Membership of Type allows unlimited access to our online library. Join to support new research and writing on the design of the built environment.
You can read more about membership here.
Already a member? Login to your account to avail of unlimited downloads.
Membership of Type allows unlimited access to our online library.
Join to support new research and writing on the design of the built environment.
You can read more about membership here.
Individual Membership Fees
Individual membership is available on a monthly or annual basis.
The fee is €10/month or €99/year.
Our bodies do the work, do we think of them when they are working?
Feet ache from standing, backs tire from lifting, shoulders ache from poor posture at a desk. We sit down, stand up, take a break, take refreshment. In some workplaces, there is consideration of the worker and their body: canteens are provided, bathrooms are kept clean, and the ergonomics of a desk are contemplated. All of this relies upon the acknowledgement of, the visibility of, certain types of work and workers. If we turn our attention to the city as a workplace – specifically, the streets, thresholds, parks and pavements that make up the public realm in the city and that act as a place of work for many workers – how does it accommodate the bodies of workers? Is it hospitable?
Over time, the perceived value of certain types of work, and consequently certain types of workers, has fluctuated. When seen as essential to the economy, to growth, the needs and availability of workers are considered, and their ability to advocate for better working conditions is strengthened. This has occasionally resulted in an architecture that responds directly to workers’ needs. We might take the example of pithead baths, communal bathing facilities that were built close to coal mines in the early twentieth century. Here, miners could change and bathe; the dust and dirt of the colliery becoming the responsibility of the mine itself and not the worker and their home. In Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain, by Gary Boyd, we follow the development and eventual obsolescence of this distinctive typology, pointing to the transitory nature of coal mining as one of the reasons for the short lifespan of the baths and for their fading from view in histories of modernist architecture in Britain.[i] So we have an example of an architecture that springs up in response to workers’ needs, but that also mirrors the changing status of the workers themselves.
The value of different types of work is something that we continue to grapple with and that contributes to inequality locally and globally. Precarity is widespread.[ii] Nowhere is the daily reproduction of the worker more difficult and given less consideration than in the city workplace. A conspicuous example of precarious and disembodied labour is the fleet of food delivery riders that has grown in response to the evolution of online delivery platforms. This new virtual infrastructure has resulted in, but takes no responsibility for, a workforce that is reliant on the fabric of the city. While there has been recent media coverage of the riders' problematic working conditions,[iii] there has been less discussion about the pragmatic and bodily realities of their work, where they contend with weather, traffic, criminality and so on.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau sets out a model whereby power structures are discernible by the “strategies” of agencies and institutions, representatives of the state or of commercial interests; the organising logic of city planning, for instance, or the virtual frameworks that map, track, and influence. Against, or within, these strategies are the “tactics” of the other; the citizen, the customer, or, to employ de Certeau’s preferred term, the user.[iv] If we pay close attention to the city workplace, we start to see the “strategies” and “tactics” at play, the creative and opportunistic ways of “making do” that individual riders employ in their everyday life: they rest against walls and railings; they take shelter under canopies and in ad hoc repair shops; they take shortcuts, crosscuts over rainslick tracks or in the narrowing gap between a bus and a van; they take risks;[v] they sit on park benches and at the feet of statues.
At O’Connell Monument:
Do you eat your lunch here?
“Yes, this is my office chair.”[vi]
A warehouse on Henry Place holds a rental and repair shop, renting primarily to food delivery workers. The building is a protected structure that is decaying as it awaits a contested redevelopment.[vii] A single open space is divided into two zones by a low plywood barrier: public (for rental) and private (for repair). Bikes stand ready. Metal shelves along the east wall hold the accessories that might be required by a rider. In front, a desk where forms are filled and rent is paid. In a corner, some sofas face a TV screen. A fridge, microwave and kettle provide basic facilities.
On Henry Place:
Do you take a break here?
“Yes, this is the only place that we are able to eat because we rent the bikes here, so they let us use the microwave, the refrigerator... This is the only place in the city that we can have a little space together to eat something.”
On this backland site, a temporary and informal responsiveness is demonstrated. The city user improvises on the ground, while elsewhere, a debate rages about value. In contrast to the windowsills and kerbstones that are often places of momentary rest for a delivery rider, a dilapidated and impermanent structure gives a sense of shelter and retreat, making space for camaraderie and some degree of bodily comfort.
