Tech Won't Save Us - What Drives Architects to Design Saudi Megaprojects? w/ Kate Wagner

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Kate Wagner to discuss the goals behind Saudi Arabia’s architectural megaprojects, the incentives for major architects to work on projects for despotic regimes, and how architecture’s relationship to tech is driven by profits and PR.Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and journalist. She’s also the creator of McMansion Hell. Follow Kate on Twitter at @mcmansionhell.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Kate wrote about Saudi Arabia’s big architecture projects, the problem with PR-chitecture, the ethical failings of modern architecture, and why utopian architectural projects suck.In 2020, Bjarke Ingels met with Jair Bolsonaro about a tourism plan for Brazil.Workers in the architecture industry have begun to unionize.Support the show

Everything about this to me is funny in a kind of terrible way. Really exemplifies a lot of what's going on in architecture, what's going on in politics, what's going on in tech. It's the perfect intersection of BS, essentially. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Kate Wagner. Kate is an architectural critic and journalist who's written for a bunch of publications, including The Baffler, The Nation, and The New Republic. She's also the creator of McMansion Hell, a blog that digs into the worst McMansions you can ever hope to find. I was excited to have Kate on this week's episode of

the show because I feel like there are a lot of similarities between things that happen in the tech industry and in the architecture industry. You know, in particular, a lot of focus on PR, especially for projects that might not have a lot of public benefit, but will certainly benefit some corporations and some capitalists down the line. No pun intended. Because we start this week's episode by talking about what has been going on in Saudi Arabia recently with projects such as Neom, The Line, and other major architectural projects that focus on these big kind of buildings that have all of these wild attributes to them that are supposed to give Saudi Arabia some

positive PR by using architecture in this way. And certainly, right from the outset, we can see that many of these projects are pretty ridiculous, are unlikely to ever be built. And certainly, if they are built, will look nothing like the images that they put out there, but are designed to get some credibility abroad. You know, they certainly make some money for some of these architectural firms that work on them. And they suggest that Saudi Arabia is something more than a bloody dictatorship built on oil money. But then we go beyond that to talk about the broader architecture

industry, you know, what drives this industry, what, you know, they are trying to do, the relationships to the tech industry that even exist within architecture, you know, as many other businesses have sought to show that they can adopt AI and all of these other kind of grand tech promises. Architecture, you know, is not immune from those things and has been doing the very same thing. And we talk in particular about Bjarke Engels, a Danish architect who, you know, is very well known in the architecture world and even outside of it. If you've heard of an architect, he's probably one of them. And for me, I feel like there's a lot of kind of similarities to Elon Musk and the types of things that he does, the projects he decides to pursue, and how, you know, there's a lot of kind of bullshit that's going on there as

well. So I thought this was a really fascinating conversation. I was really happy to have Kate on the show because I've been following her blog, McMansion Hell, for a long time. And so hopefully you enjoy this conversation as well. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every week so I can have these conversations with people like Kate, you can join supporters like Diane from Falls Church, Virginia, Ben, who lives on Wurundjeri land in so-called Melbourne, Australia, and Max, who's in Sydney, Australia, by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Kate, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very excited to chat. I've been following your blog, McMansion Hell, for a while and, you know, your work more generally. I went back to read some of your pieces while I was preparing for this and pulled up your P architecture piece. And I was like, that was in 2020.

How was that so long ago? I think the pandemic is just like warped time. I don't understand. But anyway, very excited to chat with you. Generally, you know, I want to explore what's going on in architecture, how this is relating to a lot of these big projects that we often see, and how, you know, that makes me feel a lot like similar things that we see in the tech industry constantly when it comes to kind of solving problems and things like that, right? So these are all the types of things I want to explore with you. I do want to start with Saudi

Arabia, though. You know, we see a lot of kind of major architectural projects that seem to be emerging in Saudi Arabia the past few years, whether it's Neom, which is, you know, this 500 billion dollar smart city that's supposed to be 33 times the size of New York City, or the line, which is part of that, you know, 170 kilometer or 110 mile long city, I guess it's supposed to be that's supposed to house like 9 million people. You know, these just seem kind of otherworldly, like, it doesn't seem like the type of thing that is ever actually going to get built and just seems like it's out there to like, I don't know, get some attention for Saudi Arabia, make them not seem like murderous despots. What should we make of these projects? I mean, it's very funny because the PR engine of the line and of Neom writ large is calling it a

