I don’t remember exactly when I first heard the phrase “the house is a machine for living in,” from Le Corbusier’s seminal 1923 book, Toward an Architecture. It was likely when I was at university, learning about Modern architecture—Le Corbusier’s progeny—for the first time. I remember being doubtful of his claim. A machine? I asked myself. I don’t quite feel like I’m in a machine when I’m most comfortable in any house I would call home.

I know I’m taking a very literal route by fixating on the word machine, but such words, and such claims, carry a lot of weight. The term implies attributes I would typically assign to airports, supermarkets, and call-center offices: impersonal, cookie-cutter spaces incapable of eliciting character or emotion, and concerned more with getting a task done than with how someone feels while they’re doing it. Lifelessness, stiffness, anonymity—these are qualities I don’t associate with my idea of domesticity.

Around the same time I learned about Le Corbusier’s perception of home, I learned that, during the 1920s and 1930s, something called the International Style of Modernism was on the rise in the United States. What piqued my interest were two hallmarks of the architectural manner: the wide use of uniform, mass-produced industrial building materials, and the utter rejection of ornamentation, which it equated with a crime.

To me, this suggested that progress in architecture, within this framework, meant that all buildings should be conceived of and constructed similarly to one another, regardless of where they’re built or who they’re built for. It also suggested that none of these buildings would have significantly identifiable qualities on the exterior that would give us any clue about what might be happening inside them.

I tried (and failed) to make sense of this from my vantage point as a student in South Africa: Were the beautifully painted exteriors of the homes of the Ndebele people specimens of bad architecture? Those brightly colored, intricate geometric adornments have meaning. Painted exclusively by Ndebele women and girls of age, they are symbols of things such as a family’s status, heritage, wishes, prayers, and announcements of marriage, to name a few. They are as informative as they are ornamental. Is there no function in insignia?

I also thought of the buildings of Tiébélé, a small village in the south of Burkina Faso that’s home to the Kassena tribe. The village dwellings are painted in vivid black-and-white geometric patterns, riddled with symbols representing the tribe’s history, folklore, and even some key information about the inhabitants of the structures (the royal family’s home, for example, has more detailed patterns than others).

Since the 15th century, the Kassena tribe has developed these symbols within their architecture not only as an exterior building envelope appliqué, but also in architectural planning and programming: rectilinear houses signify a family home, while circular structures are meant for bachelors. It’s another case of ornamentation that’s not merely frivolous, but functional.

Now, a decade into my career working as a designer in the fields of architecture and furniture, product, and graphic design, my view of Modern architecture has evolved. Its tenets were formed by very small groups of men in the United States and Europe, whose views obviously do not represent those of the entire world. These small groups of men, in relatively small parts of the planet, essentially decided how the classroom I sat in—as a Black man on the African continent, where life differs greatly from that in the West—should look, feel, and work.

The elements we have come to associate with Modern architecture—the open plan (Le Corbusier’s “plan libre”), large windows, white walls—were meant to aid in creating flexible spaces that could be used in a variety of ways. To be clear, I have no quarrel with flexible spaces. However, I have realized in my professional practice that these spaces often end up as basic, generic, unidentifiable non-places where almost anything could happen, yet almost nothing significant ever does.

Coined in 1992 by the French anthropologist Marc Augé in his 2009 book, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, the term non-places refers to everyday, transient spaces in contemporary life that are devoid of a prominent cultural or historical identity. Think about a space in your immediate surroundings that is a non-place. It shouldn’t take long; contemporary life is filled with them. In fact, I am sitting in a non-place right now: the airport in Barcelona.

In his book, Augé explores the differences between places—spaces that have the capacity to assist in the creation of social connections between people—and non-places, which Augé humorously deems “the opposite of utopia.”

The airport is a good example of the latter: Most interactions I have with anybody there are predicated on a need for information rather than the desire to get to know the person I’m speaking with. Non-places are abundant because they tend to be the spaces we traverse through to get to places. The widespread application of the components of Modern architecture I mentioned earlier—uniformity and standardized building elements—suggests that the threshold between non-places and places has the potential of being obscured, rendering that boundary between them difficult to define.

The Ndebele people and the Kassena people’s structures fit within Augé’s definition framework of place. The ornamentation and its utility for each of these cultures creates environments of identity, tethering the design of their homes to the basic integral functions of their respective societies. All things considered, it seems to me that places cannot exist if they do not somehow reflect the culture, identity, or history of the people occupying them. Historically, cultural identity has been legible—not exclusively, but vividly—through the use of symbolism. So the syllogism here is that symbolism in the form of ornamentation, to any degree, could be a key signifier that one is indeed in or at a place.

A few questions arise as I think about this: How can designers of spaces fold these ideas into their work and consequently, our world, to create more places? How do we ensure that the line between non-places and places is clearly defined? How do we reconfigure the components of non-places to make places? And how do we ensure that the places we create have long-lived meaning for the people currently in them, and for those who will inhabit them in the future?

“As practitioners in the built environment, we are responsible for making places for people that are a reflection of them, and not solely of an ideological movement.”

From Barcelona, I flew to Milan, and one night wound up at a seafood restaurant with about 20 people I met at a fashion show that evening. We’re loud, but so is everybody else there. It’s packed. There are mounds of food everywhere. The restaurant is not well-designed by any standard. It’s a Modernist’s nightmare. The relentless, ocean-themed décor is unsurpassed in its tackiness. But the operative idea here is that it is a place. And it’s glorious.

This restaurant is exactly the kind of environment that restores my hope for the future of architecture and interior design, fields I have recently scaled back from practicing full-time. I’m not saying that places should be heavily decorated, or that white-box spaces aren’t ideal at times. What I am saying is that, as practitioners in the built environment, we are responsible for making places for people that are a reflection of them, and not solely of an ideological movement.

If more designers designed with this in mind, we would have more places that allow for improvisation and change in ways that are user-specific, that have positive impacts on the people in them, and that will survive the current wave of mass demolitions and be cared for and used for generations.

If we design places for people first, the ideological framework will be filled in by those very people. A good building is a servant to the community by being a part of it, not above it.

Here’s to fewer “machines.”