Affective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments

Linda Kopitz

Architecture, Affective Architecture, Care, Built

Environments, Affect, Imagination

Keywords

Krisis 42 (1): 29-42.

Abstract

Between urban sprawl and a return to the rural, between technological advancements

and historical preservation, built environments become a productive sphere to explore

imaginations of a shared future on a changing planet. At the same time, contemporary

architectural writing increasingly appears to extend further than considerations of envi-

ronmental care – particularly in relation to spaces and places frequently criticized for

their “uncaring” neoliberal politics. This article will argue that architecture is increas-

ingly infused and saturated with aective connotations of care. Approaching global

examples critically allows for a further exploration of the interdependency between

spaces, places, and communities that care. In this understanding, care becomes, quite

literally, structural.

DOI

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC

Licence

https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37891

https://doi.org/

Affective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments

Linda Kopitz

Introduction

Between urban sprawl and a return to the rural (cf. Taylor 2023), between technologi-

cal advancements and historical preservation, built environments become a productive

sphere to explore imaginations of a shared future on a changing planet. At the same

time, contemporary architectural design increasingly appears to extend further than

considerations of environmental care, particularly in relation to spaces and places fre-

quently criticized for their “uncaring” neoliberal politics. The starting point for this

article was precisely a space like this: a photograph1 of a room with the oor and

walls covered in blue fabric, empty except for three white lounge chairs in the shape

and (presumed) softness of a pillowy cloud, and two white oor lamps, standing del-

icately on wooden legs. Eliciting ideas of sleepiness and calmness and serenity, the

room appears to keep the bustle of the outside world out with long, white, owing

curtains. Somewhat surprisingly, this room is one of the oces of a German tech

start-up specializing in safety and security systems – superimposing the exploitative

aspects of a 24/7 start-up-culture with the connotations of serenity of the bedroom as

the presumably most private room within the home.2 Blurring the boundaries between

relaxation and eciency, mindfulness and productivity under a larger schema of caring

values, this layering of connotations is neither accidental nor – as I will argue here –

unique. If “space and its making are political” (Gámez and Rogers 2008, 22, emphasis

in original), a deeper engagement with the architectural process, from the initial idea

to the built structure, is paramount to understanding the social, political, and cultural

connotations of space-making.

As both concept and practice, “care” is as interdisciplinary as it is intangible – tra-

versing practical concerns in healthcare to philosophical approaches and political discus-

sions, from caring for the (human) bodies directly around us to caring about more abstract

concepts like the environment or the world at large. Tracing care in architecture allows

us to think dierently about not just what care means but also where care can be located.

Here, I am following an understanding of care as both an imaginary and a practice – or, as

the members of the Care Collective phrase it: “Care is our individual and common ability

to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast

majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive – along with the planet

itself ” (2020, 6). In the absence of one universal denition of care, approaching care as a

constantly shifting and changing imaginary, an “ability”, allows for an engagement with

possibility and, for the purposes of this article, with architecture as a site of becoming.

If “architecture can creatively and critically invest in the potentiality of spaces

yet to come” (Frichot and Loo 2013, 3), paying attention to the concept of care in the

process of designing and building also has the potential to ultimately create more caring

spaces. Drawing on award-winning examples ranging from the workspace re-imagined

as “hub and home” to governmental buildings (re-designed to “radiate transparency”),

I argue in this article that architectural design is increasingly infused and saturated with

aective connotations of care by: 1) blurring the boundaries between corporate and

the private; 2) emphasizing nature and natural materials in built environments; and 3)

highlighting the embodied experience of spaces.3 At the same time, the potential of

architectural writing to both ground the intangibility of care on the one hand, and

strategically employ care as a rhetoric – a ‘care-washing’– of neoliberal processes on

the other, highlights the ambivalences in these processes. As Frichot and Loo suggest:

“Architecture invests in words, or all the things that can be said and written about a

built (or unbuilt and speculative) form, as much as it engages in its seemingly central

task, which is to design, form and construct indisputably material edices, spaces and

objects” (2013, 4). To arm this understanding of architecture as embedded in practices

of not just place-making but simultaneous meaning-making, I draw on examples from

across the globe, consciously blending the boundaries between dierent projects to

trace how the notion of care, intermingling with other values like openness, dialogue,

and transparency, has been employed in the framing of a Taiwanese meatpacking factory

as much as the Swiss headquarters of a luxury brand, in a judicial building in Singapore

just as in a German start-up company.

