Category: Architecture

Notes on Rhizomes

April 17th, 2025
A rhizome is a term used in biology & botany that refers to a subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. More broadly, it can refer to a structure characteristic of many plants and fungi. A rhizome is a horizontal, decentralized system: it can grow from any point and shoot off into separate rhizomes, meaning it’s not bound to a specific plant or tree. Rhizomes can connect to other root systems. Deleuze & Guattari introduce their concept in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Their writing is very complex and often incomprehensible, so it will be tempting to ignore the more obscure parts of the discussion and use the rhizome as a simple metaphor, but Deleuze dislikes metaphors. And getting used to their way of writing can be extremely rewarding.

Let us now proceed the way they do: first by determining the oppositions of the concept. First, let’s determine what the rhizome is not. The primary concrete example D&G use is the book:

A first type of book is the root-book. […] This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). […] The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two.¹

The root-type book has an organic unity similar to the tree structure. This “one becomes two” principle describes that structure: the trunk, then two branches, then two more branches from each, and so on. The borrowed terminology we use in philosophy is also evidence of the primacy of the tree in classical thought:

It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also […] all of philosophy: the root-foundation, Grund, racine, fondement.²

The primary example of this in philosophy would be Plato’s forms: There is the ideal form (the foundation), and then there are imperfect instances of actual objects that try to represent or imitate that form as closely as possible. The actual instances will never perfectly fit the concepts they’re trying to signify, so any actual instance is somehow lacking.

In art, this hierarchy was shattered first with challenging realism as a value and then with non-representational painting. For example, Pablo Picasso’s bull drawings, which try to get farther and farther from the form of the actual bull, challenge the idea that the more closely a painting resembles that which it is trying to represent, the better.

There is also completely non-representational painting. This type tries not to imitate but to ask: what can painting do?

If what Deleuze calls arborescent thinking is representational, an example from architecture of that would be the buildings of Andrea Palladio: in search of perfect proportion, as if there is an ideal form of the building, which is all alluded to in the title of Colin Rowe’s famous essay.³ A more crass example would be buildings that try to look like something, to represent something directly.⁴

Like non-representational painters and avant-garde architects, D&G are challenging the primacy of the arborescent, the hierarchical mode:

We’re tired of trees. […] All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics.⁵

There is also the radicle system or the fascicular root (in biology, a bundle of leaves or flowers growing crowded together). In the case of the book, an example D&G give is William Burroughs’ cut-up method, where there is a unified structure behind fragmented bits of text. Nietzsche and Joyce also fall into this category, not breaking with the binary system completely.

A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented.⁶

After D&G have distinguished the root-system and the radicle system from the rhizomatic one, on page 6, we find the first mention of the rhizome:

The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension but …with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constructed: write at n-1 dimensions… A system of this kind would be called a rhizome.⁷

Maybe n-1 refers to removing oneself from one’s writings because they mention the unattributability of the book and how the book has no subject or object. Similar to the death-of-the-author arguments made by Bathes.⁷ But subtracting the unique might point to a different explanation: getting behind the apparent self-sufficiency of an actual event or object, stepping back from the concrete detail, and seeing it in the web of relations it exists in. For example, instead of seeing rats as separate organisms, we might see them unabstracted from the air they breathe, the shadows they cast, the relationships they form, the ways they move, and the garbage they eat.

It’s clear, then, that not just potatoes and crabgrass are rhizomes. Rat burrows, ant colonies, vernacular cities, musical forms, the movement patterns of tourists, a pool of oil on a pan, a group of guerrilla fighters, and the unconscious are also rhizomes. Even the book—A Thousand Plateaus—is a rhizome.

Since D&G feel that this is not enough, they then present six characteristics of rhizomes:

1 and 2: The Principles of Connection and Heterogeneity: The ‘pure’ rhizome is infinitely connectable, with each point having the capacity to connect with any other point in any other system. A pure mechanism or machine operates on a plane of consistency that is not immediately apparent and will become perceptible after we follow the rhizome down to the most abstract connections.

