The Stories Moving Our Industry Forward

Avi Rajagopal (AR): I studied industrial design. My education was steeped in the design world, but I became very interested in the culture around design as well. Not just looking at individual works but looking at broad arcs in design. I have some training as a design historian as well, and then that line of thinking drew me to a master’s in design criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

So, I come from the perspective that any creative activity requires outside cultural scaffolding: it requires people who are interested in it; who care about the means and the goals; and people who are keeping an eye on the fact that we are spending our resources and our efforts in the directions that maybe the society and the world needs us to.

Tiffany Rafii (TR): That foundation shaped how you think about criticism, not as commentary, but as responsibility. Criticism becomes a tool for examining who design serves and what the built environment asks of all of us.

AR: I think when we hear the word criticism, we typically think of a review, right? Or even better, the food critic in Ratatouille (2007), or this person who sits in their armchair, for some reason is considered an expert in a topic, and through the power of his words can demolish careers. The truth of the matter is that within design, especially in today’s media landscape, criticism works in a very different way.

When we say criticism, I understand that to mean critical thinking about the processes, the profession, the people—basically the entire ecosystem of the built environment. So, when we apply critical thinking tools to design, we start to ask some very basic questions about design.

And if you look at METROPOLIS coverage, the way it shows up is not necessarily in any individual article—although many of our articles have very strong points of view, and that’s one of the things we’re known for—but it also shows up in the broad arc of our coverage. What are the things we choose to cover? What are the questions we choose to ask? What are the kinds of things that we want to promote using our platforms? What are the ways in which we engage with our community?

Because METROPOLIS is not just about the stories we publish, it’s also about the discussions and relationships we hold with the broader profession. We do events, hold conferences and I do so many roundtables. Also, we are  unique in the media landscape in that, as a publication, we’ve taken on the role of creating resources. We created the first resource for interior designers to look at carbon emissions in their work. That’s a very different thing for a media platform to take on, but it felt necessary to us because it felt like we were uniquely positioned to bring the community together as a neutral entity.

And that too, in its own way, is a kind of criticism. It’s applying critical thinking to the professional landscape as we understand it, and then supplying what we think is missing. Supplying understanding, guidance, analysis, but also highlighting work that we think represents what the future of the built environment should be.

We use judgment and discernment every single day in our work at METROPOLIS, making our own assessments of what is worth covering, what is not, how much we should cover, how we should cover it, and what the angle on the story should be. How should the discussions be framed? Who shows up for the discussions?

All of these things are judgments. I’m not scared of the word judgment. What I would caution is that if we didn’t have discernment and judgment around our work, we would never strive for excellence. We would never strive for innovation. All those things are really important. It keeps us on the path to trying to do more, trying to do better as a profession.

We’re a big community of architects, designers, contractors, builders, manufacturers, developers, and we all hold each other accountable in this space. And more than anything else, we’re accountable to society and to the planet in terms of what we choose to build and how we build it. This is as true of a luxury residential experience as it is of a super affordable, low-income housing project.

There’s no judgment—I would say no priority—of what kind of project is worth building. Where there is judgment is in whether we have done justice to this work, given whatever frameworks we’re interested in at the moment.

TR: That sense of responsibility doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is informed by history, by patterns that repeat and lessons our industry is still learning. Looking critically at design today means first understanding how we arrived here in the first place.

AR: Luckily, in a position of leadership, I get to (in collaboration with a lot of team members) chart the path of what our platform stands for—what we cover and what we do day in and day out. History flows into that, too, and I think a lot about what has been done.

For example, when I talk about sustainability, I often point out that something really complex happened in the wake of World War II. Yes, we like to go back all the way to the Industrial Revolution, but really, in the period between the two World Wars, and after World War II, we shifted our focus within the built environment in a few different ways. Some of them, from our vantage point today, we would consider positive. Some of them we would consider negative. We really started to strive for simplification and mass production of buildings and objects which, on the one hand, is great. It brought access to beautiful spaces to a lot of people who maybe didn’t have access before.

On the other hand, we are now realizing that in that quest for efficiency, we’ve let in materials that maybe we shouldn’t have. We’ve lost some skills and some knowledge that we shouldn’t have. We’ve also not adequately thought about the impact of the built environment on communities. We still struggle to wrap our heads around that.

