The big story for 2009 and the conceivable future is going to be the financial crisis. We have only begun to see the impact on architecture.

There is no easy way out of this recession. We used up the easy way out during the last few recessions. Just as the Keynesian model of spending our way out of a recession collapsed at the inception of post-Fordism, so the monetarist model of lowering interest rates and cutting taxes is now exhausted as well. Fast money is a thing of the past. It will likely make a comeback one day, but not until this collapse is a distant memory.

A lot of people, particularly young people now in school or recently out of school, think that this crisis will pass. They’ve come of age without experiencing severe economic slowdown and have little perspective. This is a big contrast from what the previous generation experienced. Coming into consciousness at the time of the OPEC energy crisis, starting to work just when stagflation was at its worst, graduating into to the long recession of the 1990s, Generation X expected to be the first generation under modernity to have it worse than their parents. Instead of expecting jobs to be there when they graduated, they had to invent their own jobs, make their own futures instead of expecting a world that would take care of them. There are going to be a lot of crushed spirits out there, but the smart and lucky ones will survive and even thrive.

Obama promises America what it wants—hope—but let’s face it, there is no hope anytime soon for the economy, ravaged by decades of profiteering (and it’s not just Bush, Clinton did his share, read Kevin Phillip’s Bad Money Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism to get an idea of what happened). Obama’s presidency will be a salvage operation but he’ll have a much easier time salvaging the country’s foreign reputation (he could not conceivably do worse than Bush did) than the economy. It’s not going to be much of a time for spendy new initiatives.

Make no mistake, this bust is going to last a very long time, likely five years, but be prepared for a decade. If that sounds extreme, think about this: the bust that began in 1966 really didn’t get fixed until the last years of the 1990s, and Japan, a country that was ahead of the United States in developing a post-Fordist economy (it was called Toyotism by some), entered into its economic troubles in 1990 and hasn’t yet recovered yet (see Japanese asset price bubble). Some old school Marxists used to make a lot of noise about ours not being a post-industrial economy, but they got it wrong. Our economy has been post-industrial for some time. In 1950, 29.3% of the U. S. Gross Domestic Product was manufacturing and 10.9% was financial services, by 1980 that was 20.8% and 15.0% and in 2005 it was 12.0% and 20.4%. Industry is the new agriculture, a debased mode of production relegated to the sidelines. Unfortunately the new dominant mode of producing capital—speculation—is bankrupt. We have a little problem that we aren’t going to be able to solve anytime soon.

So brace yourself, the recession proper is just beginning.

Things will go from bad to worse next year as firms begin to understand just how much lower consumer spending is going. This will trigger shutdowns, in turn leading to more unemployment, more nervousness, less spending, more shutdowns and so on. Government will be able to do little to change this. An easy way to gauge just how bad things are is if Obama pulls a Bush and sends out cash kickbacks to taxpayers. That’s a sure sign it’s over. Not saying he’s going to do it, just suggesting that if he does, you might want to stock up on canned goods.

Don’t expect much from Obama’s much-vaunted infrastructure bailout. Sure, he’s going to spend money on roads and bridges, but as we discovered recently in the research that we published in The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, NIMBYism is rampant in this country (and others). If every homeowner’s home is their castle, those homeowners have become skilled practitioners at defending their castles with an arsenal of weapons. Government bureaucracies, politicians, and contractors are also adapt at ensuring that nothing of any consequence will get done.

Obama’s been pretty vague about what he’s going to do, but I have reason to worry. His cabinet is more of the same and that is absolutely what we do not need in terms of infrastructure. Now the country really does need to rebuild its roads, bridges, and dams and no doubt some of that will happen, but that won’t improve our quality of lives in the least, except maybe in terms of saving our automobile suspensions and ensuring we have water to drink for some time to come. New infrastructural initiatives are unlikely. I’d love to see a high-speed train to Boston, for example, but we already have one and it isn’t really all that fast due to old track and existing routes in densely populated areas.

What I’ve just described is a huge paradigm shift from a modern conception of infrastructure (build more, make it big!) to a postmodern conception of infrastructure (it’s all compromised and all you can do is a patch job). But if we want to bring infrastructure into the age of network culture (prediction: I will write a book on network culture in 2009 and at least get it out in part on my Web site, then we need to start thinking differently. We need to find ways to change existing infrastructure completely by augmenting it, building intelligence into it as we rebuild it and, following Adam Greenfield’s suggestion, make that intelligence open to us all. I’m already finding myself routing around traffic as I drive my Saab around the New York metropolitan area by checking out what Google maps tells me on my iPhone. That process can and should get much more intelligent.

As for architecture: architecture is in deep trouble. If the boom was the product of speculation, it was speculation on buildings and many people are going to remember that. Architects rode this boom as far as they could, and should be glad that they did. The hard part now is going to be to figure out how to survive the coming lean years. The old strategies are gone, post-criticism, cool form, affect, the Bilbao-Effect, new technologies: kiss all that goodbye.

