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When you think of 20th-century modernism, what immediately comes to mind? For me, it’s not an iconic building like the Villa Savoye, nor is it the name of a revered designer, like Mies van der Rohe. When I hear the term, I immediately think about the concept of “tabula rasa” — the idea that designers arrive at what is essentially a blank slate, upon which they can impress their ideas.
Of course, as with most design movements, by the 70s resistence to this mentality emerged, with what Kenneth Frampton famously coined “critical regionalism.” Yet, fast forward to the late 90s through to the 2010s, and a new type of tabula rasa approach emerged: one where culture lionized singular landmark buildings that, though more visually complex than the stripped bare aesthetics of modernism, were no less divorced from the places and people they were meant to serve.
I’ve always been more interested in the processes behind buildings, rather than the finished products. And, as Managing Editor at Architizer, I spend a lot of time reviewing new architectural projects from around the world that have recently been uploaded to our site. Over the past few years, through assessing drawings and photographs and reading project descriptions daily, I’ve noticed a shift in the kinds of work architects around the world are designing and building, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on how I could articulate what I was seeing in a cogent way.
So, it was striking to spend three days at Clerkenwell Design Week, where I not only had the pleasure of conversing with a diverse array of designers but also the privilege of hosting a series of panel discussions with some of the leading practitioners in the field. Conversation after conversation, I found myself thinking about the modernist concept of the tabula rasa.
Oriente Green Campus by KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox), Lisbon, Portugal
Across the panels I hosted, designers kept describing a posture that would have been unrecognizable to the heroic modernist: the designer who begins by assuming they know nothing. Not nothing about craft or structure, of course, but nothing about the building’s future, nor about its inhabitants or users. This is a central tenet of neuroinclusive design — a prominent topic across other panels throughout the week — but it’s also a fundamental presumption for building architecture that isn’t disposable. Buildings that can be flexible and adaptable as programs and needs change are less likely to be demolished or require extensive renovation in the future.
More than this, conversations returned to an emerging and related direction that design is taking. If biophilia is a term that has lost meaning in recent years, a growing cohort of designers has pushed beyond designs that simply feel more natural (decorative) toward creating systems that actively regenerate ecological health. In terms of relationship to site, this stance, rooted in reciprocity, couldn’t be more opposed to the modernist tabula rasa approach. Oliver Heath, who has spent years threading a “green thread of wellbeing” through projects, framed his move beyond biophilia toward life-centered design in similar terms: a decentering of the human to create space for birds, insects, soils and whole ecosystems considered as equal stakeholders.
Within this framework, architecture is not assumed to be separate from nature, but rather as a participant within larger biological and climatic systems. The upshot is transforming the role of the human occupant. Advances in biomics and material science, as well as climate-responsive urbanism, are pushing the field toward forms of design that behave more like living organisms than static objects. John Bushnell not only explored how his firm is thinking about nature integration at a broader, more urban scale, but also how KPF is developing tools, like their Microclimate Digital Twin, to monitor how users are actually experiencing spaces post-completion — ie, an investment in understanding the afterlife of the design.
Material explorations in Mamou-Mani’s studio | Photos by Hannah Feniak
If the occupant is playing a different role vis-a-vis the designer, so too is the material. Selection used to be the architect’s main relationship with material — pick, from a settled catalog, what met the spec and looked right. Yet, more and more designers are cognisant that every material arrives with a biography: a place of extraction, a set of hands, an embodied carbon figure, an afterlife once this building’s first ends. To specify is to step into a supply chain and a labor practice whose social consequences land elsewhere — and the architect, in that frame, is less an author than a facilitator inside an expansive network of systems, which extend a building’s reach far beyond the site where it is built. Arthur Mamou-Mani stood out in this regard: his eco-parametricism is rooted in rigorous research into material processes. His studio, Mamou-Mani Architects, has an in-house fabrication and recycling facility, Fab.Pub, in which they harness digital tools to create circular materials and construction methods (they’ve also created Mobile Factories that can be shipped around the world for local fabrication).