By intentionally establishing connections between not only dierent types of

buildings and dierent architectural approaches but also dierent geographical regions

and dierent requirements, I aim to emphasize the underlying notion of care that has

become prevalent in architectural practices over recent years. What might at rst glance

come across as a random selection of examples actually follows an algorithmic logic that

doubles as the methodological process for this article: the diverse projects and contexts

cited here are all categorized under “Commercial & Oces” (which quite strikingly

also includes institutional buildings) on the curated architecture platform Architecture

Daily4, thus collectively reveal the prevalence of care as valorisation in both corporate

and public architecture. Approaching these examples from a critical media studies per-

spective – taking into account the visuals, as well as how they are described and embed-

ded into the website – teases out conceptions and contradictions in the architectural

inscription of care. Activating Hays’s understanding of architecture as a “specic kind of

imagination – an intimate blend of sensing, imaging, and conceptualizing” (2010, 357),

the methodological approach to these examples is similarly an exploration of the play

between thinking about and sensing through built environments. The repetitive format

of these marketing materials – following the same (or at least highly similar) structure

and bound by the expectations and aordances of the same website – foregrounds the

connections between these seemingly accidental examples.

It is important to note that, while the examples discussed here might qualify as

responses to Gámez and Rogers’s “call for an architecture of change” (2008), they neither

necessarily or intentionally, nor actively or convincingly, oer alternative approaches

to contemporary questions. While acknowledging that “architecture as product and

process is always embedded in social dynamics” (2010, xi), Till similarly points out that

the engagement of (most) architects with these dynamics remains somewhat lacking.

Authorship also plays a relevant role in this context: as marketing materials, these texts

and images are carefully selected, curated and structured to tell a specic story about

the concept-becoming-concrete. The disclaimer “text description provided by the

architects”, prominently positioned at the top of each page, further underlines this

conscious interpretation of design by the architects who quite literally construct these

meanings. Prompted through the restrictive and recurring, established and expected

format of Architecture Daily to put the “unspoken” conditions of architectural design

into actual words, the complex positions of practitioners that are “clearly complicated

by [architecture’s] dual role as art and industry” (Jobst 2013, 73, emphasis in original)

become tangible. Tronto famously argues that “using care as a critical concept will

require a fundamental reorientation of the disciplines of architecture and urban plan-

ning” (2019, 26). How, then, can we move from an “Architecture of Change” to an

“Architecture of Care” – and more specically one encompassing the political, social,

material, and emotional conditions of care as mentioned above? Tronto’s answer to this

question is the call for an architecture willing and able to share the “responsibilities of

caring for our world” (2019, 28). In this article, I elaborate on this answer by suggesting

that shifting the emphasis from caring for to caring through and caring in can expand the

direction and scope of care as both a concept and a practice.

Despite the architectural projects discussed here being framed in Architecture

Daily through their outstanding excellence, there is an undeniable similarity in these

(re)designs: there is an undercurrent of genericness that resembles what Koolhaas

(1998) has described as the “generic city”, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet, it is precisely

the common prevalence of an explicit and implicit discourse of care that makes these

examples a productive starting point to demonstrate how architecture not only shapes

the conditions of a space spatially, but also our understanding of that space guratively.

Moving from the physical setting – and the absence of physical boundaries therein –

of a caring space in the rst section “Hub/Home”, via the caring materiality of natural

building materials in the second section “Material/Intangible”, to the negotiation of

embodied caring connections in the third section “Emptiness/Encounter”, this article aims

to challenge our understanding of the capacity of buildings.

1. Hub/Home: Traversing Boundaries between the Corporate and the Private

While situating the animating concern for their book “The Room of One’s Own”,

Aureli and Tattara argue that “the separation between house and workspace is in decline

as production unfolds everywhere” (2016). At the same time, it should be noted that

this unfolding of production everywhere is not a unidirectional move: while we mostly

talk about the blurring of clear boundaries between work/life as it comes to work

entering the private sphere, the opposite also appears to be true. With the aectively

charged imaginary of the “home” – in the sense of the private, but also the safe and the

serene – infusing the workplace in the examples discussed here, the unique aordances of

the “home” simultaneously become embedded in the neoliberal logic of productivity. If

“architecture, as both process and form, can be understood as the result of a multiplicity of

desires – for shelter, security, privacy and boundary control; for status, identity and repu-

tation; for prot, authority and political power; for change or stability; for order or chaos”

(Dovey 2013, 134) – the negotiation of these desires in the design of corporate buildings

becomes particularly interesting. Positioning the neoliberal workplace as a caring space

through the aective connotations of the home, as I argue in this section, underlines an

understanding of architectural writing as embedded in processes of meaning-making.

