SOCIAL MEDIA ZEITGEIST

Not long ago, I stumbled on a techno EP series tellingly titled “Ego Death.” One release in particular, Ego Death 004 by the artist Uun, arrested my attention. Its cover image was a photograph of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute rendered in stark black-and-white symmetry. Here was one of the most iconic pieces of architecture of the past century, used as the album cover for a work about the death of ego. The irony was wry and exact.

As an architectural designer who also enjoys techno, I couldn’t help but smile at this cross-disciplinary inside joke. At 3 AM on a packed dancefloor, lost in a relentless techno beat, you can forget yourself entirely. The DJ isn’t a star commanding an audience; they’re more like a guide, weaving sounds as the crowd moves together. In those moments, it isn’t about any one person at all – it’s about the collective energy, the ego dissolving into the rhythm.

Contrast that with my day job in architecture. When I first stepped into practice, I felt a low-grade dread: maybe I wasn’t built for this. Architecture seemed to demand a kind of ego I didn’t possess; the loud, declarative push that insists, “my vision matters, and the world must bend to it.” I had visions of my own, and I wasn’t short of confidence, but claiming absolute certainty felt false, even outdated.

To act as though I alone knew the right way seemed less like leadership and more like theatre. My ideas were real, but they felt naive, tentative and I knew I couldn’t carry them alone.

What I did know was that I wanted to bring things together. The way a curator does. A building, after all, is never just one person’s work: it’s a tangle of inputs, constraints, expertise. The architect’s role isn’t to be the lone author, but the one who mixes the ingredients into something coherent. Like baking: you don’t taste the eggs or the sugar or the flour in isolation. you taste the cake.

In my first London job, that wasn’t how it worked. Briefings were short and sharp: ‘I want this. Make it work.’ There was a strange thrill to it. As if we were stretching the laws of physics, budget, and common sense to match one person’s will. It felt dramatic, even glamorous at times. But it also left the team scrambling, endlessly patching, adjusting, and coordinating around decisions that couldn’t really be questioned.

So much for collaboration; the ego was the architecture

I remember thinking: maybe this is what architecture really is, a lone voice holding the pen while the rest of us bend reality to fit. It was exhausting, but it had a kind of clarity. The architect was in charge, the name on the door carried the weight, and everything else fell in line.

Now at another studio in a nother place, the conversation is different. Instead of “make it work,” the response is more often: “This doesn’t work. Let’s change it. What’s the alternative?” Meetings are less about bending the rules to fit one vision, and more about solving problems together: architect, engineer, client, contractor.

There’s still ego in the room, of course there is, but it plays a different role. Less about force of will, more about guiding the team towards something workable.

This shift fascinates me, because as an architectural designer, still in the early days of my career, I don’t really carry an ego of my own yet. At university, you’re trained to present like a starchitect-in-waiting: bold, declarative, telling your story as if the building rests on your shoulders alone. In practice, you’re often silent, your drawings redlined, your details questioned, your voice not quite invited in. It’s humbling, and sometimes frustrating. The ego you were trained to perform gets softened, sometimes flattened entirely.

And yet, watching my bosses has taught me that ego isn’t useless; it just needs direction. In some experiences, ego meant clinging to vision at all costs. Others, it means listening, adapting, and persuading others that the design matters even when compromises pile up. One kind of ego demands obedience; the other thrives on problem-solving.

Architecture has always traded on ego. It was the architect’s ego that sold buildings to clients who wanted a name attached to their project. It was ego that fuelled those long nights on the computer – drawing board, insisting that your idea was worth pursuing. And it was ego that gave architects their place at the table in the first place.

But perhaps ego is shifting. I think of a recent project where it wasn’t a bold sketch or a sweeping vision that carried the day, but a structural engineer stubbornly refusing to accept a detail that would have leaked within a year. Or an early-career assistant whose sketch shifted the circulation just enough to resolve the client’s months-long anxiety.

Neither story belongs in glossy marketing copy, but they mattered. The building became better not because one ego dominated, but because each voice insisted in their own ways to keep the project alive. What mattered wasn’t the solitary vision, but the collective refusal to give up on making it work.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that the public realm depends on “being seen and heard by others.” Maybe architecture is moving closer to that idea. The ego hasn’t vanished; it’s just grown plural. Instead of the solitary sketch, it’s a chorus of voices, sometimes messy and contradictory, but still capable of producing something extraordinary.

Byung-Chul Han warns that our obsession with performance and transparency can hollow things out, leaving them soulless. The cult of the architect-genius can feel like that: brittle, hollow, performative. But collaboration, when it works, has its own kind of soul.

There’s a quiet beauty in the way architecture emerges from disagreement, compromise, and shared effort, something more durable than one person’s signature. Something about the struggle is what makes it great.

Of course, ego hasn’t disappeared from architecture entirely. You only need to look at the awards culture to see it alive and well. In my dissertation research, I noticed a pattern: the ‘most significant’ prizes still tend to orbit big names. Cultural flagships, high-budget projects, commissions that carry political or corporate prestige, these are the ones most likely to take home the trophies.

But beneath that, at regional levels or in community categories, the picture shifts. Modest retrofits, collective studios, socially driven schemes often receive commendations and sometimes steal the spotlight. These projects are rarely about one ego forcing through a vision. They’re about many hands working carefully within constraints, and being recognised precisely for that.

It leaves me wondering: are awards celebrating collaboration, or simply dressing up ego in new clothes? Perhaps the truth is both. The profession still craves the clarity of a name, a story, a face to put on the project. But the projects that linger in memory, that speak most to value, often come from teams where no one voice dominates.

Maybe that’s where ego belongs now: not in the individual signature, but in the collective confidence that what we do is worth celebrating.

Ego is in transition

This shift matters because it’s not just about how we work but how we are seen. Architects aren’t just artists making statements, though we borrow some of that spirit, we’re curators, orchestrators, people who make things happen across competing pressures. If ego is in transition, maybe that’s where our strength lies: in reclaiming our space in the construction world, not by shouting the loudest, but by showing that without us, the pieces don’t come together.

Ego, then, shouldn’t disappear. It should expand, from the solitary genius to the collective act, from the name on the door to the network of hands shaping the work. We still need ego to believe what we do matters. We just need to remember whose ego it is.

Back to the grind

Of course, all of this is easier to say than to live. Back at my desk, another email drops: a client query, a redline, another round of coordination. Collaboration, collective ego, shared beauty, noble ideas. But at 7:30pm on a Tuesday evening, they mostly feel like exhaustion.

Still, every so often, there’s a flicker: a detail that clicks into place, a laugh on site, a sense that the building might just be better because we kept listening. It’s not the ego of the lone genius. But maybe it’s something better: the quiet glory of doing the work together.

Gigi King is a Part 2 Architectural Designer educated at Kingston University and Oxford Brookes, with experience in studios across London and Devon. She will continue to share reflections on architectural practice and the industry from an early-career perspective in future articles for Beedier.

This week she has also contributed Music2Design2 Playlist to the Beedier collection – Modern Hypnotic Techno (2015-25) – which you can enjoy listening to on Spotify or Apple Music.