Authorship, Adaptability, and the Buildings We Deserve
For most of its history, architecture has been an act of declaration. A building is placed upon the earth and, by virtue of its mass, its materials, and the authority of the author, it announces that things are settled, that things are finished. The Palace of Versailles¹ did not merely house a king; its immense formal landscaping broadcast the stability of the institutions that built it. The architect, in this tradition, is a singular author, a visionary who acts upon a site through design sensibility alone, and whose completed work is meant to endure without revision. This image of the architect as an unimpeachable author has persisted through centuries of practice, raised on a new pedestal with the advent of modernism. Even after modernism fell under much critique, the age of starchitects in the early 2000s perpetuated the image of the architect as the ultimate author of the built environment. But the world these architects designed and the buildings they constructed in it have come to be occupied. Time passes and even the smallest errors in design can result in issues several magnitudes larger than the original mistake. After construction, buildings no longer sit still and perfectly on architectural draftboards, they are subject to weathering and social mutations of space resulting from events unknown when they were first constructed such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The question now confronting the discipline is whether architecture can learn to relinquish some of that authorial control, not as a concession, but as a design ambition.
It not only can, but it must. Buildings are not finished objects authored once and sealed shut. This model mindset of the building must be left behind in academia. Reality shows us that end-users augment space through programmatic needs so buildings need to be open systems, imagined as frameworks that invite their inhabitants to participate in an ongoing act of design. Through tracing a chronological arc from the rigid permanence of classical and modern architecture toward that emerging paradigm of the open system, one can fully grasp the role of authorship in making design decisions that could either serve the ideals of the designer or the people who will actually use the space. It is here that questions begin to emerge; Who decides what a building is, what it becomes, who is involved in the process of construction, and what happens when those answers begin to change?
The instinct to treat a building as a siteless product carries consequences far beyond the failures of modernism. Beatriz Colomina, in Privacy and Publicity (1994), shows how Le Corbusier curated photographs of his Villa Schwob before publishing them in L’Esprit Nouveau. The effects of these edits, removing site context and cropping away undesirable elements, result in presenting the project as though it existed outside of time. The building, in its published form, was not a place where people lived. It was an authored object, frozen at the moment of its completion.² When architecture is conceived this way, there is a lack of consideration for what happens next. Facades weather. Interior layouts that suited one household no longer serve another. Mechanical systems buried in concrete slabs reach the end of their service life, and replacing them means destroying the very structure they were meant to serve. The building, viewed as a permanent static object, authored once and for all, has no mechanisms for change.
This issue is not merely technical, it is a problem of who is allowed to speak. The singular-author model concentrates design decisions in the hands of architects and developers while the people who actually inhabit buildings are treated as passive recipients of someone else’s vision; their input is silenced in the design process. As N. John Habraken argued in Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing (1972), mass housing’s uniform approach treats occupants as interchangeable, stripping them of agency in the design of their own dwellings. The result is a built environment that leaves occupants alienated, feeling their needs are an afterthought. Here, users are reduced to a number and seen as just a source of capital.
It took physical destruction on an enormous scale to crack this model open. The devastation of World War II created tabula rasa conditions in which new building ideas could take root.³ In Japan, the postwar landscape produced the Metabolist movement. Architects like Arata Isozaki, Kisho Kurokawa, and Kenzo Tange were among its most prominent members. They proposed cities as massive structural frameworks supporting modular, replaceable living units. Kurokawa’s Agricultural City (1959) imagined a new urban datum floating above farmland. Tange’s Master Plan for Tokyo Bay (1960) extended that logic over water.
These proposals understood that buildings, like biological organisms, needed to grow and shed parts over time. Yet the Metabolists remained, in their own way, singular authors. Their visions were radical but top-down, utopian but rarely built. When the 1973 oil crisis exposed Japan’s over-reliance on imported materials, the movement lost momentum. The few structures that were realized, most notably Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972), could not live up to their promises. In the case of the Capsule Tower, one of the capsules could not be replaced without first removing all those above it.4 After years of deterioration, the tower was demolished in 2022.