On O’Connell Street:
Do the delivery companies provide any equipment or clothes for you?
“Not exactly, once in a while they give something for free, like the bag and the jacket, but not all the time. The jacket is more for promotion; it gets wet, you get wet anyway. We have to be careful because we can get sick most of the time, because the rain makes our bodies very cold. We have to be extra careful when it’s wet.”
Where previous communities of workers had their needs considered, as in the construction of pithead baths for miners, for example, it was possible to point to a single employer with responsibility for the welfare of their workers. Groups of workers could agitate and negotiate for facilities, for practical solutions to tangible problems. Emerging from a pit with body and clothing covered in black coal dust led to straightforward questions about washing, changing, eating dinner, and storing clothes during the working day. Improvements in conditions for miners were realised because these workers were together, situated, and visible. Another historical example of situated workers’ facilities was the series of green huts built by the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund in late-nineteenth-century London. The shelters provided hot drinks and food, a place to read the paper for cab drivers, answering a series of pragmatic, corporeal needs. Like many Victorian philanthropic efforts, they came with an undertone of self-serving paternalism. Now with a protected conservation status, a handful of shelters are still in use, the interiors remaining the exclusive preserve of cab drivers.
Today, in corporate[viii] settings, the body is considered in great detail. Ergonomic assessments are exacting in their appraisal of a body at a desk: the length of shin (footstool), the height of eye (monitor stand), the reach and range of forearm (vertical mouse). Training is provided in how and what to lift. In theory, an employer is responsible for assessing these risks to the body regardless of the location of their employee. But in an era of modern piecework, who cares for the pieceworker? And is there a parallel between the hands-offishness of employers and our attitude to city streets and passageways?
Delivery riders are visible in the city but untethered, distributed through the network of the streets, finding their own informal gathering places. They are not employees; they are independent contractors. This status allows them to be light-footed within a network of regulations and legalities.[ix] The subcontracting of accounts with various delivery companies, for instance, results in a grey market of official and unofficial riders. These tactics have their mirror in the ways in which riders improvise occupation of streets and pavements, and act, to a degree, on the city; they are limited, however, in how they might shape the city to their needs.
Emerging from a tradition that prioritises urban commerce and suburban living, we plan for the street as a thoroughfare, an artery, thinking mostly of flow, of efficiency. There is arguably a parallel prioritisation of the commuter worker within the workforce. Certain dimensions are assigned for cars and buses, for bicycles and pedestrians to move seamlessly from the city centre to the periphery. This diminishes the value of the urban realm as a place to be, to dwell. What if we were to see (or return to) the streetscape, the weather-world[x] of paths, gratings and doorways, of tarmacadam and streetlights, as a single, integrated space that hosts diverse needs and functions, including those of city workers? The sense of the city as a place to move through can be challenged by an ambition to make a hospitable city: a place of rest, shelter and conversation. Acknowledging the public realm as a workplace might prove a catalyst for an inclusive approach to city-making, considerate of all bodies and all work.
One Good Idea is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2025.
[i] In particular “Pithead Baths, Modernism and Modernity” in: Boyd, G.A. (2023) Architecture and the face of coal: mining and modern Britain. London: Lund Humphries.
[ii] A report on the UCD Working in Ireland Survey (WIIS) 2021 concluded that one in four workers are precariously employed: Geary, J. and Wilson, L. (December 2023) UCD/NERI Report: Job Quality in Ireland.
[iii] The Irish Times, 13 February 2024. “Dublin Food Delivery Riders to Join International Strike on Valentine’s Day”. Accessed 4 April 2024. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/work/2024/02/13/dublin-food-delivery-riders-to-join-international-strike-on-valentines-day/
[iv] “Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong’, an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter’s tricks, manoeuvrable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic and warlike discoveries.” Certeau, M. de (1988) The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, California; University of California Press. pp. 36.
[v] “Work intensification is a general feature of work under capitalism. But work intensification when you work on the road means something quite specific: a continual pressure to increase the risks you take. The piece wage system encourages you to take chances on every shift. If you’re less careful, you make more money. Over time, you become desensitized to danger which, in another context, would make you slam on the brakes and stop weaving through traffic.” Cant, C. (2020) Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. pp. 37.