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.⁹

The example they use here is language:

It [language] evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.¹⁰

3: The Principle of Multiplicity: The multiple must be treated as a substantive, it cannot be reduced to the multiple either. Here we get example of the puppeteer:

Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: “Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that its multiplicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text. Granted; but the actor’s nerve fibers in turn form a weave. […]”¹¹

What does it mean to treat the multiple as a substantive? To treat many things as really many. To forget the subject and the object, to forget unity. To think of only lines, not points or positions in relation to the whole.

4: The Principle of Asignifying Rupture: Any rupture is not going to destabilize it. The rhizome has no beginning and end, only a middle (milieu) from which it grows and overspills. It proceeds by the conjunction ‘and…and…and’…

A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.¹²

This applies to American and some English literature: such works do not follow conventional narratives but move from one episode to the next. Joyce seems to fit, and maybe Beckett. The entire rhizome cannot be traced back to a single origin. Saying that rhizomes do not have a single point of resolution necessitates that we stop thinking with foundational concepts that attempt to explain everything:

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and… and… and…”¹³

Perhaps, here it would be helpful to think of the difference between a rhizome and a hydra: the hydra grows two heads when one is cut off, while the rhizome can give birth to separate entities. Hydras are arborescent.

A very vivid example D&G use is that of the wasp and the orchid. To understand this, we have to go through some biology: In simple terms, a pollinator animal moves pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of a flower. Pseudocopulation is a behavior that takes place when a pollinator attempts to copulate with a flower that looks like a female mate. The wasp orchid, or Chiloglottis, is a flowering plant that looks much like a female wasp and is pollinated by thynnid wasps.

Wasp and orchid, as heterogenous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion […] At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code […]¹⁴

Another example is that of a virus that transmits from one species to another (from the baboon to the cat) and brings a trace of the DNA of the former. Phenomena like this ought to make us dispense with arborescent schemas for evolution:

Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead of a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another. Once again, there is aparallel evolution, of the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or copies of each other […] We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. […] The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.¹⁵

5 and 6: The Principles of Cartography and Decalcomania: Its trajectory is mappable, but not traceable. An image of a rhizome does not let us know its trajectory. An example of the traceable is psychoanalysis, which has a theory set in stone, a theory to which all the facts of the matter have to be morphed to fit and confirm it.

It [psychoanalysis] consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made.¹⁶

The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. […] Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways: in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome …¹⁷

Grassroots, ants on the march, rats building burrows, and guerrillas operating in enemy territory do not follow simple binary choices or directions laid out in suggested routes. Guerrilla fighters or tourists use maps, but they do not always stick to the prescribed routes or tracings. Rhizome as a map offers more possibilities than the already specified ones.

The urban planning ideas of the Garden City Movement and Le Corbusier are also examples of this rigidity determined in advance by an overcoding structure, which contrasts with the city of Amsterdam, further exemplary due to its underground system of stem-canals.

With that, D&G get to the end of the discussion without mentioning fungi, an example used frequently today.

All this reads like a manifesto for non-linearity in theory and practice, as an account of what might be possible, which is why the chapter ends with calls to action:

Write to the nth power, the n – 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! […] Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. […] establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings.¹⁸

References
1. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. p. 5
  ↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 18 ↩︎
3. Rowe, C. (1982). The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. MIT Press.
  ↩︎
4. How Not to Do Things With Buildings ↩︎
5. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. p. 15 ↩︎
6. Ibid., p. 6 ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Barthes, R. (1977). Image, Music, Text. Fontana.
  ↩︎
9. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. p. 7 ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Ibid., p. 8 ↩︎
12. Ibid., p. 9 ↩︎
13. Ibid., p. 25 ↩︎
14. Ibid., p. 10 ↩︎
15. Ibid., pp. 10-11 ↩︎
16. Ibid., p. 12 ↩︎
17. Ibid. ↩︎
18. Ibid., pp. 24-25 ↩︎
The White Tail of Milan

June 25th, 2022
In 1609, Paolo Morigia wrote of the uninterestingness of the Milanese palazzi from the outside, yet compared the interiors to “paradises on earth” (Ballabio et al., 2017, p. 11). If Morigia was alive in the 1970s, he might have said the same of the Milanese “red dinosaur with a white tail,” commonly known as the Monte Amiata, a housing complex in the Gallaratese district by Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi. This essay will focus primarily on building D: the simplest of the five and the only one designed by Rossi. A piece of architecture that conceals its internal variability through its façades, emphasizes some of its parts by cancelling out others, and reminds us of history.

