 2018, https://wtop.com/dc/2018/08/
anti-trump-images-become-big-business-for-dc-projectionist/slide/1/
19. Jessica Taylor and Peter Overby, “Federal Watchdog Finds Government 
Ignored Emoluments Clause With Trump Hotel,” National Public Radio, 
16 January 2019; https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/685977471/federal-
watchdog-finds-government-ignored-emoluments-clause-with-trump-
hotel
20. Curtis M. Wong, “LGBTQ Group Projects Word Trump Reportedly 
Tried to Ban from CDC Onto His Hotel,” Huffington Post 28 December 
2017; https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hrc-trump-hotel-cdc-
reportedly- banned-words_us_5a3aa7d2e4b0b0e5a79f16ae. The “banned 
words” terminology was likely overstated—follow- on reporting suggested 



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that, far from a ban, the list of words was merely 
a suggestion of terms to avoid if an organization 
wanted to get funding during a highly-politicized 
era. 
21. Robin Bell (@bellvisuals), “Projecting 
#BootPruitt on the EPA, it’s time for @
EPAScottPruitt to go!,” twitter post, 28. 
March 2018; https://twitter.com/bellvisuals/
status/979142626548109313?lang=en; “’Sessions 
Must go’ Projected on DOJ Headquarters,” USA 
Today, 19 May 2017.
22. M.W. Folsom, The Facts About Home Owning: 
An Authoritative Presentation (Chicago: National 
Association of Real Estate Boards, 1922).
23. Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped (Boston: Bulfinch 
Press, 1991), 320.
24. Mona Domosh, “The Symbolism of the 
Skyscraper: Case Studies of New York’s First Tall 
Buildings,” Journal of Urban History 14, 3 (May 
1988), 337, 339.
25. http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/building/
chicago-temple-building/2609; https://
www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/15/
yamoussoukro-notre-dame-de-la-paix-ivory-coast-
worlds- largest-basilica-history-of-cities-in-50-
buildings-day-37
26 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: 
Simon and Schuster, 1970), 81.
27. Andy Hoffman, “Dubai’s Burj Khalifa: Built 
Out of Opulence; Named for Its Saviour,”
The Globe and Mail, 4 January 2010; 
https://www.theglobeandmail .com/report-
on-business/dubais-burj-khalifa- built-
ou t -o f - opu l enc e -named - fo r - i t s - s a v i ou r /
article1208413/
28. “Tel Aviv City Hall Lit with Egypt Flag 
in Solidarity with Copt Terror Victims,” 
Times of Israel, 28 May 2017; https://www.
timesofisrael.com/tel-aviv-city-hall-lit-with-



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egypt-flag-in-solidarity-with-cairo-terror-victims/; “Egyptian Flag 
Lights Up TA City Hall in Solidarity with Mosque Victims,” Times 
of Israel, 24 November 2017; https://www.timesofisrael.com/
egyptian-flag-lights-up-ta-city-hall-in-solidarity-with-mosque-victims/.
29 Martin Kitchen, Speer: Hitler’s Architect (New Haven: Yale University 
Press, 2015), 34.
30. Kitchen, 72-73, 85.
31. National Museum of Australia, “Aboriginal Tent Embassy;” https://
www.nma.gov.au/defining- moments/resources/aboriginal-tent-embassy; 
Tom McIlroy, “The Aboriginal Tent Embassy Has Been Left off the 
ACT Heritage List,” Canberra Times, 19 April 2015; Monica Tan, “The 
Aboriginal Tent Embassy: ‘We Were All Young, Crazy, But We Believed in 
Justice,’” The Guardian, 10 May 2016.
32. James Weirick, “Don’t You Believe It: Critical Response to the New 
Parliament House,” Transition (Summer/Autumn 1989), 65.
33. The celebratory volume sponsored by the RAIA is Haig Beck, ed., 
Parliament House Canberra: A Building for the Nation (Sydney: Collins, 
1988), 20-25; Joint House Department (Canberra), Australia’s Parliament 
House: The Meeting Place of Our Nation (Canberra: Australian Government 
Publishing Service, 1989), 8.



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Koolhaas’ revision of foucault’s 
panopticon, or 
how architecture and philosophy 
just met

ANDRÉ PATRÃO

1. To ask about the interactions between philosophy and 
architecture

 
       Architecture and philosophy have engaged 
with one other, directly, marginally, or just simply 
implicitly, in the works and discourse of academics, 
practitioners, and critics, most evidently in 
architectural modernism and postmodernism, but 
most intensively in the reactions to both. Philosophy 
has been avidly sought by architects to help question, 
disclose reveal, systematize, express, and expand the 
understanding of architectural works, the world 
upon which they intervene, the discipline itself, 
and the role of its practitioners and theoreticians. 
Architecture, in turn, has grown within philosophy 
from a passing example or an illustrative metaphor 
of some other matter, or a generally misfit artform 
within an aesthetic theory, into a topic in its own 
right—as testified by the recent development of a 
‘philosophy of architecture.’ 
      The particularly acute multiplication and 
radicalization of interactions between philosophy 
and architecture throughout the 20th century 
produced a number of well-known cases in which an 
author, work, school, movement, or approach from 
one discipline had a direct decisive effect the other. 
Famously, Norberg-Schulz relied heavily on Martin 
Heidegger’s philosophical writings to elaborate his 
own distinctive architectural phenomenological 



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theories. Kenneth Frampton, also well-read in the German philosopher’s 
writings, was never shy about the effect Hannah Arendt exerted on him. 
At times philosophers and architects collaborated, such as in 1985 when 
Bernard Tschumi invited Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman to design 
a garden pavilion in Parc de la Villette (1982-1998), or when discussions 
between Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel were published as the book The 
Singular Objects of Architecture (2002). Preceding them all is of course the 
philosopher who also briefly became an architect, Ludwig Wittgenstein in 
the design and construction of House Wittgenstein (1928).
       These celebrated examples represent the epitomes of a still widespread 
tendency which, in diverse ways and to different degrees, shapes both 
philosophical and architectural works. And yet, seldom does either 
discipline take a step back to reflect upon the motives and methods of 
these interactions as a research topic in itself. How does architecture make 
use of philosophy? How does philosophy speak of architecture? Why does 
one turn towards the other? What comes about in their doing so? 
      We shall engage these questions by analyzing one particular case-
study of such interactions: the potential influence of philosopher Michel 
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) on architect Rem Koolhaas’ Koepel 
Panopticon Prison renovation project (1981). This connection is far less 
well-known than the previously mentioned examples, as it is far more 
low-key. In fact, it is difficult to point out or even discern its existence. 
However, as shall be seen, this discreteness does not mean that there is no 
case-study, but rather that discreteness is one of its principal traits, and 
one which distinguishes it uniquely from the cannon of architecture and 
philosophy’s interactions. 
       We shall begin by introducing the two protagonists of each domain 
and their respective contributions to the case-study: first, Foucault and 
the popular section of Discipline and Punish’s chapter “Panopticism;” 
second, Koolhaas’ renovation proposal for the Koepel Panopticon Prison 
and the explanatory text Revision that came with it. Third, we will dwell 
on how the former’s philosophical thinking may have exerted direct yet 
nearly imperceptible consequential influence upon the latter’s architectural 
project. Fourth and finally, the distinctive characteristics of this case-study 
shall be brought before the broader questions of how philosophy and 
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2. Michel Foucault, and Panopticism

       Michel Foucault has long been a recurring 
reference in architectural discourse. His writings 
on the socially marginalized, the power structures 
that set them apart from the mainstream, and 
the role of a certain conception of knowledge 
in enforcing this system have informed and 
influenced architectural concerns, generally—
but not only—through the social sciences.  His 
concept of heterotopia, for example, continues to 
sprout a rich variety of contradictory readings and 
reflections, while delighting the imagination for 
architecture researchers, practitioners, researchers, 
and even students, very much due to his original 
social critiques and the inspiring images with 
which he conveyed them. The force of Foucault’s 
impact on architecture is rather surprising, though, 
considering that architecture is not a major  
Foucauldian topic, nor even a minor one, nor did he 
ever produce any literature whatsoever exclusively 
or even primarily dedicated to architecture. For 
example, the famous lecture about heterotopias 
“Of Other Spaces” (Des Espaces Autres), delivered to 
the Circle of Architectural Studies (Cercle d’Études 
Architecturales) in 1967, is in fact little more than a 
copy of “Heterotopias” (Des Hétérotopies), the 1966 
radio broadcast on France Culture about utopia and 
literature, and with absolutely no intent to engage 
architecture at all—much like the concept’s first 
appearance in The Order of Things (Les Mots et Les 
Choses, 1966) which also focused on literature. The 
closest Foucault came to addressing architecture 
directly, thematically and extensively was in “Space, 
Knowledge, and Power,” a 33-question interview 
conducted by American cultural anthropologist 
Paul Rabinow, and published in the architecture 
and design journal Skyline in on March 1982. 
However, even there, architecture is not so much 
discussed directly as a topic in itself but rather as 

seldom does 
either discipline 

take a step 
back and 

reflect upon 
the motives 

and methods 
of these 

interactions 
as a research 

topic in itself. 
How does 

architecture 
make use of 
philosophy? 

How does 
philosophy 

speak of 
architecture?

“

”



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a gateway into topics that underlie it (e.g. knowledge and power) which 
actually interested him. It so happened that they interested architects too.
       Indeed, in Foucault’s writings architecture and architectural works only 
tend to appear as metaphors or as case-studies to illustrate and develop 
some issue other than architecture itself. And perhaps the most effective 
deployment of both strategies is found in the second section of the chapter 
“Panopticism” of his book Discipline and Punish.
       Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et Punir – 
Naissance de la Prison), published in 1975, is a genealogical inquiry into 
the emergence of the modern prison system, particularly in France, and a 
study of its disciplinary mechanisms’ widespread presence in many other 
areas of society. The emphasis falls on the reformist disciplinary penal 
system developed since the late 18th / early 19th century which, though 
far more benign than the punitive system it supplanted, nevertheless 
constituted an intensive form of generalized social control. At the center 
of this kind of disciplinarity are surveillance strategies—as hinted at in the 
discrepancy between the book’s original title (Surveiller et Punir) and its 
English translation (Discipline and Punish), where the French surveiller (“to 
monitor”, in the sense of “surveillance”) is replaced by “discipline.”
    To illustrate these disciplinary mechanisms, Foucault resorts to what 
he considers their most paradigmatic example: the panopticon, a building 
typology devised, curiously enough, not by an architect but by renowned the 
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), inspired by his brother 
Samuel’s organization of industrial labor compounds. In its simplest and 
most characteristic form, the panoptical typology consists of a cylindrical 
multi-story arrangement of partitions around a central observation house. 
The observers at the center have a constant unhindered view into every 
partitioned space; hence the typology’s name from the combination of the 
Ancient Greek pan (all) and optikos (pertaining to sight), meaning “all-
seen” or “all-under-sight.” From within the partitioned spaces, however, it 
is impossible to perceive what happens in the observation house.1 Thus, 
in a panoptical system, a small number of observers can monitor a large 
number of people at any given time; the prominent feature, though, is that 
those monitored, unable to verify when they are or are not in fact being 
watched act as if they always are. The prisoners thus become their own 
guards.
       Foucault, like Bentham, regards the panopticon as an architectural 
formulation of certain Benthanian philosophical and social principles—
in a way making it too a case-study of architectural and philosophical 
interaction—which Bentham celebrates optimistically in Panopticon; or, 



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the Inspection-House2 (Figure 1) 
and Foucault denounces bleakly 
in Discipline and Punish. For 
both, however, architecture is 
only employed as a means to 
make a point, but is not the 
point itself. Foucault does not 
invoke the panopticon because 
it is architecture. In Discipline 
and Punish the panopticon 
is both a metaphor—the 
disciplinary power relations 
described throughout the 
book symbolized by the 
dramatic image of the 
archetypal surveillance 
techniques employed to enforce it—and a case-
study: not just a representation but a paradigmatic 
operational mechanism that enables and enforces 
the power structures of which Foucault speaks. 
Throughout the “Panopticism” chapter, Foucault’s 
interpretation and depiction of the panopticon 
ends up producing a philosophical description of an 
architectural typology, by expounding its historical 
origin, purpose, possible functions, modes of 
operation, formal characteristics, and societal role. 
Inadvertently, though, in doing so his reading also 
becomes an interpretation of the panopticon qua 
architectural object, albeit one grounded on his own 
understanding of architecture seen later in “Space, 
Knowledge, and Power,” as an mere instrument of 
far greater underlying forces. Hence this is why, in 
his words:

the Panopticon must not be understood 
as a dream building: it is the diagram of a 
mechanism of power reduced to its ideal 
form; its functioning, abstracted from any 
obstacle, resistance or friction, [may very well] 
be represented as a pure architectural and 
optical system: it is in fact a figure of political 
technology that may and must be detached 

 architectural 
works only 

tend to appear 
in Foucault’s 

writings as 
metaphors, 

to illustrate 
a non-

architectural 
point, or as 

case-studies, to 
illustrate and 

develop some 
other non-

architectural 
issue

“

”

figure 1:

Bentham’s panopticon 



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from any specific use.3   
Discipline and Punish thus unwittingly offers a philosophical critique of an 
architectural object and, with it, an accessible way from architecture into 
Foucault’s philosophical thinking. 
       Between 1979 and 1981, Koolhaas made use of both. 

3. Rem Koolhaas, and the Koepel Panopticon Prison

       The second protagonist of this story is a young Rem Koolhaas, 
renowned in the architecture world after Delirious New York (1978) but 
still seeking to establish himself as a practitioner. In 1978, his Office for 
Metropolitan Architecture produced what would become the first entry in 
their official list of projects: the Dutch Parliament Extension, in The Hague, 
Netherlands. Despite an ex aequo first place in the competition, alongside 
the Dutch architect Leo Heijdenrijk , the proposal was ultimately rejected 
along with all the others. However, OMA was granted what Koolhaas called 
a “consolation prize:” in 1979, the Dutch Government commissioned 
OMA to assess the possibility of prolonging the lifetime, by another 50 
years, of a prison, built in Arnhem between 1882 and 1886. (Figure 2) 
The original building, designed by Dutch architect and engineer Johan 
Frederik Metzelaar, was known as the Koepelgevangenis—a conjunction of 
the Dutch words “jail” (gevangenis) and “cupola” (koepel), alluding to its 
distinctive large domed roof. Along the inside of its cylindrical walls were 
four floors of holding cells, around a guardhouse at the center from which 
guards could originally see into every cell without being seen. In other 
words, the Arnhem Koepel was a panoptical prison.
       OMA’s proposal adds a series of new functions and structures to the 
prison complex: outside of the original building to the east there is the 
entrance, lobby, reception area, porter’s room, and meeting room; from 
here a visitor heads south, to the visitor’s garden and visitor’s room; to 
the north is the pavilion for difficult prisoners, a kitchen, and a patio in 
between, as well as a storage area; to the west  is the guard’s’ canteen, 
guard’s’ cloak room, instruction department, shops, and more storage 
space, as well as the sports area, which includes a gymnasium, judo room, 
multi-purpose room, running track, sports field, and a pool. Inside the old 
Koepel dome is a library, barber, meeting room, shop, and an infirmary. 
      The original building undergoes modifications as well: two new satellite 
structures house living quarters, dining rooms, and bathrooms, enabling 
the possibility of dividing the inmates of each floor into two groups (of 



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sensibly 48 people each), or even more if the satellite 
is divided too; and the cells, no longer constantly 
translucent to the guards, offer privacy. The most 
significant change, though, is the replacement of 
the central guardhouse by two lower-level streets 
intercepting in a cruciform manner, containing 
several of the aforementioned functions and opening 
access to the rest of the complex. In S, M, L, XL 
(1995), Koolhaas 
alludes to this 
s i m u l t a n e o u s l y 
metaphorical and 
practical gesture 
with two gruesome 
frames from 
Luis Buñuel and 
Salvador Dali’s film 
Un Chien Andalou 
(1929), displaying 
an eye being cut: 
the crossing streets 
cut the all-seeing eye, the pan-optikos. In other 
words, Koolhaas removes panopticism from the 
panopticon.
      Both generalist and specialized literature 
commonly assume that OMA’s redesign of the 
Koepel Panopticon Prison was strongly influenced 
by Discipline and Punish, published just four four 
years before the commission, and by Foucauldian 
thinking in general. One of the earliest and most 
prominent examples of these texts was Anthony 
Vidler’s article “The Ironies of Metropolis: Notes on 
the Work of OMA,” published in Skyline in March 
1982—by no coincidence in the same Skyline edition 
issue that included Foucault’s interview “Space, 
Knowledge, and Power.” According to Vidler, 
“[in the Arnhem prison project] we find echoes 
of a reading of Michel Foucault, whose studies of 
discipline and power have strongly influenced the 
politics and strategies of the generation of OMA.”, 
and it is “in the space marked by Foucault after 

the crossing 
streets cut the 

all-seeing eye, 
the pan-optikos. 
In other words, 

Koolhaas 
removes 

panopticism 
from the 

panopticon.

