Since the 2008 crash, a scatter of small practices (none more than fifteen years old and none large enough to need a manifesto in the traditional sense) have arrived, independently of one another, at some version of the same refusal: to sound too certain, too soon, in a discipline that had spent the previous decade selling confidence as a finish. They would probably resist being filed under one heading, but the coincidence itself is that something about practising architecture after 2008 made innocence look like the only posture worth trying.
At least from 2019 onwards, Fala has circulated a two-word description of itself, repeated verbatim across dozens of architecture outlets: a "naïve architecture practice." No footnote, no irony, just an office, founded in 2013, that built a decade of houses, birdhouses and institutional commissions on a term architecture had spent a century trying to outgrow. The question the phrase raises is not whether the buildings are any good (as they generally are) but what it means for a practice to choose innocence as a public position. Where does post-irony end and marketing begin?
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