Civic Architecture: Designing Institutions for Democratic Capacity

American democracy is entering a period of structural exhaustion. The institutions that once formed citizens and carried meaning, responsibility, and authorship of a common life still function – schools, universities, workplaces, congregations, hospitals, etc. Yet they no longer enable people to govern together and see themselves reflected in the world in any meaningful sense. Civic energy persists, but it leaks through frameworks that can no longer turn that energy into durable public life. The result is not only distrust in government but a deeper collapse of civic faith. This paper advances civic architecture as a framework for understanding and repairing the exhaustion – the structural civic breakdown of American institutions. The paper argues that democracy depends not simply on participation but on design: the deliberate construction of institutions that embed authorship, distribute power, and sustain civic responsibility across generations. Developed conceptually through democratic theory, civic studies, and the Black intellectual tradition, the framework is illustrated through an institutional example at Huston–Tillotson University (HT), a Historically Black University (HBCU) in Austin, Texas. There, the Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House (Farmer House) demonstrates how students and educators can translate frustration into durable authorship, showing what it means to design for democracy within existing institutional life. Democracy cannot survive on energy alone. It requires form.