civilizational revolution, which is pretty crazy because I mean, some of the things they're promising are really insane. Let's like, I think we need to like really create a baseline of just how insane this is sure lay it out for us a floating semi-automated port an innovation hub in the desert a year-round ski resort in the desert and a man-made freshwater lake also in the desert uh apparently there's also going to be an artificial moon, glow-in-the-dark beaches, robotic butlers, holographic teachers, and something akin to Jurassic Park. These are also being considered. Also, the whole thing will be surveilled by a core of drones and facial recognition software, which of course is held accountable only to the Saudi security state and, you know, of course, MBS. If this sounds like some kind of horrible nightmare, that's because it kind of is. I mean, it's totally ridiculous. So this is totally one of those things where the powers that be who have all this money, who are bringing in the sort of soft capital, you could say, of some of architecture's biggest names to kind of

whitewash it. It's all just a vanity project, essentially. I mean, it's just going to be a giant horizontal mall. Like, again, you see the same rhetoric in the tech industry all the time, the civilizational revolution, we're going to create whole worlds from scrap, and they're going to be future forward and all of this. I mean, architecture has been dealing with this for years. We had like the smart cities thing for the last decade. Now you've got a bunch of architects who are parroting AI PR releases. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But yeah, this is a classic tech won't save us

kind of scenario we're dealing with. I feel like when you describe like the various pieces of Neom and the line and all the big things that they're promising, like the drones and like the AI surveillance is the piece that actually sounds like the most realistic of any of it. I mean, just for the record, I don't think that this is going to get built. I mean, I think it's going to generate a lot of make work for people who make renderings for a living. But I highly doubt that this will actually, you know, come to fruition. Another thing that's very funny about it is they claim that it's going to be a very sustainable project. And it's going to all be powered by renewable energy, but the whole thing is paid

for by oil money. So okay, just this everything about this to me is funny in a kind of terrible way. Really exemplifies a lot of what's going on in architecture, what's going on in politics, what's going on in tech. It's the perfect intersection of BS, essentially. What's going on in like the entire world, unfortunately. Yeah, so you don't buy when they were clearing 150 kilometer line of dirt in the desert last year. You weren't taking that as though they're really going to get this thing off the ground. Oh, yeah, that's another really insane thing is that this is just a huge land grab. And they're basically displacing a bunch of tribesmen and sentencing them to jail in order to get this going.

So even if they don't build the whole thing, at least they got those people out of their, you know, where they live. So yeah, of course, a very manifest destiny kind of perspective. Yeah, it's going to be a very equitable society just unless you've been displaced in order to build it. And then on top of that, you know, Neom and the line are part of this huge smart city. But Saudi Arabia is also

proposing another major project, which is New Maraba, a downtown revitalization plan for Riyadh, which will include the Muqab, which is a massive cube the size of 20 empire state buildings filled with hospitality, leisure and retail that, you know, will, I guess, put Riyadh on the map as like a city of the future or something like that. Like, it's just another one of these kind of visions, right? That make no sense. The week after I published this piece, or the Baffler published this piece that I wrote about Neon, they announced the giant cube thing. And I was like, wow, I already read that. This is kind of interesting to me because it used so mega structures and architecture have been around for a really long time. I mean, you started seeing these ideas even as early as the

19th century when people first started to dwell on creating cities from scratch. But this particular project, including the people involved, have their roots in late modernism, which is the period of architecture that encompassed a bunch of different styles, like high tech, for example. And into, this is from the 60s and the 70s, essentially, post mid-century modernism, but before postmodernism. And during that time in the 70s, there were a lot of intersecting crises, much like we have today, for example, the oil crisis, the environmental crisis, the beginning of really the computer era and the era of the personal computer, you know, the space race, all of these different technological and societal clashes and innovations. It was a time of great upheaval.

You started to see ideas that ranged from totally pre-planned cities that were designed holistically by architects. These were essentially paper architecture, which is a phrase that means architecture that's not going to get built, right, or is unlikely to get built, but is really sort of a commentary about the way that we live or the way that we could live. And so this happened all over the world. It happened in Japan with this style of architecture called metabolism, which essentially borrowed from biological systems and how they interact in order to create these kind of sprawling web-like interlocking cities that are just kind of floating above the earth on stilts and all kinds of other crazy things like that. So Peter Cook is an architect who is involved in this project, which is not surprising. And he created this idea called Walking Cities with his firm Archigram.

And the drawings they put together for this are very fun, actually, and very aesthetically pleasing. It's kind of like science fiction meets the Yellow Submarine. And he had this idea of sort of endless, effortless consumption that was kind of migratory. And it sort of said a lot about the ephemerality of this period in the 60s and 70s, where we had sort of reached the height of mass consumption and had started to seize more and more critiques of mass consumption. And so on the other hand, you had this firm called Super Studio, which is, this is where it gets really funny to me. Because if you look at the renderings

for Neom and for the cube, they look just like this Italian firm's drawing, Superstudio, from the 70s, where they had these ideas of these endless cities that were basically these giant gridded mirrored cubes superimposed on various landscapes, you know, the Italian mountains, San Francisco Bay. But these were, of course, tongue-in-cheek critiques of that kind of consumption that Peter Cook was all in on, which is, you know, this was a total critique of capitalism. It's like, look at this sort of homogenous, hyper accelerated world of consumption that's just completely hedonistic and, you know, completely just dominates the landscape.