With a “spatial organization where limits between workspaces and common

areas are diused”, the oces of the informatics company iGarpe-GPISoft in San

Javier, Spain5 are exemplary of this understanding. Structurally, the building organizes

both open spaces, partially separated seating areas and closed oce – with “closed”

meaning separated by wood-framed glass here – around an open atrium to establish

“direct relationships between the team”. A collaborative, balanced work life becomes

not an attitude or approach achieved through and embedded in corporate culture,

but rather an architectural challenge to be achieved with open oor plans rather than

through managerial decisions. Going even further, the common areas of the Spanish

informatics oce are specically “conceptually considered as domestic spaces”, envel-

oping moments of relaxation within structures of productivity, private conversations

within the corporate context. The new building of the T-HAM PABP meat processing

factory, located in Southern Taiwan,6 the largest one in the country, similarly states an

intention to “upgrade the working environment of their factory workers and their

daily working experience” as one of the main animating concerns in the architectural

process – albeit in fourth place, preceded by priorities to increase productivity, expand

production capacities, and maintain corporate standards. In what might be one of the

least-caring industries imaginable – both in environmental impact and labor conditions

– the reconceptualization of the factory to be “neither a shed, nor a fridge-like box”

highlights an attention to the well-being of employees inside as much as to the (public)

perception from the outside. The light-lled spaces for social interaction in the front

of the building in addition to access to the rooftop has not only “made the factory

workers’ daily experience much more pleasant”.

Here, again, the link between design and desire becomes imminent. As

Ballantyne argues, “most buildings most of the time are commissioned with the expec-

tation that one’s current needs will be better accommodated than they were before

the move into the new building” (2013, 194). While there certainly is an expanding

dialogue between design as a practice and as a form of resistance to social, political,

and environmental issues,7 the emphasis on care as governing principle and guiding

value becomes undermined by a near constant linking between “better motivation and

improved product quality” here. In neoliberal logic, “happy” workers will be willing to

stay longer in these enhanced working environments – both in terms of working hours

as in professional career duration – and channel the architecturally augmented “moti-

vation” into their labor. Following Tronto’s suggestion that “even if caring needs are

recognized, they are often in conict with each other” (2019, 30), the negotiation of the

dimensions and hierarchies of care through architectural writing become particularly

interesting. If “neoliberalism is uncaring by design” (The Care Collective 2020, 10), it

is interesting to see how design itself attempts to re-inscribe caring values into clearly

neoliberalist processes. Notably, this also extends from a spatial organization to other,

seemingly purely aesthetic choices.

Writing about Luis Barragán’s emotional approach to architecture, Van den

Bergh points out an “architectural mise en scène of space and light, material and color,

of smell and sound, movement and time” (2006, 1). Strategically using the same strate-

gies that are also used in more private contexts – warm lighting to create an atmosphere

of calmness, for instance – blurs the lines between the private and the corporate even

further. Using their own architectural and design practice as a case study in humanistic

architecture, Richard Mazuch and Rona Stephen conclude that “visual monotony can

contribute to physiological and emotional stress” (2005, 50). Interestingly, the color

palettes in the examples here consciously break this visual monotony, eectively shifting

the attention from a potentially monotonous work to a visually stimulating environ-

ment. These aesthetic choices, meant to “regulate privacy and assure comfort” (as in the

iGarpe-GPISoft oces) and raise “the morale and pride in the workforce” (as in the

T-HAM PABP factory) are also strategic choices embedded in existing power dynam-

ics. While undoubtedly adding another layer to the problematic absence of recognition

of domestic work, the blurring between these spheres within both the home and the

workplace also blends the ideologies connected to these spaces under a neoliberal

umbrella. If the “domestic space as a space of retreat and intimacy unburdened by

working relationships” (Dogma 2016) is (re)situated in the sphere of productivity, the

separation between work/life becomes even more challenging than already assumed.

This emphasis on care could also be understood as a dual defense against critical con-

cerns raised about “social exclusivity in the design and production of the built environ-

ment” (Jenkins 2010, 19) on the one hand, and about exploitative work practices on the

other. This ambivalence further points to a necessary carefulness when reading care in

built environments, highlighting the importance of the context and contextualization

of these examples.

