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Figure 1: Blender File on particle generation (IPFS hash :

QmSCGBzHoeBYwSyHZeBVRN Pc3f3T5LkLaEq75AnynFkf6f).

Crypto: towards a Theodore Dounas

New Political
t.dounas@rgu.ac.uk
Economy in
Architecture Add Article to Issue
03/08/2022
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Blockchain, Crypto, Cryptography,

Deconstruction, Odysseus, peer economies,
Political Economy

The paper presents a “primitives” approach to

understanding the computational design
enabled by blockchain technologies, as a new
Back to Top political economy for the architecture
discipline. The paper’s motivation lies in
exploring the challenges that exist for
 architects to understand blockchain,
evidenced through the author’s multiple
prototypes,[1,2,3,4] discussions, workshops and
code writing with students and colleagues, but
also in the fragmentation of the Architecture-
Engineering-Construction (AEC) industry and
the impermanence that computational design
enhances in architecture.[5] These challenges,
while situated within the confines of the
discipline of computational design and
architecture, are defined and affected by the
challenges that exist within the wider AEC
industry and its extractive relationship with the
physical environment.

Methodologically the paper is a philosophical

and semantic exploration on the meaning of
architecture in a decentralised context,
considering its uncoupled nature with signs
and design, and it sets a direction in which
architectural practice needs to move, changing
from an extractive to a non-extractive or
circular nature.

Blockchain: peer
economies, trust and
immutability,
transparency,
incentives for
participation, and
entropy
A blockchain is a distributed computer
network, where each computer node holds a
copy of a distributed ledger that holds values.
[6] Computationally, a Blockchain acts as both
a state machine able to execute smart
contracts,[7] i.e., software code that is the
equivalent of an automatic vending machine,
but also a continuous, immutable chain, built
out of discrete blocks of information, each of
which contains a cryptographic hash of the
previous discrete block. Each block contains a
series of transactions or changes to the
distributed ledger, which in the discipline of
architectural design can be a series of design
Back to Top synthetical actions, executed in a bottom-up
fashion, and encoded into a block. Within a
 regular time interval, the blockchain network,
though an incentivised participation system,
selects the next block to be written to the
ledger/chain. Due to the their nature, public,
permissionless blockchains act as a medium of
trust (trust machines) between agents that are
not necessarily in concert or known to one
another; are resilient in the sense that losing a
large part of the network does not destroy the
blockchain; are immutable because one
cannot go back and delete information as by
design block cryptographic hashes are
embedded into the next one creating an
immutable chain; and operate through
cryptoeconomic incentives, i.e., economic
mechanisms that incentivise, not always
monetarily, behaviour that maintains or
improves the system itself. Economically, a
blockchain is a decentralised trust-machine
that enables the creation of peer-to-peer
economies via smart contracts, tokens and
their computer protocols.[8]

The first blockchain, the one invented in the

bitcoin whitepaper,[9] has been designed as a
replacement for centrally managed financial
institutions. As such, blockchains, when pubic
and permissionless, act as a medium of de-
centralisation, i.e., a channel within which to
engage with, where one does not need
permission or approval beyond the limits and
rules of the computer code that runs the
blockchain.

Blockchains encompass cryptography and its

semantic discipline, immutability and entropy
of information, continuity but also
discreteness of information, and trust. Due to
their decentralised nature, there is little room
to understand blockchains as having affinity
with architecture, the act of designing and
building. In the following similes, however, I
develop the parallels between architecture and
blockchain, employing ideas from western and
eastern literature.