Rossi’s publication Architettura della città, of 1966, was the culmination of his initial research and the foundation of his semiotic interpretation of buildings as urban artifacts. He desired an architecture that came from the old city, an architecture of the city. He investigated the city’s finite parts, its individual buildings, each invested with a distinct character. By architecture, he said, “I mean not only the visible image of the city and the sum of its different architectures, but architecture as construction, the construction of the city over time.” (Kirk, 2005, p. 208)

In November of 1967, Aymonino invited Rossi to design the Northern extension of the complex. Rossi proposed a white, elongated slab with shared galleries, “a building form as recognizable to Italians as town houses are to the English”(Kirk, 2005, p. 210).

West elevation and its proportions

East elevation and its proportions

The complex deliberately ignores the surroundings and establishes its point of reference. It has its own oppositions and similarities, exposed structures and concealed corridors. Yet the exterior of building D relates more to the outside than to its inner logic. Rossi went against the tendency of modernist architects to directly express the structure through the elevations.

Consider, for example, Eero Saarinen’s conviction that the beauty of his CBS building consists in it being the simplest skyscraper statement in New York. “When you look at this building,” he said, “you will know exactly what is going on” (Baird, 1969/2000, p. 45). Rossi’s approach, as we will see, is in stark contrast to this.

Rossi was working when architecture neither supported the coherence of a modern style nor took a reactionary stance against the modern; it mostly aspired simply to represent an evolution of modern innovations. (Eisenman & Iturbe, 2020, p. 46)

If Eisenman is right, Rossi’s building is not postmodern—it is late modern. It owes much to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation and is in a sense its development, but saying this doesn’t capture the novelties of this work. It also owes much to the Milanese case di ringhiera (“guard rail houses”), a type of housing with several apartments sharing an open gallery on each floor.

A casa di ringhiera by Paolo Monti (Milan, 1970) [1]

The building, however, is still quite idiosyncratic. Even within the Monte Amiata complex, it stands in obvious opposition to Aymonino’s machine-like complexity and individuation of parts into discrete elements.

In the Gallaratese Quarter in Milan, in opposition to the moderated expressionism of Carlo Aymonino, who articulates his residential blocks as they converge upon the hub of the open-air theatre in a complex play of artificial streets and tangles, Rossi sets the hieratic purism of his geometric block, which is kept aloof from every ideology, from every utopian proposal for a “new lifestyle.”

The complex designed by Aymonino wishes to underscore each solution, each joint, each formal artifice. Aymonino declaims the language of superimposition and of complexity, in which single objects, violently yoked together, insist upon flaunting their individual role within the entire “machine.” These objects of Aymonino’s are full of “memories.” And yet, quite significantly, Aymonino, by entrusting to Rossi the design for one of the blocks in this quarter, seems to have felt the need to stage a confrontation with an approach utterly opposed to his own, that is, with a writing in which memory is contracted into hieratic segments. It is here that we find, facing the proliferation of Aymonino’s signs, the absolute sign of Rossi, involuntarily and cunningly captured by the play of that proliferation. (Tafuri, 1974/2000 pp. 156-7)

Building B

If we compare Rossi’s building to modernist ones, several of its characteristics mark it as distinct in style. Both façades are flat with an array of functionally unnecessary pillars and square openings at regular intervals. The West façade might seem so repetitive that the arrays should become meaningless like background noise—emphasizing the part that rests on cylindrical columns—but irregular balconies and window blinds make the façade more chaotic than it seems at first.

