Designing Capacity

Four stories about what architecture makes possible

Over the past few weeks, I saved four articles that seemed to have very little to say to one another.

One was about an architectural battery installed in a public square in Ontario. Another presented MVRDV’s interpretation of a vertical village in Shenzhen. Beijing had been named World Capital of Architecture for 2029. And in the United States, a major housing reform had become law.

Energy storage, a cultural complex, urban identity and federal legislation.

I kept going back to these stories, trying to understand why they seemed connected. Perhaps it is because, having been trained as an architect, I still find it difficult to think of architecture as simply the production of buildings.

The first project is relatively small. In Cannington, Ontario, a 60 kWh battery has been integrated into a community square. It stores electricity when demand and prices are lower, releases it during peak periods, provides public charging and can supply power during an outage.

What interested me was not the technology alone. Batteries are hardly new. The more unusual decision was not to hide it.

We normally notice the systems supporting our cities only when they stop working. Energy arrives from somewhere, data moves through invisible networks, water disappears beneath the street. Architecture often covers these systems, contains them or keeps them out of sight.

Here, design gives a technical object a public presence and a social function. The square no longer simply consumes electricity. It can store it, redistribute it and become more resilient.

A relatively modest intervention, but a significant change in role.

From Ontario I moved, rather improbably, to the Bihailou Art Village in Shenzhen.

MVRDV’s project brings cultural, commercial and public activities together in a fragmented vertical composition. Each function occupies its own volume, with its own identity, entrance and operating hours. Between them, stairs, walkways and terraces remain publicly accessible.

At first, the project appears to be mainly about form: a colourful stack of irregular objects, deliberately different from the uniformity of a conventional tower.

Behind that form, however, is an organisational question. The different activities must remain independent without becoming isolated. The building needs density without sameness, coordination without requiring every part to follow the same rhythm.

That sounded familiar to me, and not only as an architectural problem.

Organisations face the same tension. People and teams need room to act, but they also need to understand the system to which they belong. Different functions move at different speeds and follow different priorities, while still depending on one another.

Bihailou does not try to resolve this by forcing everything into a single programme. It gives each part a degree of autonomy and concentrates the design effort on the relationships between them.

Perhaps this is one of the less visible purposes of design: not deciding everything that will happen, but creating a structure within which different things can happen without the whole falling apart.

Then Beijing’s selection as the UNESCO-UIA World Capital of Architecture for 2029 shifted the scale again.

The theme will be “Back to Balance”, with architecture presented as a bridge between culture, nature and people. Beijing was selected partly for the way its architectural heritage coexists with regeneration, experimentation and a rapidly changing urban environment.

Of course, designations of this kind are also exercises in city branding and cultural diplomacy. But cities need more than functioning infrastructure. They need a way to understand what they are becoming.

Beijing contains several versions of time simultaneously: imperial structures, hutongs, monumental planning, rapid expansion and contemporary experimentation. They coexist, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not.

Architecture is being asked to help the city change without completely losing the memory through which it recognises itself.

Planning the future, after all, is not only about deciding what to add. It also means deciding what should remain, what can be transformed and what a community is not prepared to lose.

Empathy enters the process here. Not as a vague expression of good intentions, but as the ability to understand how people experience change, identity and belonging. Technical competence may tell us how to transform a place. It cannot, by itself, tell us what that transformation means to the people who inhabit it.

The fourth article is about a law, and initially I was not sure it belonged in the same conversation.

The United States has enacted the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, its most extensive federal housing legislation in decades. It addresses financing, administrative barriers, manufactured housing, the conversion of vacant commercial buildings and the concentration of residential ownership among large institutional investors.

There are no iconic buildings here. No renderings and no recognisable architectural language.

And yet this may be the most architectural story of the four.

By the time an architect draws a home, many of its essential conditions have already been established: whether it can be financed, where it can be built, how long approval will take and who will realistically be able to buy or rent it.

Policy does not draw rooms, but it helps determine which rooms can exist, where and for whom.

A beautifully designed house that cannot be approved, financed or accessed does not solve a housing problem. It remains an object disconnected from the conditions that would allow it to perform its social purpose.

Only when I considered these stories together did their common thread become clearer.

The battery gives a public space the ability to store and redistribute energy. The vertical village creates room for independent activities within a shared structure. Beijing is trying to hold memory and transformation together. American housing reform attempts to change the institutional conditions determining access to a home.

They operate at different scales and through very different instruments, but they are all designing capacity.

The word is useful because it shifts attention away from appearance and towards possibility.

Concrete, steel and glass are not the only materials involved. Rules, time, trust, responsibility and relationships can also be designed, even if they cannot be photographed as easily.

I find the same logic in management.

A manager does not add value by remaining at the centre of every decision. Good management establishes direction, makes responsibilities clear and leaves room for judgement. Planning is less about predicting every event than preparing a system to absorb uncertainty. Empathy keeps that system connected to real people rather than to the ideal users represented in a diagram or presentation.

This may be where architecture and leadership meet.

Both give form to relationships between people, resources, constraints and time. Both need to balance direction with freedom. And both begin to fail when the desire for control becomes more important than the people the system was intended to serve.

When evaluating a building, an organisation or a policy, perhaps we should begin with a deceptively simple question:

What does it make possible, and for whom?

The most valuable result of design may not be the object itself, but the range of possibilities it opens and can continue to support.

These four stories are not simply about a battery, a cultural complex, a title awarded to a city and a housing law.

They are different ways of designing possibility.

Four stories about what architecture makes possible

Further reading