[vi] Testimony from food delivery riders was gathered with the assistance of students in the Master of Architecture programme at University College Dublin, Autumn 2024: Aidan Byrne, Aine Dunne, Alex Dunne, Agata Koniarska, Paulius Rutkauskas, Kriesya Shankar.
[vii] The Irish Times, 05 January 2023. “Moore Street Buildings Subject of Proceedings Lodged against Dublin City Council.” Accessed 10 November 2024. https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/01/05/moore-street-buildings-subject-of-proceedings-lodged-against-dublin-city-council/.
[viii] Many bodies united in one body: Corporate (adj.) early 15c., “united in one body, constituted as a legal corporation”, as a number of individuals empowered to do business as an individual, in early use often of municipalities, from Latin corporatus, past participle of corporare “make or fashion into a body, furnish with a body”. Harper, D. (n.d.). Etymology of corporate. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved September 19, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/corporate.
[ix] In an attempt to regulate the sector, the EU has started to work towards legislation that improves the working conditions of platform workers. Here another motivation is discussed, namely the implications for member states when there is a cohort of workers operating outside the typical tax and social protection payment systems: “The misclassification of the employment status has consequences for the persons affected, as it is likely to restrict access to existing labour and social rights. It also leads to an uneven playing field with respect to businesses that classify their workers correctly, and it has implications for Member States’ industrial relations systems, their tax base and the coverage and sustainability of their social protection systems.” PE-CONS 89/24 Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on improving working conditions in platform work. pp. 5.
[x] We could apply the same logic to all the elements of the urban realm as Ingold does to sea and land, whereby they “appear to be engulfed in the wider sphere of forces and relations comprising the weather-world, together subsumed under the great dome of the sky. It is in this dome, where the sun shines, storms rage and the windblows – and not, as Gibson surmised, at the surfaces of solid objects and the ground they rest on – that ‘all the action is’ (Gibson 1979: 23)”. Ingold, T. (2021) “Landscape or weather-world?” in Being Alive. Routledge. pp. 132.
He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk,not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs.
James Joyce, Ulysses [1]
Joyce introduces Mrs Grogan, the dairy woman, in the first chapter of Ulysses. Milk is referred to over 300 times in his novel, with over 12,000 allusions: 18 times as brick, 200 times as water. Milk would have seemed material to the city in the novel’s setting of 1904. Did Joyce use milk as a symbol of something more than it has appeared in research to date? The agency of this substance was present in the first articles he published. When you look closely, it flows through his work and the streets of early twentieth-century Dublin.
1904 was the apex point of the female-driven dairies in the city. The clean milk movement and industrialised agricultural society were galvanising. Despite its relatively recent significance, the role milk played in the city would soon be effectively wiped from history.
Today, the dairy women, the ‘Mrs Grogans’ are gone; instead milk, a fluid, now arrives homogeneous, and neatly packaged in commercialised settings. Still, it remains popular, with Irish households consuming around 6.75 litres a week [2]. Ireland has a reputation for lower carbon in milk production and high-quality yields [3]. Our cows are raised outside on the land. The moisture-rich grass lends itself to both itchy sheep's wool and creamy, yellow butter.
Dr Jessica Smyth's research in UCD, which analysed residues in Irish Bronze age clay vessels, established there was clear early evidence of dairy rather than animal fats, and in larger proportions than elsewhere. This established that the Bronze-age Irish were already dairy farming and were keeping their animals for food production rather than just for meat. This culture began much earlier than anticipated [4]. Dairy has mapped out many key features of our diet and language. Bán Bia, the 'white food' influenced land usage, laws, the distinctive architectural characteristics of raths and burial mounds, byre dwellings. Early structures were designed to control or protect our animals from raiding and attack. Today the architecture of the barn and farming is omnipresent throughout the rural landscape. Its translation to domestic buildings would reinforce the opinion that it is a local, traditional, and arguably one of the few indigenous architectural forms of native post-modernism: the corrugated roofed barn has become an unlikely beacon of the new Irish aesthetic.
For the most part, we do not associate the fabric of Dublin with dairy. We do associate it with Ulysses, but not as an agent of the city, as a food or metaphor [5] so what was Joyce imbuing into Mrs Grogan?
