2001, Hamlet, & Technocracy : On the Future of Design
2001 : A Space Odyssey is probably one of the greatest works of art from the last century, if you’re being medium agnostic. Our kids will probably watch it from their space-ship cabins one day.
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Given the letters “A” & “B”, here is the exhaustive, complete list of words you can form:
AB
BA
Here is an example of a sentence you can create using this:
Ab.
If we add one more letter (C) so our set becomes [A,B,C], we can spell the following words :
Ab
Ba
Baa
Acca
Abba
Cab
And we can create the following sentence :
Ab.
If we add three more letters (D,E,F) for a set total of [A,B,C,D,E,F], there are approximately 91 english words you can create (and about a total of 1,859 non-english words) – which enables you to begin to write something slightly more poetic and meaningful.
Dead cafe faced fade…
& Deaf babe ebbed away.
Acceded feeb bade
[While] effaced deed deca[y]ed.
Writing a poem with only 6 letters is hard! In fact, making anything meaningful out of such a constrained knowledge base is difficult. Thankfully, though, we have substantially more than 6 letters in our beautiful language, enabling us to form exponentially more words & sentences, and write seminal works beloved by many, like The Divine Comedy and this weekend’s Saturday Night Live.
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Le Corb was probably the architectural Shakespeare of modernity. Ville Savoye is Macbeth, Ronchamp is his Julius Caesar, and Radieuse his Hamlet.
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The tragedy of modern architecture lies not in our inability to create beauty, but in our collective surrender to constraint. We find ourselves at a critical inflection point, where our obsession with producing brilliant designers has blinded us to the Ford-like industrialization overtaking our profession. While we perfected our craft in ivory towers, the vast landscape of our built environment slipped through our fingers – now 97% of buildings emerge without the touch of architectural thought, each a testament to our profession's surrender to commodification.
The irony cuts deep: while we trained ourselves to write architectural poetry, the world needed us to speak the language of systems and scale. Computer science has evolved from room-sized calculators to trillion-switch chips smaller than your fingernail, yet our construction sites, with their paper documents and manual systems, remain frozen in amber, preserved from 1925 like architectural fossils. We still build with portland cement from 1845, our processes still rooted in the age of steam engines, our palette limited to the same trinity of steel, concrete, and plastic.
Like a linguist restricted to two – or three – letters trying to write poetry, we find ourselves surprised when our buildings emerge as nothing more than variants of Costco warehouses. It's no wonder we contribute to 40% of global emissions – we've been reading the same script since the industrial revolution began.
We studied so we could produce Hamlet; and now, the vast majority of our buildings are no more than architectural brain rot.
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As a child, I never fancied being an architect, though I certainly loved building blocks and Legos. I wanted to be an inventor. Now, while in school, I've found myself drawn back to that same calling I wrote on my 1st grade dreams sheet. I'm working on a startup that helps people design, finance, and execute renovation projects – making it easier for people to create the space they want. While not my ultimate goal, it represents a step into a new future: one where architecture becomes a system of enablement rather than individual authorship.
I think if we hope to transform our built environment, architects need to begin taking after other disciplines. Gone are the days of the hyper-specialist; ushering in a new age of building requires us to learn from other industries, to think about systems and products over singular designs. It is in business classes and blockchain meetings that I see new pathways for financing; in engineering lectures and hackathons that I glimpse new methods of assembly; in computer science and network theory that I find new ways of organizing our incredibly complex industry.
The "architect" – as we knew them – is dead.
But what rises in their place is far more vital: the architect as system designer, as complexity navigator, as future builder. It is time to embrace this new age – the age of innovators cognizant that while the world may not be ready for change, it must happen. It is time for us to create a new kind of architecture: an architecture of complexity – an architecture of technology – an architecture of democracy.
We dream in a language existence has yet to speak.
