If your algorithms are anything like mine, there’s a lot of architecture and design served up no matter if I’m scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. One second I’m touring John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein House, the next I’m watching a deep dive into the psychology of reality TV homes, and then I’m seeing a roast of sofas that scream Instagram trend victim. (Note to shoppers: Avoid the much-duped Togo and Camaleonda.)
A decade ago, criticism like this was confined to the printed page or, occasionally, documentary films. But now, it’s moved onto our phone and computer screens, served up in brief snippets that just make you want to get swallowed even deeper. This world, which we’ll call Very Online Architecture, is always informative, often funny, and highly addictive. Want to know more about congestion pricing? Or the absurdity of NEOM, the mirror-covered 100-mile linear “city” in Saudi Arabia? Or how messed up Robert Moses is? It’s more fun, and digestible, to scroll through a series of before-and-after photographs showing his impact on cities than pick up a book.
In the past, critics and architects pursued publication in big-name journals and networked in salons and conferences. They still do, but there’s a growing faction who are pursuing content creation as a significant element of their work. And some are making their entire living off it. They’re heading to the places where audiences hungry for this information already are—Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok each have over 1 billion monthly users—and building sizable platforms on them. Of course, this isn’t the first time that critics and architects have leaned into mass communication to get their ideas across, but it has the most reach by far.
While the intersection of architecture and social media in tech’s early days may have been limited to firms promoting their work and seductive design-porn images, the creators within the genre of Very Online Architecture are developing new forms of practice, using their platforms for advocacy and serving as mediators, employing the tools of our time to welcome us into their worlds. And they’re having a lot of fun doing it.
“I have friends who are in architecture or adjacent fields and there’s a sense of, Oh, we have to take this very seriously—it’s very dry. It’s very bureaucratic. It’s very important,” said Diana Regan, a gamer turned content creator who runs the TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram accounts Cities by Diana (combined reach 440,000), which features absurd and unfathomable situations, such as Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump playing the video game City Skylines together or a day in the life of a “red-blooded” Cybertruck owner. Regan is candid about having “no qualifications whatsoever” in design, as she told AN, but she has tapped into topics like car culture and the ubiquity of placeless suburban development, which are familiar to a lot of people but are absent from mainstream conversations. “I’m expressing this contradiction and conflict between the unsustainable way our cities are built but also how they’re kind of cool,” Regan said. “I kind of like getting on a big-ass highway, seeing the same cookie-cutter buildings over and over again, and going to Costco and Target.”
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The frustration with this too-serious world of design is why Dami Lee, a licensed architect turned YouTuber with 1.9 million subscribers, became a content creator. While she loved her field, every time she talked about it to her friends, their eyes glazed over. “In the beginning I was like, Why aren’t people interested in it?” Lee said. “But then over time, I just realized that it was the way that I was talking: It was so academic, nonaccessible, and weird.” She initially started making videos for students and designers about how to become a licensed architect, but during the pandemic—when architecture work was drying up—shifted to design history and analysis targeted to a wider audience. Now she makes videos that explain topics like hostile architecture, megacities, and the urbanism of Burning Man.
The move has also given her a competitive edge. Lee and her five-person team spend about 70 percent of their time producing videos and 30 percent on design practice. Her YouTube platform helps the business side of her practice, too. “It’s just a really great microphone,” Lee said. “I never have to do proposals. The clients who reach out already feel like they know me. In my first meeting with a client, I was prepared to go in with my very limited portfolio and try to sell myself, but they said, ‘I’ve already watched all of your videos. I know where you are in your career. I just want to work with you.’”
The creator and influencer economy has become big business over the years. One study estimated that there are 11.4 million full-time content creators in the United States. It makes sense, then, that architects would join the party. It has also led to an unlikely outcome: The insider perspective on architecture work that people outside the field usually consider mundane has grabbed their attention.
Cathal Crumley, who became a content creator six months ago, believes that the rise in content creation in architecture is an example of the shifting nature of practice. During COVID-19 lockdowns, he saw how remote work impacted the way that architects interacted. “I just remember thinking, This might be the future, a digital way of architects designing things and communicating to one another,” Crumley said. When he began his career, he envisioned having his own office. But he can’t see himself building a traditional practice. Now, he consults on video games and creates videos that address third-rail topics like the ethical dilemma of accepting commissions from fossil fuel companies. “Making videos has come quite easy, and I joke to my wife that I have so much to say and I no longer bother her with those opinions,” Crumley explained.
