If we had all somehow managed to miss the antics of Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, then the sudden flood of click-bait articles on “the most anticipated buildings of 2026” would have marked the arrival of the new year anyway.
These lists, often published by mainstream media outlets in addition to the architectural press, share some common attributes. First, they are almost always the same list of flashy buildings. Second, even non-architects recognize that the projects featured tend to come from a relatively narrow and familiar pool of high-profile practices. This isn’t necessarily because the buildings in question will prove unimportant, but because they are made highly visible by their authors and publicists.
Third—and most frustratingly for architects who would like to think they make a meaningful contribution through their work—these articles treat architecture as something to be judged primarily in terms of style. Style, in this context, is understood very narrowly. A building is said to “have style” if its external form can be reduced to a quickly recognizable visual language and described using familiar shorthand. Stylish buildings are “iconic,” “futuristic,” and “visionary.” They are “stunning,” as if being knocked unconscious by architecture is a good thing. And if they have design flaws worth discussing or unsavory clients, they are described as “polarizing.”
Those who have been around the profession for a while will recognize that the media has long struggled to find an appropriate register for talking about architecture. Not so long ago, serious discussion was effectively reserved for those willing to take a position on the most difficult essays of Jacques Derrida or Gilles Deleuze, an era that felt exclusive and wholly disconnected from reality.
Today, the problem is almost the reverse: Architects who thrive in a capitalist marketplace and its lightning-fast news cycle by making exciting imagery are rewarded, regardless of how their buildings look when they are finally built, if they are. Either way, the reader is left with a distorted sense of what architects actually do. When architecture is framed primarily through style, its capacity to operate at a deeper, more societally meaningful level is diminished.
This matters because the day-to-day business of architecture is rarely concerned with matters of superficial judgement. Around the world, architects work amid housing shortages, rising construction costs, tightening regulation, political instability, and accelerating climate commitments. Buildings are expected to last longer, perform better, consume fewer resources, and serve broader sections of society.
At the same time, architects carry significantly greater administrative burdens. Across jurisdictions, practices are required to certify compliance with increasingly complex performance-based legislation, navigate opaque planning systems, and interpret development plans that frequently contain conflicting or poorly articulated ambitions. If you think practicing in New York is stressful, wait until you have tried Dublin!
To use a seemingly outdated idea: What section of the newspaper does architecture belong in? Locating architectural coverage in an outlet’s Style section is not an inconsequential editorial decision. It carries with it assumptions about how buildings should be evaluated and understood. Appearing in the Style section implies that novelty, branding, and visual impact are the primary measures of architectural achievement. If, by contrast, new buildings were to be covered in the Business or Politics sections, the criteria by which they were assessed would look very different. Questions of cost, durability, social value, and long-term consequence would presumably be emphasized.
The gap between how architecture is represented and what it actually is remains vast. It is also largely unexamined and, therefore, prone to easy or unreflective interpretation. When architecture is presented primarily as spectacle, it reinforces the perception that the profession serves elite interests while disregarding urgent social needs. It allows influential political figures to suggest that architecture is no longer a profession at all. It obscures the extent to which political decisions, real-estate markets, and procurement systems shape the built environment. And it leaves the public poorly equipped to understand why delivering housing, decarbonizing construction, or adapting existing building stock is so complex, or why these efforts matter.
Part of this problem is related to architecture’s longstanding intimacy with art and design. The disciplines share so much, but architecture is fundamentally different. Despite our wish to think about buildings as art objects, they largely aren’t commodified in the same way. We can recognize the obvious fluency between designing objects—furniture, lamps, and the rest—and architecture while realizing that the costs and methods of construction are far more expensive and complex, respectively.
This issue also relates to the collapse of the media industry, largely blamed on the proliferation of the internet, which disrupted 20th century business models of advertising and subscriptions. Consolidation also means that there are more publicists and fewer journalists working today: There are more stories, and fewer people to tell them. In the U.S. lately, the rough ratio is six publicists for every journalist. Outnumbered, editors (and writers) are besieged by content and flogged from above to deliver coverage that will “get the clicks.”
The internet has also eaten away at our collective attention span for more nuanced appreciations of reality. Architecture can be consumed quickly through images or videos, but that engagement often misses the iceberg of work that goes into delivering buildings. A building that took years of an architect’s life and tens—if not hundreds—of millions of dollars to create is somehow now supposed to be understood through a quick article written in a day (or less). The collapse of visual information into an endless scroll of algorithmically sequenced content packs knowledge into boxed packets. A building becomes equal to a chair becomes equal to the current military invasion becomes equal to the latest runway show. Cue Walter Benjamin: “The eternal is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.”
It is easy to see how the presentation of each year’s architectural completions comes to resemble a prolonged fashion week. Editors need images, and “anticipated openings” make for easy, compelling content. Contemporary media culture rewards buildings that promise novelty or visual distinction, because they are easier to package than those whose value lies in quieter, more considered acts of judgement—where, to recall the time-tested anecdote, the architect questioned the brick and the brick replied that it wanted to be an arch. Surely a talking brick is front-page news?
The question, then, is not whether some buildings opening in the coming year will be important. Likely most of them will be. The question is how we choose to evaluate importance. If coverage continues to prioritize style over substance, we risk misunderstanding a discipline whose most consequential work is rarely glamorous but prosaically necessary.
Garry Miley is an architect and lecturer in architecture at South East Technological University in Ireland. His work focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence on architectural design, education, and professional practice, with current research exploring how theories of architectural quality—particularly Gestalt theory—might be made legible to computational systems. He writes regularly on architecture, technology, and planning.
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