The year’s end brings the chance to survey architecture’s progression and social impact through salient entryways that include labor, activism, and the development of topical building trends.

Another way of recapping things is by looking at the varied rows, discord, stories of ill-treatment, and critical reactions to certain projects that shape the way the architecture progresses and is viewed by the broader public. With everything from conflict to college dorms domineering the news cycle, our coverage has been as influenced by current events as it was by goings-on inside halls of higher learning and professional practice.

Twelve months ago, we documented what happened once the industry began to recover from a years-long pandemic-plagued economy. What followed was a year marked by new pinnacles and uncertainty within the industry. With an eye for the murkiness that happens behind the scenes and ends up reliably above the fold, here (again) is our look back at the controversial year that was.

The world of academia was once again a leading source of strife between those in positions of influence and authority and the mostly option-less groups of young people lacking either the avenues of recourse or the career incentive to stop them.

For example, the self-cleaning of SCI-Arc began after a panel discussion on “How to be in an Office” backfired and spun into an internal investigation into abusive employment practices that eventually yielded the resignations of Tom Wiscombe and Marikka Trotter, along with a host of other policy changes and proscriptive oversights in line with similar institutional inquiries of our era. It gave us a soundboard for non-gated reflections on academic-industrial pipelines and work culture seen previously at UCL, where an independent report’s findings on the Bartlett’s bad environment meted out in-kind punishments for faculty and administrators, who for years perpetuated their own unique brand of toxicity at the inevitable cost of students and their colleague’s mental health.

“Their testimonies expose an inexcusable and pernicious underbelly of bullying and other unacceptable behavior that is completely at odds with the values on which UCL was founded,” President Michael Spence said contritely before turning to offer an apology to “everyone who has suffered.”

"What you have been through is wrong and should not have been allowed to happen,” he told them. “I recognize your pain and distress and the myriad long-term consequences of what you have experienced.”

Staying in the UK, another university scandal provided evidence as to the hazards of merely giving a platform to Pro-Palestinian statements after curator Alistair Hudson fell victim to a lobbying effort organized against him in response to Forensic Architecture’s on-again, off-again exhibition at the school’s Whitworth Gallery that was originally supposed to be about pollution but became a solid lesson on censorship in different forms instead.

FA’s founder Eyal Weizman told reporters he thinks the episode “makes clear yet again that the anti-colonial struggle in support of Palestine and elsewhere has to be fought within and sometimes against our public institutions, including universities and art and cultural spaces.” (He also said architecture can be an “exercise of violence,” talking about the group’s award-winning output in a statement that I loved.)

Meanwhile, RIBA’s tumultuous year seemed to center around the build-up to its unprecedented election and its resultant new leader, the early-career architect Muyiwa Oki. His tenure began amidst the resignations of Chief Executive Alan Vallance and its first-ever Diversity & Inclusion Chief Marsha Ramroop after only a year.

Leadership turnover and funding concerns weren't the ends of the story. The fall’s annual Stirling Prize shortlist announcement was met immediately with charges of greenwashing that were later defended by Kunle Barker and the outbound President Simon Allford.

“We have to remember that the Stirling Prize is ostensibly an architecture competition and not a sustainability one,” Baker yearned to remind us. “Expecting architects to design buildings that may have been conceived a decade ago to current sustainability standards requires more than great architecture; it requires architects to be Time Lords.”

Upcoming London projects like the Populous' planned MSG Sphere and the contentious National Gallery redesign by Seldorf Architects had critics decrying the encroachment of the contemporary rentier class, which one of those newly decanted called the product of “a political system that prioritizes economics over community.”

David Adjaye’s blocked UK Holocaust Memorial proposal marked the low end of a year mixed with good and bad headlines for the 2022 Order of Merit appointee, who also faced accusations of scandal and corruption in his home country of Ghana.

Across the channel, Notre Dame Cathedral’s debated restoration drew the skepticism of preservation specialists that objected to specific cleaning methods used in its interior refurbishment. Their refusal to mix tradition with the cutting-edge mirrored prior sentiment in the matter and was a worthy primer on the constant strain between heritage causes and contemporary design.

On the topic of cutting-edge, the massive NEOM megadevelopment in Saudi Arabia seems to be an ever-growing topic of contention and critique as the state tellingly looks to eliminate dissent through threats of death and forced evictions.

Finally, some artful New York Times puffery surrounding the premiere of Wiscombe’s Sunset Spectacular billboard prompted writer Carolina A. Miranda’s incisive comment on journalism’s complicity in promoting the design industry, saying self-reflectively that it “seemed as if the architectural establishment [was] intent on scrubbing the record clean” back home in L.A.

In the end, the collected discord offered a grating assessment of the latent issues central to architecture’s debunked mythology and the subsequent need to outlaw or prohibit certain practices. The cost of war and tuning out is taking an unacceptable and easy-to-verify toll on the built environment and natural world. Watching matters unfold from the sidelines while it plays out is having caustic effects on ourselves. 

My hope in the new year is to see better people being able to overcome these challenges and bring about adequate change.