The forms of the International Style of the twenties (in Italy called Rationalist) are revived, simplified, clarified, made stiff and static. Architecture is reduced to its geometric essentials in the typical Neoclassic way, recalling that of Ledoux. It is very Italian: the conception is on the one hand utterly immaterial and Neoplatonic, all pure idea and primary shapes in the ancient tradition of Renaissance humanist theory. But, as is also typical of Italian architecture, the forms are also very physical. They are heavy—in which they differ most from their Rational predecessors—solemn, and insistently repetitive, casting ominous shadows like those painted by de Chirico so long ago. (Scully, 2003, p.163)

Misterio y Melancolía de una Calle by Giorgio de Chirico (1914) [2]

Following Adolf Loos, Rossi uses no stylistic ornamentation. His “white blade” calls up images of ancient colonnades and de Chirico paintings, the Monastery of San Paio de Antealtares and the Milanese case di ringhiera, Le Corbusier’s Unité and Louis Kahn’s drawing of the hypostyle hall at Karanak through primary elements: doors, windows, walls, columns, stairs, and openings.

The east façade, the one you see first when entering the complex from the metro station, is a screen in front of a corridor which conceals the irregularity of doors and windows on the inside. It makes the corridor a space that is neither outside nor inside. Moreover, the square openings make us think that the building has two floors of apartments, when in fact it has three.

East façade screen and corridor

As such, this outer façade is like a mask with openings at an urban scale that do not correspond to individual rooms inside and that obscure the domestic scale behind it. This “frees” the façade from the logic of function, which differs from the modern free façade that “freed” itself from the logic of structure. (Eisenman & Iturbe, 2020, p. 51)

The opposite façade operates within a similar framework: it is regular with three strips of square openings but also obscures the variability inside. The apartments have balconies at specific intervals, but this is not apparent from the outside.

West façade screen and balconies

Following Le Corbusier, the building stands on a colonnade. Here, however, the columns can also be seen as walls which partially enclose the gallery inside. The depth of these columns makes the outside visible only if we look directly—when looking at an angle, all we see is an array of walls and shadows.

Rossi’s work—both at the urban and domestic scale—counters Le Corbusier’s insistence that modernism marked a divisive moment in history against which one could measure a before and an after. Rossi espoused a more nuanced notion of time, studying transformations in the urban fabric across time. For Rossi, there was no single moment that marked a new beginning in the city, as evidenced by his interest in Canaletto’s “capricci” or his collaboration with Arduino Cantafora on the mural Città Analogica of 1973 and his own collage of the same name of 1976. (Eisenman & Iturbe, 2020, p. 54)

Another feature of this building is the contrast between inner luminosity and outer darkness. In a 17th century Spanish monastery, Rossi “noted a striking luminosity which contradicted the nearly prison-like aspect of the exterior façade. The same shouts that reached the outside of the convent were perceived on the inside with even greater sharpness, as in a theater. In the same way the young man’s eyes perceive the sight of the exterior as in a theater, or as one who watches a performance” (Rossi, 1981/2009, p. 3).

Mosteiro de San Paio de Antealtares, Spain [3]

How is this effect achieved? The corridor, the frequency of windows, and their size. When looking at the east façade, the only thing we see through the screen is the dark ceiling of the corridor. Inside, the sun illuminates our path.

Analyzed in this way, we can see where Aldo Rossi diverged from his modernist predecessors and where he followed them. We can see how a building can conceal variability through repetition, look dark yet lack no illumination, emphasize its parts through noise, ignore its context yet look familiar, and simultaneously remind us of housing blocks, paintings, prisons, and monasteries.

