CARRIER FORMS

What happens when architecture loses its ideological tether? When form is no longer bound to a political agenda or even to function, what remains? In the wake of the twentieth century's great ideological projects—from heroic modernism to critical postmodernism—architecture today often defaults to performance and pragmatism as its legitimating frame. A building is valuable because it reduces energy use, because it houses people efficiently, because it resists climate. These are good things. But they are also insufficient.

This essay begins from a different assumption: that form itself possesses an agency beyond utility or moral intent. That architecture—at its most resonant—functions not through correctness but through transmission. Forms that spread, that echo, that embed themselves in the cultural imagination, do so not because they are good or ethical or efficient, but because they stick. They reproduce. They mutate. They behave like memes.

The early modernist project saw form and ideology as laminated: a formal gesture implied a political stance. The flat roof was not only a technological advance, but a social proposition. The glass curtain wall was meant to reveal and equalize. In this context, architecture's formal language served as an ideological vehicle.

But as Colin Rowe noted, and as subsequent decades confirmed, that relationship fractured. Postwar architecture saw the delamination of form and ideology—where geometry no longer carried social program, and expression became self-referential or stylistic. What filled the void was pragmatism. Performance. A demand that architecture justify itself in terms external to its own discipline.

Yet form persisted. Even stripped of political certainty, it continued to evolve, circulate, and seduce. It acted, not as symbol, but as figure. And figures, like memes, propagate through repetition, mutation, and cultural resonance.

Memetics, drawn from Richard Dawkins’s work in evolutionary biology and adapted through media theory, describes how ideas or units of culture replicate in non-genetic ways—by imitation and transmission. A meme spreads not because it is true, but because it is sticky. Architecture has long operated this way, though it has not always admitted it.

The arch. The dome. The gridded façade. The open plan. These are not just historical artifacts; they are memetic structures. They return in new contexts, loaded with affective weight, symbolic ambiguity, or aesthetic inertia. They are not neutral. They transmit.

When we treat geometry as purely functional or expressive, we miss its memetic potential. A form can signal familiarity or estrangement, authority or irony, without ever declaring its meaning outright. It moves through culture by association, by rhythm, by pattern-recognition. It embeds in the unconscious, where architecture often does its deepest work.

In a memetic framework, architecture no longer speaks in full sentences—it hints, stutters, repeats. It parodies. It allegorizes. A thickened column in a contemporary building might quote Rome, or mock it, or simply echo a thousand other thickened columns we’ve seen. Meaning is not encoded and delivered, but emergent and unstable.

This drift is powerful. It allows architecture to operate culturally without being reduced to message or function. It embraces the gap between design intention and reception. It allows forms to live second lives—copied, misread, re-contextualized.

In this sense, architecture becomes not the bearer of ideology, but a platform for its circulation. Its forms are vessels—not of fixed content, but of potential, of latency, of affect. Allegory replaces diagram. Recurrence replaces clarity. Formal strategies become cultural software, open to iteration.

To think of architecture as a memetic practice is to abandon the security of fixed meaning. It is to design not for resolution, but for propagation. This is not an abandonment of rigor, but a shift in orientation: from expression to transmission, from ideology to effect.

A projective formalism does not reject history, but treats it as a library of forms in motion—available for appropriation, distortion, and recoding. It sees architecture as a semiotic field where figures can be deployed to produce resonance rather than reinforce meaning.

The goal is not to make forms that declare, but forms that travel. Carrier forms. Shapes that spread—not as viral images, but as spatial ideas. Not because they are right, but because they refuse to go away.

What would it mean to teach this? To practice this? To abandon pragmatism as a default and embrace the speculative, the drifting, the memetic? Carrier forms offer no guarantees. But they offer the possibility that architecture might still matter—not as proof, but as pattern.