“

”

figure 2:

arnhem prison



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Nietzsche, that the project has been conceived.” 4 
       Indeed, the easily accepted assumption of Foucauldian influence on 
the Koepel renovation does not appear to raise any red flags that would 
lead us to question it. Until we do question it, that is: Exactly where is 
this influence? We ought to remember that the current inquiry does not 
merely search for a possible Foucauldian interpretation of the project, one 
amongst many that a critic may adopt to understand Koolhaas’ project 
once concluded, but rather the actual Foucauldian influence during the 
design process that produced the project. Thus, instead of assuming the 
existence of a case-study, we must first ask if there really is a case to study.
       The task presents difficulties though. As it turns out, Koolhaas and 
Foucault actually met in what we could well imagine to be a pivotal 
event: Around seven years before the Arnhem commission, architecture 
student Rem Koolhaas had just arrived in Ithaca (New York, USA), 
where he would attend Cornell University from 1972 to 1973. In  the 
fall semester of 1972, Foucault spent three weeks at Cornell lecturing at 
Cornell’s Romance Studies Department. The celebrity French thinker 
and the promising Dutch pupil became acquainted during this time. The 
encounter itself, though, was not especially life-changing. Recalling the 
occasion in an interview with The Cornell Journal of Architecture 8: RE 
(2004), Koolhaas affirms that he “cannot claim any kind of significant 
intellectual influence”5 from Foucault. Admittedly, the answer is 
disappointing, but not surprising, coming from someone who readily 
makes use of his formidably rich knowledge of his and other various fields 
in his works, but resolutely resists sacrificing his authorial originality to 
them. In 2008, in an interview for Radical Philosophy, the interviewers Jon 
Goodbun and David Cunningham noted how other architects of the same 
generation—Eisenman, Tschumi, and Libeskind—explicitly associated 
themselves with various philosophical trends while Koolhaas did not, to 
which he answered, after listing multiple philosophers he was acquainted 
with: “I don’t think these influences or relationships necessarily need to be 
flagged up. But it’s not an indifference to these thinkers.”6 
       Indeed, any claim of an ‘influence’ upon Koolhaas must be cautious in 
its use of the word. Rather than a powerful force that invades and pervades 
his work, an ‘influence’ for Koolhaas seems more like an ingredient which 
he takes hold of, tinkers with, processes and mixes with others to produce 
something of his own. The original sources of these external contributions 
become almost untraceable. It is in this sense that we must understand an 
exceptional confession, made at an event hosted by ETH Zürich in 2011, 
regarding Delirious New York, published in the same year as the Arnhem 



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commission:
[There is something which is generally not 
recognized,] that actually this book was a 
kind of French book, in the sense that it was 
profoundly influenced not only by Barthes, 
but also to some extent by Foucault, and 
particularly by somebody who had become 
my personal friend, Hubert Damisch.7

       Could the same be said specifically for the 
Arnhem project, though? In 1981 OMA handed 
in the Arnhem renovation project to the Dutch 
Ministry of Justice with an essay called Revision 
containing an overall historical analysis of the 
Arnhem Koepel prison and its typology; the 
theoretical and conceptual framework in which 
OMA operated; and an objective programmatic 
and formal description of the project itself. The text 
was later published in S, M, L, XL (1995), a book 
traversed through and through by a cornucopia of 
words simulating a dictionary, and which includes 
three entries quoted from Foucault: ‘exclusion’, 
quoted from Foucault’s 1970 address to the 
Collège de France under the entitled “L’ordre du 
discours,” translated by Alan Sheridan in 1972 as 
“The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse 
on Language;” and, from Discipline and Punish, 
‘visibility’ and ‘power.’8 We may, however, argue 
that these dictionary entries came after the fact, as a 
later recognition of an influence. 
       Nevertheless, Revision also contains other little 
(but more than coincidental) connections. For one 
thing, the text’s description of the panopticon uses 
a series of words that appear in Alan Sherridan’s 
English translation of Discipline and Punish, but 
not, for example, in Bentham’s Panopticon; or, the 
Inspection House (e.g. referring to the panopticon’s 
floors as ‘rings’ instead of ‘circumferences’). 
        More importantly, though, Revision echoes 
Foucault’s bleak critical interpretation of the 
panopticon, resorting to similar reasons and 

Indeed, the 
easily accepted 

assumption of 
Foucauldian 
influence on 

the Koepel 
renovation does 

not appear to 
raise any red 

flags that 
would lead 

us to question 
it. Until we do 

question it, that 
is: exactly 

where is this 
influence?

“

”



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description, so much so that we can even pinpoint Revision’s similarities 
to the first two paragraphs, and perhaps part of the third, of the second 
section of “Panopticism.” Once again, though, we may counter by noting 
that perhaps these similarities only suggest a shared  intellectual context 
between Foucault and Koolhaas, with crossing issues, discussions, and 
approaches, like Vidler had noted so well. This was already the case at 
Cornell, for the same academic milieu that brought Foucault to campus, 
and that even pioneered the introduction of continental philosophy in 
the USA through the journal Diacritic, surrounded Koolhaas during his 
studies. It is no coincidence that Koolhaas had also read Roland Barthes, 
another renowned structuralist and later post-structuralist from the same 
Parisian intellectual scene as Foucault’s before producing his “French 
book.”
       Indeed, skepticism over the existence of a case study at all  seems 
reinforced by the fact that throught the entire text of Revision Foucault is 
not once quoted, mentioned, or even alluded to even though he explicitly 
references the evaluation by the governmental Jacobs Committee, the 
accusations launched by the 19th century Dutch Parliament member 
Wintgens, and prison typologies experimented with in Amsterdam and 
Maastricht. Other unnamed decisive forces may also have come into 
play. Four years before Discipline and Punish, Robin Evans published 
the article “Bentham’s Panopticon: An Incident in the Social History 
of Architecture” (1971) in the Architecture Association Quarterly, while 
Koolhaas, an eager reader of these issues, was still a student at the school. 
Evans, curiously enough, quoted one of Foucault’s earlier publications 
in the essay, suggesting that not only was he acquainted with the French 
philosopher’s work, but found him pertinent for the topic too. Their 
readings differed though: for example, Evans’ focuses less on the role of 
authority—distinguishing his reading from Koolhaas’ and Foucault’s—
but more on the panopticon’s solitary confinement—like Koolhaas’, but 
unlike Foucault’s. This may explain certain particularities of Revision’s 
interpretation of the panoptical typology: on the one hand its two main 
pillars are the all-seeing surveillance system and solitary confinement, not 
so emphatically highlighted by Foucault; on the other hand, it often omits 
critical components of Discipline and Punish, such as the panopticon’s 
imposition of self-surveillance upon the surveyed, a fundamental point for 
both Bentham and Foucault.
       An alternative possible explanation, though, comes from the same 
event in which Koolhaas admitted some degree of Foucauldian influence:

[S]omehow I have a kind of sense of reticence, or chastity, or perhaps 



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it is that I write in my own kind of mind more 
literature than theory that prevents me from 
mentioning all these sources. And also because 
I am deeply aware that I am the kind of result 
of very respectable influences but also very 
unrespectable influences and that everything 
is a kind of amalgamation of trash and high 
culture […].9

       In other words, we should not expect to find 
a smoking gun of direct influence as it may be 
dissolved with other elements, or even not exist at 
all. The difficulty in confirming the assumption of 
a case-study is both due to the fact that because the 
links between the architect’s and the philosopher’s 
works are not explicitly demarcated, and also 
because these are irreducible to a single simple and 
uncorrupted instance, act, or event.  The cause lies 
partially with Foucault’s less than marginal interest in 
architecture, but mostly with Koolhaas’ own attitude 
towards external influences. It is nearly impossible 
to pinpoint an irrefutable, straightforwardly 
Foucauldian effect upon the Arnhem design, or to 
determine exactly how much can indeed be directly 
attributed to Foucault, or how many links were 
consciously forged by Koolhaas. Notwithstanding, 
a reading of Revision shall come to show that, to a 
significant degree, the Koepel design does indeed 
deal with a Foucauldian approach to a Foucauldian 
representation and discussion of a Benthanian 
object, regardless of whether this was or was not 
deliberate. It is in this sense that we can claim the 
existence of a case-study. 

4. The Foucaldian ‘influence’ (and lack of) in Koolhaas’ 
designRevision: Koolhaas from, through, beyond, besides 
Foucault

        How does Foucault’s and particularly Discipline 
and Punish’s influence appear in OMA’s project 
for the Arnhem panopticon renovation? To better 

    the Koepel 
design does 

indeed deal with 
a Foucauldian 

approach to 
a Foucauldian 

representation 
and discussion 

of a Benthanian 
object, 

regardless of 
whether this 
was or was 

not deliberate.

“

”



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understand the design process we return to the explanations given in 
Revision, whose seven small chapters may be split between a critical analysis 
of the old Koepel—from historical overviews to the broader architectural 
debates they provoke, and of the new proposal that follows—from its 
conceptual aim to its formulation as an architectural project.
       The first few paragraphs contain OMA’s interpretation of the 
panopticon qua typology, and of the Arnhem panopticon in particular. 
More than simply an introduction for the reader, this description reveals the 
architects’ grounding interpretations of the site’s pre-existing conditions, 
thus constituting the object upon which to intervene. For example, we 
could conceive of the Arnhem prison in terms of its urban situation, or 
of its distinct cylindrical form, or its colossal dome, the interior lighting, 
materiality, running costs, or environmental sustainability. Each different 
reading of the site’s pre-existing conditions derives from different 
approaches, theoretical frameworks, priorities, interests, and many other 
factors which reveal and emphasize different aspects of the site and call for 
different responses
          Koolhaas construes the Koepel according to “the Panopticon Principle, 
with its mechanistic ideal,” as an application of “a universal principle of 
organization for situations in which a small group of supervisors monitors 
a much larger group of supervised.”  For Koolhaas, “[t]he Arnhem Koepel 
represents the principle in its purest form: a single, all-seeing “eye” is 
placed dead center in a circle of the observed.” However, this principle, 
“[o]ne hundred years later, has become intolerable.”10 In these words we 
recognize a synthetic and superficial semblance to Foucault’s reading of 
Bentham’s description of the panopticon: the stress on its mechanistic 
character and the purity of an ideal put into an architectural form is even 
reminiscent of  the previously quoted passage of Discipline and Punish 
concerning the panopticon’s not being a ‘dream building’. In other words, 
OMA’s interpretation of the pre-existing object, upon which they, as 
architects, shall intervene upon, broadly coincides with a Foucauldian 
critical philosophical description of the panoptical typology.
         Turning Revision’s pages and moving towards the contents of OMA’s 
own proposal, implicit reference to the philosopher, no longer limited to 
Discipline and Punish, persists. Consider, for example, Koolhaas’ argument 
for programmatic flexibility, rather than ideal pre-determined architectural 
formal typologies (Koolhaas’ real interest), as a manner of accounting for 
the inevitably incessant historically shifting ideologies and their social 
formulation (Foucault’s real interest): 

If prison architecture today can no longer pretend to embody 



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an “ideal”, it could regain credibility by 
introducing the theme of revision as raison 
d’être. A “modern” prison architecture would 
consist of a prospective archaeology, constantly 
projecting new layers of “civilization” on old 
systems of supervision.11  

        A reader familiar with Foucault cannot help 
hearing echoes of the philosopher’s own concept of 
“archaeology”, as conveyed for example in The Birth 
of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception 
(Naissance de la Clinique – une Archéologie du 
Regard Médical, 1963) and Archaeology of Knowledge 
(L’Archéologie du Savoir, 1969). Koolhaas’ 
prospective archaeology both presupposes and 
builds from Foucault’s archaeological method: on 
the one hand, it rejects trans-historical and trans-
cultural absolute social and (consequentially) 
architectural models, embracing instead the 
constant transformation of what societies, or 
“civilizations” as the architect put it, regard as the 
best model in each period; on the other hand, it 
then turns this Foucauldian analytical tool deployed 
on the past for an understanding of the present into 
a generative design principle projected towards the 
future. Hence prospective archaeology, which does 
not simply create a new archaeological layer with 
the next prison typology, but rather builds on the 
fact of their inevitable demise and replacement. 
The Arnhem renovation project is founded on the 
thematization of prospective archaeology. 

“Arnhem could be an experiment with a form 
of renovation that articulates programmatic 
and ideological change without destroying the 
building itself.”12

     Foucault’s implicit presence as a reference 
understandably disappears as the design progresses 
deeper into architectural and technical territory. 
OMA’s actual design gravitates around the surrealist-
inspired metaphor of cutting the panopticon’s all-
seeing eye, executed by replacing the guardhouse 



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with the two sunken streets from which the rest of the project spreads out. 
While this gesture may act upon Foucault’s reading of the panopticon, it 
certainly does not act according to him. In fairness, Discipline and Punish 
is mostly a descriptive endeavor, and thus does not offer prescriptive 
orientations that Koolhaas could follow. But would he, who so vehemently 
rejects external dominance over his work, ever agree to follow them even 
if he could? 
     In the end, the full weight and extent of Foucault’s influence upon 
OMA’s design process is measured not only by philosophy’s presence, 
but also by philosophy’s absence. While Discipline and Punish, Foucault, 
and philosophy in general do introduce decisive inputs throughout the 
design process, particularly in the initial interpretation of the pre-existing 
and in preparing an approach towards it, architecture is never sidelined 
as the dominating force. The Koepel renovation project was not meant 
as a mere literal architectural formulation, expression, or translation of 
philosophical principles, discussions, and ideas. Koolhaas meant to design, 
first and foremost, an architectural project—a seemingly banal yet radically 
simple approach within the larger architecture world’s interactions with 
philosophy.

