Why Wigley Thinks Modern Architecture Was About Bacteria—New York City

Climate Week 2026 fills Manhattan with panels on carbon offsets, biodiversity bonuses, sustainability metrics. Meanwhile, the most interesting hospitality brands are doing something quieter: they’re documenting systems that outlast the moment.

Mark Wigley—architect, historian, dean emeritus at Columbia—says landscape isn’t space between buildings and planet. It is the planet. And simultaneously, as small as a smartphone.

That’s the tension hospitality lives in. How do you make a property that’s irreplaceable without pretending you can control everything?

Most brands answer this by adding features: solar panels, composting, farm-to-table menus. But Wigley would call these the same gesture modernism made when it whitewashed its walls to kill microbes—superficial cleanliness masking a deeper separation. You can install solar arrays while ignoring the nitrogen cycle in your soil. You can serve vegetables from your garden while staff can’t name the farmer who grows them. The technology sits on the surface; the system remains untouched.

Wigley warns against “collecting virtue badges”—extractivism, equity, indigenous, local—as if design could be a moral ledger. He’d rather have something obnoxious, scandalous, non-boring.

That’s what “irreplaceable” means for him. Not perfect. Not polite. True to the system.

Why It Matters

Wigley notes that architecture separated humans from the soil—we lost fifty percent of microbial density since going indoors 10,000 years ago. Hospitality has learned this lesson poorly. We decorate sustainability with virtue badges; the soil doesn’t care if you're carbon neutral. It cares about nitrogen, water, carbon. Regeneration isn't messaging. It’s physics. The brands that survive won’t be those with the cleanest reports. They’ll be the ones whose land asks questions competitors can’t answer—and whose staff know the answers.

The Work

Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Mark Wigley has authored thirteen books on architecture’s relationship to technology, culture, and biology. His scholarship traces how modern architecture wasn’t about glass and steel—it was about bacteria.

→ Read We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture

→ Explore his 2025 exhibit with Beatriz Colomina: We the bacteria. Notes Toward Biotic Architecture