Applications that have promise within the

blockchain space and that are distinctive
compared to other similar or competing
automation technologies are the creation of
tokens, both fungible and non-fungible [10, 11]
Back to Top the formation of Decentralised Autonomous
Organisations i.e., organisations that operate
 through the blockchain medium, and
applications of decentralised finance. All these
are built through the smart contracts, along
with additional layers for interfaces and
connectors between the blockchain and its
external environment. Since the blockchain is
an immutable record, it becomes even more
important to ensure that data that passes and
gets recorded on the blockchain is of a high
quality or truthfulness. To ensure this takes
place, the concept of an oracle is introduced.
Oracles are trustworthy entities, operating in
the exterior of a blockchain, made trustworthy
through both incentivisation and disincentives,
with the responsibility to feed data into
blockchains. Parallel to blockchains, though,
remain distributed filesystems, used for storing
files, rather than data, in a decentralised
manner. One such filesystem is the
Interplanetary filesystem,[12] which operates
via content rather than addressing: within IPFS
we are looking for “what” rather than “where”
as we do within the world wide web. Content
on IPFS is also cryptographically signed with a
cryptographic hash that makes the content
unique and allows it to be found. For example,
the following file from Blender has the IPFS
hash:

Figure 1: Blender File on particle

generation (IPFS hash :
QmSCGBzHoeBYwSyHZeBVRN
Pc3f3T5LkLaEq75AnynFkf6f).

Architecture as
Cryptography
Odysseus

To explore the idea of blockchain as an

infrastructure layer for architectural design, we
will introduce Odysseus (Ulysses),[13] a much
discussed hero and anti-hero of many turns or
Back to Top
tricks (polytropos),[14] as his myth as a
craftsman is solidified by architecture in the
 closing narration of The Odyssey.
Inventiveness and the particular craft skills
attributed to the character are compelling
reasons to use him as a vehicle for creating
parallels between blockchain and architectural
design.

Odysseus participated in the Trojan Wars, and

was the key hero responsible for the Trojan
Horse and the demise of Troy. His quest for
“Nostos”, i.e. returning home, is documented in
the second Homerian epic, Odyssey. The
Odyssey describes the voyage of Odysseus to
Ithaca, after the Troy war, where his ship and
crew pass through a multitude of trials and
challenges imposed by Poseidon, in a voyage
that takes about 10 years. His crew and ship
get lost but he is saved, and manages to return
to the island of Ithaca.[13,14] Upon his return, he
must face a final challenge.

The olive tree bed

During his absence of more than 20 years, his

wife Penelope has been under pressure by the
local aristocracy to re-marry, as Odysseus is
considered lost at sea. Local aristocrats have
converged at the palace and are in
competition to marry Penelope. She has
prudently deflected the pressure by saying
that she will chose one of the aristocrats, the
“Mnesteres”, after she finishes her textile
weaving – which she delays by weaving during
the day and unmaking it during the night.
However, the day comes, when Odysseus
arrives unrecognised at Ithaca, and is warned
upon arrival that not all is as one would expect.
At the same time, the Mnesteres, or suitors,
have forced Penelope to set a final challenge to
select the best of them. The challenge is to
string and use the large bow that Odysseus
had carved and made tensile, and shoot an
arrow through the hanging hoops of a series of
large battle axes. No other but Odysseus
himself was able to tense the bow since he
first crafted and used it, providing thus a
formidable technical challenge.

Odysseus enters the palace incognito, as a pig

herder, and also makes a claim to the
Back to Top challenge, in concert with his son Telemachus.
Penelope reacts at the prospect that a pig
herder might win but is consoled by
 herder might win but is consoled by
Telemachus who tells her to go to her rooms,
where the poem finds her reminiscing of her
husband. In the main hall of the palace, all the
Mnesteres, in turn, fail to draw back and string
the bow. Odysseus, however, tenses and
strings the bow, passing the first challenge,
then successfully uses the bow to shoot an
arrow through the axes, providing the first sign
that uncovers his identity. At the same time, he
connects all the nodes of the battle axes in the
line, by shooting his arrow through their metal
rings, thus creating a chain. This is the second
challenge, after the stringing of the bow that
Odysseus must pass to prove he is the true
king and husband of Penelope.

The third challenge, remains: the elimination of

all suitors. A battle ensues in which the
Mnesteres are killed by Telemachus and
Odysseus, and thus the third challenge is
complete.

