It wasn't an architect who did this, but if it had been an architect, it would have been a good day's work: there was a marketing person who convinced Walmart that their products sold better in daylight than electric light. It would have been interesting if an architect had deliberately designed this change with all its spatial consequences in mind, thinking about how the change would multiply across all the square footage of all the roofs of all the Walmarts in the world. It would have been a beautiful trick - a physical, practical, political pleasure.

Architects and urbanists are fascinated with cities that are shrinking, like the Rust Belt cities. Or, alternatively, we are fascinated with the growth of favelas and informal settlements. The 2008 financial crisis made these changes more extreme. The subtraction protocols rehearse a way of thinking about multiple properties in counterbalancing interdependence - not just the shaping of one property but the ratcheting interplay between properties.

If you're steering a boat down a river, it's not something about which you can know that. You can only know how to do it. It's unfinished, it has no start-stop time, it's fluid. Practicality relies on indeterminate markers. It's just another kind of knowledge that's sexy, in a certain way. It's reactive, and often physical.

I thought architecture would offer a mix of the artful and practical. It seemed cooler than some of the other options in the university. The lights were on in the architecture school when I got out of rehearsal at night. And I thought the men were handsome.

There is a comfort with design that may be a detail, rather than a building; comfort with form that is time-released and never finished. How do you represent an instruction set that will play out in time? There may be slightly different kinds of documents for representing those forms, and different skills for advocating change outside of our fee-for-service habits.

In the context of the kind of infrastructure space I'm looking at, I'm making a very unlikely argument by saying that all the stuff that's repeated, from spatial products to whole cities, which looks so daunting to architects, might be especially empowering. At this moment, it might be harder to make a meaningful object form alone, but easier to make an active form that can piggyback on those multipliers to recondition spaces in a politically significant way.

There are dangers surrounding innocuousness and consensus and habit. ISO organizes hundreds of people on technical committees who are, no doubt, trying to do their best. But the standards in some cases end up reinforcing violence and destruction thousands of miles away.