Nontypological architecture here refers to a tendency in
architectural form to gravitate toward blank, empty space—devoid of
subdivisions or features that might anchor it to specific functions or
representations. Rather than acting as an exoskeleton that molds specific forms
of labor subjectivity, domesticity, or modes of life and production,
nontypological architecture tends toward a kind of inoperativity. This
condition was already visible in the industrial factory, where innovations in
production techniques cleared out preconfigured interior spaces and stripped
exterior facades of representational content. The acceleration of technological
change has now outpaced any capacity to represent, stabilize, or anticipate
future spatial arrangements. As a result, architecture tends to lose its
predictive and organizational authority, becoming a kind of fluid
infrastructure rather than a symbolic or typological enclosure.
Yet this movement toward fluidity is not purely liberatory.
It is accompanied, in equal and opposite measure, by a reterritorialization of
forms and representations that reproduce familial, familiar, and functional
motifs. These are meant to ward off the psychic and social dislocation that
might otherwise emerge—a kind of nihilism that could threaten the ontological
foundations of the economic order. This economy, understood in its classical
sense as oikonomia, is not merely a system of material distribution, but
a metaphysical regime rooted in divine order and sovereign exception—a
structure that preserves the imagined sanctity of the household in which gods
and subjects dwell.
This nontypological tendency is particularly pronounced in
post-Fordist architectural environments, such as those of the creative and
knowledge economies—visible in the Bürolandschaft model and the
sprawling, flexible headquarters of corporations like Meta. Open-plan offices
and temporary workspaces visually erase the spatial codifications of
traditional labor relations. Yet this erasure is not a neutral gesture. It
activates one of the most deeply rooted human faculties: adaptation. The
ability to navigate indeterminate spatial and temporal environments becomes a
tacit expectation of subjectivity. In this way, spatial formlessness becomes a
new kind of disciplinary apparatus—an expression of oikonomia—that
harnesses the subject’s pliability in the absence of rigid institutional
frameworks.
At the core of this transformation lies a dominant
metaphysics: technic. This term, as articulated by Bernard Stiegler and
others, refers not merely to tools or machines, but to a foundational mode of
world-disclosure and ontological ordering. Technic emerged in ancient
proto-states as a mechanism for temporal control, spatial partitioning, and the
reproduction of hierarchical power. Today, it has expanded to occupy the
totality of temporal and spatial existence. The architectural condition it
produces is not one of emancipation, but of paradox: a simultaneous opening
of space and closure of possibility. While technological systems
extend spatial reach and connectivity, they also constrict the capacity to
imagine or enact alternative forms of life beyond dominant economic and
logistical imperatives.
This paradox is sustained by the massive development of
technology, infrastructure, and spatial distancing—conceived as the micro- and
macro-scaling of circuits that reproduce specific relational and productive
formations, think microships and think supply and assembly lines that span the
entire earth. These circuits do not merely constitute logistical frameworks;
they instantiate a broader metaphysics and ontology of extractivism.
Within this worldview, all entities—human and nonhuman—are positioned as
resources to be used, exploited, and ultimately exhausted. Importantly, this
extractive logic persists even as it renders increasingly obsolete or archaic
visible disciplinary forms—factories, schools, prisons—that once at the apex of
producing and reproducing ontological and social separations and hierarchies.
Under this condition, technology and infrastructure
themselves become the dominant form of “architecture.” Not in the conventional
sense of visual or aesthetic form, but as the crystallization of the economy’s
specific mode of enframing—to draw on Heidegger’s concept of Gestell.
These infrastructural forms not only orchestrate production and logistics; they
also continuously reproduce subordinated subject and object positions. Those
who fall outside these optimized circuits—whether migrant laborers, ecological
systems, or precarious populations—are rendered uncared for, unprotected, and
unacknowledged as essential to life. In this state of ontological neglect, they
are subjected to ongoing cycles of exploitation, depletion, and abuse.
