This fifth instalment of the Domus Contract supplement has a hermeneutic intent. It describes the world of voluminous commissions through the voices of major actors, who explain their strategies for increasing sales potential, the logics of specialised services, new in-house departments and digital platforms. The issue outlines the limits and ambits of a word – contract – that is losing its clarity and focus. We could say that contract is to architecture what the fourth industrial revolution is to the economy: “disruptive innovation” that is reforming the way we conceive large-scale interior design projects. 

The term disruptive innovation was coined by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower in Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave published in Harvard Business Review in 1995. The article describes why leading companies fail to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change. The companies invest successfully in the technologies necessary to retain their current customers, but then fail to make certain other technological investments that the customers of the future will need. This is because they are unable to see new markets and new needs. Twenty years later, in 2014, Larry Downes and Paul Nunes revisited the topic in their essay Big Bang Disruption, anticipating how social networks, big data and all the phenomena linked to the consolidation of broadband internet create an ecosystem of interactions that would give rise to radically alternative business models with extremely competitive costs. The impact would be huge, which is why they called it the fourth industrial revolution.

In the same way, when it comes to architectural commissions for contract work, the advent of forceful technologies that change our way of living, working and thinking impose a change of scale and thought upon designers and business formulas, reshaping the traditional dynamics of supply. Now, the disruptors are those able to requalify our indoor surroundings according to the interactions taking place inside – fluid and crossable functions. In the US economy, the impact of start-ups is the creation of 1 million new jobs per year by companies under 1 year old; 95 per cent of all jobs is created by companies less than 5 years old; 40 per cent of the gross domestic product is generated by companies less than 30 years old. Will it be the same with contract work?

This article was originally published in the Contract supplement, attached to Domus 1040, November 2019