When Zaha Hadid, architect of Qatar's major stadium for the 2022 World Cup, was asked about the deaths of hundreds of Indian and Nepalese migrant workers who reportedly died in connection with construction work, she responded:

"I have nothing to do with the workers; it's not my duty as an architect to look at it."

The architect's disavowal of social responsibility seems almost unremarkable today, but once upon a time architecture was driven by a moral imperative, a belief that rational, efficient buildings could provide as many people as possible with a home and even transform the world.

An estimated 1.8 million migrant workers are building Qatar's 2022 FIFA World Cup structures. ( Getty Images )

According to architect and theorist Rainier de Graaf, architecture has instead become a story of compromise and banal setbacks, governed by commercial interests at the expense of public good.

The profession has always been fuelled by a collective sense of grandeur; young architects graduate with what de Graaf describes as near-megalomaniacal ambitions, omnipotent fantasies of being able to, quite literally, construct the world. The reality they encounter, however, is far more prosaic.

"It's often considered an elevated art form, above everything else, when of course the reality is it's amidst everything else," says de Graaf, the author of Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession.

"Architecture, like everything else, is very much a product of the circumstances in which it is produced.

"Basically we're talking about a discipline that isn't autonomous."

The Sirius building at Millers Point is a well-known example of brutalist architecture in Sydney. ( Supplied: Barton Taylor )

De Graaf believes most architects still produce stylistically "modern" buildings, but it's a modern architecture devoid of its original intent, untethered from social responsibility and the dream of a decent standard of living and affordable housing for all.

This architecture remains cheap, efficient and rational, but it's in the service of profits rather than people.

"The logic of a building no longer primarily reflects its intended use but instead serves mostly to promote a generic desirability in economic terms. Judgement of architecture is deferred to the market," de Graaf says.

Architecture as an agent of inequality

Reading Thomas Piketty's Capital, de Graaf was struck by the parallels between Piketty's economic analysis and the progression of architectural history. The 1970s, he suggests, marked a decisive turning point in the history of architecture and housing.

"In 1972 the Pruitt-Igoe public housing estate in St Louis is demolished, an event that critics generally herald as the end of modern architecture and, on a larger scale, the end of modern utopian visions for the city," he says.

Pruitt-Igoe, a failed Modernist public housing project in St. Louis. ( Getty Images: Lee Balterman )

"Through the general deployment of the term 'real estate', the definition of the architect is replaced by that of the economist.

"There may ultimately be no such thing as modern or post-modern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital."

As a result, architecture has increasingly become a subject of protest.

Major, iconic architectural projects have met with local resistance from Beirut to New York, and are viewed as part of a global trend toward urban gentrification, which marginalises and often displaces local communities.

In an ironic twist, de Graaf says, modern architecture has become an agent of inequality. Its effects are utterly antithetical to the principles that once underpinned the modernist ideal.

Pursuit of the mundane

De Graaf himself grew up in a small flat in a block made of prefabricated concrete, surrounded by identical buildings. It was the kind of housing that would become the site of bitter ideological contestation, the material expression of larger political and economic issues.

For some, the anonymity, repetition and homogeneity of modernist housing estates was ugly and alienating. But for many, like de Graaf and his family, the buildings felt familiar and profoundly humane.

"To us, the repetitive and repeated message of the architecture was self-evident: the equality of the buildings was a reflection of the equality of their inhabitants," he says.

Much of this kind of cheap, mass-produced public housing has now been demolished. But as we confront a seemingly permanent housing affordability crisis, de Graaf suggests our prefab past may still have something to offer.

The iconic Red Road Flats were supposed to be the answer to Glasgow's overcrowded slums. ( Flickr: Paradasos, CC BY-NC 2.0 )

"Faced with a massive housing crisis, [we] nearly solved it with a huge amount of serial, prefabricated monotonous housing slabs," he says.

"Moreover, it generated the financial space for a whole generation of working-class children, particularly in Western Europe, to acquire a higher education … Europe's middle class was born and bred in the grey concrete of these anonymous buildings."

If de Graaf is nostalgic, it's a nostalgia "for progressive times". He describes modernist housing as the "radical pursuit of the mundane". Contemporary architecture, by contrast, is utterly preoccupied with the radical.

"If you look at today's architecture and you put up all the icons produced by award winning architectural firms, everything is different, everything attempts to be different, everything attempts to be original," he says.

Reinier de Graaf says contemporary architecture is "preoccupied" with being original. ( Getty Images: James D. Morgan )

"And yet, if you line them all up you get a curious kind of monotony of the exceptional.

"When everything is exceptional, actually the monotonous becomes weirdly exceptional.

"It's just that contrast that fascinated me; and how quickly people can move from one extreme from the other. When the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But the middle is almost unattainable."