The Algorithm That Became an Architect
When TikTok’s Code Becomes the New Building Code and Reshapes Architectural Space from Within
In 1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe stood before an open glass structure in Illinois and declared that “less is more,” presenting the world with a boundless, wall-free space that redefined architectural freedom. Seventy-three years later, a new generation of architects stands before a 6.7-inch smartphone screen and discovers that the expansive space Mies heralded has become — literally — dead space. Not because people stopped loving openness, but because a single algorithm decided that whatever fails to fill a vertical screen does not deserve to exist.
This is not journalistic hyperbole. It is the conclusion at which the latest academic research in platform studies converges, indicating that what has come to be known as “TikTokification” — the transformation of TikTok from a passing entertainment app into a structural model that every other platform absorbs and reproduces — has crossed the boundary of screens and begun imposing its conditions on physical space itself.
From the Painted Wall to the Digital Code: The End of “Instagrammable Architecture”
Architectural discourse has long addressed the impact of social media on design from a single, flattened angle: “Instagrammable architecture.” A pink wall in a Los Angeles café, a spiral staircase in a Parisian boutique, neon lighting in a Dubai restaurant — elements planted in space as visual bait for the Instagram lens. But this reading, despite its prevalence, stopped at the surface of the phenomenon and never touched the infrastructure that governs it.
What recent research reveals runs deeper and is more unsettling. In his 2024 study published in New Media & Society, Paolo Gerbaudo offered a rigorous academic definition of “TikTokification” as a structural transformation in the nature of digital public spaces, where we have shifted from the “networked publics” that characterized the Facebook era — built on conscious friendships and follows — to what he calls “clustered publics,” human aggregations assembled by the algorithm based on interests and tastes with no personal connection among their members. This shift, Gerbaudo warns, carries three severe consequences: the depersonalization of digital experience, the opacity of algorithmic communication structures, and the fragmentation of the public sphere into isolated cultural islands.
For the architect, this means the question is no longer about inserting an “Instagrammable” element into an existing design, but about radically rethinking the nature of space itself. If the algorithm determines who sees what and when, then architectural space is no longer designed for its actual visitors, but for a digital phantom the architect neither knows nor controls.
Screen Scale as a Structural Constraint: When the Phone Dictates Room Dimensions
In traditional building codes, the legislator dictates to the architect the minimum ceiling height, the minimum corridor width, and the location of fire exits. These are tangible constraints, documented in regulations that leave no room for interpretation. But a new, invisible constraint has begun asserting itself with no less rigor: the 9:16 aspect ratio.
Gerbaudo demonstrates that the most visible sign of TikTokification is the spread of the “For You” paradigm — that full-screen vertical feed of autoplaying short videos navigated by swiping — across Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and even the “For You” tab on X. This proliferation is not mere superficial mimicry. As Diana Zulli and David J. Zulli show in their 2020 study in the same journal, it is the embodiment of a logic of “technological mimesis” that has shaped TikTok’s infrastructure from the very first sign-up moment. TikTok does not merely host content; it “engineers imitation” through reusable sound libraries, ready-made visual effects, and duet and stitch tools that make replication the primary creative act.
When this logic is projected onto architecture, a striking result emerges: the “algorithmically successful” space is the one that fills the vertical screen entirely, leaving no dead margins. In practice, this means lower ceilings, narrower corridors, and acute angles that force the camera closer to the surface. The wide, open space — from Mies’s glass halls to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim atrium — becomes “algorithmically dead space” because it leaves empty areas at the edges of the vertical screen. A new generation of emerging cafés, galleries, and museums is being designed today at “phone screen” proportions, without their designers necessarily realizing that the constraint they are following is not aesthetic but purely algorithmic.
The Seven-Second Rhythm: How the Algorithm Killed the Quiet Corridor
If scale is the spatial constraint, rhythm is the temporal one. The average duration of a successful TikTok video ranges between seven and fifteen seconds — a number that seems trivial until you realize it is reshaping the entire experience of walking through architectural space.
