Commentary on the Contemporary Spatial Experience

This essay is a commentary on the following three publications (referenced after the text):

Paul Virilio: The Overexposed City

Michael Benedikt: Less for Less Yet: On Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace

Keller Easterling: Histories of Things That Don’t Happen and Shouldn’t Always Work

The texts of Virilio, Benedict and Easterling make for an interesting collection of thoughts criticizing and depicting the modern way of life and the modern way of leading through design. Virilio’s thoughts about the unavoidable abstraction of space through the rapid development of different types of communicative technology complement Easterling’s writings on infrastructure and the not-so-evident or protruding aspects of the design of the built environment and societal structures.

If space is that which keeps everything from occupying the same space, this abrupt confinement brings absolutely everything precisely to that space, the location that has no location

(Keller Easterling)

is a notion that undeniably reflects modern society even better today than at the time of writing in 1997. One can’t help thinking that the bland cityscape of contemporary architecture is a prominent result of the invention of the wireless, the digital cloud and the digitalization of human interactions. It seems like tech kills physical space not only in diminishing the need of leaving one’s own home, but also in streamlining public space.

Spaces formerly related to human interaction and urban buzz, such as railway stations are nowadays almost eerie. Not eerie as in the lack of people but in the lack of substance. Ticket offices are replaced by ticket machines (that are replaced by applications on phones), newspaper kiosks shrink to a point where coffee seem to be the most important commodity as it is something that you can’t download on your phone. You can however pay for the coffee without human interaction. The result is not only that spaces become emptier because of the streamlined use of digital appliances, but they also become less social as there is no need to arrive early, you already did everything you had to beforehand, on your phone and if you didn’t you know there won’t be a line as everything is optimized and smooth. At the end of the day, you won’t have to sit down at a station café anymore as you have no time to kill.

It is interesting that Virilio compares space design and car design as I think car design is a brilliant example of how digitalization kills physical design. Car interior design used to be a way of indicating quality and separating the car brand from another car brand. It is ultimately the part of the car that is the most haptic and most hands-on for the user. Nowadays most car interiors are dominated by one large single screen or several smaller screens in the name of modernity, which makes it impossible to differentiate brands from each other. Most importantly the haptic experience of touching a swivel wheel or pushing a button is lost. This can be directly compared with the haptic experience of sitting on a waiting hall bench, leaning on a desk, and ringing a bell with the universally bland feeling of one’s fingertip hitting the thin glass of a ticket machine touch screen.

This development into an anti-analog society as the result of over-optimization is comparable to the active theme in Benedict’s writing as well. The idea of saving time and resources (mostly money) has become the seemingly immortal motive of late modernism. As benedict puts it the architect is left with the impossible task of creating something with substance out of a small and ever-shrinking budget. Contradictory to the cost-saving frenzy the only acceptable outcome is something that is perfect in all aspects. If otherwise, the architect has failed. Is the idea that everything must solve everything the reason why contemporary architecture is so bland? Does it try to solve so much that it ends up solving nothing? I believe that a healthy stance on modern architecture would be that it doesn’t have to solve it all. Of course, urgent matters like environmental, health and other sustainability issues must be of high priority, but does the design have to take everything else into account as well to be deemed successful? Most critique sessions at the Department of Architecture in Otaniemi most certainly indicate so.

I write this text sitting in a living room built in the 1920s which has many flaws. I can hear my neighbor’s conversation by the time of writing. I have to wear a felt not to get cold during long writing sessions and I have to lower my head when I enter my bedroom because the door is slightly too small. Yet, there is not one contemporary apartment that would provide me with the same sense of joy that this apartment gives me every time I get to spend time here. The space dimensions are harmonic, the light is beautiful and every little detail that does not solve any problem, such as the profile of the doorframe provides a sense of purpose. I cannot for the world understand why this idea of building just because it feels good isn’t acceptable anymore. What is the point of solving every problem in the world if people are not happy with the result? Benedict states that there should be something more to the reason why people want to move to a freshly finished apartment block other than the fact that it is new, and I cannot agree more.

No wonder people go to the movies where they can see what happens when someone takes days to get the light right

(Michael Benedict)

as he puts it - there is no other reason behind that light, than that it provides a feeling. It has purpose in having no purpose.

I attended a course in sustainable design last semester*, where a collegium of professors and practitioners displayed their personal design principles. The last session had an open discussion on how we can solve the global environmental crisis, and one remarkable notion struck my mind. We don’t solve everything by solving everything. The idea behind that is that if every aspiring designer would find one thing that they want to improve in the way that we design buildings and dedicate most of the design process to that particular thing, then it wouldn’t take long before the architectural collegium would have an unimaginable skillset to utilize when taking on the climate challenge. This is precisely the same idea that Easterling has about the way of managing and designing. That we need to step away from the binary mindset of one single universal truth, be it modernism, digitalization or modernism or anything else. If we would instead celebrate different interpretations and the diversity of design solutions and go cherry picking from this wide array of solutions, then couldn’t that be the next architectural movement? A network of truths. Easterling describes a similar network as the interplay that doesn’t openly declare itself. If we would adapt to this mindset there would be no more historicism vs modernism or capitalism vs socialism, only historicism AND modernism, capitalism AND socialism. Arguably the happiest societies implement mixed economy** because there is no single truth. Maybe the ultimate architectural philosophy is the one that implements the best of all movements. The meta-movement.

Originally written in May 2025

References and mentions:

*Sustainable Design Principles, under professor Matti Kuittinen

**University of Guelph: Economic Systems Around the World https://books.lib.uoguelph.ca/mgmt1000/chapter/1-2-economic-systems-around-the-world/3

**World Population Review: Happiest Countries in the World https://worldpopulationreview.com/country- rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world

Virilio, Paul. “The Overexposed City.” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, Routledge, 1997, pp. 381–90.

Benedikt, Michael. “Less for Less Yet: On Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace.” Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, edited by William S. Saunders, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 8–21. Available in the ebook at https://primo.aalto.fi/permalink/358AALTO_INST/ha1cg5/alma999346536106526

Easterling, Keller. “Histories of Things That Don’t Happen and Shouldn’t Always Work.” Social Research, vol. 83, no. 3, 2016, pp. 625-44. Available online via https://primo.aalto.fi/permalink/358AALTO_INST/cis3s6/cdi_proquest_journals_1848802621