Architecture is not Architecture.

Achitecture loves a bon mot and the more enigmatic the better. Yangsong Ma has form in the genre. His declaration in the eponymous 2010 exhibition “Feelings are facts¹” had us stroking our chins. I made my peace with this fairly quickly since, on some level, all feelings are emotional truths but this is dangerous territory because along with many other groups of people, serial killers and architects are alike in believing that that, on some level, what they do is making the world a better place.

This month when Ma was made guest editor of Domus, his address to the crowd at Politecnico di Milano was titled “Architecture is not Architecture”. You can read a summary on the Domus website² but the point seemed to be the following.

Today, architecture must open itself up, move into new territories, and engage more directly and closely with the times and with people. It could even be said that architecture today can become anything – except what is familiar and known. 

Now this is no more than something someone said and what follows here is no more than what it made me think of. I’ll wait for some more MAD buildings to make up my mind whether “architecture” succeeded in engaging more directly and closely with the times and with people. It’s strange though, to hear architecture spoken of as if it were a real entity with a real will and agency. He might calling for an architecture that doesn’t rely upon novelty as its major aesthetic effect, or he might be calling for a new type of novelty. Either would be different from anything that’s gone before on some level but whether either or both would engage more directly and closely with the times and the people isn’t a given. I have a lot of respect for what MAD’s Baiziwan Housing ^3,4 project in Beijing for trying to give residents an environment better than they perhaps expected but so far, this seems to be an exception. If it’s engagement with the times and people, then housing is probably the best indicator. Otherwise, it’s a representation of the power to evoke emotions. We could call it emotional pollution.

This is all I can say in direct relation to Ma’s use of the word engagement. The following are some thoughts on the word emotion because engagement I can understand on some level in an architectural sense but emotion not so easily. We’re very likely to understand both as emotional engagement. This would be post-modernist as well as creepy but the fuller summary of the address hints that architecture is still not engaging us on the emotional level but here is where the future looks murky. Every image of every building we see engages us on an emotional level to a degree trackable by eye movements and/or quantifiable by clicks. We have emotional reactions to public art but buildings are bigger and last for longer so, if they’re going to have some sort of [positive] emotional response, then it needs to be we will never tire of. Tricky. Our era doesn’t aspire to timeless appeal. Me, I’ll gladly forsake the emotional highs and lows. I don’t want buildings to make me unhappy but I don’t want to angered or driven to despair by insipid whimsy. This is what public art is for.

Perhaps it’s best to not conflate architecture and art because then we’ll have people making tiresome comments such as such and such a building is great because different people relate to it differently, and in a multitude of ways. I’m tired. Frankly, having an emotional response to every building one sees is exhausting. I have more respect for the designers of buildings that don’t make a noise. So much of our time is taken curating information rather than processing it. Even if “architecture” did have the power to manipulate our emotions [for better and for worse], then how are we ever going to decide what we’re going to allow to do so? I suspect we’d quickly learn to filter much of it out in the same way we do to advertising, and notice only the most strident or subtle. We already have enough competition for our attention. Perhaps this architecture that is not architecture as we know it will be understated, subtle and not screaming for our attention? Fat chance. If ever it happens, I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that it’s just a cynical ploy to make us notice it, then it’s just architecture playing hard-to-get but for the same ends as ever.

I’m trying to imagine what an architecture that engages people on the emotional level would look like and the only example I can think of is the work of Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori⁵. He navigates a fine line between the weird and the whimsical and is pleased when children like his buildings. I imagine it’s because he can trust their reactions to be genuine. He designs private houses, public buildings and structures such as teahouses for exhibitions. He has his own brand of architecture that is not architecture as we know it. We recognize it as architecture because we see his buildings as highly individual expressions but this might be our problem not his.

Fujimori has no grand ideas for cities but his public buildings contain the same unconventionality as his private ones. Not only are Fujimori’s buildings examples of architecture but not as we know it, but his way of working and way of obtaining commissions do not fit our image of an architect. Again, this could be our problem, not his.