And so they were doing this as a satire. But when you look at the drawings from Neom and you look at them from the line, you just see those drawings. It's like, wow, they missed the plot on this one. Of course, I'm not sure they knew about Superstudio, which is kind of the purview of 70s fanatics and architecture critics. But there's some irony there, of course, that, you know, these discussions we've had before, these crises have their roots in other crises because the problem is capitalism.

And so, yeah, again, this is kind of the dark side, I think, of paper architecture. But it still says like all paper architecture, a lot about the society we live in. Absolutely. I think it's really funny to see these concepts like reemerge, but now they're taken seriously instead of a complete joke that people, you know, put together to kind of make fun of the industry. What do you think drives these countries or companies to want to think about putting together these massive kind of projects with these like stark attacks attached you know these people who are kind of stars of the architecture world that claim to solve all of these issues but often you know don't get built you know if we look at like many of these smart city projects of the past 10 or 15 years um there were countries all over the world saying, oh, we're going to build this massive, beautiful smart city and it's going to attract all this capital and it's going to be great. And if they were built, they were kind of shitty and didn't really reflect at all what was initially promised. And in many cases, for example, ones down in Kenya and stuff like that, they were just never built at all. What's the draw to do something like this? So I think it's very important to understand that for Saudi

Arabia, especially, this is all about what critics call soft power. So in addition to working as an architecture critic, I moonlight as a sports journalist. And in sports, you see this all the time where Saudi, UAE, like these kind of petro states that are very undemocratic, or like, for example, big chemical companies like INEOS in Britain, sponsor sporting teams in order to sort of launder their reputation, and, you know, put their name into the public consciousness and associate it with something positive. And so this is sort of the cultural side of it, though I would argue sports are obviously culture. This is sort of more of the arts side of this. It's just like how the Sacklers sponsored the Guggenheim during the opioid crisis. I mean, this is like one of the oldest

tricks in the books. Like GM had a house of the future at mid-century. Architects are all about that. I mean, I think we really need to understand something about architecture, which is really commonly misunderstood. So the people who are involved in these plans, for example, Tom Main, who is the head designer and the owner, so to speak, of Morphosis, his firm, people think of architecture as this individualized art, like you would think of sculpture, you would think of painting where there's one guy's name on the building and he designed the building. This couldn't be further from the truth unless you're talking about a sole proprietor designing, I don't know, like a kitchen renovation or a single family house or something like this. Architecture firms are essentially corporations. I mean, they have strict divisions of labor, where at the top you have these guys like Tom Main, who, of course, are public figures, but they're also essentially just petty capitalists.

I mean, and so it makes all the sense in the world that like if you think of Tom Main not as some artiste, but as a capitalist running a profitable firm, if you get a big paycheck from somebody, you're going to want to take it. It's just that simple. I mean, of course, the piece in the baffle really highlights that this is extremely hypocritical, right? Because Tom Main and a few others, Tom Wiscombe, Co-op Himmelblau, a lot of them are about,

oh, we're sustainable. We care about the future we're going to create a better world and it's like this is the opposite of that this is not sustainable this is not a better world this is completely antithetical to the liberal image that architecture tries very hard to maintain as a sort of part of the arts. But unlike other arts, architecture is not a sole endeavor, right? It is, again, like you have the stratification of labor. You have at the top, you have managers, right? You have a legal department. You have firm owners. You have publicists. You have PR. You have all of the workers who go to architecture school thinking that they're going to design really

amazing buildings and like the cities of the future. And they end up sitting at desks all day, drawing wall sections in Autodesk software for seven hours a day, if not more, usually 10 hours, if it's really near crunch time. I mean, the labor conditions are really atrocious in architecture, just like they are in tech. And so when you think about it this way, it makes a little bit more sense as to why they would take on a project like this, even if it seems antithetical to their values. It's all just about making money for the firm. And for Saudi Arabia, it's all about couching their name in this kind of soft power, this cultural power, these positive associations. That explains why this is all being done.