In his book Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd tells us that Joyce's first stories were published in the agricultural journal The Irish Homestead in 1904 [6]. The journal, which was edited by the poet George Russelll, was referred by Joyce as the ‘Pig Paper’. Martina Plock relates to us that his stories were published within ‘a disagreeable vicinity of dietary and self-improvement pieces in the Irish Homestead’. Such pieces included ‘The importance of fraudulent butter‘, ‘Frozen milk and health’, and ‘Bacteria in the milk’ [7]. The Irish homestead was also an essential part of the promotion of the new cooperative and clean milk movement.
By 1904 milk was becoming an agent of patriarchy, modernism and capitalism. With the formation of the co-operative movement in 1874, the amalgamation of the small holdings was promoted as a means of fighting against the advance and commercial threat of Danish butter. Denmark had invented a steamer that was churning butter at a rate that was a severe threat to the Irish dairy market. This amalgamation impacted all the small dairies and milk producers in the city.
Joanna Bourke told us that milk was once evident throughout the city and county but the new cooperative creameries diverted dairy production from small-scale female-centric milk production spaces (including tenements) to large male-centric spaces, using new “scientific’ methodologies with distinct architecture identifying them [8].
The city is the locus of memory, its brick, stone and concrete hold a material account of the work of women's milk. This work could invite another mapping, this overlooked movement of dairy women carrying their milk cans. Like a stream of milk, the chain of production moving from the lush fields and out through the mechanisation of fast-approaching modernity.
Today we see more thought about the provenance of milk, people are asking questions about it in relation to climate and animal husbandry, the industrialisation of our food production has seen animals removed from the cities and this has had both a physical and social impact.
There is now a growing interest in micro farming and independent dairies with independent dairies popping up in Paris, Berlin, and New York [9]. There is a raw milk movement in our own country [10] It may now be of interest to reexamine the work of the dairy women and the flow of milk through both Ulysses and the city to see what was removed from the city when the chain of milk was interrupted.
Drawing from Ulysses is a fruitful and recognised form of criticism but extracting individual elements for study gives us sections through the city that may be relevant to its development. These reveal not only relationships between the city’s development but also the infrastructures of food, how patterns of food, land use, and gender constitute a locus of knowledge that has shaped the development of Dublin. A legacy that may be worth reviewing to align with modern urban and food ideologies.
A redrawing of the milky city of 1904 is long past its due date.
All Dubliners accept that the fair city is inseparable from James Joyce's Ulysses. Yet Joyce's novel is saturated with a hidden ingredient: milk. This industry is an essential part of our national image, but its relationship with the fabric and women of Dublin has been largely forgotten. What if we redrew Joyce’s Dublin through milk?
Read.jpg)
While teaching, Aldo van Eyck noted his architectural philosophy, explaining that ‘tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house’ [1]. At the core of this idea was the rich connection between the part and the whole, how each contains qualities of the other, creating somewhat of a symbiotic relationship between the two. Complex issues such as climate change or the decline of community spaces can feel broad and difficult to engage with, but by breaking these down into smaller, more accessible ideas, we can begin to understand how these things work and what collective action might look like.
In Mountbellew, a small rural town in Co. Galway, through the Design Lab Bursary programme, the Hidden Heritage Walled Garden project explored how a small intervention could begin a wider conversation about community space. The local walled garden is an often-forgotten amenity within the locality. This intervention centred around unlocking this space for the community, creating a wider discussion on its future. Through a collaboration with the local school, Holy Rosary College, we co-designed a new social gathering space where students created a structure on which to hold seating and planting. By unlocking the hidden heritage behind the six metre high limestone walls of Mountbellew Walled Garden, the structure would act as a catalyst for the garden’s long-term renovation, an initiative largely supported by the community.
.jpg)
.jpg)
The importance of the intervention was not simply the structure itself, more so in giving the community a physical way of thinking about a place that had become forgotten. Through the act of making something together, the students and in turn the wider community could begin to see the potential of this walled garden differently. Of course, the intervention does not solve the future of the walled garden or the decline of community spaces in rural towns, however it makes these questions tangible, giving them a place to be discussed. Through the creation of this singular space, it is hoped that the community realises its potential and begins to unlock further forgotten spaces on their doorstep.
Free Market, the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2018, highlighted the ‘generosity, humanity and possibilities’ [2] in the common spaces of Ireland’s market towns. It examined how the importance of these types of spaces has declined in recent years, exploring how they can be reclaimed once again, becoming integral places of interaction and community. One clear success of the Biennale project was its bringing of the conversation beyond the audience of the architectural community, travelling to towns across Ireland, gathering stories, ideas and people along the way. Through these individual discussions of a larger condition across the country, the part certainly became a way of understanding the whole.
