Flexibility is the new f-word… PC is the face of contemporary architecture… and it adapts to people’s needs: stories of a promising 21st century for the discipline now subjugated to solidarity and justice.

The discipline that long prided itself for posing relevant questions in lieu of simply solving problems now finds itself on stage performing acrobatics with f-word and sustainability disguised as interdisciplinarity: the inescapable menage a trois of our days. For a while now, the discipline has been passively accumulating global tasks while failing to attend to them. Never before has the built-environment felt so frail—and never before have architects been caught at such an empowering impasse… On the other side of this balancing act stands, watching attentively, the inhabitant—the ultimate pleaser. In the digital epoch, the inhabitant—whose needs can be entirely satisfied by automation—procures a building that embodies the applied sciences of our time. It first allured the profession disguised in smart-home promises and recently returned with a bigger ego: the smart-city… Eventually, it defies the necessity for a built reality for it claims to be capable of building one virtually.  The result is buildings that adapt to everything and everyone at any time… The building of the 21st century is instantly stark, runs on solar power, saves time, and generates profit… It is the Tesla of Architectures… But the inhabitant needs to be pleased and must not struggle… Interests are constantly changing; they are nothing more than trends. So are economy, politics, and even the focus on ecological issues… Just about everything changes, always faster than before. we are witnessing architecture’s antitheses’ debut after an impressive century of theses, manifestos and buildingsTime is instant in the 21st century. Gratification, wishes, desires and architectures are too. It only makes sense to elaborate on an architecture of this century that mercifully adapts to people when under the rubric of agonism. For that, the struggle is painfully necessary, but the true and necessary adversary has yet to be identified in a time when everything can also be nothing. Meanwhile, the past presents itself as new history for those desperate for the possibility of an architectural agonism and who in return avoid taking the field apart… Yet the continuity from here onwards as a 360˙ turn does not prove itself legitimate most times either. Inevitably, we are witnessing architecture’s antitheses’ debut after an impressive century of theses, manifestos and buildings. As it is the case with people, architecture is historically marked by its stages of exception or, better yet, by the sum of its actions. The possibility of an architectural agonism demands an understanding of the whole before continuity is manifested… It is the very process through which architecture can once again become architecturally driven—through the agony of critical ideas and less through problem solving. And since we are already well rooted in the 21st century, a synthesis based on a renewed coexistence between architecture and people might just be in “Late Style” this time around…

Cross-Talk is a new recurring series on Archinect that endeavors to bring architectural polemics and debate up-to-date and up-to-speed with the pace of cultural production today. Each installation will feature four responses by four writers to a single topic. For this week's iteration, the topic is 'agonism', a political theory that has begun to enter the architect's lexicon. Championed, in particular, by the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, 'agonism' asserts that productive conflict, rather than consensus, produces democracy.