Style

Henrik Oxvig

Related terms: architecture, attention, care, correspondence, craftsmanship, critical zone, dwelling, ecology of making, form, inhabitation, materiality, ornament, ornamentation, perception, planetary, resilience, resonance, rhythm, situatedness, technique

Style once named a principle of coherence in art and architecture – a way of grasping how form, material, and life joined forces in a given time. It was not a matter of taste, but of how worlds held together. Today, the word tends to sound anachronistic, tied to historical periods or aesthetic signatures. Yet the question of style returns, unexpectedly, when we ask what it means to inhabit the Earth in the planetary condition that Dipesh Chakrabarty describes in The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). If the planetary raises the question of inhabitation, then style may describe the way such inhabitation becomes form – the way matter, technique, and thought compose a livable world.

To readers outside architecture and the arts, style may sound like a surface problem. But within the environmental humanities, surface is not trivial; it is where lives meet. Style is not a label attached to objects; it is a way worlds come to presence together. It names the adjustment through which bodies, materials, and practices find a workable accord. If we speak of planetary crisis, we speak of damaged adjustments: rhythms that no longer answer one another, tempos that no longer cohere. In such a horizon, style matters because it measures the fit between making and the milieu it joins.

The term’s etymology is suggestive. Stilus – the pointed tool for writing – carries a double movement: pressure and trace. Style is the mark of a contact, the record of how knowledge presses into being and how being resists, bends, and answers. That pressure is never purely human. Air, heat, gravity, soil – their agencies leave fingerprints in every form. Thus, to ask after style today is to ask how we might write with the Earth’s instruments, how our tools might learn a finer pressure, a slower hand.

This is not to oppose science and style. It is to let perception and measurement speak to one another. Science may calculate thresholds; style helps us live with them. Science finds limits; style teaches attention at the limit – that way of proceeding when procedure runs out, and only care remains. 

Style beyond Formalism

For Gottfried Semper, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, style was not a matter of external appearance. It was the result of a process – the slow crystallisation of relations between material, craft, use, and meaning. Style emerged, Semper wrote, when “the technical, the artistic, and the social” came into resonance. To build was to compose these forces into a coherent order. Style could not be willed or designed; it appeared only when the work found its balance within the constraints of a culture, a climate, a technique.

This is the understanding that the modern period lost. When modernity turned style into a system of signs – something to choose, apply, or reject – it severed form from formation. The result was paradoxical: architecture became global, yet lost its ground. What Semper called the law of dressing, the transformation of natural substance into cultural form, was replaced by a regime of representation. Style became a question of identity, not of world.

Semper’s insight, however, remains potent: style arises not from intention, but from relation. It is what happens when material, technique, and symbolic thought enter into dialogue. In this sense, style is a medium of correspondence, not an instrument of control. Semper’s sense that materials carry their own laws of formation resonates today, when the Earth itself appears as an active participant in the making of form.

The Loss of Style

Modern acceleration – both technical and cultural – brought about the loss of style in a deeper sense. The ambition to master complexity replaced the slower processes through which coherence once appeared. Building became project management; form became image – the world, as Heidegger noted, was “set before” us as a picture.

In this abstraction, the Earth itself disappeared from architectural thought. The ground became data. We built as if without gravity, as if materials had no voice, as if inhabitation were a logistical problem. Style, understood as a dialogue between earth and artifice, dissolved into efficiency.

Hartmut Rosa’s distinction between acceleration and resonance clarifies the loss. Resonance, he writes, requires attention, vulnerability, and response. Acceleration excludes them. Style, in this deeper sense, was always a form of resonance – the capacity of a work to vibrate with its milieu. When the tempo of production outstripped the tempo of perception, this capacity fell silent.

To invoke Heidegger here is not to found the argument on ontology, but to recall a historical displacement: ”from dwelling with to ‘looking at’; from presence to capture.” I do not write as an ontologist, but with an awareness that knowledge always leans into being – and that being exceeds it. The difference matters. Epistemology asks how we know; ontology asks what there is. Style lives in the interval where knowing touches what is more than known.