In education, model making is a key element of our training as architects. Finding cost-effective and sustainable means of material sourcing can be challenging, and particularly relevant in a cost-of-living crisis twinned with a climate crisis. The re:model project at TU Dublin sought to address this at a small and physical scale, creating a system for the sharing and reuse of materials within the school. Through workshops of designing and making, students came together to create material-sharing cabinets. In making these units, meaningful conversations arose around promoting a circular economy and reducing waste within the broader context of the university.
On reflection, the re:model project was less about the cabinets created but more about creating a system within the school. Model making produces a large amount of waste, yet this is often an invisible part of our architectural education. Through the creation of a system of return and reuse, this project makes what was once a hidden system visible. Through confronting these bigger concerns at a smaller scale, the project translates an abstract environmental issue into an everyday action. Subsequently, a publication was produced, a how-to guide for making these units and implementing its system, shared across all design departments within the university. Indeed, the very system of return and reuse encourages responsible consumption for current and future students, but also, and maybe more importantly, it is through this small act of returning and reusing materials that students can begin to question their everyday habits of waste and their own designs, questioning the need and environmental impact of certain materials in their projects.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
In both Mountbellew and TU Dublin, the act of making became a way of translating an otherwise abstract issue into something that could be seen and participated in. The power of projects like these lies not in their physical form, but in the larger ideas they make visible. The physical act of making opens up a discussion on the larger systems at play, helping us ask what could happen next? These interventions invite us to question, experiment and take risks, helping us discover new solutions and critiques of our current systems along the way. Like van Eyck’s tree and leaf, the small intervention contains something of the larger whole. Through community-led physical making, architecture can become a vehicle for conversation, bringing people together around issues that might otherwise feel distant.
.jpg)
Notes:
Mountbellew Walled Garden ‘Hidden Heritage’ project was carried out as part of the Architecture at the Edge Festival 2024 funded through the Design Lab Bursary by Galway Culture Company and the Arts Council, awarded to Brian Kelly and Grace Gacquin. Further collaboration on the project was carried out alongside LINA fellows, Dérive.
The ‘re:model’ project was carried out through student collaboration across multiple workshops, from design to construction. Supported by Laura Carroll and TU Dublin StuCAN (Student Climate Action Network). This project was developed through Green Campus Open Call 2025 and supported by TU Dublin Societal Engagement and the Higher Education Authority’s Strategic Alignment of Teaching and Learning Enhancement (SATLE) fund. Instagram: @tudublin_stucan
In this article, Brian Kelly proposes that architects prioritise community-led making as a means of translating complex issues into more tangible and accessible forms. Drawing on insights from two personal projects, he argues that change must be ‘made’ through time, passion, and conversation with others.
Read
In the first weeks of architecture school, I remember the exact moment the idea of ‘a building’ stopped being the point. Someone had pinned up a project and there was a plan and a section that looked almost standardised. Then the tutor, Dr Sarah Lappin, started talking through it: where the air would move, where water would go, what would fail first, how a single woman might feel in this space versus an elderly man, and what would cost more later if it was done cheaply now. The building on the wall did not feel like an object anymore, but felt like a set of choices that would land on other people’s lives [1]. Until then, I had assumed architecture was the finished building or the clean photograph. In that room it became obvious that the polished image is the last and least informative part, and that the real work is the ecosystem underneath it: constraints, trade-offs, and the consequences that fall out from them [2].
If you ask someone what an architect does, it’s the object that they usually describe – they see the hero photograph or the glossy image on socials. What they rarely see is the true medium of the profession: a long chain of decisions, made under constraint, where every move has consequences and every consequence has a constituency.
Tom Wujec’s ‘How to Make Toast’ exercise names the gap with disarming precision [3]. Ask most people to draw toast and they sketch a simple sequence: take bread from the bag, put it in the toaster, press the handle, butter, plate, eat. Ask someone trained in architecture and the drawing expands until the toaster no longer sits as an object on a counter, but as a node in a network: wheat and soil, labour and logistics, the power grid, packaging, waste, failure points. Toast stops being a standalone entity and becomes part of a vast system [4]. This is the professional superpower that architecture rarely admits in public – we are trained to visualise what other people cannot see. We do not draw objects alone, we draw relationships: heat, airflow, risk, access, time, cost, maintenance, politics – and in doing so, make the invisible visible. It’s also a friendly way into wicked problems [5]: the moment you draw the system, the task stops being linear and becomes an argument about priorities.