In a field study published by Anita Bhandari and Silvia Bimo in 2022 in Social Media + Society, the researchers demonstrated that the fundamental difference between TikTok and its predecessors lies in the centrality of the “For You” algorithm, which transformed the user from an agent choosing what to follow into a recipient whose self-awareness the algorithm shapes. More importantly from an architectural standpoint, this “algorithmic awareness” — as they term it — has begun “spilling over” into Instagram and Facebook, blurring the boundaries between platform categories and unifying the digital rhythm across all spaces.
For the architect, this rhythm translates into a harsh design requirement: the space must deliver a “visual jolt” every seven seconds of walking. The long, quiet corridor once considered a high achievement in traditional Japanese architecture — where the visitor contemplates the gradation of light across a paper wall — has become a “failed space” in algorithmic logic because it produces no moments that can be clipped and shared. The architect now designs a “sequence of shots” rather than a “continuous spatial experience,” much as D. B. V. Kaye, Xiao Chen, and Jing Zeng described in their 2020 study in Mobile Media & Communication the concept of “circumscribed creativity” — template-driven creation that lowers production barriers and steers users toward mimetic formats, shrinking the room available for free experimentation.
Reflective Surfaces and Infinite Mirrors: The Building Material the Algorithm Rewards
The algorithm’s influence has not been limited to scale and rhythm; it has extended to the selection of building materials themselves. In a critical study published by Matteo Mattiuzzo and Pablo Pedigoni Ponce in 2024 in the International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, the researchers presented an in-depth analysis of how TikTok’s visual design choices — autoplay, full-screen immersion, and friction-laden privacy settings — became genuine sources of platform power. They emphasize that design itself, not the algorithm alone, shapes user behavior, making TikTokification a comprehensive design phenomenon that any platform — and any physical space — can replicate.
When this insight is applied to physical architecture, a clear dominance of reflective, glass, metallic, and mirrored surfaces in contemporary interior design becomes apparent. The conventional explanation attributes this to aesthetic or environmental trends, but the algorithmic explanation is more precise and more disquieting: the algorithm penalizes matte and dark surfaces because they fail to produce sufficient visual contrast on the small screen, while it rewards light reflection that creates illusory visual depth in short video clips. The infinity mirrors we see in Riyadh restaurants, Cairo cafés, and Dubai galleries are not free aesthetic choices but unconscious responses to an algorithmic logic that favors surfaces capable of “producing content” — visually dense output in a matter of seconds.
From Dwelling to Studio: The Transformation of Architectural Function in the Age of Live Streaming
Perhaps the most radical shift is the one that has struck architectural function itself. In an ethnographic study published by Axel Schellewald in 2023 in Media, Culture & Society, the researcher demonstrated that the “For You” feeling TikTok generates is not merely imposed from above but is “co-produced” between the algorithm and users who actively read content in search of personalization. This active interaction explains why the model is imitated so widely: it satisfies a deep desire for individual recognition within a crowded digital space.
But when this logic migrates into residential space, the result is a jarring functional transformation. The living room is no longer designed for family gathering but for filming a “morning routine.” The kitchen is no longer for cooking but for shooting a “quick recipe” from an overhead angle. The bedroom has become a backdrop for late-night live streaming. The architect is designing, without openly declaring it, “a photography studio disguised as a dwelling.”
This shift echoes what Z. Zhang observed in a 2020 study on the “infrastructuralization of TikTok” in China, demonstrating that the platform did not remain confined to entertainment but expanded into e-commerce, education, tourism, and government propaganda — in other words, it became infrastructure, a template to which all other actors must adapt. By architectural analogy, space itself has become “digital infrastructure” that must accommodate content flows before it accommodates human flows.
The Invisible Client: Has the Algorithm Surpassed the Human in Design Decision-Making?
