The Architecture We Inherit, the Architecture We Choose

In May 2023, we sat down with architect Eero Lundén and Mark Linder to explore a question that continues to haunt the built environment: How do we design democratically in a world of increasing complexity?

Our conversation stretched from the nature of architectural education to global competitions, from the failures of the construction industry to the promise, and danger, of openness.

What follows is a reflection shaped by that discussion.

Growing Up Architecturally: Education and Openness

Eero began by recalling his architectural training in Oulu and at Columbia. Oulu’s school, he explained, functioned almost like a family: small, supportive, and permissive enough to let students drift into unexpected directions. That freedom, according to him, was formative. It cultivated an environment where experimentation felt natural rather than exceptional.

Finland today feels increasingly international. English is now standard in many studios, and offices, Lundén’s included, pull talent from around the world. But for him this isn’t a rupture; it’s the only logical condition for architectural learning.

Architecture, he argued, is cumulative. Ideas travel. Buildings become laboratories. What is done here can be learned from elsewhere, and vice-versa. Trying to design in national isolation would make little sense.

Beyond the Starchitect: Why Individual Genius Isn’t Enough

We turned to the mythology of the lone auteur. The “starchitect” figure, still fetishised by media, biennales, and institutional clients, has never matched the reality of how architecture is produced.

Lundén’s own office works as a constellation of small studios, each semi-independent, each with its own agenda. His role, he insists, is closer to a teacher or facilitator than an author. The narrative of the heroic architect, he says, is both misleading and unhelpful for everyday practice.

Yet he also rejects the opposite extreme. Architecture is partly an art; intentions matter. Sometimes a single idea-holder is needed to push the work forward. “We need room for the pianist,” he said, “but also for the orchestra.”

Who Influences Whom? A Shifting Global Axis

Architecture’s cultural power once radiated from the US and Europe outward. Today the picture is far more diverse. Lundén sees some of the most interesting work emerging from Africa and other regions long ignored in the canon.

But globalisation has a strange side effect: competition proposals from different countries increasingly resemble one another. Instagram, Pinterest, and architecture blogs have flattened stylistic distinctions. One can no longer easily identify the country of origin of a winning competition entry.

This raises a paradox: more openness, but less difference.

The Crisis and Promise of Competitions

Competitions lie at the heart of the architectural imagination, but in Finland—as in most countries—only a small fraction of built projects ever pass through open competition. Lundén estimates around 5% of public buildings.

Competitions are vital. They allow younger or smaller studios to propose ideas beyond their built portfolio. They expand the field of solutions. They keep architecture culturally alive.

Yet the system is strained. Juries often face impossible workloads—hundreds or thousands of entries. Designers invest massive unpaid labour: 500–1,000 hours per team, multiplied by dozens or hundreds of teams. The environmental footprint of that collective effort is enormous long before a single building is constructed.

And still, in many cases, the winning design is selected primarily on appearance.

Lundén believes competitions must evolve:– better briefs– better juries– more openness– more manageable scales– more types of projects (not only prestige museums but schools, kindergartens, neighbourhoods)

And perhaps most importantly: a willingness to rethink the brief itself.

Challenging the Brief: When “Less Building” Is the Better Architecture

One of Lundén’s recent master plan competitions asked for a massive concrete deck to bridge a highway. After a year of work, his team proposed the opposite: don’t build the deck. Instead, turn the highway into a boulevard and reconnect the city by slowing traffic and creating public life.

It was a rare case where the jury accepted a reframed brief.

But here structural pressures appear:An architecture office’s income is tied to construction volume. Suggesting a cheaper or smaller project means a smaller fee. Few offices voluntarily propose “half a building” when their survival depends on building volume.

Yet for Lundén, the fundamental question remains: Do we build because society needs it—or because our industry depends on it?

The Construction Industry Is a Giant Machine—And It’s Failing

We returned repeatedly to the absurd fragmentation of the construction industry. Buildings have become hyper-mechanical—full of pipes, cables, equipment—yet the design and production system remains primitive compared to other industries.

Cars, phones, and shoes are designed through fully integrated supply chains. Buildings, however, are assembled by dozens of companies meeting each other for the first time on site.

Architecture continues to be shaped by early modernist thinking: the building as a machine, parts plugged into parts. But the world has changed. We now know we cannot access infinite resources. The existential foundation of modernism—limitless extraction—no longer holds.

What, then, replaces it?

Two Future Paths: Total Integration or Radical Openness

Lundén sees two possible trajectories:

1. Total Integration

A centralised systemic approach where design, production, and operation become a single coordinated loop. Think mass-customised housing, 3D-printed components, platform-based construction. Efficient, scalable—and potentially authoritarian.

2. Radical Openness

A Wikipedia-like global architecture network:– shared goals– distributed intelligence– collaborative problem-solving– open-source building knowledge

This path keeps space for participation, agency, and democracy—but only if we design for it.

The danger of increasing complexity, of course, is that it can exclude citizens from shaping their own environments. Patrick Schumacher argues precisely for such a post-political architecture; many of us strongly disagree.

If architecture becomes too complex for non-experts to understand or influence, the city becomes a closed system. A democracy with no public access.

Infrastructure Is the Collective Contract

We discussed what actually persists in cities. Buildings come and go. Infrastructure remains. Old maps show this clearly: the grid, the streets, the “membranes” of movement endure even as the built forms change.

Infrastructure is the shared agreement—our collective skeleton.

The question is not whether we need rules; we do. The question is: Where should the boundary sit between shared framework and individual expression?

Cities flourish when citizens feel a sense of ownership, but they stagnate when everything becomes predetermined from above. Somewhere between anarchy and authoritarian planning lies a democratic architecture.

Agency: Architects Must Not Wait for Permission

Lundén believes architects underestimate their own agency.Instead of waiting for briefs, he urges architects to create projects proactively—research proposals, alternative visions, independent masterplans. A competition gives you a 1% chance of winning. A self-initiated project gives you a platform for public discussion, and often, real change.

Competitions may be necessary, but they are not enough. Advocacy matters. Initiating ideas matters.

If cities are “representations of us,” as he says, then we must be active participants in shaping them—not passive recipients of briefs written elsewhere.

Toward a Democratic Architecture

Our conversation ended with a shared understanding:

– The future cannot be dictated from the top.– Nor can it emerge from pure chaos.– We need frameworks that allow freedom, and freedoms that shape frameworks.– We need participation without naivety, expertise without elitism, systems without centralised control.

Architecture must become both wiser and more porous.

To design democratically is not to design by committee. It is to design for agency, transparency, contestation, and adaptability. It is to recognise that the spaces we build today form the citizens we become tomorrow.

As we closed the discussion, we promised to continue. There are no final answers—only better questions and the stubborn desire to keep asking them

Pedro Aibéo Sydney, 26.11.2025