Abandoning the Discipline

The Rituals of Architectural Belonging

Deljana Iossifova

Thirty years of publication have accustomed us to familiar cycles: thematic turns arrive with urgency, crystallise into positions, and eventually sediment into subfields. Meanwhile, the ground shifts beneath us. The crises we now inhabit no longer appear episodic or discrete. Climate destabilisation, ecological collapse, infrastructural failure, war, forced migration, and algorithmic governance are cumulative, entangled, and incessantly accelerating. The very conditions of collective life are under strain in ways that exceed any single field’s capacity to respond.

We speak of plurality, of multiplicity, of the legitimacy of many worlds and many positions. These interventions have, of course, been necessary. They have exposed exclusions and unsettled hierarchies; they have opened space for voices long marginalised. Yet the present conjuncture also demands consolidation. A coming together around shared ethical and moral commitments as a basis for speaking normatively about what sustains life on earth and what works, at different speeds, to undermine it. As humans first, and only then as architects.

This is not an easy task. Politically, we observe hardening lines. On the right, renewed insistence on fixed identities, on tradition as authority, on the classification of lives into those that belong and those that do not. On parts of the left, particularly within radical formations, a different hardening emerges: inequalities are named with precision, harm is made legible, yet positions can settle into moral closure. Dialogue narrows. Disagreement becomes suspect. The space for holding difference while insisting on shared commitment becomes fragile, at best.

Architecture does not stand outside these dynamics. Our claims to ‘doing otherwise’ have long coexisted with dependence on those who finance and authorise construction. The relation to power has always been uneasy. We navigate it; we justify it; we aestheticise it.

The more difficult question that emerges from this present moment is therefore not only whose voices are included in architectural discourse, but also what forms of knowledge are adequate to the conditions now shaping collective life. In the midst of this, within our narrow institutional bubbles, we continue to ask: ‘Is this architecture?’ ‘Is this architectural research?’ ‘Why is this a PhD in architecture?’

The question recurs with ritual regularity. It appears at doctoral reviews, in funding panels, at conference Q&As; and it is raised not only by those within the discipline, but also, often more insistently, by those who come to architecture from fields beyond its traditional boundaries. Doctoral candidates are encouraged to anchor themselves within recognised debates, to cite the canonical theorists, to demonstrate lineage. The question ‘how is this architecture?’ becomes a rite of passage. It produces conformity under the guise of rigour. It polices boundaries. It reassures gatekeepers. It disciplines curiosity.

The disciplining of architecture echoes the wider drive to classify, consolidate, and defend intellectual territory under conditions of uncertainty.

It is also profoundly misaligned with the moment.

The insistence on disciplinary self-definition has historically operated as a form of professional boundary maintenance. Professions require standards and regulatory frameworks, particularly in domains where structural integrity, material performance, environmental systems, and the basic functionality of buildings for their occupants remain foundational expectations. Where material failure carries immediate consequences. Yet even at this most elementary level, the empirical record remains uneven. Contemporary development routinely produces environments that are ecologically extractive, socially fragmenting, and thermally inadequate. In this sense, claims to architectural expertise have often functioned less as guarantees of public benefit than as mechanisms through which authority over the built environment is maintained.

If architecture is understood as the design and delivery of buildings within established procurement systems, then its scope is limited by definition. It services clients. It navigates regulation. It negotiates finance. It produces spatial artefacts that reinforce particular social and economic arrangements. Architecture is already conditioned by capital, by law, by land ownership regimes. The question ‘is this architecture?’ becomes a mechanism for maintaining that alignment.

What, then, are we defending when we defend ‘architecture’ as a bounded field?

The issue lies in the priority accorded to disciplinary boundaries. The recurring demand for positioning, for declaring allegiance to a subfield, for clarifying whether one is ‘really’ architectural, suggests that the discipline fears dilution, that it experiences expansion as a threat. But in a polycrisis, contraction is not a virtue. The fragmentation of knowledge into ever more precise silos mirrors the fragmentation of responsibility that allows systemic harm to persist.

We speak of interdisciplinarity as if it were generous. In reality, it often remains a choreography of adjacent certainties. Each discipline retains its core, its journals, its metrics, its hierarchies. Exchange occurs at the margins while the centre remains intact.

What if, instead of asking whether a project is architectural, we asked whether it is adequate to the crisis it addresses? Whether it intervenes meaningfully in the socio-ecological systems that sustain life? Whether it redistributes resources, mitigates harm, enhances collective survival?

The fetishisation of construction as the ultimate validation of architectural knowledge obscures other forms of agency. Within uneven and often restrictive institutional conditions, architects can legislate, organise, mediate, map, expose, repair, maintain, dismantle. They can refuse commissions. They can redirect expertise towards stewardship rather than expansion. They can contribute to governance, to infrastructural reform, to ecological restoration.

In research, the stakes are even clearer. To insist on disciplinary purity in the face of planetary destabilisation is to prioritise institutional coherence over collective survival. The question is not whether a thesis is sufficiently architectural. The question is whether it expands our capacity to inhabit our planet responsibly.

This does not entail abandoning expertise. Structural calculation remains indispensable. So does knowledge of procurement, regulation, construction sequencing. But these competences are components within broader socio-eco-technical assemblages. They do not define the limits of inquiry.

The discipline’s boundaries are historically contingent. They were shaped by professionalisation, by the consolidation of architectural education in the nineteenth century, by the alignment of design with state and capital. They can be reshaped.

In a time when coastlines retreat, infrastructures fail, and habitats collapse, the policing of disciplinary identity appears increasingly parochial. It protects careers. It sustains accreditation regimes. It does little to address the material conditions of life.

The disciplining of architecture channels energy into self-definition rather than systemic intervention. It converts existential threat into curricular reform. It asks for positioning when what is required is transformation.

Perhaps it is time to relinquish the comfort of boundedness.

To accept that, in the polycrisis, the most responsible architectural act may not resemble architecture at all.