Because it's not being done for the betterment of the world, obviously. What? It is fascinating to hear you describe that, though, right? Because, of course, you know, we can think about how this happens in the arts where, you know, you have major artists, I remember watching a documentary about like Ai Weiwei or something a few years ago. And sure, he was coming up with these ideas, but then he had these massive teams to kind of implement them and put them together, right, in terms of these artistic creations that he wanted to make. But, you know, it also makes you think of tech, right, where you have people like the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musks who are like treated as, you know, the glorious founders who bring these great

technological ideas to the public, when really, in many cases, they're taking credit for the work of thousands of people who work below them, who do the real hard work of trying to realize these things. In some cases, they might even tell them throughout the process, like, this sucks, don't keep doing it. And the workers will keep doing it anyway, and then make it better. And then finally, someone like Steve Jobs would be like, oh, this is great. Now I'm just going to take total credit for it, right? And not give you credit, not recognize that there's this whole massive team that does this kind of work. Like, I guess that's one of

the ways where I see this as being similar to the tech industry. Right. And in having these kinds of relationships and holding up these names as though they're the great, wonderful people who deliver these things down to, you know, us lowly, I don't know, regular folks or whatever. I mean, I also think like architecture and the tech industry both kind of launder the harms that they do. For example, like their participation in gentrification or something like this, through this imagery and this rhetoric of changing the world and like bringing about a better future they use very similar techniques of communication and pr which is important to to sort of understand

it's really important to to understand that a lot of these promises are really empty right i mean you're not going to create neo you're not going to create the line you're not going to create Neo. You're not going to create the line. You're not going to create like Bjarke Engels had, for example, this floating city Oceanics that was going around a few years ago, where it's just like, we're going to solve climate change by having floating solar cities. And of course, there's no idea of, you know, who makes a city work, right? Because the idea is that like all of the, it's a very kind of Atlas shrugged idea where all of like the creators and like valuable people are going to go into the floating city. But like, there's of course has to be some kind of underclass that supports that infrastructure,

right? But that's, you know, just completely left out. And so they use very similar tactics. I mean, the architecture PR industry like really imitates tech because tech makes a lot of money. And the people who are PR people for the architecture industry also want to make a lot of money. And so you'll often see architects and their firms or even just individual artists who

are adjacent to architecture latch on to whatever the term du jour is in tech, whether it's like the metaverse or AI or, you know, effective altruism or whatever. It's just a kind of parasitic relationship they have with the tech industry, because they see a lot of, I think, architects see the tech industry as just making a lot of money. And like, I think some of them even like believe what the tech industry is just making a lot of money. And like, I think some of them even like believe what the tech industry sells through their rhetoric. And so wants to kind of capitalize on that in their own sort of genre. Yeah, they want to be associated with it and pretend that they are kind of participating in this process of making the world a better place as you know,

the tech industry and some of these PR folks would put it right even while as you say they are enabling like a ton of terrible governments to continue what they're doing and meanwhile they act as though their architecture projects are you know alleviating certain problems in society solving certain problems whether it's climate change or whatever else meanwhile as you say they're contributing to things like gentrification, making, you know, cities less livable for, you know, the people who drive them, basically. And so these kinds of harms get covered up by the PR that is behind these projects, I guess. Yeah, definitely. I mean, gentrification is one example. I think that's probably the biggest example, because that's the one with the most publicity and the one with the most political pushback.

But I mean, architects design headquarters for ExxonMobil. And the ExxonMobil headquarters is like LEED certified, environmentally friendly. So there's all these kinds of insane contradictions and bedtime stories that architecture tells itself to feel like they are not complicit in the world going to hell when it's just simply sort of not true obviously i mean architecture is also really unique right in that it is connected unlike visual art right it's connected to the real estate industry which is an industry i mean it is extremely profitable to build things that like for rich people or for corporations or, you know, it's just our built environment reflects the way of the world, right? Whether it's in the skyline of Manhattan or whether it's in the fact

that, you know, the apartment building next to me, or it was a house divided into apartments was torn down and replaced with kind of a McMansion, but like on a small lot. And the people who are coming out of there are not my Hispanic neighbors, but there are people wearing Salesforce polos and have a Labradoodle. So architecture reveals something about the way that we live and also the way that we want to live. I mean, a lot of things are aspirational, like the McMansion, like Neom. I mean, a lot of people want to believe they're closer to the Louis Vuitton class than they are to the underclass. A lot of people who are into architecture, of course, can't afford to live in architecture. I mean, most of us live in the vernacular. We don't live in architecture at all. And so this division between high architecture and the rest of us reflects,

I think, a certain alienation of the field from the people who utilize the field. Because like everything, of course, has a use and exchange value. And architecture pretends to be really concerned with the use value, but the real estate industry is only concerned with the exchange value. And so these are inherent conflicts that pop up that make it difficult for an activist architecture to A, thrive and B, be profitable because it's an industry. It's not like a feel good kind of thought experiment. There's a lot of money on the line. Absolutely. And I think what you say there also kind of brings to mind one of the issues that I often see where like the excitement is around these big projects that have like these weird kind of unique designs to them. Like, you know, it doesn't seem like people

are excited about, you know, your kind of general apartment building for low income people where they're actually going to be able to live. It's associated with things that have this kind of unique style to them that look like they're kind of distinct in the skyline. And then that's obviously contributing to, you know, making cities more expensive, more exclusive, excluding the people who, you know, actually make the city run. But as you say, there's the relationship not only to having kind of the PR function of the architect, but also, you know, the kind of people who are paying for these buildings are quite wealthy, and they don't really care, like what the larger impact of that is. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I mean, first of all, we live in an attention economy, right?