This interval is not a void; it is a working space. Architects, artists, and field scientists know it well. It is the span between a drawing and a site visit, between a calculation and a tide. There, style appears as a manner of proceeding when the world does not match the plan: a recalibration of joints, a softening of edges, a change of sequence. The decision is technical, but it is also ethical – for it acknowledges that the work answers to something other than itself.

In that sense, style is a discipline of humility. It tempers projection with reception. It lets materials speak without relinquishing responsibility. It makes room for the contingency that is not error but environment. If modernity could afford to forget this, the planet cannot. Our forms now travel in cycles we do not command; their effects return by wind and water. Style, rethought, is the art of remaining responsive within those returns.

Style in the Critical Zone

Yet today, at the threshold of planetary awareness, the question of style returns. Not as nostalgia, but as necessity. We now live, as Bruno Latour reminds us, within the Critical Zone – a fragile skin of air, water, soil, and life no thicker than a few kilometres, where every human act reverberates across the web of existence. To inhabit this zone demands a new kind of composition.

In this context, style may be rethought as a mode of ecological resonance – a way of attuning human making to the complex material and temporal entanglements that sustain life. Style is not the opposite of science, but its partner in perception. It arises when thought, technique, and material recognise each other as participants in the same field of relations.

Chakrabarty’s distinction between the global and the planetary marks the shift. The global is the space of systems, networks, and calculation – the world as a picture. The planetary is the space of interdependence – the world as presence. Style, in this planetary sense, is what allows form to take part in the presence of the world. It is not representation but co-formation: a practice of composing with, not upon, the Earth.

Co-formation is a slow pedagogy. It asks how measures and manners might come into accord – how the quantitative and the qualitative might learn to hear one another. A building’s energy model measures exchange; its style gives that exchange a manner – an ease, a way of sitting on the ground, taking wind, gathering light. Likewise, in writing or law, the metric reveals a limit; the style learns how to move at that limit without violence. In both cases, style is not ornament but habit – a trained responsiveness, learned by contact and corrected by consequence.

Examples abound beyond the human. The style of a shoreline is not its outline on a map but its negotiation with currents and storms. The style of a mycelial network is not an image but a habit of branching, thickening, and withdrawal. To notice such styles is not to romanticise nature; it is to recognise that form is less a thing than a timing – an event of alignment rather than an act of imposition. The task for design and thought alike is to learn from such alignments without claiming their innocence.

Style as Situated Intelligence

If the planetary condition calls for new forms of inhabitation, style might describe the intelligence by which we join such inhabitation to form. It is not a method, but a sensitivity: an ability to work with the specific conditions of a situation until something begins to resonate.

Charles Sanders Peirce called this process abduction – the leap by which new meaning arises from observation and imagination. In architecture, abduction occurs when material and idea find each other. Style is what remains of this encounter: the trace of a successful conversation between matter and mind.

Marco Frascari once wrote that “details tell the tale.” In each joint, connection, and seam, architecture articulates a relation between technique and thought. The detail is where style becomes tangible – where the abstract and the concrete meet. Style, then, is not surface but depth: the texture of a world brought into conversation with itself.

Contemporary practices such as Pihlmann Architects exemplify this approach. In their work, materials are not passive but semantically active. Clay, steel, brick, or wood are not chosen for effect but engaged as participants. Their architecture does not imitate nature; it cooperates with it. Here, style reappears as a dialogue between technique and terrain – as the form that emerges when attention becomes construction.

What follows is not representation but resonance: the moment when matter begins to reply. In that reply, construction turns from projection to conversation, and style becomes its tone – the rhythm through which attention endures in form.

Situated intelligence also concerns time. A project’s schedule measures duration; its style learns duration’s character. Some things must cure, some must settle, some must weather before they belong. Style respects these tempos. It refuses the violence of forcing time and instead cultivates the patience by which materials become themselves. In this patience, the work changes too: it accepts that completion is not an end-state but a phase within a longer metabolism.

