The Longest Suicide Note in Architecture

It feels like the third season of Ashes to Ashes: the world is shrinking, the mood is heavy, and something is wrong but unnamed. That is architecture today. For forty years the profession has been drifting, kept alive on life support not by conspiracy but by habit, fear, and a lack of imagination. Everyone feels the malaise. Few can diagnose it. Fewer still can speak it aloud.

Until the 1980s, architects knew their role. They had vision, authority, and a voice. When the service economy rose and contractors seized construction, architects mistook change for loss, and opportunity for bereavement. Like children bored of a toy until someone else plays with it, they suddenly coveted blockwork, waterproofing, and design-and-build. They wanted to be contractors just as contractors no longer needed them.

Since then, the profession has shrunk into managerial populism. Architects behave like centrist politicians: no project, no stance, no vision. They react instead of lead, chase opinion instead of set direction. They follow the diktats of agents, planners, and contractors—who themselves only look backwards, repeating yesterday’s formulas. The result: architects two steps behind, forever administrating decline.

To mask this impotence, practices drape themselves in awards and slogans. They proclaim “people come first” while outsourcing imagination. They clutch safe, decontextualised causes—placemaking, contextualism, CLT—more for optics than impact. They pretend to be contractors to please developers, and sanctimonious street preachers to impress peers, failing at both.

What remains is a profession of contradictions, an Orwellian parody of itself:

• Money is greedy and corrupt (yet the profession is funded by it).

• Aesthetics are superficial (yet clients pay for them, and people find joy in them).

• Intellectual discourse is academic and immature (yet it has reshaped whole industries).

• Lifestyle is pretentious (yet architecture always belongs to its zeitgeist).

• Popular culture is vulgar (yet it is people we design for, not other architects).

So architects do the work of others: managing construction without being contractors, administrating codes without being lawyers, grinding repetitive tasks better done by algorithms, shaming joy like street preachers without a congregation. The result is a ghost ship: a profession drifting, hollowed out, still partying as if it were 1983.

What architects abandoned was their core: to observe, to research, to design, to imagine, to innovate, to narrate. Had they not surrendered design to production, they could have remained cultural authorities in property, style, technology, and society. Instead they recoil from the very economy and lifestyle they inhabit, latching onto moralistic causes that serve optics but neglect substance.

Labour MP Gerald Kaufman once called his party’s 1983 manifesto “the longest suicide note in history.” He could just as easily have been speaking of the architectural profession. But some of us do not intend to die with it.

Oxford Street Pedestrianisation: Easy Answers to Complex Questions

Pedestrianising Oxford Street sounds like common sense. Who wouldn’t want cleaner air, calmer streets, and a better shopping experience? But scratch beneath the surface and the plan quickly unravels.

Buses and taxis don’t vanish when you ban them. They get pushed into the surrounding residential streets of Fitzrovia, Marylebone and Mayfair — areas where people actually live. The result? A daily misery inflicted on residents so that shopping trips might be made marginally more pleasant for visitors who may only come once a week, once a month, or not at all.

This is not just a transport issue. It’s part of a bigger trend hollowing out central London. For two decades the West End has been drifting towards becoming a theme park for tourists and investors, while residents are squeezed out. Strip away the people who call it home and London becomes less a city, more a shopping centre with a postcode.

Supporters say pedestrianisation will boost retail and revive the workplace. But cities don’t work like that. You can’t separate shops, offices and homes as if they were pieces on a planning board. Push people further out and their commutes get longer, the fragile return to offices after Covid gets harder, and retail loses its most reliable customers: locals. For many — especially the elderly — removing buses will make Oxford Street a no-go zone. That’s hardly a recipe for commercial revival.

The truth is simpler, and harder. High streets are struggling not because Oxford Street isn’t pedestrianised, and offices aren’t half-empty just because of working from home. They’re suffering because the way we live, shop and work is changing. Instead of grappling with that complexity, politicians reach for shiny, headline-grabbing fixes.

Future generations may look back on this scheme the way we now look back at the disastrous car-centric planning of the 1960s: well-intentioned, simplistic, and deeply damaging. Reductive solutions — whether handing streets to cars or sealing them off from them — rarely solve the problem. They usually create new ones.