Where I mean, architects are enticed to create very loud athletic buildings because we are competing for attention on whether it's the architecture websites like Disney or Art Daily or if it's just Instagram. And so that really drives a lot of what gets published because a lot of buildings are built. I mean, for example, the New York Department of Housing has a really wonderful website highlighting new projects that are affordable housing projects. And all of them are really good looking. And I think that the aesthetics of gentrification are really commonly misunderstood. Like a McMansion is one thing, right? Like, you know, a McMansion goes up next door, like something's up. But a lot of apartment buildings, it's not easy to tell who is living in a rich apartment building and who is living in an affordable building. Because all apartment buildings are kind of these enterprises where they are really

restricted by building codes and that they have to conform to certain lots and all that make them look more similar than different from one another, right? But the reality is that these problems are political problems, right? Climate change is a political problem. Gentrification is a political problem. It's not a design problem. It's not caused by buildings looking good. It's caused by speculative developers buying up places on the cheap, displacing residents

and raising rents. That's a political action. Architecture may be a handmaiden in that, but it's very silly to say that a building causes gentrification. Like I said, buildings have their use and exchange value. The use value of a building is what it is. But what's related is that how much money can you get for that building as a commodity? How can it intersect with the other adjacent commodities to create this pressure that changes the urban landscape or a neighborhood or demographics, right? But my point is in saying that is not that architecture isn't culpable because obviously they are, but the fact that design is not going to save us, like there's no way to design a

building to make it less gentrify. That's not how it works. There's no way to design a building that stops climate change. That's not how it works. These are individualist ideas. When the reality is, we'll fix climate change or prevent climate change or fight against climate change. These are collective struggles and they're political struggles. They're not aesthetic struggles. I mean, they're aestheticized, but they're not aesthetic struggles. And so the more we realize that and the more architects realize that, the better. A really good example of this is, for example, the carceral state. A lot of architects have the yips about designing prisons. A lot of people refuse to do that. But when you work in a firm that has no workplace democracy, like most architecture firms, despite the fact that they all call each other families or whatever, the reality is, is until you have some sort of collective leverage over what projects the bosses want you to work on, you're stuck building prisons. And so unionization is a really

important step to the politicization of architecture to the point where the people who build buildings who are actually involved in the labor of architecture can say, hey, man, we don't want to work on NEO. This is messed up. I refuse. But until you have that collective leverage, there's not much you can do because again political problems and then you're challenging the the bottom line which of course is uh not something that's going to be welcome there i wanted to talk a bit about bjork engels in particular right because he is this figure who i think exemplifies this kind of relationship between tech and architecture to me and you know, you know,

the field much better than I do. So maybe there are people who are better examples of this. I went to an exhibition that was put on for his work in Copenhagen in 2019. It was kind of this big space in the museum. And there were all these kind of models of things that he had or that his firm had kind of put together. I don't know how many of them were actually built. And of course, all these kind of big boards with all this nice language, the types of things that you would see in the tech industry. One of the things I pulled off that that made me think about what you were just saying, and that also seemed to relate to kind of the tech language that also exists in the

architecture world. One of these boards said, at BIG, we have grown organically over the last two decades from a founder to a family to a force of 500. For our next transformation, the gradual growth must become a big leap. All that's in capitals

because it stands for Bjarke Engels Group of Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, and Production. I think it plays into like how he's using these similar languages, right? This is the family. I'm the founder of this firm. And, you know, it gives these kind of tech aesthetics to what is going on here. Whereas I feel like he is also someone who kind of makes himself out to be like the Elon Musk of the architecture world, right? He is putting out all these massive ideas for what buildings could be and what the future

could look like and how he's going to solve all these problems through architecture. What do you make of him? How would you describe him? I mean, I think Bjarke is an extremely talented businessman. He's really known as kind of being the fun architect and also kind of the hot architect. He was really leaning in on that. Like, I mean, Big's website is like big.dk. I mean, you want to talk about like masculine tech founder. You know, it's giving Marc Andreessen, right? Very SpaceX vibes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Bjork is kind of known for his fun solutions to serious problems. Like he has like this super cute power plant that's also a ski scope, which is like, dude, don't ask for this. Who cares? He's really good at marketing. He was on the Netflix series about design. He's very public. He dresses in like black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs. I mean, he very much is a product of the first generation of architects to really grow up with the tech industry. I believe he's in his 40s. So he's from that generation. And so he was able to really latch on to, I mean, a lot of architects were into, you

know, the sort of Y2K era technological posturing, like, for example, Coop Himmelblau, which is working on the line, and Tom Main, who was working on the line. These were architects who were really well known in the 2000s for their adoption of technologies and the aesthetics of Y2K era tech industry. But Bjarke was the only one to really understand the capitalistic goings on of the tech industry and the PR kind of operations of the tech industry and applying those to architecture. Even if he wasn't the first one, I mean, I might be missing somebody. He's obviously the most effective at it.