The most architectonic metaphor of the poem

takes place after the battle, at the moment
Penelope needs to recognise her long lost
husband, in rhapsody “Ψ”, i.e. the penultimate
poem of Odyssey. She calls for a servant to
move Odysseus’s bed outside its chamber and
to prepare it so that he can rest. Upon hearing
that, Odysseus immediately reacts in fury,
claiming that moving the bed is an
impossibility. The only person who could make
the bed movable would be either an amazing
craftsperson, or a god, as its base was made
out of the root of an Olive tree, with its
branches then used for the bed. Essentially the
piece of furniture is immovable and immutable,
it cannot be changed without being destroyed
and it cannot be altered and taken out of the
chamber without having its nature
inadvertently changed – i.e., cutting the olive
tree roots.

Odysseus knows this as he was the one that

constructed it, shaping its root from the body
of the olive tree and crafting the bed. He then
describes how he built the whole chamber
around the bed. This knowledge acts as a
crypto-sign that verifies his identity. Odysseus
himself calls the information a “token” – a
Back to Top “sêma” – a sign that it is indeed him, as only he
would know this sêma. In a sense, knowledge of
 this is the personal cryptographic key to the
public cryptographic riddle that Penelope
poses to verify his identity.

The story acts as an architectonic metaphor

for blockchain, in three layers. First, the token,
both the information and the bed itself, cannot
be taken out of its container (room) as its
structure is interlinked with the material of the
olive tree trunk and the earth that houses it.
Second, it is Odysseus who is the architect of
the crypto-immutability of the bed and the
architecture around it, created by the most
basic architectonic gestures: re-shaping
nature into a construction. Thirdly, the intimacy
between Penelope and Odysseus is
encapsulated in the token of the bed, as
knowledge of how the bed was made recreates
trust between them – in the same kind of
manner that blockchains become bearers of
trust by encapsulating it cryptographically and
encasing it in a third –medium, crafted, though,
by a collective.

The implication is that architectonic signs are

cryptographically encased into their matter,
and changing the physical matter changes the
sign. Odysseus has created the first
architectonic non-fungible token in physical
form, where its meaning and its function and
utility are interlinked through a cryptographic
sema, in the same fashion that a non-fungible
token exists through the cryptographic
signature on a smart contract corresponding
to a particular data structure.

Deconstruction in
Chinese
Odysseus is not the only one who has created
physical NFTs. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han
describes in his book Shanzhai:
Deconstruction in Chinese the relationship
that exists in Asian cultures generally, but
specifically in Chinese, between the master
and the copy, where emulating or blatantly
copying from the original is not seen as theft;
instead, the form of the original is continually
transformed by being deconstructed. [15]
Back to Top
Byung-Chul Han presents a Chinese ink
painting of a rock landscape, where a series of
 Chinese scholars have signed it using their
jade seals and have scribbled onto it a poetic
verse or two, as a parting gift to one of their
friends leaving for another province. Within
Chinese culture, the jade seal is the person,
and the person is the jade seal. As such, the
painting has now accumulated all the
signatures and selves of the scholars, and has
become unique in the same sense a non-
fungible token is unique due to its
cryptographic signature onto a smart contract.
The difference from the simple non-fungible
tokens that one finds by the thousand now on
the internet, is that the Chinese painting scroll,
according to Byung-Chul Han, is activated and
becomes exclusive with the signature-seals
and poems of the literati. It is a dynamic NFT, a
unique object that is open to continuous
addition, and exclusive and recursive
interpretation.

The act of creation, then, of the token, the

unique sign, is the accumulation of all of the
signatures of the scholars, whereby the
painting cannot be reverted back to its original
format; it is unique because it has been
permanently changed. It is the same craft in
Odysseus that takes the olive tree and makes
into a bed, and then builds a room around the
bed, an immobile, immutable sign, and its
physical manifestation. The sêma of the
significance of intimacy between Odysseus
and Penelope is inextricable from the physical
object of the bed, and the vector of change for
the Chinese ink painting cannot return to its
previous condition.