Whilst we’re still waiting to see what this new emotional architecture will turn out to be, Yansong Ma’s fuller statement puts the blame on Modernism once again and we accept this as Modernism-bashing but – curiously? suspiciously? – he doesn’t acknowledge that what happened after might also have something to do with the problem he identifies. In other words, you can’t continue to blame Modernism yet not blame if for what happened after. The only way out of this logical conundrum is to admit that everything after Modernism was not what the times and people needed and to start over after conceptually returning to some point in time – I pick 1949 – and trying to imagine what other paths were open to architecture at that time. This means erasing Post-Modernism from our memories and, for good measure, The dead end that was the International Style that Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies were practicing in 1949.

I’ve always believed in trying to discover where things went wrong, and then trying to work out, with the benefit of hindsight, which path might have been the better one to take. This seems like one of those times. I’m not sure if the emotional path will be the right one, but going back to the death of modernism and perhaps concluding that it wasn’t the lack of meaning but a lack of emotion is a one valid conclusion. This new emotional architecture might work or it could just amuse us for a while and when it no longer does we can think of something else neither familiar or known for architecture to be. This never-ending quest for the new does seem a constant even if it’s toned down a bit since the Futurists.

One significant problem with blaming Modernism is that the world is different now. 2026 is not 1949. Call it Modernism if you will but, in 1949, “architecture” was still attempting to house entire workforces at a time when work was still largely manual labour performed by people who needed accommodation. In 2026, our new robot workers and AI avatars can work 24/7 so architecture this time housing the labour required by factory owners isn’t on architecture’s must-do list – or at least not in the old-fashioned sense. It’s not accommodation as we know it, but robots and avatars seem to require a seemingly infinite number of huge and energy-hungry data centers to make them work at maximum efficiency. Architects aren’t competing with each other to design better data centers A) because AI can probably do it by now anyway and B) data centers don’t need the architecture-as-we-know-it value that architects add. Meanwhile, Rome and everywhere else burns.  

Another problem – my final one for now – is that if architecture is allowed to engage our emotions, then would it do so using stimuli unique to architecture? After all, why go to the trouble of making a building if a piece of sculpture or a painting or some other visual art can do the same? If people want their emotions engaged through storytelling then maybe they should read stories instead? Whatever the delivery medium, news is a good source of emotion via narrative. The old question of what is unique about architecture remains. If it’s not the satisfaction of spatial and physiological requirements, then we need to give this some serious thought and not continue to settle for the next suggestion put in front of us.

Here are three suggestions for architectures that are architecture but just not as we know it.

Perhaps an architecture of individual buildings has run its course and we should move towards the bigger picture of buildings in groups or even entire cities of them? I’ll leave it to architects or interested other parties to decide whether this is be merely compositional or something greater.

Perhaps an architecture that is understated, subtle and not screaming for our attention? It’s worth a try. Nothing to lose.

Perhaps an architecture wrapped in emotion-engaging patterns of pixels? Window films as video screen already exist³ so perhaps dematerializing the entire building will help us move away from “form” as the only or dominant determinant of architecture?

• This has the advantage of being relatively inexpensive compared to contorting concrete and steel into emotion-inducing shapes.
• There’s also advantage of the visuals being able to be continually updated.
• Sure, the implied space is illusory but, when compared to images seen through smartphones or whatever, one has to be in a particular place to have this experience. The illusion of perspective obviously works best for this opposite street corner but there’s still a physicality that is something good we don’t know we’ve lost. I’ll leave the emotion-inducing visuals up to others.

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1. Feelings are facts, 2010, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2010, Photos: Studio Olafur Eliasson ↩︎
2. https://www.domusweb.it/en/speciali/guest-editor/ma-yansong/2025/11/27/manifesto-mission-ma-yansong-domus-2026.html ↩︎
3. ↩︎