Essay
Architecture, Responsibility, Reversibility – On Conditions, Effects, and the Limits of Set-Making.
Architecture is responsibility because it remains.
This proposition was intentionally formulated as a strong set-point. It insists on the fact that architecture does not dissolve after use, interpretation, or fashion. Built decisions continue to act—materially, spatially, socially—long after authorship has withdrawn. Responsibility, in this sense, is inseparable from duration.
A recent response by Achim Lohse productively sharpens this claim by shifting the focus from permanence to revisability. His argument does not negate responsibility through duration; it reframes it as an ethical and epistemological problem under conditions of uncertainty. This shift is not a contradiction, but a necessary extension. It exposes a tension that architecture cannot resolve by simplification: responsibility requires both commitment and the capacity for correction.
If architecture is understood as the production of conditions rather than objects, its effects cannot be treated as deterministic outcomes. Architecture does not command behavior; it biases it. It alters probabilities of perception, movement, interaction, attention. Effects are neither arbitrary nor absolute. They are contingent and yet structurally influenced. This understanding relocates architectural responsibility from claims of control to questions of evidential plausibility.
Responsibility, then, is not grounded in certainty, but in the ability to argue effects rationally. Architectural effects must be thinkable in a counterfactual sense: it must remain conceivable that different spatial conditions would have produced different experiential or social outcomes. Without this counterfactual structure, architectural “impact” collapses into rhetoric. What follows is not a demand for proof in the scientific sense, but for triangulated evidence: phenomenological description, social-practical observation, and physical parameters must remain in dialogue. Responsibility begins where claims become discussable.
At this point, permanence becomes ambiguous. Duration stabilizes decisions, but it also stabilizes errors. The ethical problem is not whether architecture should last, but under which conditions lasting decisions remain legitimate in the face of future uncertainty. Here, revisability enters not as an aesthetic preference for the temporary, but as an ethical second order. Responsibility does not only concern what is set, but how irrevocable that setting is allowed to become.
This reframes architectural ethics fundamentally. Responsibility is no longer exhausted by reduction, clarity, or formal restraint. These strategies can increase legibility and accountability, but they do not guarantee future adequacy. A reduced form may still enforce exclusion. A clear order may still normalize power. What matters is not neutrality—which is impossible—but the transparency of means and the accessibility of alternatives. Architecture becomes problematic not when it influences, but when it influences without remaining readable and criticizable.
This is where the distinction between duration and revisability becomes productive rather than oppositional. Certain architectural decisions require permanence: structures of safety, accessibility, and collective orientation cannot be perpetually provisional. At the same time, an architecture that denies its own fallibility risks transforming present values into material dogma. The ethical task is not to avoid setting, but to integrate non-knowledge into the act of setting itself.
From this perspective, architecture is neither pure object nor mere atmosphere, but a relational dispositif: an ensemble of material arrangements, thresholds, rhythms, and constraints that configure how the world becomes accessible. Responsibility operates within this relational field. It demands that architectural means remain legible, effects arguable, and consequences—where possible—open to revision.
This does not weaken the original proposition. On the contrary, it specifies it. Architecture is responsibility because it remains—but remaining alone is not sufficient. What remains must also remain answerable. Responsibility, then, is not the confidence of the one who sets, but the discipline of the one who anticipates being questioned by future conditions.
Architecture does not create certainty. It creates conditions under which better judgments may later become possible. That, ultimately, is its most demanding form of responsibility.
— Felix Schwake
This essay responds to and extends a recent contribution by Achim Lohse on architecture as condition, effect, and revisability.