From Grown to Curated Space

The Aestheticization of the Built Environment

Walk through a recently built residential neighborhood and you encounter more than a collection of new houses. Increasingly, you encounter complete, carefully composed environments. House, terrace, and garden form a coherent aesthetic ensemble: large-format pavers, pergolas, privacy screens, outdoor lighting, and planting schemes follow an immediately recognizable design vocabulary. Even the garden—once something that typically developed over years—is increasingly designed alongside the house and installed by professionals as a nearly finished product.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. On the contrary, the attention now devoted to the design of private outdoor space can be understood as a considerable improvement. What is more interesting is what this development may tell us about a broader cultural transformation.

In The Society of Singularities, German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz describes a structural transformation of modern society. Whereas industrial modernity was largely organized around standardization, rationalization, and mass production, late-modern societies increasingly assign value to the distinctive and particular. Objects, places, experiences, and ways of life are no longer expected merely to function. They are expected to be characteristic, authentic, atmospheric, and, ideally, unique. One’s own way of life consequently becomes an object of continuous selection and design. Few fields reveal this transformation as clearly as architecture and the city.

The Curated Home

Dwelling has, of course, never been merely functional. Architecture has always expressed social position, cultural affiliation, and individual aspiration. What appears different today is the extent to which almost every component of domestic life has become aesthetically coded.

The kitchen, bathroom, furniture, lighting, flooring, terrace, and garden are expected to produce a coherent atmosphere. Materials are selected not only for their practical properties but for the associations they carry. Exposed concrete, natural wood, handmade ceramics, particular plants, and carefully chosen furnishings communicate attitudes toward nature, culture, craftsmanship, and the good life. The home becomes a curated ensemble.

This also changes its relationship to time. Traditionally, houses—and gardens in particular—were often the products of gradual appropriation. Rooms changed, furniture accumulated, plants were added and moved. A tree matured alongside its inhabitants; a perennial might have come from a parent’s or neighbor’s garden; a terrace might be extended after years of use. The home absorbed traces of occupation and thereby became increasingly biographical.

Against this stands another ideal: the immediate production of a finished condition. House, interior, and garden are expected, as early as possible, to resemble the image that previously might have emerged only after years of inhabitation. We might describe this as a transition from grown to curated space.

The City as Experience

What happens in the private realm has its counterpart at the scale of the city.

Cities, too, are increasingly expected to be distinctive. Neighborhoods acquire brand identities, public spaces are conceived as experiences, former industrial sites become characterful “destinations,” and market halls become gastronomic attractions. Even historical authenticity can become something carefully staged.

Again, this is not necessarily a negative development. The long functionalist period of twentieth-century planning demonstrated what can happen when atmosphere, identification, and the cultural meaning of places are neglected. The renewed attention paid to place, existing fabric, and specific local character has been one of the important corrections of recent decades. The problem begins when distinctiveness itself becomes conventional.

Paradoxically, places determined to appear unique can begin to resemble one another: the converted industrial building with exposed brick and restaurants; the public square furnished with movable planters and designer seating; the new mixed-use district equipped with a carefully formulated identity; the apartment building with timber screens and a communal rooftop garden. Singularity itself becomes standardized.

Architecture between Use and Image

This development is reinforced by another transformation. Buildings today circulate as images to an unprecedented degree. We often encounter architecture first on websites, real-estate platforms, social media, or in architectural publications rather than through direct experience.

Architecture is therefore increasingly required not only to function spatially but also to function as an image.

This can produce a subtle reversal. Instead of use gradually creating the characteristic appearance and meaning of a place, a desired image is established in advance and future life is anticipated within it. Here lies a particular challenge for architecture.

Good architecture contains a dimension that resists complete curation. It must accommodate change, appropriation, and the unforeseen. A space whose meaning has already been determined in every detail leaves its inhabitants relatively little opportunity to make it their own.

Perhaps one of architecture’s important contemporary tasks is therefore not merely to design finished images, but to design the conditions under which something can develop.

Productive Incompleteness

This is not an argument for a romantic return to the unplanned garden or the supposedly authentic city of the past. What has grown over time can be banal, dysfunctional, or exclusionary, just as professional design can substantially improve the quality of everyday environments. The crucial question concerns the relationship between design and appropriation.

Architecture can be precise without determining everything. A garden can be designed and still be allowed to grow. A neighborhood can possess a clear spatial order without prescribing in advance the atmosphere its inhabitants are expected to produce. Existing buildings can be transformed without reducing their accumulated layers of time to decorative scenery.

There may be a quality in this productive incompleteness that deserves renewed attention in an increasingly aestheticized environment.

Architecture, understood in this way, would not be the production of a perfectly curated condition. It would be the creation of a durable framework within which life can accumulate, modify, appropriate, and leave traces. The distinction may seem subtle, but it is fundamental.

Curated space seeks to tell us who we are from the moment it is completed. Grown space acquires its meaning because we have lived in it.