Comparative Perspectives on the Social Responsibility of the Architect

In a 1968 speech to the American Institute of Architects, Whitney Young Jr. said that architecture was “...not a profession that [had] distinguished itself by social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights” but rather that architects were defined by their “silence and… complete irrelevance.” What Young Jr. meant by the phrase completely irrelevance was not that architects had no power in contributing to the cause of civil rights, but rather that there had been no recognition of this power from within the community itself and thus no attempts had been made to utilize architecture for greater social change. Even in the present, the presence of architecture as a ubiquitous determinant for the aesthetic character of the built environment continues to elude architects from realizing the importance which design has in defining the future and its window of social parameters. During his term as guest editor of Domus, Jacques Herzog published this response to a letter submitted by peer David Chipperfield: “Dear David, you ask me what we architects should do about the unmistakably impending environmental catastrophe. About social inequality. About poverty. About the degradation of this planet's resources… Dear David, the answer is: nothing,” however there does exist a new school of thought for designers to wield the power of their creativity’s materiality and permanence to be mindful of the needs for social progress, and to set precedent for the future of the field. By looking at design which intentionally centers equity, looks forward to future challenges and best predicts how to prepare for them, and utilizes experimentation in material, process, and design, we can see the slowly developing roots of a new future for architecture. In order to combat the irrelevance which Whitney Young Jr. once spoke of, architects must lay stake to their position on current cultural issues which affect everyone, and center architecture's interdisciplinary nature as a mechanism to create a better future both within the field, and around it.

Design that focuses on equity seeks to not only build stronger marginalized communities, but ameliorate wounds of the past that segregated communities via explicit and implicit means. The myth that the United States is a post-racial world has filtered itself into nearly every field of academia and practice. But the fact is that seeds of discrimination planted within the foundations of the contemporary environment which all architecture now occurs within, have turned into the roots which uphold the value system of our world that predetermines condition as well as opportunity for the minority character existing in the urban world. As Mabel O. Wilson and Irene Cheng write in Race and Modern Architecture, “[defending] and [excluding] difference is precisely the logic of how race forms hierarchies of power.” For example, the practice of redlining, which was all too common in the United States around the middle of the 20th century – as Richard Rothstein states in The Color of Law - created deep divisions for communities of color when it came to accessing opportunities or building generational wealth. The roles of the architect and the urbanist - which are often occupied by the same social actor - played a significant part in the construction of structural American inequalities: the urbanist decided what areas were more deserving of wealth and new development, and the architects followed suit by designing more elegant and spacious homes within the meticulously drawn income division lines. The architect once again serving to consolidate social inequalities into the foundations on which the structures our society occupies are built. New designs oftentimes seek to move towards a new relationship between race and architecture. Projects like Walter J. Hood’s Black Towers/Black Power create an intentionally explicit connection between the history of racial discrimination in the United States – or more specifically, revolutionary citizen movements that overcame such discrimination - and the urban environment built upon those ideas. By transforming the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party into a series of 10 distinct tower designs, Hood creates visibility on the role which the architect has played in defining American culture and addresses the responsibility of architects to collaborate on the path forward.

Architectural focus on progress is not only dependent on an acknowledgement of past wrongdoings, but also on ideological adherence to inventing new systems of thought and process. Tangent to this, architecture can be used to reckon with our active role in creating the climate crisis, as well as preparing for the inevitable oncoming cataclysm. Past architecture occupies borrowed land which humans assume as inherently anthropogenic, with little care for appropriation to natural ecologies or indigeneity; and for too long architects have given minimal thought to the environmental impact which their designs exert. Fortunately, ever increasingly are architects maximizing the impact of their buildings as active participants in combating climate change. SPACE10’s publication The Ideal City lists a number of unique projects that have taken sustainability into account. With paragons across the world that incorporate fantastically uncommon ideas such as creating a floating water-based community, using permeable sidewalks to grow plants, recycling subway heat for home heating, and even capturing carbon within the form of the structure itself. This new architecture attempts to create a net positive contribution on behalf of the building (and by association, the firm) towards humanity’s climate-resolved future. Just as the aforementioned trend focuses on the after of the project, so too is new ideation arising about the origins of a project. The Lot 8 project by Assemble, bc architects and Atelier Luma from 2020 is a renovated workspace made entirely of resources found within a 70km radius of the building site. Similar projects successfully yoke genesis with outcome, creating an entirely eco-friendly building, rather than merely the outward front of one. Scholars such as Charlotte Malterre-Barthes take this idea a step further, having produced a body of work on the idea of “architecture without extraction,” a new ethos for design that considers the whole of the project as holding an impact on its environment. While immediately ending architecture’s reliance on the extraction of metal and rock is untenable, the formulation of new ideological precedent can lead us into a new era of architecture. In A Moratorium on New Constructions, Malterre-Barthes outlines nine necessary points which are to be accomplished in order to achieve a transcendent ecologically sustainable age for architecture: “1) Stop building 2) House everyone 3) Change value systems 4) Halt extraction 5) Revolutionize construction 6) Fix the office 7) Reform the school 8) Don’t dig 9) Take care.” These nine points contextualize the future of architecture and design. Architects should no longer accept the relegation to being supplementary actors in the immovable machine. Instead the future architect will be active in every facet accompanying social consciousness. Just as nobody is spared from the experience of dealing with climate disasters, or distasteful political discrimination, architects should no longer be absolved from the damage their role has had throughout history, and the responsibility which they presently have in expanding the positive impact which good design can create.