This is where the similarities end though. While

the craft is the same, in the Chinese ink scroll,
the point of departure is not nature, but
another artwork. The non-fungible token of the
Chinese art scroll remains open to more
additions and recursive poetry, new
cryptographic signatures may be added to it,
while the olive tree bed has a finality and a
permanence. Odysseus changes nature to
create his token, and the olive tree can never
be the same. To create a bed and the
foundations and the wall of the room, the tree
needs to be transformed into architecture. The
Back to Top Chinese literati change a drawing, an artefact
already in existence, which in the end remains
still subject to further change. In the case of
 still subject to further change. In the case of
the olive tree, the hero is one, single, and the
sêma revolves around his relationship with the
world. For the Chinese literati and the Chinese
ink scroll, the sêma is immutable towards the
past but open to re-signing as a manner of
recursive interpenetration. Significant mental
shifts and attitudes is demanded to travel
from crafting architecture like Odysseus, a lone
genius who is king of his domain, to crafting
architecture like a collective of Chinese literati,
where a well balance collaboration is required
from all. Both can be served by blockchain as a
record of actions taken; however, it is only the
collective, dynamic work open to continuing
evolution that has the best future fit between
blockchain and the discipline of architecture.

“Zhen ji, an original, is determined not by the

act of creation, but by an unending process”
Byun Chul-Han

The extractive nature

of Architecture:
Odysseus.
The current dominant political economy of
architecture is based on the Odysseus
paradigm. The metabolism of the discipline is
based on abundant natural resources and their
transformation, and this parallels the irrational
form of capitalist development.[16, 17]
Essentially, the criticism shaped against the
extractive nature of the discipline focuses on
the ideological trap of continuously creating
new designs and plans and sêmas, as Tafuri
would have them, reliving the myth of
Odysseus as a craftsperson, where every
design is a prototype and every building is
brand new, and where the natural environment
is immutably transformed as the arrow of time
moves forward. The repercussions of this
stance are well documented in IPCC reports in
terms of the carbon impact and waste
production of the AEC industry.[18]

In contrast, the “Space Caviar” collective

posits that we should shift to a non-extractive
architecture. They examine this shift via
Back to Top interviews with Benjamin Bratton, Chiara di
Leone, and then Phineas Harper and Maria
 Smith. The focus within is a critical stance on
the question of growth versus de-growth in the
economy of architecture, where one needs a
little bit more resolution to define the question
in a positive term. Chiara di Leone correctly
identifies design and economics as quasi-
scientific disciplines and, as such, dismantles
the mantra of de-growth as a homogenous
bitter pill that we must all swallow. Instead, she
proposes a spatial and geo-coupled economy,
one that can take into account the local,
decentralised aspects of each place and
design an economy that is fit for that place. I
would posit that as part of geo-coupled
economy, an understanding of nature as a
vector of a circular economy is needed

Decentralisation is, of course, a core principle

within the blockchain sociotechnical
understanding, in the sense that participation
in a blockchain is not regulated by institutions
nor gatekeepers. However, before declaring it
the absolute means to decentralisation, one
needs to take a look at what is meant by
decentralisation in economics and
development, and the difference with
decentralisation in blockchain, as there are
differences in their meaning and essence that
need alignment.

Decentralisation and
autonomy of local
economies in the
70s
Decentralisation as a term applied to the
economy used to have a different meaning in
the 70s. Papandreou, in his seminal book
Paternalistic Capitalism, defines the
decentralised economic process as a
container for the parametric role of prices in
the information system of a market economy.
[19] In the same book, Papandreou, while
interrogating the scientific dimensions of
planning, calls for the decentralisation of
power, in a regional, spatial function, rather
than a functional one, after having set logical
(in distinction to historical) rules for popular
Back to Top sovereignty and personal freedom. This is to
counter the technocratic power establishment
that emerges in representative democracy, as
 citizens provide legitimacy to the actions of
the state. To further define decentralisation of
power, he turns to regional planning and Greek
visionary spatial planner Tritsis’ PhD thesis:
“The third aim: decentralisation. This points to
a world depending for its existence less on
wheels and population uprootings and more on
the harmonious relationship between man and
his environment, social and natural”.[20]