A few marquee architects—Gehry, Hadid, OMA, and so on—will continue to make signature work but no more than a handful of firms will be able to compete at that level. The economic crisis is worldwide. CCTV is going to get topped off right as China goes under, the same with the Burj Dubai, although it may still go the way of Ryungyong. Both will stand as monuments to hubris. I don’t have a good feeling about Ordos either, and it bothers me that so many of my friends are involved, but maybe they have good alibis? On the other hand, the prospect of a subdivision of abandoned high-design macmansions in the middle of the desert taken over by armed Mongolian youths is kind of amazing in a bldgblog sort of way.

Speaking of suburbia, urban boosters like James Howard Kuntsler puffed a lot of wind about the end of suburbia last year. Sure there have been foreclosures in the suburbs and many of the people who have been foreclosed upon are the lower-middle class or even the working poor, it’s not just Humvee-driving Macmansion owners who are losing their houses, it’s recent immigrants struggling to make a foothold in this country. Taken as a whole, suburbia is tremendously diverse now—much more diverse than the yuppie playground-cum-mall formerly known as the city—and much of the slamming of the suburbs is a new form of racism that simply has to stop.

It will stop soon since cities are about to have their turn. Get ready for the great urban collapse of 2009-2010. Cities are massively overbuilt and, with the financial collapse, just as massively underfunded. There’s no getting around that and we’re going to start seeing the effects soon. If there’s any silver lining for architects, it’s that if they have a lease expiring in the next year, they’ll be able to pick up office space in any major city virtually for free. Office space piled upon office space will jam the cities, much of it empty. Nor will residential properties do any better. A huge amount of building and condo conversion has been done by speculators. Take New York’s famous Plaza Hotel, which sold off its rooms as condos to overseas speculators, the result being an urban version of the Overlook hotel from the Shining. Properties like these will go for a song when the speculators get more margin calls.

Don’t expect to build anything in the foreseeable future. Count your lucky stars if you do.

The hard part is going to be for architects to understand just how this is healthy for the profession. First, architects have hardly raised their productivity since the integration of digital design tools into their work. Sure, designs have gotten much more complex, but more isn’t always more. Many firms have wound up wasting labor on gimmicky designs produced by an army of interns. Now those firms are going to finally begin using technology the way it was meant to be. Watch as fifty-person firms shrink to five or ten core employees. Instead of talking about the cool things that digital technology can make, architects are going to talk about how fast and efficient digital technology makes them.

That will be a huge paradigm-shift and will lead to more interesting work along the way. For example, architects have sat by the sidelines in network culture in part because the model of digital-design diva has no room for appropriation and sharing. Why should we design everything anew each time? I very much doubt we’ll be doing that in the future. Smarter architects might be inspired by Open Source software to trade libraries full of design objects, either in an architectural sourceforge or in loose collectives.

Parametric design may still keep in the spotlight, but its main consequence is that it’ll cement the movement toward downsizing in architecture firms. By allowing vast quantities of permutations to be done rapidly, it’ll allow firms to get slough off more nonessential design staff.

Again, I don’t see this as bad for the discipline. On the contrary, architecture has been obsessed with design at the expense of expanding the scope of the discipline for so long that it has emptied out its storehouse of original ideas. Elsewhere I’ve argued that there’s been pitifully little significant architecture built in this decade. Perhaps this is because architecture hasn’t had any down-time to think, to reflect?

A while back I spoke to one of my smartest friends, now a principal at an up-and-coming firm. Remembering that he had always been ahead of me in terms of interesting reading, I asked him what he’d read lately. Nothing, he replied, he was just too busy designing. We’ve got to get out of that mentality. It’s tragic and unhealthy for the profession.

I’m confident that architecture will get reflective again fast. Unless the parametric people push in the wrong direction, the navel-gazing obsession with pointlessness of the 1980s and 1990s is long gone, so in its stead something better will rise.

I wager that architects will expand the discipline again by using their incredible synthetic knowledge to go into other fields. The Eameses’ venture into media design is a great illustration of this. Charles and Ray turned to media because it allowed them to get their concepts across to people much more rapidly and efficiently than architecture could. Or take Archinect for example. It’s vastly more important than any of the buildings made in the last decade. That’s why it’s no accident that I teach at Columbia: Dean Wigley’s has set out Columbia’s program as being to create “the expanded architect.” That’s exactly what we should be doing.

On a related note, watch for the return of conceptual practices. I’d recommend that people NOT flock to Ph.D. programs. Doing a doctorate is very hard work and only for the committed and the crazy. It’s much more psychologically fraught than you could ever imagine and makes an architecture degree look like a romp in the park. Then, when you’re done you find there are no jobs anyway. So don’t do that. Instead, look to conceptual practices. How would Superstudio or Archizoom or Ant Farm have responded to present day events? This is why I think there’s immense promise in the new program that Columbia is launching this year under Felicity Scott, a two-year Masters of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCPArch).

New tools are what architects need. Our bellies may get a little emptier, but most of us could use a diet anyway. Why not start a garden in your backyard (speaking of which, I predict that local food movements and ideas like this one are going to be more common in the new economy) or at a community garden or wherever you can, and subsist on a bounty that you grew yourself while you dream up a future for yourself? It’s just what I did fifteen years ago when I graduated into a recession and those were some of the best times in my life.