The Architecture of Low Obligation: Minimalism in a Post-Welfare Society

Architecture, Ethics, and the Erosion of Collective Responsibility Within the framework of postwar social-contract architecture, contemporary minimalism appears not as a neutral stylistic preference but as a symptom of a broken ethical horizon. Its widespread appeal marks a decisive shift away from architecture’s former role as a material agent of collective obligation and toward a …

The Cultural Functionality of Architecture

The cultural functionality of architecture should not be regarded as fundamental. Architecture is by far the most cumbersome and inert of all cultural expression techniques. Its production is bound to material, time, and social negotiation; it resists acceleration. Yet precisely this resistance has turned against it. In an age of ever-faster content consumption and the …

Architecture as a Slow Medium in a Fast Culture. On the Structural Erosion of Architectural Meaning

For much of the twentieth century, architecture was widely understood as a cultural practice in the strong sense of the term. Buildings were not merely shelters or infrastructures; they were carriers of collective values, spatial condensations of political ambition, social ideals, and shared futures. This assumption has become increasingly fragile. The recurrent diagnosis that architecture …

Measure, Means, and Intention: Louis Kahn and the Question of Architectural Worth

When Louis Kahn spoke about architecture, he rarely did so in the language of efficiency or economy. Cost, for him, was not a technical constraint to be optimized away but a condition to be answered. What mattered was not how little could be built, but whether what was built was commensurate with its task—spatially, materially, …

From Silence to Light. On Louis Kahn’s understanding of architecture

Few formulations in twentieth-century architectural thinking are quoted as often—and misunderstood as frequently—as “Silence to Light.” For Louis Kahn, this was not a metaphor, nor a poetic afterthought appended to built work. It was a condensed theory of architecture itself: a description of how architecture comes into being, and of the ethical discipline required to …

The Architecture of Self-Reliance: Emerson’s Philosophy in Wright’s Buildings

Every culture is haunted by the question of origins. Where does authenticity begin? For America, two figures answer in remarkably parallel ways—one with words, the other with buildings. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher of Self-Reliance, and Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of organic modernism, never met across time, yet their work speaks like two voices …

Published by Michael Merrill: Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing

Louis KahnThe Importance of a DrawingMichael Merrill (ed.)ENGLISH | ISBN: 9783037786444 Interview with author (Common Edge, 31.01.2022) Michael Merrill, an award-winning architect and educator, has published his third book on Louis Kahn. As in his previous books he focuses on the importance of Kahns creative intelligence and design process. The book edited by Merrill combines …