The Ethics of Emergence

If style is to be meaningful again, it must also be ethical. It must address the question of how to build without mastery – how to compose in the presence of others, human and nonhuman alike. In this sense, style resembles what the environmental humanities call resilience, not as a return to equilibrium but as the capacity for adaptive transformation without loss of integrity.

Style endures precisely because it changes. It is flexible yet grounded, responsive yet composed. In ecological terms, style is the architecture of coexistence: the set of relations through which form learns to live.

This understanding reactivates Semper’s insight that every technical act has an ethical dimension. To weave, to join, to mould – these are not neutral operations but gestures of care. They make the world habitable. Style names the continuity between making and dwelling.

To avoid reinstalling the human at the centre, ethics must widen its circle of address. If style is a practice of response, the question becomes: who and what is being answered? A foundation answers gravity; a façade answers light and weather; a plan answers habits and paths, including those not our own. Ethics, then, is not an overlay on technique but the disclosure of its addressees. The more fully a work recognises them, the more exact its style becomes.

This is why “building without mastery” cannot mean building without decision. It means deciding in conversation – with materials, with ecosystems, with those who will inherit the consequences. Sometimes the conversation says no. Sometimes it asks for less. Sometimes it asks for another kind of work altogether: repair rather than novelty, maintenance rather than display. Style is not diminished by such refusals; it deepens. Refusal can be a manner of care. It may also mean learning to withdraw – to let form recede where waters advance, to yield ground so that other rhythms may continue. A style adequate to the planetary must know how to retreat as well as to build, how to draw with the tide rather than against it.

If we look for nonhuman analogues, we find styles of refusal everywhere: the way a plant closes in heat, the way a bird trims its flight in crosswind, the way a dune line retreats to survive the storm. These are not metaphors for human design but reminders that form navigates forces by tempering itself. An ecological style learns from such tempering. It composes thresholds that can yield without breaking, joints that admit movement, and margins that host other lives.

A New Ornament

What follows from this is a renewed understanding of ornament – not as decoration, but as the trace of relation. Jörg Gleiter has argued that ornament today must be rethought as “a metaphysics of the surface”: the site where material reveals its participation in the whole. Ornament is where style touches the world, where the work discloses its belonging to a field of forces larger than itself.

Ornament, in this sense, is not addition but attention – a way of acknowledging the shared surface between humans and the more-than-human world. To speak of style in the planetary age is therefore to recover the intimacy between surface and ground. Ornament becomes a record of interaction, an inscription of the Earth within form. This is not revivalism, but recognition: a style adequate to Gaia must be one that lets matters speak.

The surface is not an afterthought; it is the site of contact. An ecological ornament makes contact legible. It may be the limewash that breathes with the wall, the eave that thickens shade, the moss that is allowed to take hold where water lingers. None of this is picturesque. It is the grammar by which a work acknowledges its dependencies. Ornament, once freed from display, returns as evidence – a quiet proof that the project has entered into relation rather than standing above it.

Dwelling with Style, Finally

Style cannot be designed. It can only arise when thought, craft, and care converge under new conditions. The age of the planetary is precisely such a condition – one in which architecture, art, and design are compelled to rediscover their terrestrial intelligence.

Style, in this sense, is not what distinguishes epochs or individuals. It is what allows a work to belong – delicately, and compositionally – to the Earth. It names the resonance between human making and the life of the planet.

To work in style today is to compose within the Critical Zone, where every act of construction is also an act of attention. Style is the way in which this attention takes form – the slow, patient articulation of a world that remains livable.

To dwell – finally – is to accept that the world is more than we know and to let knowledge work in that more. Style is the craft of this acceptance. It is how a sentence leaves room for breath, how a path yields to roots, how a building keeps a margin for weather and birds. Such margins are not losses; they are what allow coherence without conquest. In them, the work finds its measure and, perhaps, its grace.