(Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
There was a moment, believe it or not, when it seemed like things in the architecture world, or, more precisely speaking, in the professional architectural community, could change. It was 2018-ish: Trump was two years into his first term; Richard Meier had been publicly accused of harassing five women and was sort of stepping back from his firm; a shared Google Sheet recounting various forms of harassment and abuse went viral.
The Architecture Lobby, a pro-union organization founded by Yale professor Peggy Deamer, had published a short but theoretically and practically strong pamphlet called Asymmetric Labors, and was showing up all over. Young practitioners started a group called Architectural Workers United. These were heady times! I was on some conference calls, gave some modicum of advice for how the media might be leveraged, and thought that everything would, finally, change.
Here we are in 2026, and it’s basically the same. Work by firms with disgraced leaders is still happening. The whisper network has all but shut down, or at least, I haven’t heard of anything. Maybe the unpredictable horrors that met not only the architecture profession but society at large—the pandemic, wars, another Trump term—have made it harder to imagine the kind of complete change that, once, seemed so possible.
The Dutch theorist and partner at the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Reinier de Graaf, in his latest book, Architecture Against Architecture (Verso), seems to think that all is not lost—that all it might take is a well-worded and crisply argued manifesto (his word) against architecture as it has been practiced since, it seems, time immemorial.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Architects,” is wildly entertaining and compulsively referential. He is funny (almost cute!) when writing about architects, and the short and evocative chapter titles, such as “Time’s Up!” and “Free For All” set the tone for snack-size interventions.
Minor factual inaccuracies aside (he claims, for instance, that Adjaye Associates’ Princeton University Art Museum project was cancelled, when in fact it recently opened), it’s a raucous tour of what can loosely be identified as The Problem with Architects. And the problems are manifold: They use too much software; it’s all about the charismatic figureheads; architects are by nature of the profession exploited but do not believe they are; people give stupid presentations at Yale; Niemeyer was sexist; copyright is difficult to establish; clients and AI are equally stupid and necessary. It ends with two cris de cœur: “Time for shock therapy!” and the closing entreaty, “Arise ye architects from your slumber!”
I was fully arisen from any slumber at this point, ready to return to the 2018-ish days, thinking: Bring back the whisper networks, the lawsuits, The New York Times’s exposés! Change the academy, teach the students something worthwhile, get them to see how crucial their work could be if only done well! Reinier, I am with you!
Unfortunately, the second half of the book, “Architecture,” put me to sleep. Maybe it’s my own fundamental orientation toward people over objects, but I found it to be slow, plodding, and, to use a bad phrase, “exhaustively researched.”
Despite reading the following chapters, I can’t really tell you what they said, so intrusive were the constant references to names, dates, and buildings. The first part of the book works so well because it identifies the problem: the messy, complicated, often selfish, often underpaid, often delusional people who are actually creating our built environment. But the second half, which focuses on the product, falters—maybe because it’s much less clear who or what to blame, and therefore much more difficult to offer solutions.
Regardless, specific ways of moving forward don’t emerge by simply understanding how we got here. That understanding will help inform the next steps, which requires more brain work to develop—brain work that is not performed here.
Thankfully, near the end, de Graaf returns to quoting architects saying the darnedest things, with a frankly astonishing series of quotes by figures including Bjarke Ingels, Thom Mayne, and Wolf Prix justifying working with cruel regimes and in very bad places. “We’re back, baby!” I scribbled, only to become immediately catastrophically bored again with a relentless catalog of impediments.
De Graaf closes with the observation that “the time has come for architecture to go beyond building and become a form of politics in its own right,” which sounds great. Come to think of it, all his entreaties sound great—but that’s where they start and end. How do we actually get these things done?
This manifesto, though it rejects the need for theory throughout, is to my reading an example of theory completely divorced from practice, even though it purports to be about practice. The changes suggested to the field—make this job more economically viable; deal with the predators; divorce fame from the production of good architecture—are interpretive, dressed up as practical.
It’s not that de Graaf is an emperor who has no clothes, per se—what he’s wearing (a gas of an exercise) simply isn’t what he says it is (a road map). And whereas a manifesto should speak truth to power as a way of galvanizing public awareness, I wonder how much more consciousness-raising the industry actually needs, versus clear, concrete ideas for accomplishing the kind of incremental and material changes he gestures toward, which will come about only through radical changes to our economic structure (no more trillionaires), real consequences for harassers (change the legal system), and a shared understanding across cultures that the built environment matters to everyone, not just people building nice houses for themselves.
Maybe things will change in our society and in architecture—I, for one, am almost preternaturally optimistic—but, very sadly, it won’t be because of this book.
Architecture Against Architecture will be the focus of the July 25 gathering of the New York Architecture + Design Book Club, a quarterly book subscription and event series organized by Untapped and the Brooklyn bookshop Head Hi. The program will feature Reiner de Graaf in conversation with Lauren and Craig Sinclair of Sinclair Collective. Find out more and RSVP on the book club’s website.