And he does this through this kind of cutesy funness. He's like, has this book that's like, yes more which is a pun on me vanderhohe's modernist dictum less is more and it's a comic book you know he's like the millennial architect essentially but he wouldn't be like a like a maximalist right like he still has a very kind of minimalist kind of clean line design style yeah he, he's Danish. His architecture is just very Danish architecture. You know, they're modernist, minimalist, but they're heavily articulated buildings. Like a lot of them are kind of pixelated or broken up into several different masses to create kind of almost superstructure looking buildings. And that kind of extends to his projects like Oceanics,

which are also kind of modular, at least in appearance. I don't know about a function. They're very different things, practically speaking. I don't think you need to worry about function on that one. Yeah, I don't think it's going to get built. But I mean, Jarka is funny because he's like this Danish guy from the Scandinavian country who's like very pro like the solution to the climate crisis is to have fun, essentially, and design like things people like and then we'll solve climate change. this is. But he was caught palling around with Jair Bolsonaro because Bolsonaro wanted to create a tourism master plan for part of the country of Brazil. So again, these guys, tech founders, talk out of both sides of their mouth, where they're promoting an image of making a better world while actually doing things that make the world

objectively worse. So I guess that's my little explainer on Bjarke, who is no friend of mine. I mean, if you read my columns, he is always kind of the guy I point to as being emblematic of a lot of what's wrong with architecture. And I think part of that is generational because he's an old millennial and I am a middle to young millennial. And so for me, he's like the architect that was very on the up and coming when I first got into architecture as a high schooler because he's, I don't know, 10 years older than me or so. And he was very, very successful, very, very young, which also gives him this kind of founder aesthetic, so to speak. He kind of was a prodigy in terms of how quickly it took him to, A, like begin a firm, grow

a firm and become a partner at that firm, all sort of in his 30s, which is really astonishing. Architecture firms are a little bit like, almost like advertising firms. Like if you watch Mad Men, where it takes a really long time to get your name on the building if you are starting at a firm. And then when you die, like your name becomes an acronym on the building. Like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill are all dead, but it's still SOM. They're not going to add any more letters. But this was a very kind of mid-century capitalist way of doing architecture, like an international firm. Whereas Bjarke is very

much the millennial way of doing it, which is like, we're a family, we're growing, we are changing the world. It's all there. It's all tech rhetoric. And if you realize it's all tech rhetoric, you realize how hollow it all is. You don't buy it for a second. No, completely. And I feel like, you know, you say he's the one that was kind of taking off as you were going through all this, as you were getting into architecture, learning about these things. You know, for me, as someone who is not very well versed in architecture, he's like one of the few names that I know, because he also has this profile and this relationship to the tech industry, right? In the piece that you wrote, I believe it was the one for the Baffler, you wrote about how it's important for these architects to

kind of portray a liberal image, even as they work with these kind of dictatorial regimes and stuff, right? You know, in the tech industry, what we've seen recently is, you know, it was important for them to have this image kind of in the past, but increasingly they are becoming much more open with just kind of having a right-wing politics and championing that. Has something similar occurred in the architecture industry, or is it still important for them to have that kind of liberal image? I mean, I definitely think that it is extremely important for them to have that liberal image because of their proximity to the arts and the arts have this liberal image, right? It would be very not so great if today's crop of architecture, I can't speak for the past, like we're like, you know, got on the anti-transgender train. It would be bad for them because their whole thing is like, we're artists, right?