Adaptive reuse, which in a decade has moved from pragmatic compromise to one of contemporary architecture’s most celebrated forms, is the purest case: anti-tabula-rasa by definition. And this logic can extend to material approaches: Manchester-based SpaceInvader Design follows a seven-point operational framework that shows interior design can be an inherently low-impact discipline, Sarah Dabbs explained. Her studio prioritizes extending the life of what already exists through retention and repair, demolition-waste diversion, furniture re-homing, responsible material specification, biophilic integration, adaptable layouts, and tracked carbon. Likewise, Catarina Kohut shared how Tuckey Design Studio roots their practice in attending to what a place already holds — not only literal structures, but also the ground itself (they’ve built one of only a few rammed earth homes in the UK; it also incorporates construction demolition aggregate). Reuse was again and again celebrated architecturally, but Colin McGadie of ForEveryday.Life (FE.L) and Futures Lab, also framed it strategically, a stance carried over from a decade reorienting a global real estate portfolio away from disposability.
Wisconsin Homestead by Tuckey Design Studio, Lake Michigan, Wisconsin
What struck me most, walking the showrooms between sessions, was how thoroughly this had stopped being niche. Circularity and salvage were not the special subject of a sustainability track; they were simply in the air, especially among younger designers — pieces built to be taken apart and repaired rather than replaced, covers made to be removed, demolition waste returned to use so elegantly you would never have guessed its origin. In three days, I rarely heard the word sustainability — the only time it came up may have been when I remarked on the fact that I hadn’t yet heard it. (Notably, the technology that seems to be omnipresent these days, AI, barely surfaced either.) Instead, designers are treating “green” design approaches as exciting in their own right, beyond the need for statistical storytelling. Cristina Stefani made the same case at the scale of a single fiber: Aquafil’s regenerated nylon has opened new possibilities for circular specifications in large-scale projects like hotels and cruise ships (the used carpets from these projects usually end up in the landfill).
A subtler shift sits inside all this, concerning knowledge itself. Once you acknowledge that you have something to learn from the user, the site and the material — that all three will be open to change long after you’ve walked away from the design — the knowledge you generate stops looking like proprietary treasure to be guarded. So many conversations with designers described a move away from the siloed firm toward something more open; research and development published and shared rather than protected. This surfaced in Mamou-Mani’s open-source instincts.
1196 Tollcross Road by Collective Architecture, Glasgow, United Kingdom
Another ripple effect of this shift will be seen in a move away from firms that are identifiable by a singular iconic design language, like that of the iconic landmark structures of the early 21st century. A design brand’s real substance increasingly lives beneath the logo, in a firm’s decisions and culture, Ayo Abbas asserted. Indeed, Caro Communications’ Anya Cooklin-Lofting discussed how firms are anchoring their brand’s integrity in true stories about the people behind the work, rather than the work itself, and Sophie Irvine described Collective Architecture — an employee-owned practice without a founding figurehead or signature aesthetic — as a firm whose identity is its way of working rather than its house style.
If, in the past, architects moved from style to style — from Modernism to Critical Regionalism and Postmodernism to the Starchitect era — none of what I’ve been witnessing amounts to a simple shift in style. It is closer to an epistemology, or a relocation of where designers believe authority and origin actually lie. The tabula rasa, of course, was always a fiction: the ground was never blank, the user was never generic or static, the material never inert, or divorced from social processes. What felt new at Clerkenwell was the profession’s growing willingness to stop pretending otherwise, destabilizing the idea of architectural authorship that governed the preceding century. If words like “biophilic” and “sustainable” are dissolving, it’s because the assumptions that underpin them are no longer as radical as they were under the aegis of the tabula-rasa mentality; hopefully, they are becoming too ordinary to need naming.
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Top image: Southbank Tower by KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox), London, United Kingdom