If socio-cultural concerns – from politics and economics to desire – indeed con-

stitute architecture’s “perennial sites of negotiation” (Grosz 2001, xvi), an exploration of

the implicit and explicit emphasis placed on care within presumably “uncaring” spheres

becomes paramount for a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship

between the built environment and the bodies moving in and through it. Clearly, the

shift of the connotations of “home” from the private to the private sector is cause for

concern. At the same time, there is a recursive element within the discourses presented

here: these examples partially reverberate the modernist architectural conviction that

fundamental social and political change can be implemented (solely) by design. The con-

tradiction that Gámez and Rogers see “between the goal of social change and those of

market capitalism and institutionalized power” (2008, 20) could arguably be transferred

from modernist architecture to the present, from urban architecture to corporate archi-

tecture. With a quite optimistic tone, Bell suggests that for communities and individuals,

the process of designing the built environment has the potential to “solve their struggles

by reshaping their existence” (2008, 14). This approach to understanding architecture as

a proactive strategy in tackling social, cultural, political, and environmental issues reso-

nates with a framing of architectural choices as “creating a kind work environment”8 or

embodying “autonomy, freedom, solidarity”.9 Traversing the boundaries between the

corporate and the private, then, also traverses the complicated line separating a re-imag-

ination of the workplace from a mere “care-washing”. Caught between the promise

of care and the premise of capitalism, contemporary architectural writing appears to

perform a bridging between these contradictory demands by inscribing values into

structures – and, quite notably, the materials used to build them.

2. Material/Intangible: Tracing Care in Built Environments

Existing research on the connection between architecture and wellbeing frequently

focuses on the architectural and interior design of (mental) health facilities.10

Consequently, the role of architecture in these spaces is reduced to a supporting one for

clinical practitioners in a top-down hierarchy that re-inscribes existing power discrep-

ancies between patients and healthcare professionals. Instead, this article consciously

stays away from both private residences and healthcare facilities to trace the aective

potential of care in buildings where care is not conventionally a primary consideration.

Conceptualized as “the feel and emotional resonance of place” (Du 2013, 217), this

approach also connects and intersects with Birdsall et al.’s exploration of how “values” are

mediated and experienced through the senses in urban, public spaces (2021). Speaking

about the shifting paradigms in architecture from the 1980s to now, Hayes argues for

an “ontology of the atmospheric—of the only vaguely dened, articulated, and indeed

perceptible, which is nevertheless everywhere present in its eects” (2010, 358). The

“atmospheric”, then, closely relates to the ideas of aective dimensions of care as an

architectural value proposed here. This section proposes that materiality plays a decisive

role in conjuring these caring, atmospheric spaces – particularly through the emphasis

on natural building materials.

A case in point: the Swatch and Omega Campus in Biel, Switzerland,11 encom-

passing the headquarters, factory, and museum of the renowned watch manufacturer,

is one of the largest hybrid mass timber structures worldwide. The choice of timber as

the main building material is contextualized by the architects as simultaneously caring

for the environment – as the material “holds much promise for the future” – and for

the well-being of employees – as “wood environments are known to contribute to

greater occupant happiness”. Underneath this reasoning, however, there appears to be

yet another logic: while the use of wood is framed as a vehicle for care on the one

hand, they are framed as an incentive for productivity on the other. What architect Luis

Barragán poignantly referred to as “emotional architecture” (see Bergh 2006) strives for

deeper sensory resonance, which could also be understood as a step away from a more

technology-driven approach to both the design process and its results. Interestingly,

technology also moves into the background in most of the descriptions – almost as if

highlighting smart technologies and smart materials is diametrically opposed to the

emphasis on the natural, the pure, the caring. The previously mentioned Taiwanese

meat processing factory, for instance, is covered in textured tiles made from clay mim-

icking “the fertile agricultural lands of this southern county” – a typical Taiwanese

cladding material evoking a sense of heritage and continuation of tradition, a sense of

the “known” in an accelerated, globalized industry. Not coincidentally, the natural mate-

rial also helps to maintain the building’s internal temperature, which is of the highest

importance to ensure an adherence to the strict quality standards of producing export-

able meat products. This dual function of natural materials in providing comfort while

at the same time enhancing productivity can also be traced in other examples. Instead of

an intangible and immaterial atmosphere, then, the focus is squarely placed on organic

material as embodiment of care. Common to these examples is their introduction of

natural elements, both in building materials and interior design, while at the same time

opposing the growth and uncontrollability of nature with clearly designated “natural”

areas. In doing so, the design draws on the calming eects of nature experiences (as for

instance Franco et al. 2017 have discussed), while at the same time entrapping these

experiences within the spatially planned structure of the built environment.