5. Philosophy for architecture,, architecture for philosophy

     Despite two years of discussions with the Dutch authorities and, 
eventually, an approval for construction, OMA’s proposal for the Arnhem 
prison was never built. Its indefinite suspension was not due to any 
particular conceptual or programmatic problems, but to an all-too-familiar 
reason for architects; lack of funding. The Koepel would eventually be 
renovated by Martin van Dort, of Archivolt Architecten BV, in a process 
that started in 1994- and only ended in 2005.13 But the declining number 
of prisoners in the Netherlands led the classified national monument to be 
closed in 2016, and sold in 2018.
       Nevertheless, OMA’s Arnhem panopticon renovation project remains 
an exceptional, unique, and—design-wise—highly successful instance of 
a consequential interaction between philosophy and architecture. This 
outcome may surprise considering the two protagonists involved, the 
way they work within their own disciplines, and how they interact with 
the other’s: Foucault’s disinterest in architecture as a research topic and 
Koolhaas’ almost indiscriminate  appropriating, and critiquing of the vast 



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multiple sources he knows. 
       The result is a case-study as much about 
architecture and philosophy’s interested interaction 
as concepts and topics become shared across 
disciplinary boundaries as it is about their 
disjunction. We do not find an authoritative 
philosophical imposition of ill-fitting, inadequate, 
and even just unrealistic principles, norms, and 
judgements upon architecture. Instead, Foucault 
works within his own concerns, but develops 
them in such a way that they offer themselves to 
appropriation. In an interview with the geographers 
of the journal Herodote, in 1976, Foucault, 
insistently confronted with the fact that he had not 
said much about geography in his writings, offers a 
reply that can just as well be applied to architecture:

If I do the analyses I do, it’s not because of 
some polemic I want to arbitrate but because 
I have been involved in certain conflicts 
regarding medicine, psychiatry and the penal 
system. […] It’s up to you, who are directly 
involved with what goes on in geography 
[or architecture], faced with all the conflicts 
of power which traverse it, to confront them 
and construct the instruments which will 
enable you to fight on that terrain. And what 
you should basically be saying to me is, ‘You 
haven’t occupied yourself with this matter 
which isn’t particularly your affair anyway 
and which you don’t know much about’. And 
I would say in reply, ‘If one or two of these 
“gadgets” of approach or method that I’ve 
tried to employ with psychiatry, the penal 
system or natural history can be of service to 
you, then I shall be delighted. If you find the 
need to transform my tools or use others then 
show me what they are, because it may be of 
benefit to me.’14 

     This is where Koolhaas comes in. Not, however, 
as the architect who obsessively attempts to 

       Koolhaas 
did not 

simply copy 
Foucault into 
architecture, 

but rather 
borrowed his 

conceptual and 
terminological 

clarity to 
develop and 

better express 
his own ongoing 
architectural 

discussions

“

”



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translate philosophical concepts into architectural form as if there lay an 
unassailable absolute foundation for architectural designs, and much less to 
superficially legitimize his work with empty or misunderstood quotations 
of a celebrated philosopher. Koolhaas, both a brilliant theoretician and 
practitioner, respectfully instrumentalizes philosophy and, along with 
many other tools, takes what he needs as and when he needs it for the 
sake of the production of an architectural project first and foremost. His 
sources, almost impossible to isolate in a single moment of contact, may 
also very well arise from the sheer shared discourse between disciplines, 
which often includes influential literature like Discipline and Punish and, 
it would seem, seminal works of architecture too.
      The Arnhem project thus shows architects how their designs can 
gain from resorting to philosophy without sacrificing architecture in the 
process. However, there are relevant insights for philosophers as well. While 
Foucault’s study of the panopticon created a philosophical critique of an 
architecture object, Koolhaas’ design in turn created a philosophically-
charged architectural reaction to a Foucauldian interpretation of Bentham’s 
panopticon—the conception of the pre-existing object upon which OMA 
intervened. The Koepel renovation project contains an architectural 
critique of the Benthanian utilitarian vision that originated the panoptical 
typology, and a critical conversation with Foucault’s own critique of it. As 
such, it can be read in philosophical terms, even if the architect’s action 
itself is not philosophy nor primarily philosophically motivated, for it does 
engage in a dialogue with philosophy even if through the distinct means 
of architecture. The Koepel Panopticon Prison renovation is therefore not 
just a case-study for architects, but for philosophers too.

Endnotes

1. Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House.” In The Works 
of Jeremy Bentham, 4:36–142. (Edinburgh: William Tait) 1843, pp. 40-41.
2. Bentham, 1843, p. 39.
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1975, 
p. 205.
4. Anthony Vidler, “The Ironies of Metropolis: Notes on the Work of 
OMA,” Skyline, March, 1982 p. 21.
5. “OMA re: OMU: Interview with Rem Koolhaas on Oswarl Mathias 
Ungers.” Interview by Jeremy Alain Siegel, Melissa Constantine, Matt 
Eshleman, and Steven Zambrano Cascante. The Cornell Journal of 
Architecture 8: RE, March 6, 2004. http://cornelljournalofarchitecture.



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cornell.edu/read.html?id=18. 
6. Jon Goodbun and David Cunningham, 
“Propaganda architecture: interview with Rem 
Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf.” Radical Philosophy, 
October 30, 2008. https://www.radicalphilosophy.
com/interview/rem-koolhaas-and-reinier-de-graaf. 
7. Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. “A 
Conversation,” Interview by Trüby Stephan. GTA 
Events - ETH Zürich official website, May 18, 
2011. https://video.ethz.ch/events/2011/d-arch_
gta/75db5f75-5ff9-41af-a221-c48ab14f8aa5.html.
8. “Revision.” [1981] In S, M, L, XL, by Rem 
Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and OMA, 233–53, 2nd ed. 
New York: Monacelli Press, 1995.
9. Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. “A 
Conversation.”
10. Revision p. 237.
11. Revision  p. 241.
12. ibid.
13. P.I. De Berg, “Arnhem - renovatie, restauratie en 
uitbreiding koepelgevangenis” (Rijskmonument)” 
Archivolt Architecten BV. Accessed August 31, 
2018. https://archivolt-bna.nl/web/wp-content/
uploads/2015/03/PI-De-Berg-A4.pdf.
14. Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography.” 
In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other 
Writings, 1972-1977, translated by Colin Gordon, 
1st American ed., 64–77. New York: Pantheon 
Books, 1980. p. 65.

Foucault’s works cited in the text:
“Des Hétérotopies.” France Culture, July 12, 1966.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd 
Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other 
Writings, 1972-1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. 1st 
American ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

     it does 
engage in a 

dialogue with 
philosophy and 

its subjects, 
even if through 

the distinct 
means of 

architecture.

“

”



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“Questions on Geography.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and 
Other Writings, 1972-1977, translated by Colin Gordon, 1st American ed., 
64–77. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
“Space, Knowledge, Power.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul 
Rabinow, 1st ed., 239–56. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison. Collection TEL. Paris: Gallimard, 
1975.
The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Translated by 
A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1982.
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage books 
edition. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1966.
Michel Foucault and John K. Simon. “Michel Foucault on Attica: An 
Interview,” 1991 1974.

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Useless Speculation: 
Architectural Obsolescence 
and the micro-parcels of Gordon 
Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates 
(1973)

rick fox

“History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.”  
--Mark Twain

Introduction

       More often than not, architecture is created 
to bolster the express beliefs and ambitions of 
those who sponsor it.  Individuals, groups, and 
institutions in power tend to promulgate symbols of 
their own prestige.  Architecture is thus understood 
as a tool of the powerful and by the powerful.  
Real estate speculators are undeniable agents of 
change; they possess genuine power to transform 
both natural and built landscapes.  Many aspects of 
the change they promulgate are public and highly 
visible; others much less so.  Processes such as title 
transfer, subdivision, lot merger, covenants, deed 
restrictions, dedications, and easements vary greatly 
in their degree of public visibility. While the twin 
pillars of real estate economics—market value and 
investment performance (and their shadow features 
of irrational exuberance and obsolescence)—do not 
figure prominently in most academic literature on 
architecture, these topics have become unavoidable 
for today’s practitioners.  An exploration of the 



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broader philosophical implications of an economically speculative 
architecture created, bought, and sold by a surprisingly small number 
of financial elites is highly relevant for anyone wishing to be on the side 
of fairness of opportunity in the context of today’s staggering wealth 
inequality.1  
       The work of SoHo-based American artist Gordon Matta-Clark is 
particularly instructive in this regard for two reasons. First, architecture 
is simultaneously the subject matter and the medium of much of his 
creative output.  Second, he challenges many cherished beliefs about the 
production of architecture.  My point of departure in this essay will be an 
exploration of one of his lesser known but more conceptually-oriented 
works, Reality Properties: Fake Estates (“Fake Estates”).  This work has 
been largely overlooked by critics eager to comment on his more famous 
building-cuts.  Additionally, Fake Estates was a work conceived at a time in 
the 1970’s when New York City was teetering on the verge of municipal 
bankruptcy, while at the same time promoting massive urban renewal 
schemes that clearly favored rapacious real estate speculation.  These twin 
circumstances proved fertile ground for Matta-Clark in his work generally, 
and Fake Estates in particular.  
       In this paper, I argue that this specific work offers us valuable 
architectural and philosophical lessons if we view it as a reductio argument 
that: 1) exposes several contradictory values that underpin real estate 
speculation; and, 2) highlights potential pitfalls in the architect-speculator 
relation.  

Genealogy of Reality Properties: Fake Estates 

       In late 1973 and early 1974 Gordon Matta-Clark, best known for his 
building-cuts Splitting (1974) Englewood, N.J, and Conical Intersect (1975) 
Paris, purchased fifteen surplus parcels of land sight unseen for between 
$25 and $75 each from the New York City Real Estate Department at two 
separate public auctions.  Fourteen of the parcels are located in Queens, 
and one on Staten Island.  The parcels are tiny odd-shaped fragments 
ranging in size from a 27 square foot triangular sliver to a 355-foot long 
strip.   The complete inventory of parcels is diagrammed in Figure 1.  If all 
fifteen parcels were somehow aggregated their total area would be 3,264 
square feet, not even enough to make a tiny residential lot in Queens. 
       Subsequent to their purchase, Matta-Clark collected all the relevant 
legal documents including notarized grant deeds, legal descriptions, sales 



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contracts, and parcel maps, along with numerous 
black & white photos he took during various site 
visits.  The discrete works we know today as Fake 
Estates were assembled posthumously, in 1992, by 
his widow Jane Crawford, prompted by the urging 
of Corrine Diserens, a curator from the Institut 
Valencià d’art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia Spain 
who was researching a Matta-Clark retrospective, 
using the original materials he collected. While 
Crawford named the individual works, i.e. “Little 
Alley” Block 2497, Lot 42 (1974); “Jamaica Curb” 
Block 10142, Lot 15 (1974); “Maspeth Onions” 
Block 2406, Lot 148 (1973); and “Sidewalk Grass” 
Block 1107, Lot 146 (1973), it was Diserens who, in 
her retrospective, named the full collection Reality 
Properties: Fake Estates.  The original materials 
themselves have an interesting provenance that is 
relevant here.  Matta-Clark gave the materials to 
his friend Norman Fisher who agreed to hold them 
after Fisher agreed to pay the property taxes that 
Matta-Clark was repeatedly ignoring.  When Fisher 
died in 1977, his executrix Tina Girouard became 
custodian who then returned the materials to 
Crawford sometime in 1979 or 1980.  Matta-Clark 
died in 1978, but around 1980 Crawford began 
receiving what to her were mysterious delinquency 
notices from the City that the parcels were being 
confiscated for nonpayment of taxes.  Apparently, 
at the time Crawford was unaware of her husband’s 
purchases.  The eventual foreclosures are ironic given 
that he had purchased these lots at tax-foreclosure 
auction. In the case of “Staten Island” Block 1224, 
Lot 12 (50.34 square feet) the unpaid quarterly tax 
for fiscal 1974 amounted to $1.83.  As of 2003 only 
four of the parcels had been purchased by private 
entities; the other eleven remained in administrative 
limbo.
       Curiously, Crawford elected not to include the 
tax bills in the assembled collages deeming them, 
“no longer relevant to the works”2 perhaps because 
she earnestly endeavored to present Matta-Clark’s 

it only takes 
a small 

surveyor’s 
error to 
change a 

perfect 
rectangle into 

an off-kilter 
trapezoid 

with an 
unaccounted-

for surplus 
sliver.

“

”



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work in the best possible light—in its purest form.  In hindsight, her 
decision is unfortunate for two reasons.  First, given that Fake Estates is 
a posthumously presented work, the record is incomplete (or deceptively 
oversimplified) without the follow-on story of the aftermath of Matta-
Clark’s purchases because this story tells us a great deal about his collaborative 
networking method as an artist and social activist.  Second, for our 
purposes of architecture philosophy the eventual disposition, ownership, 
and transference of the parcels is relevant as an additional object-lesson 
consistent with the overall import of his intended project.  The fact that 
eleven of the fifteen parcels appear to remain in administrative limbo is of 
no small consequence to Matta-Clark’s critique of property ownership as 
well as to my argument as to its importance.
       What we know of Matta-Clark’s intentions with respect to the fifteen 
parcels comes from numerous and fragmentary sources.  Interviews with 
his contemporaries produce incomplete and contradictory recollections 
about his intentions.  As one commenter put it, “...the story of Fake Estates 
is both mythologized and full of holes.”3 By other accounts he purchased 
the lots without a clear intent as to what he planned to do.  According 
to Manfred Hecht, his friend and building-cut collaborator, Matta-Clark 
lost interest in the properties and it was Hecht who ultimately ended up 
owning them.  One of the clearest expressions of Matta-Clark’s intentions 
comes from New York Times reporter Dan Carlinsky writing a humor piece 
about the city’s real estate auctions.  When asked by Carlinsky after the 
auction what he planned to do with the lots, an effusive 28-year old Matta-
Clark told the reporter he planned to use them in works of art he would 
soon be creating.  Making reference to one of the parcels that had no 
access to it from the public right-of-way (“Maspeth Onions”, Block 2406, 
Lot 148) he remarks, “That’s an interesting quality; something that can be 
owned but never experienced. That’s an experience itself.”4  
      What the total record of recollections, interviews and manuscripts 
reveal is that at the time the complete work he envisioned consisted of three 
parts: 1) a written documentation of the parcel including exact dimensions 
and location, and “perhaps a list of weeds growing there”5; 2) a full-scale 
photo of the property; and 3) the land itself.  He intended that parts 1 and 
2 would be included in a gallery exhibition, and that purchasers would 
acquire title to the land as part of their art purchase.  Thus, part of his 
reasoning for buying slivers becomes more obvious in that he regarded 
these parcel sizes to be “manageable” objects in a gallery setting where, for 
example, he might hang from the wall a 1-foot x 95-foot rectangular, or a 
6-foot isosceles triangle-shaped photograph. Neither the full scale photos 