Based on this definition, Papandreou then

builds the vision for a kind of governance
consensus between decentralised regional
units to form a “national” whole, with rules
agreed and set between all units in a peer-to-
peer basis. Within this, most importantly he
calls for the liberal establishment of a
guarantee of freedom of entry into
occupations, in a kind of “integration of all
forms of all forms of human work, of mental
with manual, of indoors with outdoors” as
envisioned by Tritsis [20]. Papandreou extends
the vision of decentralisation in a global
society and envisions the emergence of new
poles of global power through regional
decentralisation. As such, decentralisation
used to mean something other than what it
means within the context of blockchain – up
until the first politics of “cypherpunk”.
Decentralisation used to be a planning
instrument and a political stance, rather than a
technological strategy against the centralised
power of established technocracies. Still,
within the local, spatial geocoupling of
economies, one can align the political
decentralisation and the cypherpunk version
of blockchain decentralisation, i.e. of no
barriers to participation, of trust in the
computer protocol, and the exclusion of
authority of central political institutions, from
which no one needs to ask permission.

A new political
economy for
Architecture
When one chains the spatial- and geo-
coupled economy that Chiara di Leone
proposes to decentralisation, both on the level
Back to Top
of the politics of technocracies and the level of
the operating system, i.e., the use of
 blockchains, it is possible to shape a new
political economy in architecture, where
computation regulates its heart. Encased
within this shift is also a shift from the
Odysseus craftsperson to the Chinese
collective in terms of the “prototype” and our
understanding of it. An economy where the
artefact is open to recursive reinterpretation
and is never finished can easily be transformed
into a circular economy and adapted to
minimise carbon. We have already prototyped
early instances of collective digital factories for
buildings,[21] where collectives of architects
and digital design agents are incentivised
through smart contracts to minimise the
embodied and operational carbon impact of
buildings: simply put the design teams earns in
proportion to the increase of building
performance and decrease in environmental
impacts.

To be able to create this regenerative

renaissance for the discipline we need to make
a series of changes to the manner in which the
discipline is practised and taught. First, to
integrate the function of the architect not only
as the designer but as that of the orchestrator
of the whole AEC industry. This requires that
we abandon the notion of artistry, and
embrace the notion of craft and engineering,
including an understanding of materials and
the economy. Second, to develop the
infrastructure, products and services that can
make that happen, where we also assume the
responsibility and, why not, the liability for that
integration. These first two actions will reverse
the trend of abandoning the space of
architecture to consultants where the erosion
of our integrity has led to the glorification of
form as our sole function. Thirdly, to shift our
attention from star practices to collectives, as
we embrace practices where wider
stakeholders are considered. Odysseus needs
to morph into a collective, where the artefact
of architecture is conceived as ever changing,
ever evolving, into circular thinking and
economies. This might mean that alternative
forms of practice emerge, where younger, more
inclusive minds have more of a command and
say on the purpose of an architecture
company (and not a firm). Fourth, in the same
Back to Top
pivot we as architects should reclaim the
space lost, to embrace rigorously the new
 tools of the craft in the digital realm. It is not
by chance that the title for senior
programmers and digital network professionals
is that of “architect”, as there is no other word
that can specifically describe the people who
orchestrate form-function-structure with one
gesture. The age of machine-learning
generative systems performing the trivial
repetition of an architect is already here.

Still, the automation we should embrace as a

fifth point, since it allows the shaping and
design of circular and peer-to-peer
economies, is that of blockchain. This is the
true Jiujitsu defence to the capitalist growth-
at-all costs mantra.[22] Unless we embrace
different, local, circular economies, we will not
be able to effect the change we need in the
discipline – and this also means that we might
not necessarily need to be naive and simplistic
about carbon impacts, for example by
declaring that timber is always better than
concrete. To embrace the automation of
cryptoeconomics though, we need to first
abandon the romantic idea of the architect as
the sketch artist and embrace the idea of the
architect as a collaborative economist. Only
then will we be able to define ourselves the
conditions for a regenerative architecture, in a
decentralised, spatial-human-geo-coupled
manner.

References
[1] T. Dounas, W. Jabi, D. Lombardi, “Non-
Fungible Building Components – Using Smart
Contracts for a Circular Economy in the Built
Environment”, Designing Possibilities, SIGraDi,
ubiquitous conference, XXV International
conference of the Ibero-American society of
digital Graphics (2021).

