What is architecture for?
For this week’s City of Tomorrow column, I want to step back from projects and policies and ask a more basic question: What is architecture for?
We often speak about buildings as objects that are designed, completed, photographed, and eventually judged. But architecture does not end when construction does. It continues in the way people occupy it, adapt it, care for it, and make it part of everyday life.
In Southeast Asia, where cities are shaped by climate, migration, inequality, memory, and constant change, this shared condition is impossible to ignore.
Architecture is shared
The following manifesto is an attempt to put that position into words. It is also the idea behind “Shared Ground”—this year’s Anthology ASEAN Architecture Festival, which brings architects, designers, thinkers, and communities from across the region together in Intramuros, Manila, from October 2 to 4.
I invite you to join us and to listen, question, exchange ideas, and consider together what architecture can contribute to the cities and societies we are building.
The Shared Ground Manifesto begins with a simple proposition: Architecture is shared. Architecture creates space. Architecture becomes ground. Architecture is shared ground.
Buildings only become architecture once they are shared. Architecture itself is an act of sharing. We share it with the people who use it, live alongside it, and pass by.
Across Southeast Asia, the ground on which we build is never neutral. It holds the memory and labor of both inequality and resilience. It is shaped by monsoon and heat, by migration and trade, and by the everyday work that keeps cities running.
To design here is to enter ground already shaped by others. Shared ground is not assumed. It is negotiated.
Care
Shared ground requires care, and our responsibility does not end with construction. Cities are kept alive through maintenance and repair, and through adaptation over time. Care is carried over time.
Architecture that makes no provision for this work is unfinished. What lasts is rarely what receives the most attention. Architecture must care for it to endure.
Ground continues long after construction ends.
Culture
There is no single narrative of place. Culture is living memory, and memory is contested. Buildings give identity a visible form whether architects intend it or not. They can reinforce who belongs and who remains at the margins.
On shared ground, culture cannot simply be dictated. Culture is lived and changed over time. Architecture must leave room for this to happen.
Collective futures
The future is the final test of shared ground.
Futures are negotiated. Architects and governments shape them, but so do developers, communities, financial systems, and the ways people occupy and alter space over time.
Space distributes opportunity. It affects who has access, who gets to participate, and who is left outside.
What forms these patterns? Who makes these decisions? What shape will this future take?
A future built for only some of us is not collective. Architecture must not discriminate.
Toward Shared Ground
Shared Ground is a framework and a commitment. It moves architecture from authorship to stewardship, from the finished object to the conditions of collective life.
To build on shared ground is to accept responsibility to the land beneath us, to the people among us, and to those who will inherit what we make.
Architecture shapes more than buildings. It shapes the relationships around them. Shared ground is where architecture becomes a public act.
For more information, visit anthologyfest.com and get your tickets. Anthology Festival is supported by the NCCA and the Intramuros Administration, and is co-presented by Boysen Paints, Omni Electrical and Lighting, Glassbox, Fasclad Inc., and Midea