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figure 1:

micro-parcel inventory



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nor the gallery exhibition ever materialized.  
      For a young SoHo artist of insufficient means struggling to find 
affordable housing and cheap gallery space the cultural mythology of a 
gentry class buying an estate in the economically devastated New York 
City of the mid-1970’s is an irony too rich to ignore. In the early 1970’s 
New York City had become a bleak, violent and dilapidated city in decline.  
The steady loss of manufacturing jobs as industry moved out of the city 
combined with a general flight to the suburbs left the city with countless 
empty buildings.  Abandoned tenement buildings and dilapidated side 
streets were commonplace throughout the City. The Bronx borough alone 
lost one-third of its population in the 1970’s. The Brooklyn neighborhood 
known as ‘DUMBO’ remained uninhabited throughout most of the 
decade.   In lower Manhattan the World Trade Center Site was being 
constructed while deteriorating neighborhoods burned. From 1970-1975 
there were 68,456 fires in the Bronx alone.6  Arson, as a percent of all city 
fires rose from 1% in the 1960’s to over 7% in the 1970’s.7  Landlords 
would occasionally burn down their own buildings to collect insurance 
money when they could no longer afford to maintain them. By mid-decade 
New York City, the global epicenter of capitalism, was sliding inexorably 
towards municipal bankruptcy.  
      The absurdity that these parcels were all undevelopable—too small, 
odd-shaped, poorly situated, literally inaccessible from the public right-
of-way—as homesteads, estates, or other meaningful forms of human 
inhabitation while they maintained their apparent exchange value is crucial 
to the ethos of Fake Estates.  Matta-Clark was fascinated by the description 
of these surplus lots as “inaccessible.”  From a 1974 interview with Liza 
Bear for Avalanche, he says:

What I basically wanted to do was to designate spaces that wouldn’t 
be seen and certainly not occupied. Buying them was my own take 
on the strangeness of existing property demarcation lines. Property 
is so all-pervasive. Everyone’s notion of ownership is determined by 
the use-factor.8  

       An example of what Matta-Clark might have meant by ‘use-factor’ is 
offered to us by a story told by one of his colleagues.  Betsy Sussler who 
accompanied him on one of his 1975 site visits to the Queens parcels, that 
included a 2.55-foot wide strip of land in a 355-foot alley that neighbors 
had to cross over to enter into their private garages (Block 3398, Lot 116), 
remarks that Matta-Clark:  

…understood quite well the psychological and political factors 
involved in walking onto a person’s property to inform them that his 



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[Matta-Clark’s] piece of forgotten land he’d 
bought was in fact part of their driveway.9  

As far as anyone knows Matta-Clark never enforced 
his property right to exclude his would-be trespasser 
neighbors.      
        Collectively, these fifteen micro-parcels are 
important reminders of how the urban world is 
dissected by an underlying system of property 
ownership, and the laws and regulations governing 
their transfer. It is tempting to blame senseless 
bureaucrats for the existence of these land slivers, 
but that would be misleading.  These parcel-
fragments are the physical and conceptual residue 
of the rational machinations of a socially-legitimate 
process.  The name of the collected works given 
to us by Diserens simultaneously highlights the 
vicissitudes of property ownership in an urban 
environment where every patch of dirt, no matter 
how small, is assumed to be a commodity, and it 
captures the juxtaposition of the real fragmented 
New York City with the unreal unified New York 
City of popular imagination.  Matta-Clark was 
fascinated by the prospect that the mistakes of 
surveyors and architects might be the genesis of 
his micro-parcels.  After all, it only takes a small 
surveyor’s error to change a perfect rectangle into 
an off-kilter trapezoid with an unaccounted-for 
surplus sliver.  While it is tantalizing to consider 
that professional errors and incompetency might 
be the source of these land fragments the truth 
is more telling.  And the “error” he points to is 
much larger than a drafting mistake, or simple 
math error.  Contemporary investigations into 
the title history reveal that these micro-parcels did 
not come about by accident but instead were the 
outcome of an intricate system of change in use and 
ownership—subdivisions and mergers, easements 
and dedications, road widenings, municipal 
projects, rural farmland conversions—both public 

  we are 
brought 

face-to-face 
with what 

are squarely 
philosophical 

questions: What 
exactly is 

the bearer of 
value? What 
is the genuine 

object we are 
buying and 

selling.

“

”



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and private.      
      Matta-Clark was equally fascinated with the North American collective 
imagination about land speculation these parcels signify.  The reasons other 
buyers offered to the New York Times reporter Carlinsky for buying surplus 
parcels included: 1) a Virginia man who purchased a few small parcels 
as investments for his children; 2) a man who purchased 20 square foot 
adjacent to the tiny parcel he already owned in the hopes of selling both 
to his next door neighbor for a garden; 3) a New York City planner who 
bought three lots just because he wanted to own a piece of the city he loved; 
and 4) another man who purchased several parcels as Christmas gifts for 
his friends.10   Given these diverse motivations, we are brought face-to-face 
with what are squarely philosophical questions: What exactly is the bearer 
of value? What is the genuine object we are buying and selling: Is it the 
actual land with weeds, trees and fences, or the legalistic paraphernalia of 
title transfer?  Or is it participation in a cultural process (verging on myth) 
that supposedly grounds our self-worth?  Or perhaps it is, as Matta-Clark 
seems to have intuited, only as art in the full 1:1 scale gallery photographs 
he conceived but never executed.  By any conventional measure of use 
the land itself has no real value; its token value is the mere residue of a 
conceptual framework of ownership to which buyers and sellers are deeply 
committed.
The three-part nature of the work Matta-Clark envisioned offers important 
guidance. The ontological distinction between a discernible piece of the 
earth’s surface and a commodified chunk of “real estate” is crucial.  Without 
physical markers such as a surveyor’s benchmark, a flagged property corner, 
a fence post, or some other naturally occurring thing, we only know that 
a discernible patch of the physical landscape exists as a “parcel” because 
of the legal-bureaucratic artifacts that record its existence and location. 
As Frances Richard so aptly puts it, “One can stand on a micro-plot and 
not know it is there.”11 In this scenario, we can own something but not 
experience it; exchange it but not inhabit it; delineate it but not occupy it; 
locate it but not enjoy it.  With Fake Estates, and Matta-Clark’s purchase 
of micro-parcels useless for any meaningful development, “the absurdity of 
real estate is laid bare as a bad pun.”12 
       By engaging in purchase and ownership of these micro-parcels Matta-
Clark sensitizes us to certain absurdities of speculation. Namely, 1) the 
process of buying and selling in the hope of continuously escalating 
exchange-value is regarded as authoritative even when it produces an 
irrational or dubious result; and, 2) the process of parcelization is a 
useful fiction about democratized economic power that helps prop up 



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cultural beliefs about value, and about self-worth. 
The supposition that a normalized process always 
produces its intended results (“everybody gets 
a piece of the action”), combined with a slavish 
adherence to an algorithmic procedure founded (in 
part) on contradictory assumptions, is the essence 
of Matta-Clark’s reductio argument.
  
Ontic Insecurity: Matta-Clark’s Exquisite Corpus

       As a work of conceptually oriented art Fake 
Estates has strong implications for architecture 
philosophy insofar as it challenges the security of our 
ontic commitments to what constitutes the ground 
of possibility whereupon works of architecture 
are situated.  A useful perspective on the theme 
of ontological insecurity in Matta-Clark’s work is 
offered by Pamela Lee.  In Object to be Destroyed, 
she argues that his work presupposes the eventuality 
of its own destruction.  Extending this idea of ontic 
insecurity to Fake Estates is an important step to 
expanding our understanding of the implications of 
his acquisition of these micro-parcels.  Lee’s overall 
line of argument that Matta-Clark’s work is best seen 
through the lens of expenditure or waste rather than 
destruction or violence is compelling. Even though 
he referred to his principle activity as ‘un-building’, 
we are not obligated to view it as inherently violent.  
He did not “destroy” for the sake of destruction, or 
because he found the world empty of value.  Matta-
Clark was no nihilist.  Through his constant striving 
to make sense of his surroundings he resisted the 
notion that we live in a purposeless present.  In this 
regard, Jeffrey A. Kroessler, in his essay “Gordon 
Matta-Clark’s Moment,” offers the useful insight 
that Matta-Clark was an artist re-imagining urban 
decay and finding the inspiration needed to be an 
agent of positive transformation.13  
      Because he was fascinated with processes of 
change, and things that embraced their own 

fake Estates 
has strong 

implications for 
architecture 

philosophy 
insofar as it 
challenges 

the security 
of our ontic 

commitments 
to what 

constitutes 
the ground 

of possibility 
whereupon 

works of 
architecture 
are situated. 

“

”



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outmodedness, it is tempting to read Matta-Clark’s creative output as 
a monument to entropy.  In his early work he explored senescence and 
decay, and recorded the process and effects of disintegration. Yet, he is not 
making a fetish of a ruinous state.  He does not valorize it for its own sake. 
On the contrary, decay, waste, and disintegration are integral to becoming.  
Contingent circumstance and shifting temporalities characterize his entire 
output—his work does not lay claim to permanence.  His creative practice 
is not about object-making, or even object-destruction, rather it is about 
process-intervention.  He transformed architectural refuse into reminders 
of the deeply contradictory impulses of urban development with its deep 
schism between use-value and exchange-value.  Seeing the long arc of 
Matta-Clark’s creative practice as an intervention into collective practices 
of waste positions us on a path of resistance that in turn points towards 
some problems of architectural obsolescence that characterize both Fake 
Estates and the building-cuts for which he is most known.  Fake Estates 
further sharpens our understanding of the difference between inhabited 
space, the space of social praxis, and abstract space (the universalized 
“zoned” commodity) at the same time it performs a wonderfully wry 
commentary on Kant’s disinterestedness thesis by taking an object of such 
intense desire as New York real estate, stripping it of use-value, repackaging 
it as useless art, and then completing the circle by seducing the gallery-goer 
for a second go-round with the offer to sell the art.  

Matta-Clark’s Animus      

       The social geography of an urban place finds its expression in the 
architecture if we look close enough.  As a result of his building-cut 
work Matta-Clark had acquired considerable skill in the manual labor of 
dismantling buildings, working with building materials, and re-capturing 
architecture-based resources; skills he came to see as relevant to the 
underserved communities of New York City.  In 1977, the year before his 
untimely death, he was awarded a Guggenheim Grant for a resource center 
and environmental youth program for ‘Loisada’, the name given to the 
Lower East Side by its Spanish speaking residents.  He used the proceeds to 
purchase a building on the Lower East Side.  The resource center functioned 
(1) as a community salvage yard where materials and equipment could be 
recycled or sold, and (2) as a neighborhood youth training program that 
taught youth how to renovate and maintain buildings for community use.  
After his death the center completely disbanded.  
         While Matta-Clark is remembered for the ethical qualities of 



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his dynamic activist persona—his sociability, 
exuberance, inclusiveness, and tireless 
engagement—the aesthetic-political qualities of his 
overt architecturally-themed projects are restive, 
impatient, stubbornly dissatisfied, vociferous, and 
uneasy.  Some of this schism may be due to the 
deep and abiding animus Matta-Clark harbored 
against the architecture profession.  Even though he 
was originally trained to be an architect, attending 
Cornell’s School of Architecture (1963-1968), 
Matta-Clark’s chief aim, according to critics such 
as Yve-Alain Bois, is to negate the cultural prestige 
of architecture.14 This view is borne out by Matta-
Clark himself.  In a 1976 interview with Donald 
Wall in Arts Magazine, when Wall asks what 
reaction Matta-Clark got from Splitting, his reply 
is unequivocal: 

I don’t think most [architects] practitioners 
are solving anything except how to make a 
living. Architecture is a lackey to big business. 
It’s an enormously costly undertaking and 
therefore, like government, comes equipped 
with its entire panoply of propaganda. I think 
Monolithic Idealist problem solving has not 
only failed to solve the problems but created 
a dehumanized condition at both a domestic 
and institutional level.15    

       One way for us to make sense of Matta-Clark’s 
animus would be to view it as his worry that the 
profession as a whole, at the time anyhow, did 
not possess a well-formed social conscience. Or 
at least not a conscience he considered relevant to 
addressing the pressing problems that surrounded 
him.  In one of his written fragments he writes, 
“empty and neglected structures were a prime 
reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through 
modernization.” 16   In his view then, the derelict 
condition of New York City’s land and building-
stock is emblematic of the state of the profession 
as a whole, and like so much of capitalist cultural 

     he is not 
making a fetish 

of a ruinous 
state [...] On 

the contrary, 
decay, 

waste, and 
disintegration 

are integral to 
becoming.

“

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production architecture is destined to become waste.  So in this way, it is 
the means of producing architecture, rather than architecture as artifact 
(glorious, exalted, banal, or otherwise) that is the precise focus of Matta-
Clark’s critique.   Xavier Wrona offers a useful amplification.  He writes 
that for Matta-Clark, “architecture is not the building but the system that 
produces a particular kind of building—the order imposed on buildings, 
not the buildings themselves.”17
      Fake Estates explicitly raises questions about what it means to be a 
propertied person, to own property, to possess it, to occupy it, to abuse 
it, to glorify it, to transmogrify it, to transfer it, and to dispense with 
it as one sees fit.  In spite of his personal acquisition of real estate he 
nonetheless harbored a deep resistance to ideologies of private wealth.  He 
viewed private property and the human isolation he believed it engenders 
as increasingly unsustainable states, telling Donald Wall: 

What I am talking about is the very real, carefully sustained mass 
schizophrenia in which our individual perceptions are constantly 
being subverted by industrially controlled media, markets, and 
corporate interests.18  

       Matta-Clark was not enamored of American capitalism, laissez-
faire real estate developers, disengaged policy makers, or uncaring 
slum lords who stood idle while deterioration progressed inexorably to 
demolition and then to the “solution” of redevelopment.  Nonetheless, 
he viewed abandoned buildings through the political lens of liberalism 
as symptomatic of a socio-political system: (1) that doesn’t look after its 
everyday citizens by caring for those who cannot care for themselves; (2) 
that favors the elite at the expense of the general population; and (3) where 
wealth accumulation is valorized as an end in itself rather than a means 
to something more worthwhile.  Instead, to the greatest extent possible, 
he focused his own efforts on empowering marginalized citizens to take 
ownership of their neighborhoods. In his words, an urban site ought to be 
“responsive to the expressive will of its occupants.”19  
No doubt, the abstract urban grid is a tool for converting raw land into 
a commodity.  As evidenced by Fake Estates in which the earth’s surface 
is reduced to a series of complex abstract and interconnected legalistic 
property descriptors, an otherwise rational process can, with successive 
iterations, yield an irrational or dubious outcome. Yet, the occasional 
anomaly is not what obsesses Matta-Clark.  Rather, his two-fold reminder 
is that the usability of a piece of land is necessarily tied to abstract processes 
of demarcation, ownership, and transfer.  Second, the rapacious drive 



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to accumulate wealth disengages exchange value 
from the utility of a piece of land. And hence, the 
ground of architecture is rendered precarious.  As 
Lee, rightly observes, “For property is not so much 
considered a thing at all but a right: a relationship 
between object and subject structured around 
terms of personality and consumption.”20   In our 
era, property has become more than an extension 
of who we are—it now threatens to define us. This 
threat continues to deepen, and deepen unevenly 
across the wealth divide.  
 