Transferring ideas about the rural idyll to the urban sphere, the integration of

plants within these corporate architectures resembles what Boer has called “scripted

environments” (2018). A similar aesthetic – a ground oor quite literally grounding

plants, which extend into a vertically open oor plan – can be found across the exam-

ples categorized in Architecture Daily, from the oces of the Spanish electronic and

informatics company discussed earlier to the administrative spheres of the Chinese

Guangming Public Service Platform. Harting et al.’s terminology of “urban nature”

“admits the presence of nature even in those human environments that some consider

the antithesis of the natural” (2014, 208). In what is – somewhat optimistically – called

a “garden” in these architectural instances, the plants are not potted but still spatially

distanced from the rest of the space: placed in strategically located cutouts of the oor

paneling, centering the looming and lush palm trees as the middle point of an open

atrium or dividing paths with a succulent-laden barrier, this “natural” presence within

the “urban” remains nonetheless somewhat separate. Franco et al. (2017) emphasize

the multi-sensory aspect of nature experiences, which in turn links the well-being of

nature with the importance of not just vision, but all senses. If “perhaps touch is not

just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind” (McLuhan 1994,

108), the haptic could be assumed to play an integral role in creating the experience

of (the benets of) nature within the built environment. In the examples discussed

here, the integration of natural materials as well as organic bodies nevertheless remains

restricted to the visual: out of (physical) reach, the natural needs to be “felt” rather than

“touched”, it appears. Through the shifting and changing charge of both materials and

spaces created with and by these materials, the “feel” of nature can interestingly also be

found outside of notably green and/or natural buildings.

With its imposing walls of curved aluminum panels and glass, the Guangming

Public Service Platform,12 a dual oce and administration building in Shenzhen, China,

does not immediately evoke connotations of nature and the natural from the outside.

Nonetheless, framed quite poetically as resembling a “vessel oating on the mountain”,

the perforated material not only lets fresh air into atrium spaces, but also creates intricate,

ower-like patterns from the inside. DeLanda proposes thinking about form and struc-

ture not as something imposed from the outside, but rather “as something that comes

from within the materials, a form that we tease out of those materials as we allow them

to have their say in the structure we create” (2004, 21). Despite the material hardness

of both glass and aluminum plates in this example, the built structure teases a softness

out of them, allowing the building to become a owing, breathing counterpoint to the

stillness of the skyscrapers around it. This understanding requires an openness to both

the aordance of the materials in themselves and their connectivity or, in the words of

Hale, “connecting, not cutting o; cultivating and following the ows of force rather

than imposing upon space the sentence of a closed or even ‘nished’ object for static

contemplation or inhabitation” (2013, 127).

This is precisely what I mean by tracing care in built environments: with an

emphasis on natural materials, particularly wood and stone, and owing forms, partic-

ularly circles and waves, the examples discussed here insist on care as something that

leaves traces, which in turn accumulate to aectively charge the spaces created with and

through these materials. In “The Cultural Politics of Emotion”, Ahmed begins with the

suggestion that “bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and

others” (2004, 1). Following this understanding, charging the built environment with

“care” has the potential to envelop the bodies within these spheres and spaces with(in)

care. This also underlines how the caring connotations of the home, as discussed in the

previous section, can become entangled with the aective materiality of nature through

the (re)imagination of conventionally non-caring spaces. As an intangible, almost infec-

tious, force, care appears to move from the building materials to the built structure,

infusing the open space between these materials and structures as well as aecting the

bodies moving around and within them. Shifting our attention from what is there to

what is not there – the human body – the following section further complicates an

understanding of care as simultaneously grounded yet intangible.

3. Emptiness/Encounters: On the Absence of the Body

“Architecture and urbanism are always concerned with the future” (2019, 12), Fitz and

Krasny write in the introduction to Critical Care. Fundamental in (literally) building

the future, architecture is at the same time also concerned with the imagination of

more livable futures – for our environments, but also our own bodies, our own selves.

Whereas the discursive negotiation of natural building materials and their relation to

both sustainable and aective experience, as discussed above, is more concerned with

the former, the positioning and movement of the human body within such charged

spaces should not be overlooked. Between a striking emptiness and the promise of

more meaningful encounters, this section explores how the absence of the body adds a

further political dimension to the architectural imagination of caring spaces. Replacing

the clear lines of the “cubicle oce” or the “assembly line”, the design of the examples

discussed in this article quite literally opens up new conceptions of how public and

private infrastructures “work”. At the same time, the emphasis on transparency and

visibility could also be understood as a perversion of the panopticon as a “socio-spatial

diagram of one-way visibility wherein practices and subjectivities are produced to meet

the anonymous gaze of authority” (Dovey 2013,137), particularly in the corporate/

public settings discussed here. Rather than an unidirectional visibility, the control

through an invisible authority becomes dispersed to everyone in the room as well as to

the room itself – again juxtaposing previously discussed senses of privacy and serenity.