[2] T. Dounas, W. Jabi, D. Lombardi, “Topology

Generated Non-Fungible Tokens – Blockchain
as infrastructure for a circular economy in
architectural design”, Projections, 26th
international conference of the association for
Computer-Aided Architectural Design
research in Asia, CAADRIA, Hong Kong, (2021).

Back to Top
[3] D. Lombardi, T. Dounas, L.H. Cheung, W. Jabi,
“Blockchain for Validating the Design Process”,
 SIGraDI (2020), Medellin.

[4] T. Dounas, D. Lombardi, W. Jabi, ‘Framework

for Decentralised Architectural Design:BIM and
Blockchain Integration’, International Journal of
Architectural Computing, Special issue
eCAADe+SiGraDi “Architecture in the 4th
Industrial Revolution” (2020)
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478077120963376.

[5] T. Maver, “CAAD’s Seven Deadly Sins”, Sixth

International Conference on Computer-Aided
Architectural Design Futures [ISBN 9971-62-
423-0] Singapore, 24-26 September 1995, pp.
21-22.

[6] Ethereum.Org, “Ethereum Whitepaper”,

accessed 27 January 2022,
https://ethereum.org.

[7] N. Szabo, (1997): “Formalizing and Securing

Relationships on Public Networks”, accessed
27 January 2022.

[8] G. Wood, “Ethereum, a secure decentralised

generalised transaction layer” (2022),
https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.
pdf.

[9] S. Nakamoto, 2008, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer

Electronic Cash System” (2008), originally at
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

[10] F. Vogelsteller, V. Buterin, EIP-20 Token

Standard, https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-
20

[11] W. Entriken, D. Shirley, J. Evans, N. Sachs,

EIP-721 Token Standard,
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

[12] Interplanetary filesystem documentation,

https://docs.ipfs.io/

[13] Homer, E. Wilson trans., Odyssey (New York:

W. W. Norton & Company, 2018)

[14] Ζ. Όμηρος, Σιδέρης, Οδύσεια

(Οργανισμός Εκδόσεως Διδακτικών βιβλίων
Back to Top Αθήνα, 1984).
 [15] Byung Chul Han, Deconstruction in
Chinese, Translated by P. Hurd (Boston, MA: MIT
press, 2017).

[16] Space Caviar collective, Non-Extractive

Architecture, on designing without depletion
(Venice: Sternberg Press, 2021).

[17] V.P. Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist

Development: Origins and Context of Manfredo
Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology”, the
city as a project,
http://thecityasaproject.org/2011/03/pier-
vittorio-aureli-manfredo-tafuri/ March 2011.

[18] P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, R. Slade, A. Al

Khourdajie, R. van Diemen, D. McCollum, M.
Pathak, S. Some, P. Vyas, R. Fradera, M.
Belkacemi, A. Hasija, G. Lisboa, S. Luz, J. Malley
(eds.), IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022:
Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of
Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment
Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (Cambridge, UK and New York,
USA: Cambridge University Press, 2022) doi:
10.1017/9781009157926.

[19] A.G. Papandreou, Paternalistic Capitalism

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1972).

[20] A. Tritsis, “The nature of planning regions”

unpublished PhD thesis (Illinois Institute of
Technology, Chicago, 1969).

[21] T. Dounas, D. Lombardi, W. Jabi, [2022]

“Collective Digital Factories for Buildings”, T.
Dounas, D. Lombardi, Ed., Blockchain for
Construction (Singapore: Springer – Verlag,
2022) ISBN 9811937583.

[22] B. Tschumi, “Architects act as mediators

between authoritarian power, or capitalist
power, and some sort of humanistic aspiration.
The economic and political powers that make
our cities and our architecture are enormous.
We cannot block them, but we can use another
tactic, which I call the tactic of Judo, that is, to
use the forces of one’s opponent in order to
defeat it and transform it into something else …
Back to Top To what extent can we move away from a
descriptive critical mode to a progressive,
transformative mode for architecture?” Peter
 Eisenman and Cynthia Davidson, eds, anyplace
symposium, ANY corporation, Montreal (1994).

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