Architectural Obsolescence: The Eye of the Speculator

       Fake Estates, far from being a curious leftover side-
project to Matta Clark’s more well-known building 
cut projects, is one tent-pole for expressing his over-
arching concerns with the related ideas of waste and 
obsolescence.  Matta-Clark’s chief concern with the 
obsolescence paradigm is that it creates its own set 
of mythic beliefs by transforming complex cultural 
processes into ones that seem self-evidently natural, 
unchangeable, and universal.  The false claim that 
“the new” naturally supersedes “the old” is a long-
standing criticism of capitalism.  The argument 
that capitalism sustains itself by promulgating 
emotional and psychological discontent is another 
familiar grievance.  Other commonplace grievances 
include: everlasting transience; endless replacement; 
continuous forced supersession; and, rapid and 
sudden fluctuations in valuation.  While the 
narrative of relentless devaluation and expendability 
eventuates in waste, it is precisely this narrative of 
perpetual change the capitalist entrepreneur needs 
in order to expand consumer demand for the “new 
now,” and the “next now.”  Joseph Schumpeter, 
the Austrian economist and ardent defender of 
capitalism, who in 1942 defined capitalism as 
“creative destruction,” unapologetically embraced 
the idea that obsolescence is fundamental to 



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capitalism.  According to Schumpeter, entrepreneurial innovation is the 
vital force behind the progress and instability of capitalism thus explaining 
boom and bust cycles.  Creative destruction is thus understood as one of 
the “iron laws” of capitalism.  While capitalist enterprise and its critics 
have moved beyond Schumpeter’s mid-century pronouncements, it seems 
clear to me that what links Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates and his building-cut 
projects is that both are caught up in this net of “iron laws.”  Thus, his 
critical perspective on capitalism remains relevant along with its impact 
on us.  
      In his recent book Obsolescence: An Architectural History Daniel 
Abramson is succinct, “Architecture and its history have lessons to teach 
about coming to terms with capitalism.”21 He cogently argues that in the 
United States the idea of architectural obsolescence was birthed by the 
real estate industry around 1910. Since its advent in 1913 when it was 
created by the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Tax 
Code tax deduction for asset depreciation has served to reify the abstract 
concept of obsolescence into dollars and cents.  In the dissociation of 
economic life-span from natural durability, economic obsolescence runs 
faster than physical decay and this is by design.  The life-span tables in the 
Tax Code are politically and economically driven to benefit capital. They 
are not obtained from empirical building science data as to durability and 
structural integrity of the underlying architectural asset.  So, the cycle of 
real estate investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment operates entirely 
independent of naturalized obsolescence. Unlike most material objects and 
consumer goods, land and works of architecture while easily neglected, 
abandoned, or de-valued are not easily discarded. The invention of 
architectural obsolescence normalized capitalism’s inclinations and offers a 
convenient tidy rationale for the chaotic changes it tends to foster. Though 
Matta-Clark is not the first artist to recognize problems with the myth of 
obsolescence and its implications for the production and consumption of 
architectural objects, he is certainly the first to attack it with crowbars and 
power saws.  
      Physical mortality is relatively predictable, whereas de-valuation arising 
from highly contingent market circumstance is not.  To be sure, the 
impermanence of the built environment is the condition of possibility for 
virtually all of Matta-Clark’s creative output including Fake Estates.  While 
he purchased these micro-parcels amidst the wholesale abandonment 
of erstwhile usable land and buildings it is precisely this conceptual 
framework—that architectural change necessarily requires wholesale or 
widespread expendability—that Matta-Clark wants to criticize in all his 



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projects.   

Waste and Obsolescence in Architecture

       While I think it is clear that Matta-Clark 
understands (if only inchoately so) the distinction 
between value-extraction and value-creation, and he 
rightly identifies many of the problems associated 
with value-extraction, he under-appreciates or 
misapprehends the potential pitfalls associated 
with value-creation as a tool for architectural 
change.  These potential pitfalls also have 
important implications for the architect-speculator 
relationship.  Since the early decades of the twentieth 
century the architectural community’s response to 
obsolescence runs the gamut from denial through 
resistance to reluctant acceptance to enthusiastic 
embrace. Throughout most of architectural history 
the temporal horizon for works of architecture 
was characterized by gradualism—the desire for 
permanence but acceptance of gradual change as 
inevitable.  The past was always present and time 
passed slowly. Beginning with the twentieth century 
fixity, permanence, and gradualism began to recede.  
Abramson puts it this way, “Only in the twentieth 
century did a place of unending ceaseless change in 
the built environment come to be understood as the 
new normal.”22  
Whether, and under what circumstances, the 
political question of whether land parcelization 
is reversible gets overlooked and remains under-
theorized in Fake Estates. Though a man of strong 
politics, Matta-Clark’s work wants to get at the 
existential assumptions concerning ownership, 
value and, use underlying the political. Similar to 
archeological data, loss of information about the 
past is one of the pitfalls of real estate speculation 
as it endeavors to create economic value.  Costs 
associated with these pitfalls are scarcely accounted 
for in development proformas or financial balance 

       Though 
Matta-Clark 

is not the 
first artist 

to recognize 
problems with 

the myth of 
obsolescence 

and its 
implications 

for the 
production and 
consumption of 
architectural 

objects, he 
is certainly 
the first to 

attack it with 
crowbars and 

power saws.

“

”



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sheets.  Few real estate speculators factor ‘externalities’ such as the loss of 
historical-architectural data into their economic calculations.
       From an ontological perspective, obsolescence is a species of 
impermanence whose discourse asks us to actively disengage from past-
being while encouraging us to privilege incipient, emergent-being.  Since 
their economic power is recorded temporally in architectural obsolescence, 
the speculator in essence presents us with a bogus historical narrative 
that is a false dichotomy: either passively acquiesce to the relics of an 
ossified dysfunctional past, or aggressively seek economic advantage over 
others for control of a would-be prosperous future.  Although we in the 
architectural community are loath to admit it, and at times quick to justify 
it, the profession’s incessant drive towards novelty, experimentation, and 
the pursuit of ever-more dramatic three-dimensional form helps fuel 
architectural obsolescence. Our prevalent talk of the ‘relevant’ with its 
emergent-minded focus on ‘the germane’, ‘the immediate’, ‘the topical’, 
‘the fresh’, ‘the cutting-edge’, ‘of the moment’, infuses our theory with 
enticing rhetoric, and inflects practice towards their seductions  as Matta-
Clark intimates. To the extent that we in the architectural community 
accept this false dichotomy by embracing a speculatively-driven 
obsolescence narrative, then yes, we are part of the problem.  Those of us 
in the architecture philosophy community working to foster awareness 
of social justice issues need to sharpen our attitudes about the temporal 
composition of the future, the present, and the past.  This implies the 
abiding necessity for a genuine understanding of the temporal processes 
that constitute the milieu in which we think and act.  There is of course, 
the perennial uncertainty about what future generations will deem relevant. 
We can never know with certainty just what it is that our future selves will 
value that our present selves do not.   
       Under the influence of disembodied market forces, architectural 
obsolescence would appear to transcend politics, state influence, and 
individual subjective interest. It is as if human worth is being judged 
entirely by “objective” external standards not of human construction.  
In short, under speculation human dignity is relegated to the sidelines.  
This should not be the case. It is a mistake to portray what is essentially a 
complex series of interconnected value judgments as if they are disembodied 
objective quantifiable natural laws, because this caricature wrongly masks 
the essential human agency of the ones doing the judging—we the living. 
It is of just this sort of disempowerment that Matta-Clark warns.  Fake 
Estates is simultaneously comic and tragic. Tragic because the notion of a 
propertied estate as the summative expression of human worth propels the 



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continued squandering of natural and architectural 
resources, and the splintering of the social space that 
grounds such worth.  Comic—comically absurd—
because the process of speculation continues to 
generate more of the same. 

ENDNOTES

1. Les Leopold offers an abundance of empirical 
data on the accelerating U.S. wealth gap in Runaway 
Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice, 
New York: Labor Institute Press, 2015.  
2. Richard, Frances. “Mythology: the Evolution 
of Fakes Estates, Part II,” In Odd Lots: Revisiting 
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, ed. Jeffrey 
Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, 51-61. 
New York: Cabinet Books, 2005., p. 53.  
3. Richard, Frances. “Space Between Places: The 
Evolution of Fake Estates, Part I,” In Odd Lots: 
Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, ed. 
Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, 
38-50. New York: Cabinet Books, 2005. p. 40.
4. Carlinsky, Dan. “ ‘Sliver’ Buyers Have a Field Day 
at City Sales,” New York Times. October 14, 1973. 
http:// www.nytimes.com/1973/10/14/archives/
sliver-buyers-have-a-fieldday. (accessed January 6, 
2018). 
5. ibid.
6. Bessa, Antonio Sergio and Jessamyn Fiore. 
Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect. New York: The 
Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2017., p. 10.
7. See, http:// “all-that-is-interesting.com/1970s-
New York Photos”, (accessed July 5, 2018) 
and https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/
nyregion/30books.html (accessed July 5, 2018)
8. Richard, Frances. “Remove Your House: 
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Physical Poetics,” In Odd 
Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, 



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ed. Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, 62-71. New York: 
Cabinet Books, 2005. p. 65. 
9. Richard, Frances. “Space Between Place,” p. 47.  
10. Carlinsky, “ ‘Sliver’ Buyers Have a Field Day at City Sales.”
11.Richard, Frances. “Remove Your House,” p. 66.
12. Lee, Pamela M. Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-
Clark.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000., p. 103.
13. Kroessler, Jeffrey A. “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Moment.” In Odd Lots: 
Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, ed. Jeffrey Kastner, Sina 
Najafi, and Frances Richard. New York: Cabinet Books, 2005. p. 37.
14. Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E. Krauss.  Formless: A User’s Guide. New 
York: Zone Books, 1997,  p. 120.
15. Diserens, Corrinne. ed. Gordon Matta-Clark. New York: Phaidon 
Press, 2003., p. 188.
16. Lee, p. 94.
17. Wrona, Xavier. “Urbanism and Revolution: 2 or 3 Things about 
Gordon Matta-Clark and Georges Bataille.”  In Gordon Matta-Clark: 
Anarchitect, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore, New York: The 
Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2017, p. 96.
18. Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark. p. 182.
19. Johnson, Cara M. “Directing Energy: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Pursuit 
of Social Sculpture.”  In Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect, ed. Antonio 
Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore, New York: The Bronx Museum of the 
Arts, 2017, p. 52.   
20. Lee, p. 109.
21. Abramson, Daniel M. Obsolescence: An Architectural History.  Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 7.
22. Abramson, p. 14.  

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Designing A Common World:
Public Responsibility and the aim 
to objectify architecture
 
Hans Teerds

Introduction

      Many architectural offices today tend to present 
their works as the inevitable result of the program 
brief and building site. Often, they showcase their 
designs on their websites, in architectural magazines, 
in lectures, or on internet blogs as the sum of a 
few logical steps, adjusting a simple volume (the 
possible envelope according to local restrictions) 
towards a final form (a response to programmatic 
and site-specific characteristics). These design-
narratives often are illustrated with simple and 
schematic line-drawings, emphasizing the logic of 
the final result. It is of course a simplified version 
of the design process, a ‘narrative’ only possible 
in hindsight. The tendency beyond, I think, is an 
eagerness to withdraw from the ‘subjective,’ with its 
associations as grounded in mere personal preference 
in the presentation of the project, in favor of reason 
and logic, which operate in the open, outside the 
subject. The same tendency can be recognized in the 
effort by other offices to present their projects as the 
outcome of working methods grounded in a strict 
and seemingly scientific analysis of big data, made 
possible by the unprecedented power of computers 
to envision and manipulate data (in real time), and 



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to map and manipulate information flows. (figure 1) Once again, some of 
these offices use such computational models to evoke the impression that 
the design work is the logical, even irresistible, outcome of an objective 
and extensive analysis of information. Some even suggest that in the (near) 
future architectural designs can be generated through artificial intelligence. 
No architects required (or better said: only software engineers needed)! 
And thus, the narrative goes: the design process will be objectified in such 
a way that the obvious subjectivity of the designer is excluded from the 
process in favor of the much more subtle subjectivity of the computational 
model. It is the old quest of ‘architecture without architects’, this time 
not in favor of a vernacular architecture, local traditions and spontaneous 
building processes, but in favor of the promises of the black box of Big 
Data. To these two claims that aim to overcome the subjective aspects of 
architectural design (or as stated, of the architectural designer) we might 
add a third direction: the renewed interest in participation trajectories. 
Both in scholarly research, as well as within architectural practices, there is 
a growing interest in the development of open design trajectories wherein 
stakeholders (beyond the usual: clients, investors, and planners but also 
future residents and users) are invited to intensely participate. This interest 
in participatory design, moreover, is not limited to the design phase. The 
product itself, the building, should be built in an ‘open’ system, where 
users can easily adapt the spaces to their wishes in time. Many examples 
of the tendencies above can be given, both from the field of practices as 
well as from academia. However, as I do not want to pinpoint offices to 
a singular take, I leave it to the imagination of the reader to frame these 
tendencies in architectural practice to actual cases.   
        Although these three attempts are very different in character, a shared aim 
can be recognized: the aim to reduce the subjective aspects of architectural 
design by (in theory) minimizing or altering the role of the designer from 
creator to something more like ‘facilitator.’ Such a ‘humbleness’ that 
emerges from the field functions as a corrective to the era of ‘starchitects’, 
wherein the creativity and genius of a single architect was emphasized, 
alongside a worldwide inclination towards the ‘new’, ‘novel’, and ‘original.’ 
The 2008 world-wide financial and economic crisis that followed the 
collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in the USA made very clear how 
hollow such a perspective was. Architecture simply had become an empty 
shelf: the ‘surplus’ aesthetics attached to buildings, the icing on the cake. 
Although this can be understood in economic (and even Marxist) terms as 
the ‘surplus’ value, which could be made profitable in terms of marketing 
and branding, it of course hardly can be seen as a ‘proper’ understanding 
of the significance of architecture for inhabitants, users, society. After 



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all, due to the crisis, it immediately 
became clear that such a surplus value 
was only profitable in the case of the 
few designers that had become a brand 
in themselves. Or better said: there 
seemed to be no language left wherein 
the significance of architecture could 
be explained, neither to the inhabitants 
and users, nor to society as such, and, 
in line with that, also not to clients, 
constructors, investors, developers. 
Architecture had turned into a ‘statue 
of Nebuchadnezzar’: beautiful, 
spectacular, impressive, powerful, 
glamorous, but only loosely rooted in 
society (if rooted at all). 
       Consciously addressed in articles in the media and 
(new) assignments to architects, or unconsciously 
touched upon in discussions, it seemed that the 
‘subjectivity’ of the architectural designer was to 
blame. And thus, we can understand (and probably 
also value) the above-mentioned ways to organize 
and present design differently: they are mostly sincere 
attempts to overcome the crisis in architecture and 
to (re)connect to the client and user, to each other, as 
well as to society. The subjectivity of the designer has 
become the ‘whipping boy’ of architectural design. 
These reflections implicitly divide architectural 
practices into two very different approaches: the 
artistic practice versus the engineering practice. 
Schematically, both positions can be seen as the 
outer ends of a spectrum. On the one side the 
architect is presented as creative genius producing 
original and unforeseen (architectural) proposals 
(model: the ‘starchitect’, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead) 
which need to be characterized as ‘art’, while on the 
other side one would find the architects that simply 
understand their practices as consultancy offices, 
and their work as a form of engineering. These 
architects get the project done, straightforwardly 
fulfilling the wishes of the client (model: a ‘service 

they are 
mostly sincere 

attempts to 
overcome 

the crisis in 
architecture 

and to (re)
connect to the 

client and user, 
to each other, 
as well as to 

society.

