The original note, as written at the time
Let me tell you what I think about the kind of buildings we are constructing today, especially in the Global South. We think we are imitating an elegant international style, but we are wrong. It’s not elegant. We are simply imitating convenient building. We should know it for exactly what it is. It’s not elegant, it’s just convenient. As such, the office blocks we build are just really high-rise warehouses. While of course, the residential units are just glorified slum shacks.
Ongoing development
Let me tell you what I think about the kind of buildings we are putting up today, especially here in the Global South.
We believe we are imitating an elegant international style. We are not. We are imitating convenient building, and we have mistaken convenience for elegance because the photographs are taken at dusk and the glass is clean and the building has never had to survive a bad week.
Look at the office block honestly and it is a warehouse that has been taken vertically. The floor plates are deep, the envelope is sealed, the services are in the core, the light is manufactured, and the only thing that distinguishes it from a distribution shed is that the goods come in wearing suits. We stack people in it exactly as we would stack pallets — by the square metre, at maximum density, in the cheapest possible box that will satisfy a lease — and then we put an atrium in the lobby and call the result architecture.
And the residential block is not better. It is a glorified shack, raised twenty floors and clad in something that photographs well. The reason it is a shack and not a house is the same reason the shack is a shack: the construction is not designed to be maintained, the services are not designed to be reached, and the whole thing depends on a supply of water and power that nobody in the building controls. It is an improvised structure made of expensive materials.
I am not against height and I am not against density. I am against density that has not been thought about — density that has been bought from a catalogue and dropped onto a site with a boundary wall to keep the consequences at a distance. A tall building is a serious object. It changes wind, light, drainage, and the social life of the street it lands in. If you are going to put one up, it should be particular to its place, and it should be shaped by someone who has stood on the pavement and watched the sun cross the site.
The tragedy is that we can tell the difference and we keep pretending we cannot. We have all walked into a lobby and known within three seconds that the building was assembled rather than designed, and we still sign the drawings, because the client asked for something that looks like the render and the render was made from a building somewhere else.
So let us say it plainly in the meetings. It is not elegant. It is just convenient. And convenience, dressed up as style, is how a city ends up with a skyline of warehouses and a housing stock of shacks that happen to be high off the ground.