We're collaborators, we're this, this, this, and this. But unlike the tech industry, which is like, obviously, you know, it has a similar rhetoric, but it's not so close to the arts. In fact, they're very anti-art, I would say. It allows, I think, a little bit more room for sort of right-wing politics to fester. But I think the actual practical reality of architecture is very right-wing. I mean, there's a huge culture of overwork and hero worship, and it's all very masculine. And a lot of that is couched in kind of like Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead type aesthetics of like the architect is like some big hero who's going to change the world. And it's always a man. And he's usually white. And yeah, I mean, the actual lived politics of architecture are not that far off from,

you know, it's just typical sort of capitalist operations, right? But because architecture is about image making, in a way that I don't think tech is exactly. I think they're quite different in that regard. A lot of architectural production is literally image making, like things like Neom, for example, which will never get built. in a very aestheticized and kind of illustrated way. And so if you just keep your politics generally vague and liberal, then you get away with everything. For example, there like Zaha Hadid, who was involved, very heavily involved in the World Cup plans for Qatar and has a stadium in Qatar right before she died. And she basically said, because she got so much praise forever, about like being like one of the most powerful women in architecture i mean i kind of consider her the hillary clinton of architecture where her sort of progressive imagery is definitely more sort of mythologized rather

than concretely expressed in actions and she basically said to the press when i asked her about like i don't know her stadium being built by what are essentially slaves, like migrant workers who are trapped working for, you know, the Qatari government in order to build the World Cup. She basically was like, that's not my problem. So like, actually, sometimes they do go mask off. But she's still very much kind of lionized. I mean, look, for example, okay, also Adjaye, David Adjaye, who is probably the most famous Black architect who has ever lived, designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian Museum, which is a really wonderful building and a very sensitively designed building.

And one that I think is, it was one of my favorite buildings of, you know, the last 10 years, just because of how it handled such a sensitive topic. I mean, you start in the bottom of the know, subjugated, you know, this sort of subaltern population that, you know, through great political struggle, gradually moved more and more up towards the light, so to speak, and into public life and into, you know, culture and their work in culture and their all these things are now starting to be finally like really richly acknowledged. And so to me, like it is kind of a head scratcher why someone who designs a building that is that sensitive goes on and be like, yeah, I'm going to do the line. But again, it all makes sense if you realize that these are petty capitalists. They make money.

They run huge businesses. David Adjaye Associates is not just David Adjaye. It's David Adjaye and like hundreds and hundreds of people. So it's very important to keep up those appearances. And so like when they get masked off, like for example, when it was it came out that Bjarke was working with Bolsonaro, he got really pissed off and was basically like, the world is more complicated than people want it to seem. And that's always what they say, something like that. It's like, well, the world is complicated, or it's beyond my control or something. They don't like it when the mask comes off. So the more you pull off the masks, I mean, it's kind of the urgent work of

architecture criticism to pull off that mask, at least in my opinion, in my personal practice. Totally. And something that's very common in tech criticism as well, right, to show who these people really are, what they're actually doing, what their impacts on the world really are, you know, with the types of projects that they're working on, the type of people that they're working with. Going back to Bjarke Ingels for a second, like you talked about the oceanic city which is you know this basically like an updated version of seasteading you know which is kind of a libertarian ideal anyway but you know concerningly endorsed by the united nations and he's also you know worked on a supposed kind of mars city that he wanted to be trialed in the dubai desert or at least he said like that was kind of the concept behind it so these things do very much seem to be trialed in the Dubai desert, or at least he said that was kind of the concept behind it.

So these things do very much seem to be playing on ideas that are coming out of the tech industry, whether it's the seasteading Peter Thiel-type vision of society that he was once associated with, or Elon Musk saying, we're going to all go live on Mars, and what's that going to look like? It does very much seem to be picking up on like the tech bullshit as well for the

credibility and PR that comes with it. Absolutely. I also think like some of these things to me are just like, man, we're never getting free if this is where the UN is putting their rule. Yeah, I believe I spoke to someone who said that like there was someone who was associated with seasteading who became involved in this particular like UN organization. And that's why like they started kind of endorsing this this kind of like idea. Oh, it's classic. Yeah. I mean, yeah. All these connections all the way down for like the worst things and projects and people. And this becomes presented, as you say, as like

our solution to climate change when it's going to do nothing of the sort. No, no. I mean, you said it best. That's the reality of the situation. I wonder then, you know, to start to wrap up this conversation, what you think of the consequences of this approach, right? Because you've talked a lot about how these issues are inherently political, but, you know, the tech industry presents its tech as the way that we solve these problems. The architecture industry presents its kind of buildings and major projects as the solution to climate change or whatever else. Do you think that there is a kind of threat or risk in the way that they approach these things and the way that people buy into it. Because then instead of, you know, say having governments implementing policies that would

address these issues, they say, oh, look, you know, we are building this massive kind of architectural project or real estate development that is going to address this issue in the same way that they're saying, you know, they're going to adopt the technology and it's going to solve things. What do you think about that? I mean, I personally think that this is really, to me, the urgent project of criticism. This is why we actually need architecture critics, like they do actually form a important part of busting this bubble. Because right now we have a media ecosystem that essentially feeds on PR. I mean, you basically, architects and designers send their press releases to places like Arc Daily or Dazeen,