“

”

Figure 1:

grasshopper program 
computational architecture



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office’).2 Whereas most of the architectural offices, obviously, operate in 
the grey zone of this spectrum (aiming to do a good job with regard to 
both ends of the spectrum), the above signalized tendency in practice 
heads towards this latter end of the spectrum.
       This tendency walks a dangerous path because the removal of subjectivity 
entails the loss of the underpinnings of architectural responsibility. In 
order to unravel this idea I will lean upon two perspectives offered in the 
writings of the philosopher Hannah Arendt. First I will use her distinction 
between the earth and the world. This distinction and her understanding 
of the world as a world-of-things offer a perspective wherein the practice of 
architecture can be understood as world-construction, a valuable external 
reference frame for the professional field of architecture. This perspective 
at first sight might seem to offer an argument to reduce subjectivity in 
design, but that, as we will see, is at odds with Arendt’s own perspective. 
A certain balance between objectivity and subjectivity is needed. In order 
to define that balance, I secondly will use her unfinished reflections on 
the human faculty of ‘judgment’. This last perspective offers a key to the 
aspect of subjectivity in design, wherein subjectivity and responsibility are 
intertwined. This perspective is important, as it opposes the move to align 
architectural design with the repressive and dangerous tendencies endemic 
to technocratic engineering.
       Before I set up this argument, three brief remarks. First: the tendencies 
described above are not novel at all. Amongst others, the writings of the 
architects George Baird and Giancarlo De Carlo and historians Kenneth 
Frampton and Robert Gutman have stressed the tension between the 
artistic and the functional throughout the 19th and 20th century, and 
pondered attempts to either transform architecture to a more scientifically 
or socially ‘just’ professional field, or reduce it to a solely artistic one.  
Current trends, while not novel, are intensifications of these tensions.3
       Secondly, it is the subjectivity of the designer that I focus on even 
though it must be recognized that the building process is shot-through 
with subjectivity: subjective are the aims and wishes of the client, investor, 
developer, of the public official that formulates the restrictions for a particular 
site, and of the politician that wants to develop a lasting monument before 
time in office has finished. Design, however, is a particular instrument 
within the building industries. It is a tool that architects have, a tool that 
bridges the different viewpoints. This is an important given. Even in times 
wherein the subjectivity of architectural design is under attack, we need to 
understand the unique capacities of design. 
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architect. In most cases, design is teamwork, work of 
an office with project architects, assistant designers, 
interns, drafters. So when addressing ‘the architect’, 
I have in mind both the single designer, as well as 
the collaborative.

The Things of the World

       How can we understand the context of 
architecture: What is its significance beyond the 
beautification of buildings, urban spaces, and 
cultural landscapes? The writings of Hannah Arendt 
offer an appropriate perspective in this regard, 
through which the cultural and political meaning 
of the profession can be understood. The Canadian 
architect and theoretician George Baird stated in his 
1995 book The Space of Appearance that Arendt has 
been one of the very few philosophers of the 20th 
century to include “the things of the world”4 in her 
political philosophy.  In other words, within political 
reflections in philosophy and other academic fields, 
theories hardly grasp the tangible world, the things 
that surround us. Arendt’s perspective then stresses 
the tangible world as politically relevant. In order 
to understand this relevance, let us first explicate 
what she meant by ‘things of the world’. In her 
writings, Arendt distinguishes the ‘world’ from the 
‘earth’, a distinction she partly based on the writings 
of philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had been 
her professor during her studies. The distinction 
roughly is between the natural and the cultural, 
the globe versus the human interventions, human 
affairs, and relationships. But where Heidegger 
offers a negative reading of this distinction, Arendt 
ponders the world in a clearly positive perspective.5 
Where Heidegger takes the classical philosophical 
stance and understands the humble and stumble, 
rumour and noise of public life, as disturbing the 

      This 
tendency 
walks a 

dangerous 
path because 
the removal 

of subjectivity 
entails the 
loss of the 

underpinnings of 
architectural 
responsibility.

“

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vita contemplativa, she, on the contrary, aims to celebrate the participation 
in public life and the engagement in the world and its wanderings, the 
vita activa. A perspective overlooked and neglected within philosophy, 
according to Arendt – and not without consequences. The whole political 
development in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century urged 
her—as a Jew born in Germany, searching for refuge in France and the 
United States—to become politically aware, and publicly active.6  So what 
does the distinction mean for her? To her the earth stands for the natural 
circumstances of the globe, depicted by the cycle of nature. For Arendt 
this is not an idealistic situation, as she stresses the need to transform that 
globe into a habitable place. This transformation establishes the world. 
The world thus is the earth made fit for human habitation and the human 
community.7 Through human intervention, through the creation of 
artefacts (houses, furniture, infrastructure), the earth is transformed into 
a human world.  The distinction between the two terms thus roughly 
corresponds to the natural and the cultural spheres. Arendt emphasizes 
the different qualities that belong to both entities: it is the cyclicality 
of nature versus the perpetuity of culture, the survival of species versus 
the permanence of the human artefacts. For Arendt ‘things’ are not just 
objects, but they are part and parcel of that artificial ‘world’. Human 
artefacts establish the world. In addition to this basic principle, Arendt 
draws attention to two perspectives of artefacts that qualify this world, 
which also turns them into a prerequisite for sensible political life —the 
relationship Baird stressed. 

1.       For Arendt the world always is a world shared with others. Or in 
her terms: the world always is ‘in-common.’ Human artefacts, that at once 
establish a world, immediately also establish commonality. “To live in the 
world,” Arendt writes in a famous quote, “means essentially that a world 
of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located 
between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates 
and separates men at the same time.”8  Arendt stresses that this ‘table’ not 
only is to be seen as a spatial commonality (to be collected around an 
artefact-in-common)), but also as a commonality that stretches in time 
(we have the object not only in common today, but we share it also with 
previous generations, as well as with those to come).9  Both continuities 
(or commonalities) of the world are rendered by Arendt as prerequisites 
for sensible political life. The intangibility and vulnerability of “action 
and speech,” that Arendt frame as the crucial activities of political life, 
requires a durable and common stage.10 Politics, for Arendt, does not 



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primarily relate to parliament and government, 
to town hall and council, but to “the coexistence 
and association of different men,” which certainly 
relates to the intangible interaction between human 
beings (like in the political arena) but also is related 
to the tangible (public) artefacts and institutions 
that structure and organize the world and orients 
their inhabitants.11  The world of things, in other 
words, is at once the stage of politics as well as the 
concern of politics. 

2.     While the first point stresses artefacts as such, 
delivering a stable stage for the realm of politics, the 
second perspective qualifies these artefacts. They are 
not neutral atoms in space, but have a particular 
shape, history, tactility, or to be short: presence. 
They appear to the human being through their 
form—a form that is particular and recognizable, 
and that can revive particular memories and 
narratives.12  According to Arendt, this particularly 
counts especially for such artefacts as memorials, 
monuments, and works of art. She thus underlines 
the capacity of artefacts—in particular: works of 
art—to reify stories and narratives, to memorize 
actions of the past, and to make history present 
today. Artefacts are carriers of meaning, memory, 
heritage, orientation, order, and identity, they 
can revive (collective) memories and evoke 
remembrances.13  This aspect of the ‘things of the 
world’ is related to a crucial capacity of the human 
being; the possibility to tell a story. The life of the 
individual—a narrative in time between birth and 
death—is an example of such a story, but also the 
‘the life of the polis’, which obviously is the story 
of particular histories. The crucial aspect of the 
narrative is not only the possibility to contemplate 
actions within time, but also that it can be shared 
with others. This, for Arendt, transforms the life of 
the polis into a political life.14  This capacity to tell 
stories is foremost a capacity of the human being, 



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but, as Arendt also stresses, such narratives are the “everlasting essence of 
the work of art” in the context of politics.15  Needless to say that works 
of art indeed often consciously reify (historical) narratives, and that such 
works of art have been important to the realm of politics and the self-
understanding of human communities. However, we do not have to limit 
our understanding at this point to figurative art, Greek poems, or the 
plot in movies. The particular shape of artefacts (works of art as well as 
everyday artefacts) can be a ‘holding place’ for narratives: objects can evoke 
remembrances, and thus are able to make particular histories present, but 
they also can evoke future perspectives, which unfold and are addressed in 
stories too. 
       To summarize, artefacts not only offer stability and permanence, but 
also memory, remembrance, structure, and orientation in the world. Both 
layers of understanding of the ‘things of the world’ value artefacts in a 
very sensible and concrete way, engaging aspects of spatiality, materiality, 
tactility, tangibility, and the capacity of narration, as well as the inherent 
aspects of production and use. All these aspects in one way or the other may 
contribute to the commonality and durability of a political community or 
disturb it.

Architecture as World-Construction

       This perspective upon the ‘things of the world’ offers a valuable 
path to construct a cultural and political—and therefore also ethical—
framework to understand the work of the architect, not only for architects 
working on grand cathedrals, but also for those developing and designing 
not-so-grand bicycle sheds.16  Arendt stressed that works of art are the 
most worldly human artefacts, particularly since they are objects not 
intended for commonplace utility but only to be accessed in a disinterested 
attitude, and therefore will not be damaged through use and spoiled by use 
or consumption. Works of art therefore are, if kept well protected from 
natural influences, the most durable objects on earth, and thus will offer 
the most stable underpinnings for society.17  Arendt nevertheless does not 
limit the twofold aspects of the ‘things of the world’ solely to works of art, 
but only placed them in hierarchy above the other works of the human 
being. 
       With these concepts in mind, let us stretch Arendt’s perspective 
to the field of architecture. We first need to recognize how important 
architecture is with regard to the establishment of the world (and in the 



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context of an existing world, the maintenance and 
continuation of it). The built environment after 
all literally shapes the world for its inhabitants. It 
constructs the everyday places of human life, as 
well as the monuments that structure political life, 
the memorials, the buildings of the parliament, the 
offices of public institutions. It structures the cities 
and neighbourhoods, where people live, work, enjoy 
a movie, or go to court, as well as the landscape, 
where the food grows, the natural reserves are, the 
slopes for skiing. Architecture builds the museums, 
where the works of art are exhibited, and it delineates 
the public squares, where people can gather. 
Architecture, in other words, mediates between 
the human being and the earth, as well as between 
the human being and the human community. It 
creates the private spaces of the home, as well as a 
context for meaningful collective life. It offers room 
for actions to unfold, for stories to be enacted, for 
history to take place, for experiences to be gained 
—and by doing so, through all the events that take 
place on their stairs and balconies, their wooden 
floors and tile pavements, against their walls and 
columns, (hi)stories are written. The patina of the 
materials, the traces of use on the stairs and floors 
—they are not entirely negative, as Arendt seems 
to argue: it is particularly through these traces of 
decay and use that history is made present, that 
memories and remembrances of users, inhabitants, 
and communities are evoked.18  Buildings and 
cities, landscapes and works of infrastructure—they 
all first accommodate the human community, but 
second also offer a ‘holding place’ for memories 
from the (recent) past. 
     Works of architecture (both grand and 
humble), we might conclude, simply relate users 
and inhabitants with the earth and with each 
other spatially through the placing of walls, doors, 
windows, roofs, pavements, and so on. This relation 
not only is established at this point in time, but also 
over time, with generations of the past as well as 

Arendt 
stressed that 
works of art 
are the most 

worldly human 
artefacts

“

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of the future. Architecture plays a role both in a tangible and material 
sense (by the very structures), as well as in a mental sense (by being 
sites of heritage, memory, and so on). Architecture, therefore, should be 
understood as ‘world-construction.’ 
       If architecture, a term which here includes the fields of planning, 
constructing, urban design, and landscape architecture, is world-
construction, then it needs to carefully engage with the world it brings 
into existence in order to keep it fit for human inhabitation and political 
interaction. Architectural design then cannot be indifferent to the world-
in-common, but requires an attitude of engagement towards the worlds 
it both touches and creates. From this perspective, we can usefully define 
three tasks for the professional field of architecture: 
1.        This perspective stresses the value of the existing (built) environment 
as the context of the social network of the inhabitants as well as a ‘holding 
place’ for stories, memories, remembrances. It thus offers an argument for 
a careful renovation, restoration and refurbishment of existing buildings, 
urban structures and cultural landscapes. The existing built environment 
is not a tabula rasa, nor neutral ground, wherein architecture intervenes. 
2.      Importantly, this is no argument for stasis. In her reflections on 
culture, Arendt stresses that two perspectives align in culture: the careful 
maintenance of the existing intertwines with the intervention that creates 
room for the new.  The second task for architectural practices thus is to 
embed the new in the existing.19 This of course creates a new composition, 
a new entity—but with respect to what has been, and how that has been 
established.20  
3.        For the third task, we need to take one step further. To acknowledge 
that through the shape of artefacts narratives can be told, is to challenge 
the architect to both understand and take responsibility for the narratives 
inherent in their proposals. This charge, of course, counts for all 
interventions in the world, but from a political perspective, it particularly 
counts for the design of public buildings. After all, public buildings— 
townhalls, schools, libraries,—through their form also reify particular 
narratives, as for example a well-designed public school will narrate the 
importance of education in our society (moreover, the structure of the 
school does influence the possibilities of education, but also narrate 
what educational system we are after—think of the early school-designs 
of the Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger), while a rundown public 
school building simply seems to show that public funding of the school 
is not prioritized.21  Just as townhalls of the past perfectly reify the 
relationship between local power and the citizens and cathedrals do the 



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same for religion and the community of believers, 
new townhalls and churches also reify comparable 
narratives.22  They are carriers of the organization 
of the current human community and thus expose 
what has been assigned as important for this 
community. As political philosopher Bonnie Honig 
argues in her recent Sydney Lectures in Philosophy 
and Society: “Public things are the infrastructure of 
democratic life, and they underwrite the signs and 
symbols of democratic unity, that, for the moment, 
still survive.” And while she relates this perspective 
with the previous mentioned need for a stable 
underpinnings of the political realm, she writes: 
“things … stabilize the web of meanings in which 
we live and into which we may act.”24  
These three tasks: valuing the existing built 
environment for its embedded meanings, sensitively 
engaging that environment with new revisions, 
and care for the narrative quality of architecture, 
are crucial assignments for every architectural 
intervention in the world. What designers propose 
never is neutral. It must always deal with structures 
from the past, as well as their inherent narratives, 
while at once adding new narratives that in their 
turn reify the current relationship to the earth 
(and its environmental issues) and the world (as a 
world-in-common). 