Commentary and jokes aside, there are also significant strides happening in the strategy of digital communication on these platforms. Stewart Hicks, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, also began shooting videos during COVID after the school adopted remote learning. “I didn’t want it to just be a worse lecture,” said Hicks, who has amassed a following of 600,000 followers on YouTube and whose most popular videos attract millions of views. He had an aha moment when he came across science videos, which have more established discourse around the craft of communication. He applied some of those approaches—e.g., animation, sequencing, timing, and narrative—to architecture.
Most importantly, Hicks uses examples from pop culture—like the show Severance or reality TV—as a Trojan horse to engage on headier topics. “The only way to understand the impact of something is to be able to make it relatable in some form,” Hicks said. “Otherwise it’s just information.”
While informing broader audiences about the history and meaning of architecture is a through line in many creators’ accounts, there’s also a deeper mission: to create change. It’s why Adam Paul Susaneck—an architect at AECOM who works on highway capping and removal projects, and who is a PhD candidate at Delft University studying the effectiveness of strategies related to those interventions—started the Instagram account Segregation by Design (183,000 followers). In it, he shares before-and-after photographs and animations of urban renewal projects and the devastation they have wrought on neighborhoods. The information about how race has shaped architecture and city planning is available in books and in academic journals; however, it’s not accessible to a mainstream audience. “To some extent, I did this because I was tired of telling people to read The Power Broker,” Susaneck said, referring to Robert E. Caro’s celebrated biography of Moses. Susaneck’s hope is that people will understand how race has shaped urban planning in their cities and demand something different. “It’s so visual that when you look for it, you can see it everywhere,” he added. “I want people to recognize that—and then organize.” In effect, he’s creating more public demand for, and understanding about, the transformative projects he works on at AECOM.
With so many images and videos circulating these days, there’s also a growing sense among creators that there’s room for more media literacy. On average people spend nearly two and a half hours a day on social media, according to Statista. But are we really aware of what we’re seeing? Dan Rosen, a comedian who skewers trends in videos that regularly rack up tens of thousands, and sometimes millions, of views on Instagram and TikTok, doesn’t think so. He wants to tune people into the complexities of visual culture, “like John Oliver is doing for politics,” he noted, with a little bit of John Berger mixed in. To wit: his celebrity home tour reviews, which are actually critiques on wealth, consumerism, and power. “I’m like, OK, I can hook you with Yolanda Hadid, but maybe you’ll stick around and understand why her home makes no sense and is in terrible taste and is just bizarre,” Rosen said.
Rosen believes his outsider status gives him freedom to be honest about what he sees. “All the big architecture magazines have an unholy alliance with celebrity culture and sometimes just become PR for them,” Rosen explained. “There’s a silence that occurs. There’s a movie critic and architecture critic in The New York Times, but there’s not an interior design critic who’s looking at new collections or looking at homes in the same way as new music or film. It’s a lane that people in the design world are glad to see filmed.”
One of the reasons why architecture is so addictive online is that we’re able to travel around the world in the palm of our hand, looking at places that are often significantly more interesting than what’s in front of us. “People are naturally drawn to beauty and well-designed spaces, but many don’t have access to them,” said Nino Ferrari-Mathis, the undergraduate architecture student behind Ninos Buildings, an account on Instagram and TikTok (with 583,000 combined followers). He often visits famous buildings as part of his schoolwork. He credits a friend for encouraging him to document these field trips. Soon Ferrari-Mathis began posting the videos. In them, we’re hearing stories about the buildings, with Ferrari-Mathis as narrator and tour guide. He’s learning right alongside his audience as he produces his videos. “I feel like it’s served as an apprenticeship, a different form of firsthand learning that has become rare in institutional spaces,” he said. “Even as an architecture student, I often struggle to fully understand what I’m learning, so I can only imagine how people outside the industry feel.”
The ranks of architects and designers becoming content creators provokes a question: Will they eventually pursue this as an alternative career path if it becomes lucrative enough? Of the creators AN spoke to, only Regan makes a living off her work. After a layoff from a job in sales, she decided to pursue content creation full-time, and so far it has worked for her. But most see it as a complement to their career. Hicks noted that the only reason he felt comfortable starting a YouTube channel is because he earned tenure. “I had to feel safe in order to start,” he said. “This is my hobby, and I don’t really want too much more out of it than what it is.… I don’t think the roller-coaster ride of being at the mercy of AdSense and the YouTube algorithm would work for me.” However, it might be a path for his students. Hicks is now teaching a seminar on video and film essays. “I didn’t pitch the seminar as having anything to do with YouTube, but the students ask about the algorithm a lot,” he said. “I’m hesitant to go there—I think I want this to be broader—but at the same time, this is the world that they’re in, and this is the world in which the practice of architecture operates. YouTube might not always be around, but video is not going away.”
Diana Budds is a design journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.
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