Are We Born with Architecture? Genetic Meditations on Design and Destiny

On an ordinary July evening, I found myself among a crowd of Indonesians, all eyes glued to the screen as their national football team battled Thailand. Cheers erupted as Indonesia secured victory. Yet I was less interested in the score than in the quality of play itself: Why don’t these teams move like the English or the Brazilians? Why did the game, for all its passion, seem fractured, the tactics dispersed, its style missing a distinct identity?

It wasn’t just a question about football. It was the spark for something deeper:
Are there entire peoples who simply “don’t excel” at architecture? More precisely, are we, in some profound sense, born with the genetic code for creative design? Does our biological and cultural inheritance shape what architectural forms we’re destined to produce—or fail to produce?

Much like not every player is born to be Messi, not every “architect” is fated to leave works that withstand the test of time. The gap between middling and exceptional isn’t just a matter of training; it may be a matter of genes, fluidity, agility, intuitive timing, endurance: all qualities that, in sports, are both nurtured and inherited. Might the same be true of design? Is there something internal, even hereditary, that makes a few far more attuned to spatial beauty and invention?

Consider the case of nations and their gifts. India may not be a football powerhouse, but it has perfected sculpture, ornament, and the lavish language of space: from Mughal palaces to Tamil temples, a riot of forms and motifs flourishes. Yet when Indian engineering enters the global market, it sometimes dissolves into confusion, bold gestures overshadowed by unruly translation. Is this a design flaw, or a mismatch between exported style and essential geography?

China, for all its millennia of building, now produces contemporary architecture at scale, yet so much feels repetitive, cold, and starved of the unmistakable signature of place. In contrast, a glance at an English building evokes restraint and order, spaces governed by discipline and history. Is this the work of genes, pedagogy, climate, or the constraints of a tight-knit city?

But what happens when architecture itself migrates, when European typologies are transplanted into the Gulf, or Japanese minimalism is dropped into the desert? More often than not, the magic evaporates. Design becomes surface, a well-dressed shell. It’s the same as a Brazilian footballer playing in a Swedish league, the body is there, but the spirit is lost amid incompatible soil.

Should architects, like athletes, stay close to their “home pitch,” or is true globalism the ability to adapt, genetically and spatially, across worlds? The answer is uneasy.

So who, in truth, is the real “global architect”? The one who trained in London and opened an office in New York, endlessly repeating cross-continental clichés? Or the village native who invents new forms out of local roots, feeding design from deep within heritage?
A survey of the global architecture scene reveals surface diversity, but intellectual inheritance is near-dynastic: the dominance of European modernism, the Zen of Japanese emptiness, the American cult of branding. Is this just coincidence, or is it the natural expansion of successful cultural genes, exporting spirit rather than just form?

And where does this leave the Arab city? If cultural genetics shape architectural identity, why do so many Arab cities cast off their own character in favor of imported genes unsuited to their climate, light, or traditions? Is it time to decode and recompose the architectural genome of the region itself? The glass and metal towers of the contemporary Gulf often feel soulless, their energy divorced from place and memory. Does the future require, quite literally, an Arab architectural genome?

Not everyone who draws is an architect, just as not everyone who runs is a sprinter. Architecture is not just a vocation, a signature on blueprints, but a calling formed through deep, sometimes inherited, capacities to translate space, light, and mass into beauty. If we are to reclaim what matters in architecture, we must rediscover those individuals who intuitively translate sublimity into built form.

This provocation is not about exclusion; it’s a plea for self-knowledge.
Perhaps some of us are born architects, just as some are born storytellers or athletes. And for the rest, architecture remains a beautiful exercise, demanding, humbling, unfinished.

If you wish, relevant ArchUp articles on regional identity, the challenges of architectural translation, and profiles of architects rooted in place may complement this meditation and invite the reader deeper into the ongoing debate about what is inherited, what is learned, and what is designed anew.