The Challenge of Subjectivity

       According to George Baird, this perspective 
“electrifies the architectural project,” ethically.  
Rightly so: while individual wishes, needs and 
ambitions as well as commercial perspectives, 
profits, and business cases are the genesis of 
most architectural assignments, there is always 
spillover.25 Architecture—even in the most isolated 
circumstances—always is tethered to the world-in-
common, and thus is establishing, maintaining, 
and intervening in the world, which in turn has 



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political and cultural meaning. Architecture thus is an inherently political 
and cultural endeavor, the import of which forms the basis for its unique 
ethos, for not only does it assert that architecture significantly establishes 
or maintains the world-in-common, but also that architecture can become 
an agent of destruction to the commonly shared world. It can disturb the 
possibilities for establishing political life and obliterate the (collective) 
stories that are stored in the world. 
       This is what justifies holding that the architectural project thus reaches 
beyond the immediate interests of the stakeholders: through its impact 
on the commonly shared world. This of course not only offers an ethical 
perspective upon the architectural designer’s work, but also is applicable 
for other parties involved in the building process, from commissioner to 
building manager, and from constructor to politicians who decide upon 
the building regulations, or the ambitions with regard to urban renewal, 
social housing, or public buildings. Arendt’s perspective offers a framework 
for a (self )critical approach to each building assignment—a horizon against 
which a project (from program brief to design, and from construction to 
demolition) can be evaluated, challenged, and valued, as it both challenges 
the ‘what/why’ as well as the ‘how’ of a project. 
       Although this perspective of ‘the world in common’ might call for 
sensitivity amongst designers to the larger context of their work, it does 
certainly not plea for objectivity in design. Baird, argues that neither a 
radically subjective position, nor a supposedly objective approach are 
appropriate responses vis-à-vis the idea of a shared world.26  Obviously, to 
develop participation processes, create open-building structures, make use 
of data modelling, and present architecture through a logical explanation 
can be valued positively as exhibiting awareness of a certain architectural 
ethos. These strategies are particularly welcome against an architectural 
era that uncritically engaged with the new and the novel, the oeuvre 
and the artistic. However, there is a clear downside to these attempts to 
wipe out subjectivity as well: if objectification of design is the endgame, 
it comes with a reductionist perspective and risks dissipation of design-
responsibility. This assertion is based on three considerations: 
1.        According to Arendt, the world is characterized by plurality: it is 
site-specific and time-specific due to the natural circumstances of the earth, 
the development of the world, the cultural and political development and 
engagement with the world, the development of tools and instruments 
(technology) that make minor and major interventions possible, as well as 
through the histories and events that unfolded within the world and thus 
upload the world with narratives. Although the ‘facts’ of these differences 



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can be traced in comprehensive analyses, or can 
be collected in the numbers of ‘big data’, their 
cultural, social and political meanings, that is to 
say, what gives them ethical import, are out of reach 
of these instruments. Without acknowledging 
the personal and collective narratives, the cultural 
and political aspects of the built environment, 
architecture is stuck in reductionist and purely 
materialist perspectives. This particularly is the 
case if the design-instruments (as data-mining, 
logical reasoning, participation) are magnified, and 
rather than being mere tools to achieve an ethical 
end become regarded as self-justifying processes. In 
all of the mentioned cases in the introduction to 
this article, there is the risk to reduce the reality of 
the world to objective facts: either to the ‘factual’ 
perspective of participants in the development 
process, or to the overwhelming amount of ‘facts’ 
that are collected through data mining, or finally to 
the ‘facts’ that are seemingly the inevitable result of  
logical investigation in program, site, and use. 
2.    Simultaneously with such a reductionist 
perspective, these methods and attempts to objectify 
architecture also disturb the ethical understanding 
of architect’s practice since the process of ‘design’ 
is misunderstood. When the design-method 
is so magnified, the process should follow its 
predefined path. Such a process is repressive; it 
strongly steers while diminshing the freedom 
to do things differently, to be surprised by one’s 
findings. This steering both removes opportunities 
for personal reflection and simultaneously taking 
responsibility for one’s decisions. One can hide 
behind the outcome of data mining, the wishes of 
the participants, the facts that are taken from the 
context and program, or behind the investors or 
client—any of which somehow ‘automatically’ lead 
to the proposed project. This of course is a bit of a 
simplified presentation: there still is ‘design’, but it 
operates on a higher level of abstraction: the design 
of the used methods and instruments, the selection 

      if 
objectification 

of design is 
the endgame, 
it comes with 

a reductionist 
perspective and 
risks dissipation 

of design-
responsibility. 

“

”



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and development of the computational program, the selection of data 
scraped, the way data are connected, the ‘architecture’ of the algorithm. 
This is a way of defining the organisation, a matter of decision making, and 
interpretation—and their impact on the world can be devasting. However, 
now the design decisions do not operate in the open, but are kept at a 
remove from the actual projects. A new and obfuscating layer, defining 
the algorithm or the structure of the design method, is added between the 
designer and the end-object. It distances challenging and subtle matters 
of subjectivity, biases, ethical dilemmas from the actual design task. This 
remove easily hides the subjective and ethical aspects of the project from 
the public eye, particularly if these methods and instruments are seen as 
objective, even if not scientifically truthful, and thus are neither challenged 
nor questioned—not in the discussions within the designer’s office, nor in 
the (everyday) talks to clients, neighbours, and society. 
       This, I would argue, is hiding behind the instruments, and behind 
the outcome of the application of these instruments, without taking 
responsibility for one’s own decisions (not on the level of the design 
of the method and instrument, nor on the use of the outcome of the 
implementation of these methods and instruments). In other words, if 
method and instrument are presented as factual and scientifically truthful, 
the outcomes easily can be understood as ‘objective facts’ too. What then 
is left to the designer except implementation? The architect will operate a 
design-machine, and needs to follow what is prescribed—simply turning 
the diagrams or directions into structures (if this is still needed, one might 
imagine that artificial intelligence even this step in the design process can 
take over). He or she probably will follow a self-prescribed path (through 
the definition of the algorithm)—but without taking responsibility that 
this path is inherently subjective and hence to be challenged continuously. 
3.      Arendt’s perspective of the world-in-common clearly at once both 
challenges the subjective intervention in this world, as well as the aim 
to be objective. It not only provokes the idea that design simply can be 
the ‘just’ interpretation of big data, or that it can be the application of 
computational models and logical reasoning, but offers a ‘critical’ reading to 
all other instruments through which the professional aims to define a more 
or less ‘objective’ underpinnings of his designs. Arendt also is critical of the 
immediate and unquestioned application of theories, dogmas, philosophies, 
particular design methods, and so on. All these ‘instruments’ can form 
an obstacle between the designer and the world, particularly when the 
tools are overvalued and the complexity of the world is reduced to singular 
perspectives. Architectural design, understood as ‘world-construction’ 



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is a matter of immediate engagement with the 
world-in-common, and reflection on its existing 
structures, meanings, its rootedness in the past, and 
how it can be strengthened, enhanced, continued, 
while immediately offering space to new needs 
and wishes. Architects simply are challenged to 
apply their work with caution, not to destroy the 
precarious threads that connect us with the past, 
neither to insert the failure-projects of tomorrow, 
nor to lose their rooting in society.27  
      This, for architects seeking to execute the 
ethical fullness of their charge, clearly is a balancing 
act between the objective and the subjective. 
The perspective that design deals with concrete 
artefacts that are in-common challenges designers 
to organize the ethical questions as clearly and 
concretely as possible within each design project 
(and not hidden in abstraction, or obscured in the 
instruments and methods), while communicating 
openly and accessibly about the subjective aspects 
of the activity of design (and how to deal with them 
from an ethical perspective). 

Architectural Judgment

       How then can we understand architectural 
design, if it is a balancing act between the objective 
and the subjective? The design process often is 
understood as a black box, wherein imagination and 
experience, taste and other subjective aspects, play 
a role. Generally speaking, architectural design is 
not understood by the broader public, as is tangible 
in all sorts talks about architecture in the media or 
in personal conversations in which the architect 
after all never is never challenged by his audience 
to respond to the costs of one iconic building, the 
terrible leaking of another, the un-functionality of 
again another spectacular building? However, if we 
zoom in to the actual process of design, we obviously 
immediately understand that the design first and 

       Arendt’s 
perspective of 

the world-in-
common clearly 

at once both 
challenges 

the subjective 
intervention in 
this world, as 

well as the aim 
to be objective.

“

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foremost is embedded in the wishes of the client. Architects actively define 
and shape the intervention in the existing environment according to a 
program brief, along the lines of wishes of clients, investors, developers, 
and other stakeholders. This perspective at first sight seems to limit the 
responsibility of the architect. After all: most of the outcome of the design-
process is already given and predefined in a program brief (particularly in 
complex projects, these program briefs are like books containing hundreds 
of pages with prescriptions). However, design is not simply the answer to a 
particular program brief, as there are many answers to that same program 
brief, as architectural competitions clearly show. 28 This simple given of the 
multiplicity of possible outcomes already shows how crucial the position 
of the designer is, despite his currently often limited power in the process 
of development. Besides the very activity of sketching and investigating, 
two aspects of design are crucial with regard to the world-in-common:
  • Through the design process, often contradictory and conflicting 
viewpoints and insights evolve, as the needs of the client are addressed 
as well as the wishes of the future users and inhabitants, the concerns 
of the neighbours, the ambitions of local politics, the constraints of the 
existing situation, the regulations of local rules and laws, and so on. 
Design investigates possibilities and opportunities, and through these 
investigations, new, unforeseen, and unthought-of perspectives open up—
perspectives that might unite contrasting positions. 
     • Through design, moreover, the question of imagination is posed: what 
do we envision as the outcome of the project, what should it narrate, what 
does it stand for (and how does it contribute to the world-in-common)? 
In one way or the other, decisions have to be made upon the directions 
of the design process. To treat these issues as jigsaw puzzles that can be 
solved through mathematical logic, smart reasoning, or through complex 
computation is to abdicate architectural judgment: to make choices, to 
decide upon what is important, to value the several perspectives, and to be 
able to discuss these issues publicly. 
      It will be useful to introduce at this point another term borrowed 
from Arendt’s writings: her reflections on political judgment. These 
reflections, although not fully developed because of her sudden death 
in 1975, incorporate ideas about the public access as well as the inter-
subjectivity of such judgments. In particular, two aspects of judgment—
the accessibility of the decision as well as its intersubjective character—are 
pressing questions regarding architectural design.   
      Arendt based her understanding of political judgment on Immanuel 
Kant’s proposition of aesthetic judgment. The crucial feature Arendt 



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adopts from Kant’s perspective is his idea of the 
“intersubjective validity [of judgment] in the 
public realm.”29  Aesthetic judgment, for Kant, 
is not limited to the application of personal taste 
(although the development of taste is crucial), but 
always is related to the larger context of society. It 
requires an active engagement with this community, 
particularly through the application of an enlarged 
mentality. This latter term open to an important 
perspective, particularly in regard to the activity 
of design. What is important at this point is that 
Arendt also argues that politics, upon which she 
is focused, should not be understood as a realm of 
‘truths’ in a scientific sense. “Truth in the sciences is 
dependent on the experiment that can be repeated 
by others; it requires general validity. Philosophic 
truth has no such general validity. What it must 
have … is ‘general communicability’.”30  Surely, 
facts do play a role in the realm of politics—as 
clearly can be derived from the omnipresence of 
‘alternative facts’ in today’s political institutions. 
However, even if all participants stick to the 
same facts, paradoxical and even contractionary 
perspectives can be developed. Facts after all require 
both interpretation and validation. In politics, 
it is much more about the weighing of facts and 
understanding their relationships, particularly in 
relationship to the world and its wanderings, than 
it is about finding and defending the truth. In 
politics, moreover, understanding the facts and their 
relationships does not lead to a political program or 
decisions that can organize society in all its plurality. 
On the contrary, for Arendt the political arena is 
not about facts and figures, but about conflicting 
interpretations and contradictory perspectives. 
This approach thus requires the capacity to make 
decisions not solely on the basis of facts, but also 
with regard to conflicting perspectives and within 
complicated situations. Political judgment, Arendt 
therefore argues, is bound to a certain community. 
One judges “as a member of this community and 



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not as a member of a supersensible world.”31 Being part of a community 
urges us to understand the subjective aspects of our own position in the 
world, and urges us to take “the viewpoints of others into account.”32  
Arendt stresses that the capacity to acknowledge other perspectives rightly 
requires a specific human capacity that she calls after Kant the “enlarged 
mentality.” “The ‘enlargement of the mind’ is accomplished by “comparing 
our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, 
and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man.”33  
       The striking perspective Arendt stresses here is that she seems to 
take this process of judgment very literally. To take other viewpoints into 
account is not to think about other perspectives (or to take note of these 
perspectives), but literally means entering the problem at hand from the 
standpoint of other positions in the world. This describes a process of 
active engagement: to re-place oneself to another position, to re-write the 
story from that very perspective. Judgment requires the ability to place 
oneself in the place of others, in order to think from their position in the 
world. This is a crucial perspective: judgment implicitly requires a public. 
The plural public is at the heart of judgment processes—if not literal, then 
through the human faculty of imagination. “By the force of imagination 
it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially 
public, open to all sides.”34  
       The crucial point for our reflection on architectural design is Arendt’s 
next step: it is one thing to replace oneself to other positions, and to be 
able to think from within these positions, but the question how to judge 
is still open. It still requires judgment to make up one’s mind and to make 
decisions. Judgment requires a space to reflect, think, test other points of 
view, as it eventually also requires expertise, experience, knowledge, and 
intuition. Such a judgment requires engagement and reasonable training, 
as it does not depend upon general rules but on “thinking the particular.” 
Since in judgment imagination and intuition are involved, it is understood 
as requiring faculties of the human being that are shaped through active 
engagement in the world and participation in public life, as well as fueled 
through experience and knowledge. Through such an engagement in the 
world, one is able to recognize the particular, and to imagine the particular 
from different points of view. It is only through such a process, Arendt 
argues, that judgment becomes “communicable:” It can be communicated 
to others, as it is based on the thinking from different perspectives and 
on the development of and reflection upon multiple possibilities. This 
communicability takes the form of a persuasive activity: it is able to appeal 
to the variety of perspectives within society, even if it has judged that some 

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of the perspectives seem to be other than just.35  
       If we now turn back to architectural design, 
we easily can see the parallel. On the architect’s 
drawing table literally lay a variety of perspectives 
at hand: the client’s, the users’, the inhabitants’, 
the local politics’ perspective, and the neighbors’. 
The architect listens to their voices and challenges 
the project from their point of view. In the end, 
however, it is the design that needs to bring these 
(often conflicting) perspectives together, against 
the horizon of the world-in-common (in space and 
time) and not the design tool, the algorithm, the 
survey, or the sorted data. Design is an activity that 
sometimes unfolds somehow in solitude (within 
the office, at the drawing table, in meeting rooms, 
and so on), but that inherently also requires a 
continuous, imaginative conversation with its 
context, with the world-in-common. It requires 
imagination to “make the others present,” and by 
doing so making the architectural office and the 
subsequent meeting rooms (of clients, engineers, 
planners, politicians) where the design is developed, 
a public space.36  It is through the making present 
of the public at the heart of the process of design, 
that the design also can be made public, that the 
design is communicable, that it is accessible to be 
discussed publicly.37  

Conclusion

       Returning to the three examples of resistance 
against subjectivity I described at the outset: 
Obviously, we can’t lump all three examples together 
as a singular tendency completely. Especially the 
attempt to open up the design process for the 
participation of future users and inhabitants seems 
to stand out. New technologies appear especially 
promising in this regard where they help to 
streamline processes of interaction, discussion and 
debate, and how new techniques, developed in the 

       All 
attempts that 

aim to diminish 
the subjective 

from design 
will fall into 

the trap of 
technocratic 

engineering, 
wherein a 

reductionist 
and materialist 

vision is 
embraced, and 
responsibility 

is endlessly 
displaced. 