In his classic writings, Louis Kahn defined architectural space as a “vessel for life.” But what contemporary research reveals is that this vessel is no longer shaped according to the needs of its inhabitants, but according to the demands of an algorithm that possesses no consciousness, no body, and no genuine spatial experience.
Gerbaudo warns that the “clustered public” produced by TikTokification is depersonalized, opaque in its structure, and threatened with isolation inside digital filter bubbles. Bhandari and Bimo indicate that TikTok-style algorithms complicate older models of digital identity construction. And Costera Meijer and her colleagues, in their recent study published in 2026 in Digital Journalism, caution that content adhering too closely to the platform’s entertainment spirit is algorithmically penalized if it attempts seriousness — a warning that applies literally to architectural spaces that try to be “profound” in an era that rewards visual superficiality.
The question this landscape poses is not technical but ontological: has the algorithm become the real “client” dictating the architect’s design, bypassing the human being altogether? Space is no longer a “vessel for life” but “digital raw material” that the algorithm processes and reshapes. And the architect who fails to recognize this transformation will continue designing for inhabitants who no longer exist in the traditional sense, while the actual client — a string of code running on distant servers — dictates scale, rhythm, material, and function from behind the curtain.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
The retreat of the open plan and the rise of the mirrored, seven-second interior are not stylistic drifts; they are the built residue of a new economic contract. When a café’s revenue depends less on its coffee than on its circulation as free advertising through short-form video, the client brief silently shifts from serving a body to servicing a lens. Attention markets, platform monetization, and the collapse of marketing budgets into user-generated content have pushed hospitality, retail, and even residential clients to underwrite spaces optimized for algorithmic distribution rather than occupation. Ceiling heights compress, corridors narrow, and reflective finishes multiply because procurement now prices “content yield” alongside square meters. The architect has not surrendered authorship to a machine; the architect is executing a commission written by a distribution logic that no longer needs to enter the room.
References
Gerbaudo, Paolo. “TikTok and the Algorithmic Transformation of Social Media Publics: From Social Networks to Social Interest Clusters.” New Media & Society, 2024.
Bhandari, Anita and Bimo, Silvia. “Why’s Everyone on TikTok Now? The Algorithmized Self and the Future of Self-Making on Social Media.” Social Media + Society, 2022.
Vázquez-Herrero, Jorge, Negreira-Rey, María-Carmen, and López-García, Xosé. “Let’s Dance the News! How the News Media Are Adapting to the Logic of TikTok.” Journalism, 2020.
Zulli, Diana and Zulli, David J. “Extending the Internet Meme: Conceptualizing Technological Mimesis and Imitation Publics on the TikTok Platform.” New Media & Society, 2020.
Kaye, D. B. V., Chen, Xiao, and Zeng, Jing. “The Co-Evolution of Two Chinese Mobile Short Video Apps: Parallel Platformization of Douyin and TikTok.” Mobile Media & Communication, 2020.
Vázquez-Herrero, Jorge, Negreira-Rey, María-Carmen, and Rodríguez-Vázquez, Ana-Isabel. “Intersections Between TikTok and TV: Channels and Programmes Thinking Outside the Box.” Journalism and Media, 2021.
Hendrickx, Jonas and Vázquez-Herrero, Jorge. “Dissecting Social Media Journalism: A Comparative Study Across Platforms, Outlets and Countries.” Journalism Studies, 2024.
Costera Meijer, Irene, Lamot, Karin, and Groot Kormelink, Tim. “The User Experience of TikTok and Its Compatibility with News.” Digital Journalism, 2026.
Schellewald, Axel. “Understanding the Popularity and Affordances of TikTok Through User Experiences.” Media, Culture & Society, 2023.
Mattiuzzo, Matteo and Pedigoni Ponce, Pablo. “Power Through Design – Dark Patterns, Personalization and the Emergence of TikTok.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 2024.
Zhang, Z. “Infrastructuralization of Tik Tok: Transformation, Power Relationships, and Platformization of Video Entertainment in China.” Media, Culture & Society, 2020.