Framed in clear contrast to historical perceptions of the juridical complex and

its architectural embodiment, the Singapore State Courts,13 which comprise district

and magistrate courts in fty-three vertically stacked courtrooms and fty-four hearing

chambers, extend this idea of openness: the design eschews a reecting facade in favor

of a series of open terraces, naturally completed with lush planted gardens, and “the

court tower as a result appears light, open, and welcoming”. Yet, precisely by perform-

ing an architectural openness, these spaces remain highly structured and streamlined,

especially with regards to the implicit potential for interaction. The spatial division

of the Singapore State Courts into two separate towers – the one in the front accom-

modating the courtrooms and the one in the back the juridical oces – is specically

designed to “not only bring light deep into the building but help keep the circulation of

the judges, persons-in-custody, and the public separate”. Following the understanding

that “architecture is always and everywhere implicated in practices of power” (Dovey

2013, 133), the structural inscription of dierent spheres underneath a layer of welcom-

ing openness keeps the existing practices of power in place.

The Huis van Albrandswaard,14 the oce building of the Dutch municipality

of Albrandswaard, similarly plays with the idea of interaction through spatial connec-

tivity: “The cafeteria for the civil servants is merged with the sports cafeteria of the

connecting gym. This encourages more interaction between council members and

citizens”. However, this architectural choice ultimately does not encourage dialogue,

but rather a sense of mirroring by portraying civil servants as “just like us” while not

actually providing meaningful access to mutual civic exchange. Interestingly, the munic-

ipal building is one of the rare examples of a featured project depicting people within

the photographs, and yet only underlines this point: the only (human) body featured in

the selection of thirteen photographs is a municipality employee. Framed and half con-

cealed by the walls of a towering wooden cubicle, the employee, already small within

the vast openness of the room itself, is looking down at a laptop screen opposite an

empty chair, evoking connotations of an inaccessible, impersonal bureaucratic apparatus

more than an interactive sphere. Although open spaces can be a potential critique on

the crowdedness and business of modern life – recalling “silence as an architectural form

all its own” (Hays 1984, 22) – the silence in this image rather detaches the building

from the life both inside and outside its walls. Assuming that creating caring spaces for

communities is only possible through discourse, the absence of an engagement with the

existing dynamics, particularly within governmental buildings, is striking.

Writing on the urban as increasingly post-political sphere, Boer argues that

“inhabitants are treated as consumers rather than citizens, who also need to work

increasingly eciently, which fuels the demand for smooth, friction-free urban spaces”

(2018). This notion of a friction-free sphere can also be applied to the examples dis-

cussed here: in the absence of interaction, of encounters, of engagement, the productive

and potentially disruptive possibility of friction is also undermined in favor of a smooth,

continuous progression of existing processes. Provocatively, one might even ask whether

this quietness might allude to the “ideal” of a society that does not disagree with exist-

ing power structures and dynamics. Expanding on Dovey’s proposition of understand-

ing buildings as an “assemblage of socio-spatial ows and intersections” (2013, 131),

the architectural choices discussed here can be read as conscious attempts to direct

these ows and shape these intersections towards continuation rather than interaction,

towards docility rather than possibility. While there are certainly aesthetic reasons for

purely architecturally focused photography, the tension between the visuals of empty

spaces and the discourses of a public sphere for encounter and interaction is palpable.

In this context, it is relevant to place these architectural photographs at a spe-

cic phase of the architectural process. Instead of “render ghosts” (Bridle 2014), virtual

inhabitants of rendered and (yet) unbuilt spaces, the examples discussed here leave us

with just the architecture, just the building, just the physical specications of an unoc-

cupied space. As Palacios puts it: “Render ghosts will not survive and will disappear

without leaving traces. An empty space is waiting for us to occupy it. We will take their

place” (2013). The architectural photographs discussed here, then, appear to capture the

in-between of virtual renderings – lled with rendered ghosts – and the actual “life” in

and of these buildings. In this sense, these projects have moved beyond the imaginary

space between existence and non-existence, assuring us that these spaces do not need to

be lled with the eerie humanity of render ghosts to manifest their potential as a caring

space. In the absence of either virtualized or real interactions, the emphasis on care as

an intangible yet ever-present aective force within these spaces becomes particularly

remarkable. Detached from the speed of construction and capitalism, these architectural

photos present a specic moment in time in which the aesthetic represents the utopian

ideal of the architects writing these designs. Expanding on Ahmed’s exploration of “how

emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they ‘stick’ as well as move” (2004,

