We’re used to thinking of space as a loyal ally: it welcomes you, protects you, makes life easier. That’s the dominant narrative of contemporary architecture: “user-friendly” and “human-centred.” But what if it isn’t? What if architecture is also full of limits, constraints and compromises?
And it’s often there that creativity finds its way through.
Space is not our servant
We’ve asked buildings to become ever more accommodating: quiet when we need concentration, flexible when we need collaboration, even “emotional”, at least from the renderings onwards. But this endless pursuit of service-oriented architecture risks turning sterile. An effective space isn’t necessarily a servile one: sometimes it’s an interlocutor. A counterpart with an opinion of its own, inviting us to experience different forms of living. Think of the staircases at MAXXI in Rome, or the loft craze that reshaped the entire SoHo district in Manhattan. Serviceable spaces? Hardly. Useful spaces? Absolutely. A building can force us to imagine different solutions, and that, too, can be its value.
Friction as a resource
A corridor that’s too narrow, a shadow that always falls in the wrong place, a material that ages faster than expected: annoyances? Perhaps. But also stimuli. Because friction isn’t just discomfort: it’s the resistance that pushes us to move, to change direction, to invent new solutions. Living is always a negotiation: if we want oak flooring, we know it will inevitably bear the marks of time. There’s no way around it: natural materials absorb the traces of daily life.
Against the illusion of “tailor-made”
We live in the age of extreme personalisation, but space doesn’t always need to follow the same logic. The illusion of the “perfectly customised” risks reducing architecture to nothing more than an application of comfort. An office that doesn’t coddle us at every turn can instead become a training ground for resilience, a catalyst for confrontation, fertile ground for the kind of conflict that sparks new ideas.
This is not about giving up on function, but about opening up to creative tension. Accepting that space doesn’t fully belong to us, that it’s something we must dialogue with, even clash with, means restoring its dignity and depth. Because it’s from confrontation that the most radical transformations are born.