REFERENCES
- Baird, G. (1969). “La Dimension Amoureuse” in Architecture. In Hays, K. M. (2000). Architecture Theory since 1968. MIT Press.
- Ballabio, F., Hockemeyer, L., Sherer, D., & Sparke, P. (2017). Entryways of Milan. Taschen.
- Eisenman, P., & Iturbe, E. (2020). Lateness. Princeton University Press.
- Kirk, T. (2005). The Architecture of Modern Italy: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present – Volume 2. Princeton Architectural Press.
- Rossi, A. (2009). Autobiografia scientifica. Il Saggiatore. (Original work published 1981)
- Scully, V. J. (2003). Modern Architecture and Other Essays. Princeton University Press.
- Tafuri, M. (1974). L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language. In Hays, K. M. (2000). Architecture Theory since 1968. MIT Press.
1. By Paolo Monti – Available in the BEIC digital library and uploaded in partnership with BEIC Foundation. The image comes from the Fondo Paolo Monti, owned by BEIC and located in the Civico Archivio Fotografico of Milan., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48047856
2. https://www.wikiart.org/en/giorgio-de-chirico/mystery-and-melancholy-of-a-street-1914
3. By Graeme Churchard from Bristol (51.4414, -2.5242), UK – Santiago de Compostela, Spain-29Uploaded by tm, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25513783
How Not to Do Things With Buildings

June 1st, 2022
Architects occasionally make buildings to say something. Some think that if a building does not intentionally convey a message, it’s not “real” architecture. Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center has a form that symbolizes flight, Daniel Libeskind claims that the form of his Jewish Museum Berlin comes from connecting the lines from the death camps to the site (Eisenman & Harrison, 2008, pp. 235-6), Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe intentionally looks like a graveyard, Mies van der Rohe’s Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht is a brick wall because that’s what was in front of them when they were shot, in a more vulgar case we have the Walt Disney World Dolphin and Swan Hotels by Michael Graves which have giant dolphin and swan statues on them.

What do these buildings tell us? In the first case, perhaps the message is “I am an airport”, in the last: “I am the Dolphin/Swan hotel”. The other projects are captivating for different reasons, and the symbolism of a memorial does not lessen its value. But are the messages themselves interesting? Is it worth it to worsen the acoustics of a conservatory to make it look like a musical instrument? Or double the cost of an airport to make it look like a bird?

You may accuse me of reductivism and point out that we can also reduce the premise of a poem or a Shakespeare play to a trite sentence. The premise of Macbeth, for example, might be “ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction” (Egri, 1960, p. 4). But there’s much beyond this premise (for an excellent analysis, see “Macbeth or Death-Infected” in Kott, 1961/2015), and the simplicity of the premise in no way makes the play worse. While in the case of architecture, the attempt to say something often takes away from aesthetics or functionality.

No building can avoid being symbolic in some sense but architecture made with the primary intent of conveying a message, usually at the expense of some other design aspect, is a different story. So why is deliberate symbolism preferable to accidental symbolism? Such architecture is too uninteresting to make up for the sacrifices it makes.

Take, for example, the poem “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

If we analyzed this in terms of its premise, the result would inevitably be underwhelming. Poetry loses its value when it is not obscure. Similarly, if the only value of a building is its message, then it’s not a very interesting building. And the message itself tends to be disappointingly banal.

Contemporary architecture should be just as radical as contemporary music. But there are limits. Although a work of architecture based on disharmony and fragmentation, on broken rhythms, clustering and structural disruptions may be able to convey a message, as soon as we understand its statement our curiosity dies, and all that is left is the question of the building’s practical usefulness.

Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep. (Zumthor, 1998/2010, pp. 12-3)

If you want to say something, to make some argument, a building is a horrible choice as a medium. No possible arrangement of columns, walls, floors, ceilings, and other elements of the langue of architecture can convey anything close to what, for example, a text can.

References
- Egri, L. (1960). The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives. The Writer.
- Eisenman, P. & Harrison, A. L. (2008). Ten canonical buildings 1950-2000. Rizzoli : Distributed to the U.S. trade by Random House.
- Kott, J. (2015). Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. (Original work published 1961)
- Zumthor, P. (2010). Thinking Architecture. Birkhäuser Basel. (Original work published 1998)
Hannes Meyer’s Philosophy of Architecture

March 17th, 2022
Hannes Meyer (1889-1954) was the most controversial and the least well-known director of the Bauhaus. He established architecture as a core subject at the art school and was a radical functionalist. A strong proponent of the idea that architecture should, first and foremost, serve those for whom it was built:

