This book speculates on the possibilities of what Robin Evans once described as a “smaller architecture.” Smaller Architecture rejects the Larger Architecture that has come to dominate in the last thirty years, with the globalization of architecture, with what Rem Koolhaas celebrated as “Bigness,” and with the embrace of new forms of large-scale finance and corporate management. Against the speculative financial models that define Larger Architecture and its rapacious mechanisms of real estate development, the vision for a Smaller Architecture proposes economic and social forms along the lines sketched out by the economist E. F. Schumacher and the urban theorist Jane Jacobs, and inspired by the philosophical writings of Emanuele Coccia, Edouard Glissant and Cornell West. Against the abstract and hierarchical business management models of large corporate firms, Smaller Architecture imagines local, radically inclusive, and anarchist forms of organization in smaller practices. And against the signature diagrammatic branding that has become the status quo, seeking to capture mass attention in a high-speed image-saturated world, Smaller Architecture invites us to picture a form of architectural creativity that addresses a more varied, more concentrated, and more intentional form of attention. Following the footsteps of William Morris and John Ruskin in particular, this book searches for a new way to redefine the relationship between aesthetics and ethics for a time in which the pace and scale of production needs to be slowed down and scaled down to allow care to be given to smaller things.

This is the first book of the Memo series by Architecture Exchange. The Memo series publishes short theoretical texts on architecture with timely agendas. They are written to the field of architecture in the hope that others will feel their motivational force, as vigorous ideas ripe for elaboration. Our ambition is to support the cultivation of the theoretical discourse around architecture, producing books that arrive quickly and cost effectively on students’ and architects’ desks, helping generate arguments, claims, and positions that other people can, follow, reject and debate. The series is edited by Matthew Allen and Joseph Bedford.