The year in architecture: In 2025, the disjuncture between material reality and architectural coloniser fantasies became impossible to avoid
Glitzy skyscrapers, highways and hotels. A hypothetical future beamed through developer logics and AI-rendered aerial views. This was Donald Trump’s ‘Riviera in the Middle East’, an illustration of a proposal posted to Truth Social in February this year. Its aims were clear: to permanently displace Gazans from their land and erase the evidence of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people by developing real-estate on top of it for a fictitious client dubbed ‘the world’s people’. In 2025, this disjuncture, between reality on the ground and coloniser fantasies found in such architectural renders, became impossible to avoid.
The Expo 2025, which opened in Osaka in April, captured a sense of this disjuncture. The American pavilion asked visitors to ‘imagine what we can create together!’ Visitors were dazzled with an array of LED screens displaying national propaganda, then swiftly ushered out after the video ended. The theme was predominantly focused on space colonisation: a simulated rocket launch led to a flyover rendering of an American colony on the moon, and ended with expansive views of stars and satellites. The word “together” repeatedly boomed from the speakers: an imagined futurity wholly disconnected from the reality of American life or politics (the only consistency being the settler’s pathological obsession with colonisation). Some solace could be experienced when visitors walked up Sou Fujimoto’s timber ‘Grand Ring’ – perhaps the only idea at the Expo staged in reality – allowing visitors to see the Expo from above. Its vantage point mimicked how architects continue to be conditioned to experience cities, from topographic height, separated from what happens on the ground.
The glossy imprecision of architectural renderings was once again on display in the imagery of new skyscrapers like 270 Park Avenue, designed by Foster + Partners for JP Morgan Chase (a bank invested in genocide) and completed in October this year. The supertall’s form and material choice, like a hovering Merkava tank, makes everything in its vicinity appear under threat: the entrance’s rock walls, coarse and seemingly intended to balance the aggressive form with some sort of natural materiality, appear like rubble. The ground plane is peppered with barriers, flagpoles, blast proof thresholds and checkpoints. It’s as if the building is awaiting retaliation from the city. What do we call architecture that appears so violent, so deeply complicit in the erosion of life?
Because 2025 also saw a global renaissance of walls and enclosures, of the technology of discipline and control: death camp, prison torture camp, food camp, refugee camp, children’s camp. Sde Teiman, the Everglades ICE detention facility (Aligator Alcatraz), the East Montana Detention Center (Lone Star Lockup), the continued construction of New York’s skyscraper jails, and the plan to expand the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador are this year’s winners of this lucrative enterprise. These sites, among many others, should not be ignored by designers and planners. They should be taught in architecture schools as case studies of racialised biopolitics, as eugenicist experiments gone too far, and as projects that architects, planners and engineers should refuse to participate in (and should otherwise be stripped of their license to practice). Genocides and their architecture are in fact repeating and proliferating globally. In a murderous rampage in Sudan, the RSF slaughtered the patients, visitors and staff of El-Fasher hospital – a monstrous déjà vu that echoed the world’s inability to halt Israel as it bombed all of Gaza’s hospitals. These sites of constructed state violence (and the ensuring streamed spectacle of human suffering) flood our news cycles, while the ivory towers of capital-driven design promote their shiny architectural experiments that house the very financial institutions funding such violence and destruction.
While there are many who want to make the desert bloom or who believe that skyscrapers can rise from rubble, others – presently and tangibly – are laying the ground for the possibility of another architecture. These architectures are continuously morphing, adapting, redeveloping from the bottom-up, outside capitalism’s forced marriage between architects, clients, and financiers. There is the Shinnecock Nation’s Ma’s house, a communal art space on Shinnecock Territory that provides residencies and community programs out of a red 1960s family house. There is the Dechinta Center for Research and Learning, a camp-ground of cabins atop a rock formation on Chief Drygeese Territory, a land – based pedagogical project rooted in Dene and Inuvialuit values and practices. There is Sakiya, a center for experimental art, science and agriculture, out of a Palestinian house in the village of Ein Qiniya, which not only takes on the role of caretaker and protector of two sacred trees on the site but has also recently renovated the nearby shrine and the agricultural terraces, despite increasing Israeli settler encroachment and attacks. There is the Om Suleiman farm and social space in Bil’in, which against all odds is growing organic produce across the hill from Israeli settlements and the separation wall. Both Sakiya and Om Suleiman experiment with architecture, with shelter, with waste and with planting, despite their inability to halt the impending Israeli bulldozers. Such projects are invested in the long term, in the world after the collapse of colonising enterprises. Even in New York, the belly of the capital-beast, community-led gardens and composting efforts, such as the 463 Halsey Community Farm and the Hattie Carthan Community Garden (both in Brooklyn), stand their ground and provide space, knowledge and food to neighborhoods being squeezed by private developers.
What unites these disparate sites of resistance is their ability to form community and continuity with histories that are categorically denied to us by the bulldozer, by coloniser-developer imaginations, and by AI visuals. If architecture ought to be the art of making life-affirming shelter (of the nexus of art and function imbued with socio-political needs), then such spaces, their organisation and disposition towards land, and towards people, render them sites of brilliant resistance. They remind us that architecture’s capacity for world building ought to belong not to the powerful, the wealthy, the perpetrators or beneficiaries of genocide, but to its survivors, who know their history and understand best how to rebuild for the world to come.