4), we might understand buildings as a type of body as well – a material and ideological

body, holding the potential to (quite directly) inuence the positioning, the stillness, and

the movement of other bodies. If emotions can “stick” to this architectural body as well,

then grounding the intangible idea of care in specic materials and design elements

through a language of transparency and dialogue can infuse the space as a whole with

its aective force even in the absence of (human) bodies. Just like the presence of render

ghosts in virtual renderings, their absence in the photography of completed buildings,

the very emptiness of these built structures, holds potential – a potential to re-imagine

social, urban, political spheres in a dierent way.

4. Conclusion

In the afterword to their overview of architectural theory, Hays and Sykes propose a

similarly atmospheric thinking about architectural thought and practice as involving

not just (techno)logical decision-making, but aective dimensions as well: “Writing the

new architecture means writing with the body as much as the mind, apprehending the

atmospheric and the ecological as feeling and aect as well as thought – folding and

refolding the situation, thickening and articulating it into narrative structures, squeezing

it to yield its social precipitate” (2010, 359). “Writing” architecture, here, should be

understood as the writing both of and about the design, as in the examples raised in

this article. The blurring of boundaries between the corporate and the private – work

and life – through both aesthetics and argumentation is exemplary of this duality. On

the one hand, the idea of a private sphere distanced from the expectations and pres-

sure of work is enveloped within the corporate setting through spatial (for instance

the integration of secluded-yet-visible areas) and material choices (with a particular

emphasis on softness). Focused on materiality, the architectural writing of the sensory

resonance of care – in wood and in plants, through organic materials and owing

structures – opens our minds to how an abstract concept such as care can be grounded.

On the other hand, the aective potential of these choices appears not to be self-evi-

dent, as the architectural descriptions still need to explicitly point out the atmospheric

experience of a kind, caring sphere. Although not explicitly referenced by Sykes and

Hays, the link to the Deleuzian fold situates this dual process of “writing architecture”

as a multi-sensorial dialogue between the building and the body. Similarly, Grosz urges

us – again at the intersection between architecture and philosophy – to “explore the

possibilities of becoming, the virtualities latent in building, the capacity of buildings to

link with and make other series deect and transform while being transformed in the

process” (2001, 73). This attention to possibility also draws a connection between the

blurred boundaries of caring space discussed in the rst section “Hub/Home”, the caring

materiality of natural materials as both sustainable and aective choices in the second

section “Material/Intangible”, and the negotiation of embodied caring connections in the

third section “Emptiness/Encounter” of this article.

Expanding the directionality of care from a caring for to a caring through mate-

riality, the idea of embedding caring in built environments becomes a possibility here,

thus transforming our understanding of the capacity of buildings. At the same time,

the immediate linking between dimensions of care and themes of productivity and

performance, eciency and docility, complicates this potential for an “architecture of

change” (Gámez and Rogers 2008, 22). As “valuation can be seen as both produc-

tion and performance of values” (Birdsall et al. 2021, 351), exploring how the idea of

“care” is employed in the framing of architectural design projects also broadens exist-

ing discussions of urban (re)development. If “value assessments are often articulated

through performative means”, as Birdsall et al. (2021, 351) propose, the performance

of care becomes at the same time value-driven and value-driving. In this regard, both

the framing of architecture and the architecture itself can be understood as modes of

expression to ascertain care as a value embedded in the architectural process and its

result. Ballantyne states – almost matter-of-factly – that “it is inevitable that there are

interactions between buildings and people. It is the point of building” (2013, 183). Yet,

the interaction between corporate buildings and the people moving in and through

them remains somewhat vague or absent in architectural writing, therefore reinserting

“the point of building” towards neoliberal logics in what could be seen as a corporate

“carewashing” (The Care Collective 2020) of sorts.