Oxford Street doesn’t need gimmicks. It needs a city that people can afford to live in, work in and belong to. Without that, no amount of pedestrianisation will save it.

Design is not a Solution

Architectural design is not a “solution”.

Whilst design does encompass an element of problem solving, to reduce the whole process to a “solution” diminishes architecture into a clinical, utilitarian discipline rather than a vehicle of exciting opportunities. Loads of opportunities. To define architecture as a design solution also carries a whiff of quasi-religious orthodoxy, which assumes that there is one absolute truth, a "right" answer.

Do fashion designers talk of design solutions? If fashion design is a solution, we’d all wear animal skins and hemp bags.

Do filmmakers talk of design solutions? If cinema is a design solution, we’d all be watching the same film. Actually, cinema wouldn’t exist because what is the problem that cinema solves?

Do chefs talk of design solutions? If cooking is a design solution, we’d all be eating raw ingredients.

And if architecture is a design solution, the office would be a tent with a desk and WIFI, the home would be a shed with a bed and a toilet, schools would be trees under which classes can congregate. And all these spaces would look the same.

Language matters. It affects behaviour, and the words we use to express things influence how we approach them, not vice versa. This is evident in how the trite, formulaic structures to design pitches, design-and-access statements, RIBA stage reports and property marketing have led to a trite, formulaic approach in designing architecture that is looking increasingly generic.

So in architecture and property development, as in fashion and in film and in tech, differentiation is a business imperative, because to be generic in a competitive market is tantamount to business suicide.

Those constraints architects face are not problems to solve, but catalysts of imagination and innovation. They nudge designers out of the familiar, out of the comfort zone and out of the pre-conceived ideas. They usher in the new and the enthralling. Unpredictability is perhaps the designer's best friend.

Discipline vs Profession

Unpopular opinion.

Things will not get better for architects, unless architects do some soul searching to understand the real role that their profession plays in today’s economy and value creation. Economic value that is, not the esoteric, philosophical “value” many in the profession pontificate about.

So unless architects reimagine the current professional model, nothing will change when it comes to fees or the work culture. We cannot expect to get different results from repeating the same process.

Those disillusioned with the status quo either jump ship to thrive in other related professions, or try to disrupt the professional model by tapping into the endless opportunities of the discipline.

It’s discipline vs profession, and so far the profession has beaten the discipline into submission. We are vehemently encouraged to give up all the assets that we were taught at school as some sort of “cut your hair and get a job” adage. How’s that worked out so far?

Brickwashing

In London, planners like to pretend that the 1960s never took place, and that modernist architecture from the time is a drunken tryst that everyone should forget about. Swinging London? Carnaby Street? The Chelsea Drugstore? No. Planners would have none of it. It’s Downton Abbey and BBC period adaptations of Jane Austen (Bridgerton for those trying to pass as edgy or cool).

In the last 15 years, there has been a diligent effort by planners and architects to homogenise our cities to resemble an idealised past that never was. Under the planners’ tutelage, a concerted campaign to exorcise what they have condemned as heretical has erased mostly modernist architecture that dates from the 1950s-1970s to be replaced by indistinguishable new developments that are almost always clad in brick (slips):

This architectural, nay cultural, campaign can be described as brickwashing. Brickwashing, in essence, entails cladding any new building with brick to confer upon it a veneer of respectability. Brickwashing means that a building can be sterile, austere and spartan, as long as the building is clad in brick. Brickwashing means that a building can contribute nothing of value to urban space and city life, yet be deemed laudable by the planners. Brickwashing means that a building can be even out of scale, vandalising the city’s skyline, as long as its brickness makes it contextual, venerable, and level-headed. Brickwashing has become the last resort for specious reading of context and lazy design. Brickwashing is the “get out of jail free” card and the joker card and all the clichés in between. In fact, brickwashing is the ultimate cliché in architecture and urban design.

With brickwashing, it feels like the planners took far too seriously the tagline of the cosmetic brand Rimmel London: “Get the London look” - as if Rimmel only sold one type of lipstick with 2 or 3 colours.