The novel concept of experimental architecture consists of the creation of unconventional designs, as well as the use of new materials previously thought oxymoronic for architectural design. It is no mystery that experimental architecture has grown tangentially as the institutional space reserved for minority architects continues to grow. Experimentations in materiality in the field of architecture seeks to subvert not only environmental issues with our current processes, but also deeper running issues with capitalism and its relationship to construction. Groups such as Atelier Luma are expanding the horizon of materiality by redefining the entirety of the process. As best demonstrated through their idea of the bioregion - in which the ecological habitat is considered as the final decider on the design. With the resulting heterogeneity of development being underlined by utilitarian application. A prime example of bioregional praxis is the Apan Housing Laboratory by MOS Architects and Mexico’s INFONAVIT, a design project that created 32 distinct designs each representing the unique character of Mexico’s 32 states. Through this unconventional approach to design, traditional materials gain a new edge as individual parts of a new experimental whole. In Nonconventional and Vernacular Construction Materials, Kenta A. Harries and Bhavna Sharma write on the importance of vernacular architecture, or design which utilizes the immediately available resources of an area. Meaning that climate and resource availability play the role of the architect. Lot 8 again resonates as a prime example of this practice. Additionally, Lot 8 demonstrates a key clarification which Harries and Sharma present: that the use of phrasing like “vernacular” is not meant to diminutively denote the designs as “primitive.” Instead, they argue that vernacular construction is unmistakably experimental and future-thinking by nature. Projects such as Panyaden International School by Chiangmai Life Architects – a mass timber structure made entirely of curved bamboo rods – utilize generational knowledge in a new application. Bioregional design and vernacular construction are most often advertised as having environmental benefit, but there is a significant relationship to methods of exploitation, and stepping out from the conformity of supply chains and commerce offers a glimpse of a possible future for the field. The experimental aspect of contemporary architecture can come not only from the design itself, but its exegesis as well. Many communities arise in an experimental, temporary nature, and aim to embody visionary ideals for a new society. In his article The Architect and Externalities, Nicholas Simcik Arese explores the intricately organized encampment of the “Occupy London” protests. In which the community decided on self-determination as its modus operandi and established a unique network for housing infrastructure – a pattern repeated countless times in instances reacting to a variety of social issues ranging from race to class (eg. the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020). In these scenarios, the architect/urbanist character once again arises as a side actor aiding in the creation of the final system, only this time the architect works under the people’s demands, rather than at the whim of the corporation.

If architects are expected to revamp the career into a civically active and socially relevant field, then acknowledging past error, holistically redressing traditional processes, and radical disruption of the model for practice are of the utmost importance. While few architects have held the political and cultural power to make the big decisions concerning greater society, they have oftentimes stood beside the men who do. The field of architecture may not be defined by its ability to establish doctrine, but it wholly carries the burden of entrenching said ideologies into the unchangeable built. As Jacques Herzog wrote in that same Domus letter, “All we have left is the architecture itself.” Even if architects never gain the position to create the situation, architecture’s supplementary role in society can and should be used to solidify ideological and cultural progress above all.

Works Cited

bc architects & studies. Atelier Luma and Its Bioregion. n.d. December 2024.

—. LOT 8. 2020. December 2024.

DESIGNBOX. Bamboo Sports Hall Panyaden International School by CLA. 4 September 2017. December 2024.

Dzierżawska, Zosia and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. "Graphic novel: A Global Moratorium on New Construction." The Architectural Review 18 November 2021.

Gerfen, Katie. "Apan Housing Laboratory, by MOS." Architect Magazine 4 September 2019.

Gestalten, SPACE10. The Ideal City: Exploring Urban Futures. Berlin: Gestalten, 2021.

Harries, Kent A. and Bhavna Sharma. Nonconventional and Vernacular Construction Materials: Characterisation, Properties and Applications. Woodhead Publishing, 2016.

Herzog, Jacques. "Letter to David Chipperfield." Domus 13 October 2020.

Hood, Walter J. "Black Towers / Black Power." Kramer, Sarah and Don McMahon. Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. The Museum of Modern Art, 2021. 69-75.

Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte. A Moratorium on New Construction. Los Angeles: Sternberg Press, 2025 (Forthcoming). Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Simcik Arese, Nicholas. "The Architect and Externalities: Translating the Commons as Design Strategy." Marshall, Scrap and Jan Nauta. POA 1-22. London: AA Publications, 2012. 29-39.

Wilson, Mabel O. and Irene Cheng. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Young Jr., Whitney M. "Full Remarks of Whitney M. Young Jr. AIA Annual Convention in Portland, Oregon June 1968." AIA Annual Convention. Portland: American Institute of Architects, 1968.