There is something telling in the grammar of OBEL's 2026 theme. "Systems' Hack" — with its plural possessive apostrophe — implies that these systems are many, or belong to multiple agents. The question, of course, is to whom. The infrastructures that govern our cities, our resources, our very capacity to inhabit this planet: who owns them, who benefits from them, and who suffers their failures? As architecture finds itself increasingly entangled in networks of extraction, displacement and ecological degradation, the invitation to "hack" these systems feels less like provocation and more like necessity.

We find ourselves in what has been termed a polycrisis — a condition where climate instability, economic volatility, geopolitical tension and social fragmentation are not merely concurrent but deeply interlinked. Construction, as OBEL Director Jesper Eis Eriksen reminds us, is responsible for a disproportionate share of global emissions and waste production. More often than not, architecture also plays a role in social and economic displacement, its gleaming surfaces masking the violence of gentrification, the erasure of communities, the severing of people from land. Within this reality, the discipline can no longer rely on its traditional role as neutral problem-solver. It must instead confront its own complicity — and find ways to lead in resolving the systemic failures it has helped perpetuate.

Last year's OBEL theme, Ready-Made, invited architecture to reconsider its relationship with material resources and reuse. It was a necessary intervention, asking us to look at the matter of buildings themselves — the embodied carbon, the extractive supply chains, the possibilities latent in what already exists. Systems' Hack represents an expansion of this inquiry, a shift in scale from the substance of construction to the wider infrastructures that enable societies to function. Where Ready-Made asked what we build with, Systems' Hack asks how we might intervene in the networks of production, governance and influence that architecture relies upon — and too often reinforces.

The theme's dual terminology is instructive. A "system," as OBEL defines it, is a group of interacting or interrelated elements working together as parts of a mechanism or interconnecting network, acting according to a set of rules to form a unified complex whole. A "hack," meanwhile, is both strategy and subversion — a technique for managing activities more efficiently, but also the practice of attempting to manipulate the behaviour of a system itself. The implication is clear: architecture is invited not merely to operate within existing frameworks, but to expose, infiltrate and reconfigure them.

What might this look like in practice? Consider the realm of evidence and accountability. In contexts of conflict and erasure, architecture has increasingly been deployed as an instrument of spatial investigation — a means of reconstructing events, documenting destruction, and holding power to account. When legal and political infrastructures fail, when humanitarian systems collapse under the weight of occupation and violence, architecture can become a form of witness. It can produce counter-narratives that reclaim visibility for those rendered invisible, asserting rights through the meticulous documentation of space. This is architecture not as neutral form-making but as advocacy — hacking systems of power to demand accountability where institutions have abdicated their responsibilities.

Or consider the question of civic infrastructure. Too often, our public institutions operate as static monuments to governance rather than living interfaces for democratic participation. What happens when we reimagine civic space as something to be redistributed and reprogrammed — when neighbourhood institutions become sites of care, education and political agency rather than mere service delivery? In her essay ‘Shields, Wedges and Supports: hacks on the way towards changing everything’, artist and researcher Ren Loren Britton speaks to the existence of hacks as indicating a need for transformation; hacks are to be shared by many in the interest of effecting systematic change. Architecture, in this framing, becomes a civic interface, challenging top-down models that separate citizens from decision-making processes. It hacks the systems of governance by creating physical and social infrastructures that enable communities to shape their own futures.

Perhaps most radically, we might consider architecture's relationship to ecology itself. For too long, design has remained stubbornly human-centred, treating the more-than-human world as resource, backdrop or afterthought. But what if architectural practice were to acknowledge ecological actors as legitimate stakeholders — even as forms of citizen? Through climate-responsive food infrastructures, through legal frameworks that grant agency to rivers, forests and non-human species, architecture might begin to function as a co-governed ecological system rather than an imposition upon the land. This represents a fundamental hack of extractive logics, aligning built environments with planetary cycles and enabling forms of shared stewardship that our current systems cannot imagine.

There is also the question of knowledge itself — of who gets to produce architectural discourse, and for whom. The systems that shape cultural production and pedagogical frameworks have long privileged certain geographies, certain voices, certain ways of understanding space. To hack these systems is to foreground perspectives from the Global South, to develop alternative models of learning and practice, to challenge the dominant canons that have defined what architecture is and who gets to make it. Architecture, understood as cultural and educational infrastructure, becomes a site for enabling more plural, situated and future-oriented practices — practices that might finally begin to address the epistemic violence embedded in our discipline's history.

OBEL Jury Chair Nathalie de Vries offers a sobering provocation: nearly half the buildings that will exist in 2050 have not yet been built. The built environment shapes behaviours, resources and power relations for decades, effectively locking in futures at precisely the moment when existing systems are already under strain. As infrastructures, housing models and governance frameworks begin to fracture, the critical question is no longer whether systems will fail — they are already failing, visibly and catastrophically — but whether architecture, in all its plurality, chooses to intervene proactively or remains reactive, reinforcing the very conditions driving collapse.

This is the invitation embedded in Systems' Hack. It asks architecture to move beyond conventional problem-solving — the ameliorative gesture, the sustainability checklist, the green veneer applied to business as usual — and instead to engage with the fundamental structures that determine how resources flow, how decisions are made, and how futures are foreclosed or opened. It asks us to consider architecture not as object but as relation, not as product but as process, not as solution but as intervention.

The systems we inhabit were largely designed. They can be redesigned. But this requires a willingness to expose their workings, to infiltrate their logics, to reconfigure their operations from within. It requires practitioners who understand that their discipline is never neutral, that every building participates in larger networks of power and resource, and that the choice to intervene — or not — is itself a political act.

Systems' Hack, then, is less a theme than a challenge. It asks architecture to become an active participant in ecological and social systems, to operate within planetary boundaries, and to help reshape the networks it has long taken for granted. Whether the discipline is capable of rising to this challenge remains to be seen. But in a moment when the alternative is complicity in collapse, the invitation to hack feels less like radical ambition and more like the only viable path forward.

About

OBEL is a foundation that recognises and rewards architecture’s potential to act as tangible agents of change that contribute positively to social and ecological development globally. Founded in 2019, OBEL values the plurality of architecture as a practice through expanding who and what defines our built environment. Through various activities, OBEL supports influential ideas and approaches that can spearhead and seed future developments, while driving architectural discourse and education.

Bio

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. She is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.