A historical perspective helps that as well. And so again, when it comes to deciding what programs, themes and stories METROPOLIS is going to invest our time and resources in this year, all of that comes into play.

TR: With that perspective in mind, the question becomes what it looks like in practice. For you and your team at METROPOLIS, this shows up in the projects you choose to spotlight, the ideas you lean into, and the voices you amplify.

AR: It starts in an unusual place. It starts from being really connected to the community of architects and designers, and people in the built environment. So much of what I do comes from conversations I have with people at events, at conferences, things like that.

I’m absorbing, and my team—all of them—are absorbing from the world itself. What is going on right now? What are people excited about? What kind of work are people doing? We highlight people who are already pushing the conversation forward.

We don’t design anything ourselves, so we have to find those people who have ideas that are remarkable and bring them to the forefront. Whether it’s a small architecture firm in Mexico City that we meet at the Biennale and then they end up with a big feature in METROPOLIS, or if it’s a little hint of a something that comes to us in a press release, and that we keep at the back of our minds for two years or three years till the project comes to completion. That’s the biggest influencer of telling us what to cover and how to cover it.

But that is situated within a purpose-driven sense of what the built environment should look like. And I know people credit METROPOLIS for advocacy around sustainability. We’re very proud of that legacy, but I would say it’s not any one theme around sustainability that we care about. It’s really the spirit and the philosophy behind that idea.

Once we have that true north that we believe in architecture that doesn’t harm, that does good in the world, and once you’ve taken that as your tenet, you think, “Okay, a future for the built environment should be a future where everybody can thrive and nobody’s thriving at the cost of others.” It gives you a sort of compass. You are interested naturally in certain types of projects and not in other types of projects.

TR: Purpose, though, is only meaningful if it can survive the realities of how the industry works. When values meet budgets, materials, and market forces, sustainability becomes less about slogans and more about discernment, trade-offs, and tough decisions.

AR: First of all, in the sustainability world, there’s a whole lot of expertise. A lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about these questions: about what is actually necessary and what is actually good when it comes to the built environment. The other thing is that sustainability is not a zero-sum game.

So, on the one level we stand with organizations that say, “You know what? We need to wean ourselves away from plastics in certain applications in the built environment. We can’t be the second largest consumer of fossil fuels through our use of plastics as an industry.” And so there are some things that we hold, but at the same time, we can’t wave a wand and do away with plastics in the built environment today. It would hurt people. So these are very tricky situations to navigate.

But the truth of the matter is that what we need to build is our own discernment. This comes back to that question about judgment and discernment, right? We build that discernment based on expertise, yes, but also we must form informed points of view. There’s no getting away from that.

I’ll come at it from another angle, which is that marketers make exaggerated claims about lots of things all the time. We often are presented with products that the press release tells us is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s the most innovative, the most creative, they got the best designer to work on it. We’ve learned to read that language and understand the spirit in which it’s offered, and we navigate that together. It’s the same thing with sustainability. Anytime somebody finds a new solution, they’re going to come and tell you this is the greatest solution in the world. And for the problem that they are looking to solve, it might be the greatest solution in the world. There’s also a lot of problems to solve. There’s lots of goals that one can have in sustainability.

Here’s a somewhat sensitive example. Over the last two or three years, we’ve had lots of different solutions come to the market around vinyl or PVC. We have, on the one hand, a very vocal sustainability leadership that says we should completely do away with PVC in the built environment. On the other hand, we have manufacturers who are trying to develop what they think of as more responsible versions of PVC, and often when we promote one of those more responsible versions, even METROPOLIS sometimes is accused of greenwashing.

While I can hold true that we should extricate ourselves from harmful plastic in the built environment, the truth of the matter is millions of square feet of that material are continuing to be specified and specified by designers who are on the teams of the people who tell us we shouldn’t be specifying it.

For those who can build a project that’s completely PVC free, you should do it. Get us more examples of that. Show us that it’s possible, and then we can get more and more people on that path. But in the meantime, when we have people who don’t have a choice on projects and still want to make sure they’re not doing as much harm as they would by specifying a conventional PVC product, we have to give them options.

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Listen to “Avi Rajagopal: Attention is Earned, Not Pitched” on the Surround Podcast Network.  

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