1. sex life, 2. sleeping habits, 3. pets, 4. gardening, 5. personal hygiene, 6. weather protection, 7. hygiene in the home, 8. car maintenance, 9. cooking, 10. heating, 11. exposure to the sun, 12. services – these are the only motives when building a house. We examine the daily routine of everyone who lives in the house and this gives us the functional diagram – the functional diagram and the economic programme are the determining principles of the building project.
Hannes Meyer, 1928

Meyer tried to make buildings inexpensive, comfortable, and functional. This seems like it should be the main aim of every architect, but it’s actually quite uncommon today. Every time you see an eye-catching building with curved forms, ask yourself: does the form of this building serve any function besides looking flashy? The answer will usually be no. Looking flashy might be useful in some cases, but it should never override the needs of the inhabitants. But that is exactly what happens when an architect doesn’t pay enough attention to the peculiarities of the site, material choices, the climate, construction costs, sun reflections, etc.

A work of architecture is meant to be used, its form is largely determined by precedent, and it is set before the public where they must look at it every day. The architect should respect the work of his predecessors and the public sensibility by not using his architecture as a medium of personal advertisement. Indeed, no architect can avoid using the work of earlier architects; however hard he strains after originality, by far the larger part of his work will be in some tradition or other. […] Why should he be so rude to earlier architects as to distort and misapply their ideas? This happens when an architectural element, evolved over many years to a perfect size, shape, and function, is used upside down or enlarged beyond recognition till it no longer even works properly, simply to gratify the architect’s own selfish appetite for fame.
Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt, 1973

In 1933, a few years after the construction of the ADGB Trade Union School, Hannes Meyer published an article where he explained his design process in detail:

My designing work is continually analytical. […] I try to approach the design — and induce my associates to approach it — entirely without any prepossessions or preconceived ideas. My preliminary sketches consist of innumerable analyses in diagram form drawn on the smallest possible scale on a standard pad of squared paper.

Whenever possible the designing brigade should seize the opportunity of putting together the detailed building program themselves since it provides a good chance to make a joint analysis of the problem facing them. At all events the analysis must cover three areas:

a) techno-economic elements
b) politico-economic elements
c) psycho-artistic elements

This analysis of the building program must be carried out scientifically and systematically, for it is the ultimate basis of the design. […]

I also make an analysis of the building site independently of that of the building program. My first visits to future building sites are among the most memorable events of my professional career.

The plants, living creatures and minerals I find there usually tell me more about the characteristics of a place than the people accompanying me. Geobotanic studies are a personal hobby of mine and I never leave a building site without a botanic cross-section in my pocket, for plants are a clear pointer to the subsoil and the conditions of life on any part of the earth’s crust.
Hannes Meyer, How I Work, 1933

ADGB Trade Union School²

This heavily functionalist approach to architecture is in practice most often employed when material conditions are so limiting that they simply cannot be ignored. We see this for example in rural Egypt, ancient Greece, and Antarctica.

Meyer believed that architecture is not autonomous. It is never separate from its historical, environmental, political, and economic context:

The architect has always been intimately linked with his social environment. He is one of the human tools that serve the ruling power to fortify its position. Architecture besides its direct utility, has always served to maintain power. We find an architect serving the Pope, in Bramante, or the King, in Le Nôtre, or as a colonial functionary, in Tolsa, or as a privileged member of the bourgeoisie, in Tony Garnier. To this we must add that building’ is an activity profoundly connected with social-economic needs and the superimposed spiritual structure. And the architect is always of necessity a collaborator. He does his work together with economists and industrialists, with workers, artisans, and housewives. […]

Architecture is not an autonomous art, as certain prima donnas of the drawing board would like to have us believe. The architect is born and finds his form in the womb of his society and is brought forth by a specific age and by a definite epoch.
Hannes Meyer, TASK Magazine, 1943

Laubenganghaus, Dessau³

So what can architects today learn from Hannes Meyer? I believe the value of his approach lies in reminding us to focus on the people and their needs, instead of our subjective notions of what seems beautiful. Performance first, aesthetics later.

References
1. By Unknown author https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Emil_Meyer_OB.F06496c.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78497514
2. By Fridolin freudenfett – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72620326
3. By James Steakley – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116019751