Brick, however, is not the actual problem. It’s weaponising brick in style wars and conformist conservatism espoused by planners and the values they represent. Brickwashing feels like an attempt to expunge from public consciousness styles and trends that dared to be different, that dared to be nonconformist, that dared to be playful, that dared to embrace the spirit of the age, that dared to reinterpret context and culture outside the confines of literalism, that dared to be the essence of cities like London and dared to be the hallmark of post-war optimism in cities like Birmingham.

But forget the style wars. What makes brickwashing so insidious is that it is often an unlikely bedfellow with greenwashing - brick is seen as an environmentally-friendly building material. Worse even, brickwashing is a facilitator of greenwashing because it is an almost always guaranteed way to get planners to agree to needlessly tear down perfectly sound and perfectly adaptable buildings, throwing all the mantras about the building industry’s detrimental impact on environmental catastrophe under the wrecking ball. Literally.

Creativity on the Dancefloor: Sequels, Architecture, Saltburn.

Everyone’s talking about Emerald Fennell’s superb Saltburn, and I’m one of them.

The film is serves as the perfect case study to illustrate the concepts of creativity and talent. People erroneously think of creativity as the conjuring of innovation out of thin air to create not only what has never been created before, but also to create something that is delightful and positive; however, the uniqueness and unprecedented nature of innovation is a myth:

Fennell’s Saltburn at face value is a mish mash of so many recognisable films: Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Saul Dibb’s 2006 screen adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Emerald Fennell consciously commandeers all those known works of drama, and produces something incredibly unique, incredibly fresh, incredibly irreverent, incredibly sexy rather than a pastiche or a period drama with Bloc Party as would have easily been the case with someone else. Saltburn is not a film without precedent, without provenance, without cultural affiliations, but no creative feat ever is.

Creating what has never been created before in vacuum is a logical impossibility. The creator belongs to a shared human experience and is influenced by context. Creativity is the ability to stake a claim in a landscape of accumulated cultural experiences, by drawing inspiration from so many precedents to create something unique, albeit with a long lineage and also a sense of familiarity. Creativity is the spark that owns the otherwise derivative and stamps it with innovation.

But this is half the story: Creativity is so often underpinned by talent. Talent is the confidence to produce something that is refined by flirting with what would otherwise be vulgar and tawdry. It’s about the ability to be so understated even with a gaudy birth. It is the ability to cobble together so many ingredients that would almost certainly give one food poising but end up with a Michelin-star dish. It’s the ability to court kitsch and still come out on top. One can be creative without necessarily being talented, but talent is the spark that elevates creativity to the stuff of legends.

Film does it. Music does it. Architecture does it. I think of the intense curiosity of OMA’s architecture which designs buildings and spaces that are so interesting, yet that could easily be a dog’s dinner in other hands. Only with OMA, not only do these buildings work, but they succeed. Unfortunately, so much architecture is beaten senseless into diffident conformity by a toxic work culture and a seriously flawed development landscape that yearns for creativity yet only pays heed to the underwhelming, a development landscape that relies on a USP to thrive but that has been domesticated to accept the generic and the derivative. Far too many architects play it safe, and they mistake aesthetic conservatism for good taste and faithful reproduction as good practice.

But this would be akin to sequels in the film industry. Sequels are made to capitalise on the success of the original production, but regurgitate the same formula to try to curry favour with viewers, especially those who loved the original, but more often than not, sequels are flops. Architecture is a world of failing sequels, increasingly failing to capture consumers. Perhaps the property development world is waiting for an Emerald Fennell-type designer to capitalise on the success and iconic recognition of trailblazing architecture, yet own this fact to produce something so distinctive, so disruptive as to deliver shock to the status quo of property development.

Naked victory dances are optional.

A Dictionary of Received Property Marketing Jargon

Are developers getting their money’s worth with the marketing that is being pumped out to promote and let their developments? Building branding and marketing literature are essential components in promoting developments in real estate to achieve lettings or sales but are they really being used to their full potential?

What makes this rather odd is that the landscape of marketing and PR in London is on a different planet in terms of innovation, ingenuity and engagement. In a league of Ogilvy, Saatchi and Saatchi and Leo Burnett, why does property marketing come across as cutting-edge as a soap advert painted on a brick wall in 1890? Oh, but there’s a website with punchy graphics so that levels the field.