“

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gaming industries, also can be applied to architectural and urban planning 
processes. Moreover, in several countries around the world new ways of 
developing buildings appear, where in cooperative ways future inhabitants 
strongly work together, and are completely involved in the processes of 
developing and designing, and even financing and constructing their 
future housing. However, this does not diminish the role of design in these 
processes. Moreover, it is clear that if all these voices have to be heard, 
the complexity of the design process increases. How to incorporate the 
different and often opposing viewpoints into a single design? It is in this 
perspective that we can validate the parallel between architectural design 
and political judgment, as pondered by Hannah Arendt. Judgment requires 
the training of the human faculty of ‘enlarged mentality’ and imagination. 
To judge means to be able to think from different perspectives, not 
to define the average of these perspectives, but in order to come to an 
informed judgment. 
       A similar case can be made for design. Design requires the ability to think 
from the perspective of the stakeholders, as well as from a more general 
context (as the world-in-common). It requires imagination to make these 
perspectives present. However, in the end it needs to judge, it needs to make 
decisions. Such ‘informed’ judgments do not only mean to be informed 
about the different perspectives at stake, but also are informed through 
personal experiences, taste, knowledge, skills, and so on, that is to say, 
subjectively. All attempts that aim to diminish the subjective from design 
will fall into the trap of technocratic engineering, wherein a reductionist 
and materialist vision is embraced, and responsibility is endlessly displaced. 
It is particularly in the very moments where the subjective enters judgment 
that a public and political discussion on architectural proposals is possible, 
and that architects can be held responsible for their ideas and proposals. 
Conversely, architectural design requires balancing between stakeholders 
and the public, between the earth and the world-in-common, the world 
as it is gained from the past, and the world as it can be in the future. 
This balancing act requires personal engagement in the world, which will 
feed the architectural knowledge that can be gained through studies and 
experience, which is gained through extensive practicing, studying, and 
reflecting upon the world. 

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1. Many examples of the tendencies above can 
be given, both from the field of practices as well 
as from academia. However, as I do not want to 
pinpoint offices to a singular take, I leave it to the 
imagination of the reader to frame these tendencies 
in architectural practice to actual cases.
2. Cf. Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice 
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991), 28-35d.
3. George Baird, ‘“La Dimension Amoreuse” in 
Architecture’, in: Charles Jencks and George Baird 
(eds.). Meaning in Architecture (London: Barrie and 
Rockliff, The Cresset Press, 1969); George Baird, 
The Space of Appearance (Cambridge MA: MIT 
Press, 1995); Giancarlo De Carlo, ‘Architecture’s 
Public’, in: Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu 
and Jeremy Till (eds.) Architecture and Participation 
(Abingdon: Spon Press, 2007); Kenneth Frampton, 
‘The Status of Man and the Status of his Objects: 
a Reading of The Human Condition’, in Kenneth 
Frampton, Labour, Work, and Architecture. Collected 
Essays on Architecture and Design (London, New 
York: Phaidon Press, 2002); Robert Gutman, 
Architectural Practice: A Critical View (New York: 
Princeton Architectural Press, 1998).
4. Baird, The Space of Appearance, 21.
5. Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 2001), 77.
6. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters 
(New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2006), 
82-84.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: 
The University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 2.
8. Ibid., 52.
9. Ibid., 167.
10. Ibid., 173-174.
11. Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, in: 
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: 



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Schocken Books, 2005), 93.
12. Arendt, The Human Condition, 73
13. Ibid., 95; cf. Paul Holmquist, ‘Towards an Ethical Technique: 
Reframing Architecture’s “Critical Call” through Hannah Arendt,’ in: The 
Plan Journal, 1 (1) 2016, 19.
14. Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, 41.
15. Ibid., 41.
16. I of course refer here to Nicolaus Pevsner’s famous distinction between 
architecture and building, as defined in the first paragraphs of his book 
on the history of European Architecture: Nicolaus Pevsner, An Outline of 
European Architecture (Harmonstworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 15.
17. Arendt, The Human Condition, 167.
18. Every architect today will at this point hear an echo of Aldo Rossi’s 
famous reading of the monumental buildings in a city as the carriers of 
(collective) memory. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge 
MA: MIT Press, 2007 [1962]).
19. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political 
Significance’, in: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises 
in Political Thought (New York 2006 [1961], Penguin Books), 208-210.
20. Hannah Arendt, ‘Culture and Politics’, in: Hannah Arendt, Reflections 
on Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 190.
21. See Herman Hertzberger, The Schools of Herman Hertzberger 
(Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009).
22. This of course is perfectly understood by the Trump Administration and 
their attempt to ‘Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’ – although one 
can question whether the choice of narrative is appropriate. See: https://
www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/14466-will-the-white-house-order-
new-federal-architecture-to-be-classical (accessed March 12, 2020).
23. Bonnie Honig, Public Things, Democracy in Disrepair (New York: 
Fordham University Press, 2017), 17.
24. Ibid., 42.
25. Baird, The Space of Appearance, 22.
26. Ibid., 22.
27. Ibid., 285.
28. This of course is one of the reasons that design cannot be brought 
back to a formula: program briefs as well as the local circumstances require 
interpretation, and thus judgment from the designer. There are as many 



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answers to an assignment as there are architects 
(and even more, as also architects themselves often 
come up with multiple possibilities). 
29. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Judgment and the Moral 
Foundation of Politics in Hannah Arendt’s Thought’ 
In: Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (eds), 
Judgment, Imagination, and Politics (New York/
Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 
194.
30. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political 
Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago 
Press, 1992), 40.
31. Ibid., 67.
32. Ibid., 42.
33. Ibid., 42-43 (Arendt quotes Immanuel Kant’s 
Critique of Judgment, §40).  
34. Ibid., 43.
35. Ibid., 72.
36. Ibid., 43.
37. Ibid., 67.



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Book review:
Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the 
Public Eye 
by Timothy Hyde
Princeton Architectural Press, 2019
223 pages, Hardcover $35.00

reviewed by Mark Jensen

      Ugliness and Judgment is a delightful and 
frustrating book. Timothy Hyde’s project lies at 
the intersection of history, architecture, aesthetics, 
and public policy. By focusing on Britain, or more 
specifically on a series of ugly moments in British 
architectural history, Hyde goes part of the way 
toward narrowing what would otherwise be an 
unwieldy project. His aim is to answer the question, 
“…how does architecture participate in societal 
judgment?” especially judgments of ugliness (2). 
Along these lines, he explains: 

…architectural ugliness must be explored not 
along a philosophical plane, but along the 
horizon that composes the difficult reality 
of architecture, which is not necessarily the 
material reality of buildings…but the realities 
of the norms, institutions, and standards of 
expectation that precede architecture. (8)

In other words, Hyde supposes that judgments 
of ugliness in architecture are not made from 
the standpoint of the dispassionate art critic, but 
instead from the standpoint of the people who must 
live, work, and play in and around the structures in 
question.
       Organizationally, the book is divided into two 

Book Review



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parts: (i) Stones and (ii) Persons. The three chapters that concern Stones are 
“Improvement,” “Nuisance,” and “Irritation,” wherein Hyde works through 
a set of structures—one prominent structure per chapter—in which he 
explores judgments of ugliness as these judgments attach to specific types 
of socio-political engagement with architecture. “Improvement” concerns 
the architect John Woods’s attempt to improve the aesthetics of the city of 
Bath using neo-classical elements; “Nuisance” concerns the reconstruction 
of Parliament with building materials that were becoming tarnished by 
pollution before the project was complete; and “Irritation” concerns the 
South Bank Arts Centre—a reviled example of 20th century brutalism 
in central London. Together, these three chapters present a picture of 
interplay between buildings, architects, clients, and the public, where this 
interplay includes judgments of ugliness as well as attempts by parties to 
respond to these judgments.
       In Persons, Hyde takes up the topics of “Incongruity,” “The Architect,” 
and “The Profession.” Here, he is focused primarily on the persons rather 
than the buildings, especially the interrelations between architects, city 
planners, and society at large. “Incongruity” is concerned principally 
with libel: criticisms of architecture in 18th and 19th century Britain 
were met with libel suits by the architects, which only emboldened 
public engagement with aesthetic judgments of the architects work. 
“The Profession,” concerns the relationship between particular architects, 
e.g., Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, organizations like the Royal Institute 
of British Architects, and the public. “The Monarch” focuses on Prince 
Charles’ interventions, presumptively (on his part) on behalf of the public 
and in rendering judgments on architectural projects that he (speaking for 
the people) took to be especially ugly. 
        The delight of the book is its engagement with very specific episodes 
in the history of architecture and the social and political consequences 
of architecture in Britain, especially London. It seems to me that when 
the literature and philosophy of architecture abstracts from context—and 
not just the context of buildings, but also the social, political, geographic, 
and historical contexts in which buildings are built—it quickly becomes 
dry, unengaging, and boring. Hyde’s book avoids these interest-killing 
abstractions: the discussion is immersed in the details of buildings, 
episodes, architects, commissions, courts, etc., that serve not only to bring 
ugly buildings into hideous life, but also to establish the context in which 
their hideousness can be put on full display.
       The English themselves are half of the delight, being at once both 
earnest and silly: earnest in their legal actions to protect buildings, in 



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their legal defenses of the reputation of professional 
architects, and in the attempt of the royals to 
prevent the construction of ugly buildings. They 
are silly in the architectural and planning choices 
that public officials and professionals make, in 
the juxtaposition of diverse architectural styles 
that span centuries, in the variety of social, civic, 
and political organizations who intervene in these 
affairs, and even in the names that they have given 
to their organizations, places and buildings: “Ugly 
Face Club, “Consistory Court,” “Mansion House 
Square, “Isle of Dogs,” and “No. 1 Poultry.”  
       The delights of the book give way to a bit 
of a worry, which is this. It might be that the 
episodes in question fail to serve as paradigmatic 
examples or key representatives of broader trends 
in architecture, politics, and history. It may be 
instead that Britain is unique: it is characterized by 
a deep-seated conservative culture and it lacks an 
overall architectural style. When parts of London 
were destroyed in WWII, large-scale rebuilding was 
required, which put these two characteristics into 
conflict. As a result, it may be especially difficult to 
draw any overall lessons from the history of ugliness 
in British architecture. To be sure: Hyde is careful 
to point out that he is not undertaking an analysis 
of ugliness or ugly buildings or even judgments of 
ugliness as we find them in British cases. But one has 
a sense that Hyde is attempting to draw overarching 
conclusions about way ugliness shows up in public 
discourse. At the end of the book, he writes:

the judgment of ugliness signals the 
participation of architecture in a social 
circumstance in which resolution is not 
achieved by aesthetic means; instead, the 
aesthetic dimension of architecture, precisely 
because of its insufficiency, is transferred into 
other instruments of social consequence. 
Ugliness, therefore, is the judgment of 
an irresolution and an insufficiency, but 

the discussion 
is immersed in 

the details 
of buildings, 

episodes, 
architects, 

commissions, 
courts, etc., 

that serve not 
only to bring 

ugly buildings 
into hideous 

life, but also 
to establish 
the context 

in which their 
hideousness 

can be put on 
full display.

“

”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

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additionally is the instantiation of that insufficiency into social 
technologies, into concrete processes, customs, and institutions. 
(184) 

What he means to say, I think, is that the judgment that a building is 
ugly is a composite reflection of the aesthetic qualities of the building, 
the broader social and political context in which the building is built, and 
the background assumptions of the people making the judgment. But as 
noted above, it is far from clear that he has a sample of the size and type 
that would justify this judgment. Perhaps insufficiency and irresolution are 
features of British culture that spillover into its architecture, rather than 
intrinsic features of architecture itself.
       Another frustrating aspect of the book, evident in the quotation above, 
is Hyde’s prose, especially when he attempts to draw broader conclusions. 
He tends toward a kind of theory-speak that obfuscates the points that 
he wants to make. This is frustrating not only because he will scare away 
educated but non-technical readers interested in the concept of the ‘ugly’ in 
architecture, but also because he is clearly on the right track—despite the 
idiosyncratic nature of his evidence—in thinking that the judgment that 
a building is ugly serves multiple aesthetic, social, and political purposes. 
He is also right in refusing to be caught up in the ideological or reductivist 
games of providing the definition of ugly architecture and then justifying 
this definition through cherry-picked examples. 
       Admirably, Hyde instead uses his examples to demonstrate the enormous 
conceptual, social, and political range of the judgment of ugliness. Some 
clarity about the concept of ugliness emerges in the discussion of specific 
buildings, such as his description of the ugliness of the South Bank Arts 
Centre:

…the ugliness of the South Bank Arts Centre consists of an 
intrusive, situated dissonance. This dissonance results not merely 
from infelicities of function, from a building not adequately serving 
its programmatic demands, or from insufficiencies of symbolic or 
associational legibility. It manifests from a third register of ugliness, 
not within the shape or material of architecture, but that consists of 
the relation between the architecture and the person who encounters 
it... (80)

As he goes on to explain, the third register is one of feeling: ugly architecture 
can evoke disgust, irritation, or antipathy.
       This passage is as close as Hyde comes to stating succinctly that 
judgments of ugliness in architecture are matters of form, function, and 



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feeling. However, when properly qualified by 
individual, social, and political contexts, one will 
find that this is the view that he defends in the 
book. We might forgive Hyde’s lack of concision 
in light of two broader truths. One is the old 
Aristotelian proverb that we can only expect as 
much precision as the subject allows. Given the 
range of disciplines in view, it would be a mistake 
to expect much here. But second, the British case, 
with its unique dispositions and history, invites 
hosts of qualifications. This is a nation-state lacking 
a distinctive, unique, and celebrated architectural 
style. Its architecture is a bit like its cuisine, but 
quite the opposite of its music and literature and 
theater. In other words, it is easier to write about 
Shakespeare and the Beatles than it is to write about 
British architecture.



isparchitecture.com

About the Authors
Frank Mahan, AIA, Associate Director of SOM’s New York office, M. Arch, Princeton 
University. He is the firm’s Adaptive Reuse practice leader.

Van kluytenaar Architectural Professional at SOM, M. Arch, Princeton University.

Lawrence J. Vale Associate Dean and Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning,  
MIT. D. Phil., Oxford University.

André Patrão is a doctoral student at EPFL.

rick fox,  architect, President, Stratos Form. Professor, Interior Designers Institute, 
M. Phil., CSU.

hans teerds Faculty member, ETH, Institute for the History and Theory of 
Architecture. Ph. D, TU Delft.

mark jensen Professor of Philosophy, U. S. Air Force Academy. Ph. D, Univ. of 
Notre Dame.

Image Credits
Cover: USAFA_CCLD_SOM_MagdaBiernat_2439BW. Courtesy SOM
Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel  Tom Spector
Lever House, courtesy SOM
510 5th Ave.(Manufacturers Hanover Trust) courtesy SOM
Polaris Hall, courtesy SOM
Lincoln Memorial: Martin Falbisoner / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-sa/3.0)
March on Washington: ppmsca 03129 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.03129  Library 
of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.
loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print, U. S. News and World Report collection. Warren K. Leffler, 
photographer.
Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago. Laura Choate: CC Attribution-Share 
Alike 3.0
Home Owning Breeds Real Men, public domain
Market Square, Bruges. Wolfgang Staudt  [1] - https://www.flickr.com/photos/
wolfgangstaudt/2545785034/ CC BY 2.0
Paris exposition postcard, 1937, source: Exposition internationale : Paris 1937 - 20 cartes 
détachables - série n°1 - H. Chipault, concessionnaire à Boulogne-sur-Seine (France), 
public domain.
Almshouse, public domain
Freedom Tower and Lower Manhattan: Tom Spector
Canberra: Lawrence J. Vale
Aboriginal Embassy: Lawrence J. Vale
Parliament House: Lawrence J. Vale
Panopticon: Jeremy Bentham / Public domain
Arnhem Prison: Henk Monster / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)
Fake Estates chart: Rick Fox
Grasshopper programming images: Thomas Mejia Taborda



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

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	0-front & back cover
	1-Editorial
	2-mahan
	3-vale
	4-patrao
	5-Fox
	6-Teerds
	7-Book review
	8-Back Matter