As “segmented assemblages resonate with other assemblages at similar and dif-

ferent scales” (Dovey 2013, 135), the examples discussed here should nonetheless be

understood as situated within their respective urban environments and their practices

of power. Following an understanding of the city itself as “a (collective) body-prosthesis

or boundary that enframes, protects, and houses while at the same time taking its own

forms and functions from the (imaginary) bodies it constitutes” (Grosz 2001, 49), the

interrelation of the body, the building, and the city in a complex entanglement of

aordances and limitations becomes even more notable. Frichot and Loo suggest that

“architecture has renewed its investment in social concerns and a politics of space,

becoming increasingly open to new and vibrant material understandings of a fragile

world that is intricately and globally interconnected” (2013, 5). However, it remains to

be seen whether this “renewed investment” becomes more than lip service instigated

by the aforementioned dicult positioning of architecture between art and industry,

between calls for community practices and commercial interests. At the same time, the

potential of architecture as both theory and practice to create a more caring, more

transparent, more connected world in and through the built environment should not

be underestimated. Approaching existing and emerging architectural projects critically

allows for further exploration of the interdependency between spaces, places, and

“communities that care” (The Care Collective 2020, 50). In this understanding, care

becomes, quite literally, structural.

Notes

ArchDaily. “Expansion of the Headquarters of

the CSN / BGLA + NEUF Consortium.”

2019. ArchDaily. March 3, 2019. https://

www.archdaily.com/912327/expansion-of-

the-headquarters-of-the-csn-bgla-plus-neuf-

consortium.

ArchDaily. “IGarpe-GPISoft Offices / Martin

Lejarraga.” 2019. ArchDaily. February 26, 2019.

https://www.archdaily.com/910454/igarpe-

gpisoft-offices-martin-lejarraga-architecture-

office.

ArchDaily. “‘Living Together Is Only Possible

If There Is Always the Possibility to Be

Alone.’ – Dogma Studio’s Hard-Line Look at

Architectural Solitude | Features | Archinect.”

Accessed August 16, 2021. https://archinect.

com/features/article/149959097/living-

together-is-only-possible-if-there-is-always-

the-possibility-to-be-alone-dogma-studio-s-

hard-line-look-at-architectural-solitude.

ArchDaily. “Singapore State Courts / Serie

Architects + Multiply Architects.” 2022.

ArchDaily. August 31, 2022. https://www.

archdaily.com/964357/singapore-state-courts-

serie-architects-plus-multiply-architects.

ArchDaily. “Swatch and Omega Campus / Shigeru

Ban Architects.” 2019. ArchDaily. October 10,

2019. https://www.archdaily.com/926166/

swatch-and-omega-campus-shigeru-ban-

architects.

ArchDaily. “T-HAM PABP Factory / WZWX

Architecture Group.” 2019. ArchDaily. July 22,

2019. https://www.archdaily.com/921310/t-

ham-pabp-factory-wzwx-architecture-group.

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.

Bell, Bryan. 2008. “Preface: Expanding Design Toward

Greater Relevance.” In Expanding Architecture:

Design as Activism, edited by Bryan Bell and Katie

Wakeford, 14–25. New York: Metropolis Books.

1 More images of the office (re)design – created

by CSMM for Bosch Security and Safety Things

GmbH – are available here: https://www.cs-mm.

com/en/projects/bosch-sast

2 Less optimistically, one might also draw a

connection between this fabric-covered room and

the inescapability of a padded cell.

3 As an important disclaimer: I do not mean to

suggest that architecture has not ”cared” in the past,

but rather aim to highlight the crucial distinction

between caring as an architectural practice (by

architects) and the inscription of caring values into

built environments (through architectural writing).

4 See https://www.archdaily.com/search/

projects/categories/commercial-and-offices?ad_

medium=filters

5 See https://www.archdaily.com/910454/

igarpe-gpisoft-offices-martin-lejarraga-architecture-

office

6 See https://www.archdaily.com/921310/t-

ham-pabp-factory-wzwx-architecture-group

7 For a further discussion of this, see for instance

Bell (2008) and Fitz et al. (2019).

8 …as the combination of materials, textures

and interior aims to achieve in the iGarpe-GPISoft

offices.

9 … as the reinterpretation of the brutalist

architecture of the Confédération des Syndicats

Nationaux in Toronto, Canada, promises. See

https://www.archdaily.com/912327/expansion-

of-the-headquarters-of-the-csn-bgla-plus-neuf-

consortium

10 See for instance Connellan et al. (2013).

11 See https://www.archdaily.com/926166/

swatch-and-omega-campus-shigeru-ban-architects

12 See https://www.archdaily.com/956371/

guangming-public-service-platform-zhubo-design

13 See https://www.archdaily.com/964357/

singapore-state-courts-serie-architects-plus-

multiply-architects

14 See https://www.archdaily.com/965978/

huis-van-albrandswaard-gortemaker-algra-feenstra

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