A more pragmatic lineage emerged in postwar Europe. The Netherlands, with over twenty-five percent of its infrastructure destroyed as a result of the war and waves of refugees arriving from Indonesia, faced an acute housing crisis in the beginning of the 1960s that demanded speed of assembly and an economy of means. Out of this pressure came Dutch Modular Coordination and, decades later this group evolved into the global Open Building movement in the 1990s. N. John Habraken founded SAR (Foundation for Architectural Research) in 1964 to develop methods of adaptable housing. His key insight was the separation of “support” and “infill”. This is the durable, collectively controlled structural frame and the changeable, individually controlled interior components. This separation was not just technical. It was a redistribution of authorship. The architect designs the support; the inhabitant authors the infill. Projects like Molenvliet (1978)5 in Papendrecht demonstrated this principle in practice, using structural grids and standardized facade bay frames that allowed residents to configure their own dwellings within a shared framework.
Stewart Brand extended this thinking in How Buildings Learn (1994), proposing six “shearing layers”, Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, and Stuff, all expiring at different rates.6 The insight is that a building is not one thing but many things layered together, and when those layers are bonded to each other, the fastest-changing element dictates the lifespan for the slowest.
Elma Durmisevic, in her doctoral work at TU Delft (2006), translated this observation into a methodology: the eight design considerations for disassembly7 that address everything from functional decomposition and assembly sequencing to interface geometry and connection types. Her work makes the case that if components are organized into independent clusters connected by reversible, mechanical joints, buildings can be taken apart as deliberately as they are put together, and their materials recirculated rather than demolished into waste.
These ideas matter now more than ever. According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s 2024 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction, the buildings and construction sector is responsible for roughly 39% of global energy and process-related CO2 emissions. Our current building strategies are only exasperating this issue. Typologies such as tract housing developments continue to consume land with monotonous, unchanging structures that resist adaptation and generate enormous waste at end of life. Entire buildings are made with concrete as their primary material. Floors are cast in place, anchoring them and everything else they touch until the building reaches its end of life phase. People resist denser community living models in part because those generic modernism models have failed in the past and offer them no agency or sense of ownership over the spaces they occupy.
The consequences of this singular-author approach are perhaps nowhere more visible than in the case of Pruitt-Igoe, the massive public housing complex in St. Louis designed by Minoru Yamasaki and completed in 1956. Thirty-three identical towers muddled together and offered residents no means of adapting their environments to their own needs. The rigid, top-down integrated design contributed to the project’s rapid deterioration and social breakdown, culminating in the project’s dramatic demolition beginning in 1972. Pruitt-Igoe’s destruction, often cited as a symbolic death of modernist planning, was not simply a failure of policy or maintenance, but the failure of a design model that treated inhabitants as passive occupants of someone else’s vision rather than active participants in shaping their own dwellings.
So how do we decentralize architectural power in the design of the final space people occupy? There are endless avenues of exploration that form new ways to disprivilege this starchitect mindset of design. One such possible route is by developing a modular frame-and-infill housing system. To further detail the project, design a representative single unit apartment bay that exemplifies the assembly system and generate configurations of its layout in combination with multiple bays. One such bay could be a structural frame composed of wood columns and steel spanning members, supporting an infill of panelized wood elements, with simple bolted connections to construct a raised floor to route services and brace variable interior partition walls. The result is a low-carbon, designed for disassembly, component based system which can then be evaluated through a framework of capacity for change, construction considerations, and layered material organization. The building proposed would remain, by design, forever unfinished; open to horizontal and vertical growth, to interior reconfiguration by its inhabitants, and to the eventual disassembly and recirculation of its materials. It is a building whose authorship is deliberately shared. The architect provides the structure and the rules, while the end-user provides the life and specificity to meet their needs.
While these new possibilities of a more flexible and end-user inclusive design system may seem exciting, the gap of architecture-as-declaration to architecture-as-invitation is still a vast chasm that needs to be bridged. Code frameworks for material reuse remain restrictive and the circular economy for building components is still nascent. Yet, we have everything we need for it to happen. The intellectual groundwork has been laid by decades of work from authors such as Habraken, Brand, Durmisevic, and more to relearn our idea of building assemblies. Add to that our current social climate, where environmental and social issues have created an urgency that could not be greater. If architecture is to remain relevant in a world defined by endless flux, it must learn to stop finishing its sentences, and start leaving space for someone else to speak.