Bland brochures with the same regurgitated format of location photos and restaurants, a lazy rehash of the tube map, dated CGIs as sexy as dad jokes and floorplans.

And then there’s the jargon, which sounds more like Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues with such language being ubiquitous in almost all property marketing literature:

Stunning New Development - said every marketing brochure about the same cookie-cutter, brick slip shoebox that looks like every other new-build development since 2010. Planners and architects have done a sterling job of turning London into an austere Soviet-style city albeit with copious amounts of brick (slips). Marketers have done a commensurate job of labelling such built form “stunning”.

Exciting Retail Opportunity - Am I missing something for not getting excited about a shell-and-core retail unit? I guess “exciting retail opportunity” is the soulmate of “active frontage” that architects wax lyrical about. The universe of retail is indeed very exciting but how is this captured here?

Sense of arrival - To yawnsville perhaps. You’d think they’re describing Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) making an entrance to his own theme tune by Francis Monkman in The Long Good Friday, or Susie Bannion (Jessica Harper) arriving at the school/witches coven in Dario Argento’s Susperia. But alas, they’re talking about an uninspiring reception space.

Encouraging Wellbeing - Cyclist facilities and operable windows, which are quite common staples in office design, are described as unique and consciously designed to promote wellbeing. A new addition making the rounds is “encouraging people to take stairs” - which is a fantastic design move; however, this description is being gratuitously applied to spaces where the stairs are tucked away and value-engineered in sad enclosed shafts, not spaces where stairs are features and prominent.

Beautifully tailored spaces - delivered in new offices by an avalanche of white plasterboard, off-the-shelf fire doors with vision panels, lazily cobbled together patterns meant to be a feature wall or art or whatever; winding corridors and almost unlivable layouts in housing.

The endemic ennui created by the architectural profession has been contagious, and if architecture is so insipid, then what can brand consultants and marketers do? Lazy words seem befitting for lazy designs. This is only one facet of the problem. The other facet is that the process of building “design” and building “marketing and PR” are siloed and not integrated. Architects as lead designers should be liaising with agents and marketing professionals to work hand-in-glove to strategise and develop architectural designs and produce desirable spaces where branding is pivotal in the design process .

Architecture and property development are screaming for a paradigm shift: Developers, architects and marketers need to view real estate development as a commodity and the users as consumers.

Watch that space.

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)

Fake Designer Handbags: Designing Buildings in London Today

What if there were another way of designing buildings?

Currently, most architectural output follows the same process: Developers ask agents (not architects) for guidance on aesthetics and style for the developers’ speculative schemes, so the agents observe popular market trends and counsel developers to copy what’s already being done relatively successfully. The architects receive the creative brief, then negotiate policy and codes and pretend to know more about construction than the construction specialists: the contractors, whom architects are desperate to be employed by (or novated to). Then comes the marketing (and branding if one is lucky) so websites and brochures with punchy graphics are produced. The marketing literature (especially for commercial buildings) almost always follows the same structure: pictures of nice restaurants in the area, punchy graphics to rehash the ordinance survey map of London and a reboot of the tube map, then visuals of the spaces with awkwardly curated people reveling in the “sense of arrival”, followed by floorplans, and finally lofty claims about opening windows and having cyclist showers as if this were the epitome of ingenuity or even science fiction.

This process has stymied innovation and creativity in the production of space and cities since, among many other reasons, copying successful trends means that these trends are overused and already on the way out, so the developers are getting lazy and tawdry copies of other developers’ buildings not much different from counterfeit designer handbags sold in dark alleys and off car boots.

All this may be just about fine in booming economy or in a predictable market, but the mere whiff of an economic downturn or unforeseen circumstances, this model flounders. Housing may be fine for now (although who knows with the nascent mortgage crisis) but one only needs to look at office buildings and commercial stock to realise that the commercial sector is in serious peril. Ditto for retail - signs promising “exciting retail opportunity” notwithstanding.

So, what if there were another way of designing buildings? Of branding buildings? Of marketing buildings?

I believe there is another way, an alternative professional model for architecture, and it all starts with reframing the discipline:

Space is a Commodity. Design is a Service. The occupier is a consumer.

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)