Is Politics of the Envelope an Excuse?

Maybe I still don’t fully understand the phrase “politics of the envelope”, but my interpretation of it does not fit with my personal definition of architecture. Using the façade as a machine to create certain effects is a visual art, not the spatial art of architecture. Creating an aesthetically-pleasing envelope does not solve the function, program, or atmosphere of a space. In The Achilles Heel of Modernity, Inaki Abalos writes that interiors can “enrich community life and the sensorial experience of citizens who discover relatively undetermined spaces ready for them to appropriate in creative ways”.  It is within the plan and section of a building, not the envelope, where architecture truly begins to take form. This is where architects consider the “atmosphere” of a space; all the materials, sounds, forms, light, spatial arrangements, etc. that create the entire three-dimensional ensemble of the building (including the envelope).

However, this style of architectural thinking is almost nonexistent in the majority of new projects today, and I think our education is partly to blame for that. For example, this semester, we were asked to design graduate student housing but there was hardly any time set aside to research and rethink how students spatially occupy their home. If we are not critically rethinking how humans live and interact with their environments, how can we expect to move architecture forward and not replicate the past? Instead, we spend more time focused on aesthetics than we do making a space pleasing the senses and an experience to inhabit. Abalos also mentions that the façade is about all that’s left for architects to have control over because the interior is left to commercial products and generic spatial configuration. This is the scary truth that architecture seems to be heading towards, as economics and money play a larger role in a building’s design. So to me, architecture is split among two paths: one to design the space solely to hold and enclose objects and one to design a space to inhabit and experience. However, I think it is our duty as architects to find the “atmospheres” of a space, regardless of how generic or “commercial” the program may be.

Programmatic Masterplan of Yokohama, Competition Entry, OMA, 1991

Hesiodo, Hierve-Diseneria architects, Mexico City, 2005

Apartment complex with a unique envelope of blown glass spheres that have no function other than aesthetics-literally chosen to be the colorful material to inject the project with “flavor and cheerfulness”