The living architecture of Anupama Kundoo. "Anupama Kundoo. Building knowledge" At the ICO museum

What the Price of a Building Doesn't Tell Us

Text by Carmen Jordán Asensi, Director of the Fundación ICO

At a time when housing is an almost daily topic of conversation, it is worth remembering that we discuss prices and square metres, but rarely what those buildings will mean for our lives.

As economists, we tend to measure a building in terms of what it costs and the returns it generates. This is a necessary measure, but an incomplete one. A building also determines how daylight enters a home, how much heat a family endures in August, whether a street encourages people to linger or simply pass through, and whether neighbours encounter one another or remain strangers. None of this appears on a balance sheet, yet we pay for it — and benefit from it — for decades.

Architect Anupama Kundoo captures this in a single sentence: “Architecture is society’s greatest collective endeavour, leaving behind spaces that embody shared values, aspirations, and ways of living together.” Her words are both an observation and a warning. An observation, because no building is the work of one person alone. Behind every building are those who commission it, finance it, design it, construct it, and inhabit it, as well as those who simply walk past. A warning, because if architecture is a collective endeavour, what we build reveals a great deal about how we organise ourselves and what we are willing to share.

In economics, we have a term for the effects of a transaction on those who are not directly involved in it: “externalities.” Architecture is, to a considerable extent, one vast externality. A well-oriented façade, a shaded square, or a thoughtfully conceived public facility generates benefits that are not reflected in the price of any home. Anyone who has crossed a treeless, sun-baked square in July, or witnessed the transformation of a school playground when shade and greenery are introduced, knows this. The reverse is equally true: a neighbourhood conceived solely to maximise financial returns imposes costs on its residents and the wider city that no one accounted for when the plans were approved. This is why architecture is never an exclusively private matter, even when the land or the building itself is privately owned.

Today, the public debate about our cities is intense, and rightly so. We discuss the cost of living, who can afford to live in the city centre, and how neighbourhoods are changing. These are urgent questions, with technical and political answers that are not mine to provide. But there is a more fundamental question we risk overlooking: “What kind of city do we want, and what do we want it for?” When building becomes a purely technical matter — regulations, deadlines, costs — or a purely financial one — returns and valuations — that conversation disappears. And with it goes the possibility for citizens to recognise something of their own in the streets and buildings around them.

Kundoo’s work offers another way of looking at architecture. In Auroville, the experimental city in southern India where she began working in 1990, she built earthen houses for a group of homeless children, firing them in situ as though each dwelling were its own kiln. She worked alongside craftspeople, students, and local residents. The result was not simply a building, but knowledge that remained with those who had built it. This is the idea that runs throughout her work: building with the resources, climate, and knowledge of a place, rather than relying on the standardisation inherited from industrialisation.

The point is not to transplant solutions from Auroville into our cities, but to recover a particular attitude: to understand that the value of what we build cannot be reduced to its price, and that the knowledge required to build well is shared among many people. This has very tangible implications. It means listening before designing. It means choosing materials with an eye to how they will age, rather than simply what they cost today. And it means recognising the value of craftsmanship and the expertise of those who work with their hands — knowledge that takes decades to acquire and very little time to lose.

As public institutions, it is not our role to determine what cities should look like, but to help society develop the understanding and judgement needed to shape them. The exhibition that the Museo ICO is devoting to Kundoo in the year of its 30th anniversary offers a valuable opportunity to do just that.

But the conversation should not end within the walls of a museum. Every time a school is designed, a square is renovated, or an apartment building is constructed, a collective decision is being made, even if we do not always perceive it as such. Recovering that awareness — that architecture concerns us all, including those of us who will never sign an architectural drawing — is perhaps the best way to ensure that what we build today will still speak well of us fifty years from now.