and they're just republished kind of uncritically. As long as that keeps happening, this kind of reputation laundering is just going to continue. You really need to have a very concentrated, I mean, for me personally, my whole project as an architecture critic is to pop this bubble and to burst this idea that this is how the world works, that architects can solve these issues through some kind of formal machinations or technology that's not real, like floating cities, solar floating cities or whatever. And so that becomes a critical project. And that media does have something to do with that. And I don't think it's all incumbent on media. In fact, I think it's mostly not incumbent on media. I think it actually, the burden lies on architects. Again, like I said earlier, the more architects

become politicized as workers, as as activists the more they become organized as workers as activists like that's where the fault line lies i mean i can sit here in my ivory tower and say like bjarke angles is full of crap for his seasteading thing i can say that till the cows come home he doesn doesn't care. He's like, oh, some architecture critic is mad at me. It's like, so what? Architecture critics are always mad. That's like their job. So the architecture ecosystem of production is really reliant on Autodesk software, whether it's Revit, whether it's AutoCAD, SketchUp, whatever. One day in November, which is actually my birthday,

November 17th, all of that went down. For six hours, it went down. Millions and millions of dollars were lost in offices alone. I can't imagine around the world. Like people were not working, not producing, not contributing to the value of the company for almost an entire workday. The revenues loss were extremely substantial.

People's projects were pushed back months because they had things that were due that they couldn't export files for to show to clients. I mean, it had extremely widespread material impact. And so if you think about that, the power that the stoppage of production in the modern architectural environment, which is heavily dependent on technology, imagine what a strike could do. Millions in six hours just gone imagine if it's multiple days weeks you want to ask how you solve this problem how you like go about creating a different architecture that isn't so vapid and stupid and believes that the problems of this world that are political problems that are part of the inherent contradictions of capitalism can just be solved by making a cool building. That power lies in the people who make architecture. Full stop. I think we just need to blow up the Autodesk servers and that'll do it.

How to blow up a server. Yeah. I appreciate you making that point because I think it's really insightful as we think about this industry, what it relies on, how you might seek to change it. I wonder, do you see things moving in that direction? Like obviously if we think publicly, there's a lot of people who are interested in your work and the critiques that you level at architecture.

I think recently about say like the vessel in Hudson Yards in New York that received a lot of criticism. I think about the criticism that's leveled at these Saudi projects. Like it does seem like there's a more kind of common criticism of these kind of architectural ideas and what's behind them. You know, what do you think of that kind of public shift and is this more common than I'm making out here? And what do you see kind of on the other side of things? Do you see more organizing among the architecture workers and more activism on that side of things as well? I mean, yeah, definitely. I think that first of all, to answer your first point about

like public perception, I actually think sports play a huge role in this because these powers that be like oil companies, like the Saudi regime, etc., first started laundering their reputation through sports. And they were very successful in this, but people have become pretty cynical about it. I mean, there's lots of jokes. People are always making jokes about like, the Saudi regime, you know, assassinating Khashoggi, for example, when it comes up when some journalist in sports like makes a kind of daring question, so to speak, you see a lot of these common sentiments on social media, people are not that credulous, you know, people don't buy the idea that because you bought a sports team, you're suddenly like all good now. And I think, you know, this is also sort of

bleeding into people's perception of these autocrats' rules in architecture. I mean, there's also been a lot of pushback. Like, for example, when Putin launched his war in Ukraine, there was a huge pushback to abandoning projects in Russia that a lot of really, really important architects signed on to. Essentially, they withdrew their labor from Russian projects. And so that's just one example of like, yeah, if something becomes politically untenable to the point where like the criticism is not worth the effort or it's not worth the money, it's not worth the popping of that bubble of, liberal politics, if they can't come back from that, then yeah, they will retreat. As far as unionization goes, it's probably one of the

more optimistic things about architecture is that architects are definitely becoming more politicized. You see it a lot in, for example, the architecture Lobby, which is a organization that is, you know, fighting and campaigning for a more equitable and more not terrible architecture, really targeting working conditions and, you know, things like licensure, which is a kind of a racket, things like targeting student loan debt, overwork, cultural stuff. And of course, also a huge movement has come from grad student unionization, of which architects have been a very pretty significant part. And there were firms, for example, Shop attempted to unionize, but it didn't work for a variety

of reasons. But the attempts are starting. Yeah, in that direction, things are definitely becoming more positive. So it's all terrible news in that regard. In fact, I think actually, we're seeing a real turning point in the politicization of architecture. Fantastic. I think that's a great place to leave it right on a positive note, when we've been talking about so much negative in relation to all this. Kate, it is great to speak with you. Thank you so much for your insights on all this stuff. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you.

Kate Wagner is an architectural critic and journalist and creator of the McMansion Hill blog. You can follow Kate on Twitter at McMansion Hill. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.