Downsizing

If it’s not quite a mumblecore manifesto, it’s not far off.

Think of it as an understated call to arms. A who-me declaration of principles. A line in the sand that is shallow and sometimes meandering but resolute all the same.

Michael Meredith’s new essay-length book—or is it a book-length essay?—is called “Smaller Architecture.” Published this month by Architecture Exchange as part of its new “Memo Series,” overseen by Matthew Allen and Joseph Bedford, it offers pretty much what the title suggests: a frank, economical, and rather informal argument in favor, as Meredith puts it, of an architecture that’s “perfectly okay being smaller,” that rejects “globally scaled abstraction and universalizing claims and reorients itself…to more localized and direct forms of engagement.”

I’ll say this right off the bat: “Smaller Architecture” is the only architecture book I’ve ever reviewed—and I’ve been reviewing architecture books for more than thirty years, going back to Peter Blake’s “No Place Like Utopia” in 1993—that forced me to confront the prospect that my review might be longer than the book itself, a version of the Borges story where the map winds up not just matching but exceeding the territory.

“Smaller Architecture” clocks in at about 12,000 words if you count the footnotes and a marvelously efficient 2,000 if you don’t. Yes, you read that right: the footnotes are five times longer than what in journalism we call the body copy. I’ll have more to say about this lopsided relationship between parasite and host in a bit.

If you’re familiar with Meredith’s work—as one of the founders, with his wife Hilary Sample, of the New York firm MOS Architects, or as a writer or Princeton professor or accidental podcast host—the tone of “Smaller Architecture,” sophisticated but loose, will be familiar. Meredith reports that he watched in dismay in recent years as “architecture offices started to model themselves after archetypes of capitalist global expansion.” The result was an architecture that convinced itself it “could be everywhere and involved in everything all the time.”

Meredith’s anxiety about this state of affairs found its way into his lectures and his Princeton studios (which lately have been concerned with communal living, music festivals, small-a anarchism, and William Morris, among other touchstones). He made note of the fact that many of the most influential firms in Western architectural history—including those led by Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, Luis Barragán, Paul Rudolph, Aldo Rossi, Rafael Moneo, and even Louis Kahn—did their most innovative work while employing fewer than twenty people. And sometimes fewer than ten. Or even five. On the whole, though, this set of concerns about the relationship between size and efficacy remained for him rather inchoate.

Then he happened to re-read a line in “Translations from Drawing to Building,” Robin Evans’s near-canonical 1986 essay, in which Evans asks a simple but potent question: might a “smaller and less predictable architecture” help the discipline, “by contraction and concentration, constitute itself anew?”

There was Meredith’s hook, and his book title. The irony, of course, is that Evans’s argument not only failed to gain traction but had the misfortune of arriving just as a mania for “bigness,” best exemplified by the 1990s-era work of Rem Koolhaas, was rising to dominance in architecture. (Evans died in 1993, at 48.) Bigness morphed into the Bilbao Effect morphed into One World Trade and CCTV—and from there into the mid-aughts work of Morphosis, into the megaprojects of Norman Foster and Bjarke Ingels, into Hudson Yards and NEOM.

The 2001 terror attacks couldn’t blunt the momentum bigness had built up. Nor could Hurricane Katrina, or the economic collapse of 2008, or the decision by the New York Times to show Nicolai Ouroussoff the door. Globalization, urbanization, neoliberalism, private equity, and celebrity worship formed an alliance with bigness that kept Evans’s dreams on the sidelines.

Which, of course, is precisely where Meredith thinks they are at their most potent. His goal is not to move smallness to center stage, where it might stand blinking dumbly in the spotlight, and therefore lose much of its destabilizing power, but rather to coax a few more center-stage types to visit smallness in the wings, and attend to it there, at least for a while.

The book in any case needs bigness as a foil. Its basic structure is to lightly personify both Smaller Architecture and Larger Architecture and then set them up repeatedly against one another. Smaller Architecture “still enjoys reading books, but it also watches YouTube videos while surfing the internet and Facetiming friends”; Larger Architecture prefers “watching a lot of Shark Tank while listening to TED talks.”

The title itself suggests the importance of this relationship; as Meredith puts it, “the -er” in Smaller “is a value judgment, a comparison to the status quo. Larger not large. Smaller not small.” He is quick to underscore that he doesn’t want to set up a dialectic, exactly. He also emphasizes that the book has no interest in demonizing technology, or in calling, in the vein of Richard Sennett, for a return to humanism or craftsmanship. His focus is simply scale—of buildings, of architectural offices, of ambition.