And yet, when architecture speaks to the public, it tends to speak in a single dialect [7]: the finished image. This is where the profession accidentally strengthens the narrative it claims to hate. If the public mostly encounters architecture as a final render, then ‘design’ looks like surface. It reads as aesthetic preference with optional flourish, the kind of thing that can be value-engineered away when budgets tighten. That is precisely the logic underpinning TD Seán Canney’s dismissal of ‘an architect’s ego going wild’ as the source of budget overruns in the run-up to last year’s revised National Development Plan [8]; design is reduced to image, indulgence, and unnecessary cost rather than understood as the thing that shapes how a project actually works. When political and media voices frame design as an impediment to progress – as expensive, slow, unpragmatic – the profession often retreats into technical language or internal reassurance. Architects talk to one another, roll their eyes, and leave the story to be written elsewhere. There is a communication failure here, where the profession keeps showing the toast and hiding the system.
Publish the thinking
There is a simple corrective to this failure, and it does not require a new software subscription or a public relations agency – it requires a shift in what is considered ‘the work’. Or, the decision to replace the hero render with a public diagram pack, and to treat that pack as participation infrastructure [9]. The point is not to simplify reality, but to communicate complexity legibly so that non-experts can participate in it [10]. Perhaps this participation could happen not via more finished images, but with a small, repeatable set of drawings that every project publishes early, updates openly, and revisits as the design evolves.
Five drawings are enough, if they are honest, and always published in the same order. They could look something like this:
(1) A Toast Map: what the project touches.
(2) A Risk Map: what harms it prevents.
(3) A Trade-off Receipt: what was chosen, what was sacrificed, and why.
(4) One Honest Section: how the project actually works.
(5) A Timeline of Consequences: who pays later if we cut corners now.
When it matters, add a sixth: the Public Redline, i.e., what changed after feedback, and why. ‘You said X; we changed Y,’ or, ‘we did not change it, and here is why’. Either approach makes the project more legible as a process. This is the point where objections and misinterpretation are not abstract risks, and a Trade-off Receipt can become a headline, a Risk Map can be read as an admission, or a Public Redline can be weaponised by actors who do not want the project at any cost, or by stakeholders who want a project quickly and cheaply and will use the drawings to shame any attempt at durability.
But the cost of hiding the thinking is not neutral, and when architects do not narrate the system, someone else will narrate it for them, usually as waste, delay, red tape, or taste. In that story, design becomes an indulgence and the public becomes a passive audience that could not possibly understand what is going on. However, in reality, the public is not an audience, but the stakeholder that lives inside the consequences. This is where the digital world becomes inevitable, and social media becomes the drawing language of that world, making futures visible before they exist: prototypes, promises, narratives. The app’s feed then functions like a public drawing set and quietly decides what counts as real.
A comment thread will not produce a perfect public, and will result in noise, conflict, and probably trolls. But treated with seriousness, it can surface the kind of local intelligence that formal processes routinely miss [11]: the wind that funnels down a street, the place that floods every winter, the doorway everyone avoids at night, the stair that becomes a barrier.
There is a reason, beyond reputation, that this inclusion is important: if architecture wants to defend its value beyond the profession, it cannot do so by simply insisting that design matters. We must demonstrate what design does: how it prevents harm, redistributes comfort, manages risk, and builds long-term value, not at the pretty ending, but at the beginning and in the messy middle, through a clear narrative of decisions. This is also how architecture can move into the mainstream agenda, as Phineas Harper has argued in different contexts: urban issues are political issues because they determine how people live [12]. These kinds of conversations should sit on Question Time, Newsnight, or Primetime.
Design is a shared attribute, and if people are to see the value in it, they need a stake in more than the finished image. They need a story that can be argued with, because if the profession keeps showing only the toast, we should not be surprised when people assume it simply pops out.
By presenting architecture only through slick final images, we undersell the true complexity and value of the profession, argues Dr Rebecca Jane McConnell.
Read
Website by Good as Gold.