Architecture's role in shaping culture has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past century. What once began as bold manifestos declaring new ways of living has evolved into collaborative processes that invite communities to participate in imagining their futures. This shift reflects broader changes in how power, creativity, and cultural production operate in contemporary society.
When the radical design collective Archigram published their fantastical visions of pneumatic cities and walking megastructures in the 1960s, they appeared to be designing buildings. However, beneath the surface, these avant-garde architects were pushing culture forward through radical alternatives to established lifestyles and urban organization. Their laboratories existed between the lines of influential architecture magazines like Domus and Casabella, with their propositions serving as blueprints for future civilizations. From Walter Gropius's Bauhaus movement in 1919 to Paolo Soleri's desert experiments at Arcosanti in the 1970s, architecture operated as a form of cultural prophecy where built form became the argument and drawings represented the vision.
Remarkably, today's world closely resembles what the visionary architects of the early 1900s imagined – we live with modular construction, interconnected digital cities, and automated systems. Yet contemporary architecture rarely proposes culture with the same totalizing confidence that characterized the manifesto era. Between the 1920s and 1970s, architectural manifestos functioned as performative documents that declared new possibilities for public life, supported by a unique conjunction of forces that made cultural shaping through architecture almost inevitable.
During this golden age of architectural manifestos, the discipline still operated within a coherent canon, speaking to a relatively small audience of professionals, critics, and state patrons who shared common assumptions about progress and modernity. Print media circulated quickly and affordably across schools and design studios, allowing ideas to spread rapidly through this concentrated community. Architects of this era saw themselves as cultural vanguards, actively remaking society in response to industrialization and evolving political power dynamics.
Institutional support reinforced these programmatic visions. Governments and municipal authorities, particularly during postwar reconstruction efforts, proved receptive to grand, top-down planning initiatives. Ambitious projects like Brasília, Chandigarh, and the British New Towns attempted to create entirely new social orders through spatial organization, where individual structures could embody complete philosophies of living. Radical collectives and publications of this era, including movements like Futurism and Metabolism, functioned as powerful conduits for cultural dissemination.
Arcosanti stands as perhaps the most compelling example of this impulse, representing an experiment where built form itself established the framework for alternative culture. Rather than responding to existing society, architecture attempted to create entirely new social structures from the ground up. However, the conditions that enabled this manifesto-driven culture-making have largely dissolved in contemporary practice.
Power and agency have become significantly more fragmented in today's architectural landscape. The early and mid-20th century featured strong nation-state or corporate patrons who commissioned architects to create "new worlds." Contemporary governance operates through complex public-private partnerships, with large projects emerging from negotiations among dozens of stakeholders. Rarely does a single visionary possess the mandate to remake culture at a city scale, as was possible during architecture's manifesto period.
Neoliberal economics has made capital increasingly risk-averse, creating additional barriers to experimental vision. Large speculative projects rarely get built because investment demands predictable returns. The experimental utopias that once found patrons in ambitious municipalities have either migrated into smaller interventions or exist purely as speculative media projects. Meanwhile, culture itself has shifted from hardware to software, with social networks and digital platforms now producing culture as much as built form does.
Contemporary architectural discourse has become notably critical, data-driven, and policy-oriented. The crisis mindset surrounding climate change, housing shortages, and migration pushes conversations toward practical solutions – building codes, retrofits, regulations, and pragmatic frameworks rather than utopian imagery. This raises fundamental questions about the contemporary architect's role in cultural production now that the future has become a conversation rather than a declaration.
To claim that architecture no longer produces culture would be incorrect – the mode has simply changed dramatically. Contemporary architects engage people in design processes through different approaches and at various scales of future-making, with themes of improvising, learning, becoming, and living that can accommodate uncertain and constantly changing situations. Culture-making has become distributed, emerging from networks of smaller interventions rather than singular heroic architectural objects.
Studio Gang's Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership exemplifies this new approach, not proposing a utopian community but rather creating infrastructure for ongoing civic dialogue and collective action. The culture it produces is procedural – architecture serving as a framework for continuous social negotiation. Similarly, Tatiana Bilbao's Sustainable Housing Prototype embodies culture as something co-produced with local communities, emphasizing adaptability and affordability over grand gestures.
Tactical urbanism represents another significant shift, presenting citizen-led approaches to neighborhood building through short-term, scalable interventions designed to catalyze long-term change. This method fundamentally inverts the manifesto logic that characterized earlier eras. Rather than declaring a predetermined future and building toward it, tactical approaches test possibilities, gather community feedback, and iterate based on real-world responses. The process itself becomes the primary form of cultural production.
Even practices working with cutting-edge technology operate differently than their modernist predecessors. Neri Oxman's work in material ecology and bio-design imagines cultures where materials, biology, and built form co-evolve through emergent systems that incorporate feedback and adaptation from the very beginning of the design process.
This transformation represents a shift from "design fiction" to "design futures," fundamentally influencing architecture's relationship to cultural production. Design fiction operated through speculative narratives where architects imagined a specific future and rendered it compellingly enough to shift public perception. The power of this approach lay in the clarity and boldness of the singular vision being proposed.
Design futures operates as collaborative foresight, exploring multiple plausible scenarios rather than declaring a single preferred outcome. This approach is participatory by necessity, acknowledging that in an era of democratized media and distributed agency, no single voice can claim to speak definitively for culture. The architect's role shifts fundamentally from oracle to facilitator, raising important questions about professional identity and authority.
In today's landscape, where everyone can potentially imagine and share visions of the future, architects must reconsider their unique contributions. During the manifesto era, specialized training and institutional position granted architects authority to declare how cities might support evolving lifestyles. Today, communities organize their own design charrettes, developers use sophisticated algorithms to optimize spatial programs, and social media platforms generate more cultural momentum than many built projects.
Perhaps architecture's contribution to cultural production now lies not in proposing grand visions but in creating robust frameworks for collective imagination. The manifesto age represented an era of grand conviction when architects believed they could redraw the world and felt both permitted and obliged to do so. From that confidence emerged works of astonishing scale and imagination: the Metabolists' megastructures, Constant Nieuwenhuys's New Babylon, and Superstudio's Continuous Monument.
By contrast, today's plural and participatory architectural culture rarely aspires to such totalizing visions. The demands of iteration and community engagement shape a fundamentally different kind of creativity, one focused on constructing frameworks through which multiple futures might emerge. The mid-century avant-garde sought to bend perception through the sheer intensity of their singular visions, while today's designers offer platforms that invite collective orientation and shared decision-making.
Both approaches represent valid forms of cultural production that shape how we inhabit and understand the world. However, they reflect dramatically different assumptions about authority, community, and the role of professional expertise in imagining possible futures. As architecture continues to evolve, the challenge lies in maintaining the discipline's capacity for transformative vision while embracing the democratic potential of collaborative design processes.
