Verbiage as Viagra

Most professions evolve their own specialized language, one often at least partly intentionally impenetrable to others. Usually these words emerge through a need for an accurate description of a technical, legal, or otherwise specific process or components for which there are no other adequate existing words.

Architecture, however, has developed a language that is concerned with what we might call its existential and theoretical needs rather than its purely practical requirements, which are, of course, shared with the whole vast construction industry. You might understand it as a need to create its own internal language in part as a defense against a hostile world (hostile, that is, to its more rarified ideas). You might interpret it as the natural outcome of a long training and a long history.

Or you might suggest it is a deliberately exclusive bullshit crafted and adopted to maintain an air of intellectual hermeneutics and superiority.

For an outsider, it can be baffling. For an insider, at least one with a love of language, it can be excruciating, a linguistic version of nails on a blackboard. These words emerge from architectural culture in response to completely legitimate concerns and crises. Occasionally they leach from academia or the broader cultural sphere, and their adoption leads to their use becoming ingrained, and often, to subtle shifts in meaning. 

Take, for instance, one much-used word: typology. Here is a concept popularized by Aldo Rossi, outlining a critique of the Modern movement and its obsession with the individual building as object rather than as part of an urban ensemble, which expressed political and power relations in the form of the city. It emerges from a very particular place; a radical Marxist Italian understanding of a metropolis.

By the time it comes down to us, however, it has been reduced to formalism; typology now is a kind of mental cataloguing of building types into broad categories, a concept stripped of its political intent. It emerged as a popular word at the moment when late Modernism was homogenizing all buildings—leading to the impossibility of distinguishing an office from an apartment tower, a school from a factory, or a big-box store from a distribution center. A moment when a cineplex could represent a moment of architectural crisis, a realization that the discipline had somehow lost its way.

Typology is a useful word in its own way and I use it myself (if my skeptical editor allows me). This essay isn’t about that. Rather, it is about a process in which a word, taken from an intellectual context, is stripped of its potency and richness and leads to a lexicon of half-understood inanity.

You might though look at another word, which is currently the most overused in all of architecture: materiality. More than any other, this is a word that reveals the anxieties and pieties, the contradictions and the paradoxes, in the language of contemporary architecture.

The word gained currency in the 1960 and ’70s, used by artists including Carl Andre and Richard Serra to express the nature of works that were all about the solidity and mass of the material: self-supporting, unironic, expressive of their own presence without pretense.

But in contemporary architecture, almost everything you see is a sham. Façades are rain screens; wooden floors sit on steel subfloors themselves suspended over concrete. Walls are of flimsy, immaterial drywall, a solidified powder. Columns are clad; doors are faced in timber with substrates of sawdust.

These are buildings that draw on an architectural language of solidity but are executed in a puff of fakery. Materiality is a word for a digital age where buildings appear on a screen and emerge as smooth as a sheetrock wall: featureless, textureless, immaterial. It is a bullshit word which, along with haptic, is diluted to become a fetishisation of finish.

It is not alone in this pantheon of words that turn out to mean the opposite of what they intend. Spatiality carries in it the same neuroses, though perhaps less problematic as it does at least acknowledge the issues of the interpretation of space. But that is not how it is actually used, which is a more apparently complex and impressive way of saying “space.” Which is itself, of course, Modernism’s own big cliché. Space is nothing, you might argue, unless you cleave to the Japanese idea of Ma, which itself leads to the void, one of architecture’s other grand, empty clichés.

Much of the worst abuse of language emerges, perhaps inevitably, from the often unreadable realm of academia—specifically texts in which the act of publishing is arguably more important than whether they are read, or understood, or not. Here you will find words in the process of immigrating into the world of architecture outside the academy.

One such word might be negotiating. Academic discourse is always “negotiating” space, or boundaries, or borders, or identities. It has become successful as a word because it works as a cipher for the powerlessness of architects, who are constantly struggling in an awkward space in which they have little agency, power, or financial clout; in turn, they find themselves constantly negotiating.

The territory that architects are negotiating is itself populated with some of the most grating clichés, including, among others, peripheries, complexities, liminality, territories, and praxis, each of which is, of course, problematized. The academic glossary is supplemented by the language of curatorial content, with its emphasis on practice (itself an actual architectural work turned into something else), performativity, criticality, imaginaries, and so on.

Through this language and the proclivity to wrap the culture in a verbiage that is both impenetrable to outsiders and boring to the rest of us—and which is exclusive just as the profession professes to turn towards inclusivity, radical care, co-production, and the participatory—is a final, bruising irony.

But if we were to analyze these linguistic quirks, we would find that at the root of it all are the manifold anxieties that cripple the field of architecture. In fact even the very word architecture has become unfashionable (read: problematic) within the discourse, as architecture is increasingly revealed to be riddled with colonial, racist, and extractive legacies, and burdened by the difficulties embodied in construction, including carbon, capital, and colonization.

The result is a shift towards spatial practices, an expanded field that might often also work to undermine architecture through questioning its legitimacy—which is all fine in academia but oozes out into the world outside in an increased burden of guilt.

Some words permeate practice and presentation but mean not that much: placemaking (a real bête noire and one brutally dismantled by Reinier de Graaf in his 2023 book Architect, Verb), participation (this usually means the opposite of what it says), co-production (ditto), radical (ditto), reparative, generative, regenerative, performative, interstitial, dynamic, rhizomal, symbiotic, hybrid. These may each be useful words, but they do architecture few favors, making it appear elitist and aloof. They are also often silly.

Each word reveals a discipline gnawed away by its own anxieties about its role in maintaining and reinforcing hierarchies. Materiality has recently become so popular because architecture is disappearing into the digital realm, where designers sit more or less exclusively behind screens. Along with craft and making, it’s a part of a legacy of rediscovered words used to recapture physical processes. At least it credits the construction worker with some (circumscribed) agency.

So long excluded from the discourse of contemporary architecture, the world has suddenly somehow become aware that buildings need to be built and that labor is among those exploitative practices that the academic discourse is able, from a distance, to critique. But their labor is aestheticized and sucked into a language intended to seduce in its connections to a spurious reality of pseudo-Ruskinian authenticity.

Architecture’s shifting, coagulating language is a record of its ongoing and developing insecurities. It is a method of expressing the desires of the discipline, reacting to the erosion of its status, power, and efficacy and, through the means of language, attempting to connect it to the concerns of the broader cultural discourse.

Aware of its complicity in everything from extraction and climate crisis, exploitation and the entrenchment of inequality, the discipline reaches into language for words that often say one thing but mean the contrary. Through language, architects convince themselves that they are on the right side of the struggle and that they remain a creative and intellectual discipline rather than purely a service industry mostly serving the wrong side.

In its creation of a bubble in which architects can alleviate their sense of impotence, perhaps it succeeds; verbiage as Viagra. In terms of persuading an outside world mostly impervious to its impenetrable language, maybe not so much. The one word architecture has donated to the broader culture is iconic. Which is, as the influencers might say, “iconic,” as this is now surely one of the most debased encapsulations of cultural cringe.