The book’s characters sort themselves into one of the two camps almost automatically. Koolhaas stands with the Larger Architecture crowd alongside Ingels, Foster, Patrik Schumacher, Michael Speaks, Donald Trump’s fondness for the word “bigly,” and management consulting. Those huddling on the Smaller Architecture end include a different Schumacher (E.F., or Fritz, author of “Small Is Beautiful”), Morris, William James, Bernard Maybeck, Édouard Glissant, Jane Jacobs, and the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia. And also the de-growth crowd, though Meredith doesn’t much concern himself with their arguments.

The main text in “Smaller Architecture” runs, ironically enough, in giant letters along the right-hand pages. The footnotes are in smaller type on the left side of each spread. (The designer is Twelve.) This leveling of the playing field between primary and supporting text seems appropriate in a book dedicated to smallness. It also calls to mind the work of the footnote-obsessed David Foster Wallace, one of Meredith’s writing heroes and somebody he got to know when two men overlapped at a residency in 2000 at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.

Meredith, born in 1971, shares with Wallace, who died in 2008 at 46, a slacker, Gen X point of view, along with an interest in that creative moment when the marginal threatens to overtake the central, at least in terms of energy and potential. The cultural spaces Meredith admires include the sideshow, the sidebar, and the undercard—not the big screen but the picture-in-picture. In a footnote, fittingly, he pauses to praise Hollywood’s character actors: “Eccentricity and idiosyncrasy become hallmarks, as does disappearance into one’s role or work.”

I was struck by this notion of an approach to creative production that might be both aggressively unconventional and self-effacing. As Meredith notes, one of the paradoxes of the Starchitecture Age, the apogee of Larger Architecture, was that the more gigantic an architecture firm got—think of Gehry Partners, or Zaha Hadid Architects, or Foster + Partners—the more it became associated with a single celebrity at the top of the heap.

“Smaller Architecture” is thin on the specific architectural (or even political) uses of smallness, as you might have surmised. We don’t really get a sense of what a character-actor version of architecture might look like. (“Smaller Architecture,” Meredith writes, “doesn’t promote an aesthetic project—not at the moment at least.”) There’s simply no room for case studies, architectural drawings, or detailed instructions in a volume so brief and stubbornly imageless. Instead Meredith is content to allude to what smallness might help us accomplish and, at the same time, eliminate.

And if “Smaller Architecture” feels messier and more repetitive than a book of this length ought to be, Meredith is right about the tenor of the times. We find ourselves in a moment, especially in the U.S., when our most significant cultural, legal, and educational institutions are simultaneously under attack and, in their craven responses to that attack, have revealed themselves to be a good deal hollower than even some of their critics realized. We have no choice but to build new structures and vessels for creative and political work, which for pragmatic reasons will have to be small and informal, at least for now. Punch List is certainly organized around this point of view.

These new structures and cultural products, Meredith has discovered, tend to work best when they are, often by virtue of being dependent on a larger sponsor, fluid, playful, and collaborative—and when they don’t need much upfront capital. Meredith’s recent podcast, a sleeper hit called “Building with Writing,” is a good example. He set it up in support of a Princeton exhibition he organized to honor the career of the retiring professor and former dean Stan Allen.

The exhibition examined the relationship between Allen’s writing and his architecture. Meredith started recording interviews with architects and academics who know Allen, a list that includes Sample, Liz Diller, Mark Lee, and current Princeton dean Mónica Ponce de León. He then pulled the recordings together into a podcast that is about as unstructured as you can imagine. In many of the episodes Meredith fails even to introduce his guest, preferring simply to press record on his iPhone and start chatting headlong.

The exhibition was… fine. The podcast, shaggy and misshapen as it is, is a deeply compelling experiment, full of conversations from which I learned a great deal. And you could say that Princeton (endowment: $34 billion) unwittingly paid for it, although my best guess is that the total budget was about thirty-five bucks.

There is some strange alchemic power right now in the ancillary, the improvisatory, and even the parasitic—in the utopianism not of the headliner but of the opening act. Meredith is a full professor but an adjunct revolutionary. There aren’t many, it must be said, who enjoy the luxury of that combination, and some will take him (or the book) less seriously for it. But I think he’s onto something. With apologies to Charles Jencks, this is the new adhocism.

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