Potential Futures for Design Practice

53 Comments on “Potential Futures for Design Practice”

1. 
   1 Alice said at 8:25 pm on December 30th, 2010:

   The type of bollocks only an architect could conceive of and then think they should share with others.

2. 
   2 Rory said at 9:45 pm on December 30th, 2010:

   Thanks for the constructive feedback ‘Alice’! Please come again!

3. 
   3 Dan said at 5:04 am on January 1st, 2011:

   (I think we can safely ignore Alice’s contribution.)

   This is good stuff, Rory, and useful. Lots to discuss here, but what I’d like to hear more about is the particular qualities that designers bring.

   One of the more powerful of these examples, Renew Newcastle, is not the result of an intervention by a designer at all, for instance, but does share a similar understanding of the form and mechanics of financing that Aravena’s Iquique social housing does, and both outcomes have delivered ‘better’ urban fabric.

   I also hear your tweet (ref. Gerard R.) about the importance of ‘making a great space’, and that shouldn’t be lost – it’s just that it’s near impossible to do that at any meaningful scale or frequency (it would seem) without an understanding of, and facility with, the context (in terms of strategy, policy, business model, culture, economy etc.) The broad failure of architecture and urban planning/design over the last 50 years speaks to this.

   So the interesting possibilities are in designing across these broader ambits, such that ‘great spaces’ are an outcome, along with other useful societal/cultural goals, of something more meaningful, scalable, influential.

   Focusing on the traditional practice of architecture will only result in further marginalisation, I fear, which is a waste of talent if nothing else. But if applying design in this broader field–which I’m fundamentally in favour of, as you know-would be useful, then what is it that we bring in terms of discipline? Not just in terms of role, as you have above, which is an approach too easily aligned to individuals-and is also difficult to claim as specific to design, as with the Renew Newcastle example-but in terms of skillset, philosophy, modus operandi, particulars of technique even?

   Looking forward to pursuing this throughout 2011 and beyond … Thanks again.

4. 
   4 Dan said at 5:23 am on January 1st, 2011:

   Oh, and I should add, I’m aware of IDEO’s/Tim Brown’s attempts around ‘design thinking’ (and integrative thinking etc. etc.) but haven’t seen anything particularly useful there yet. It’s too easy to take the definition and ascribe it to other practices/traditions/jobs – you can find and replace using the examples that Bryan Boyer pulled out here for instance: http://etc.ofthiswearesure.com/2010/02/changing-the-definition-of-design.php

   Sitra’s strategic design unit have a much better definition, it seems to me, outlining some broad competencies in ‘synthesis, visualisation and stewardship’: http://helsinkidesignlab.org/pages/what-is-strategic-design

   Strategic design recognises the role and relevance of the professional designer rather more (and that’s not just self interest talking)-but I think we can go further still-again, many other practices might also claim synthesis and stewardship, for instance, and we don’t want to be simply ‘left with’ visualisation (valuable as that is.) It feels like there is a particular form of synthesis and stewardship designers do, but it needs articulating (or visualising!)

5. 
   5 Dan said at 5:31 am on January 1st, 2011:

   Oh and finally (honest), Edwin Gardner has a good contribution to this discussion in the latest Volume (#26 I think), as you probably know.

6. 
   6 AnitaUI said at 8:07 am on January 1st, 2011:

   Brilliant , a conversation gaining momentum.

   I have practiced architecture for 20 years in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. I’ve worked in many different practices from the Superstars to the commercial and I have stumbled around the exact conversation which Rory details. Risking such a conversation with my architectural peers, more often produced a look of complete misunderstanding or one of fear, as this could NOT be the world of design!

   As I have become involved in complex projects I am convinced of the need for a much more strategic approach.
   The shear speed and dimension of the world’s population growth is compelling projects of unprecedented scale and complexity.
   I completely agree that increasingly we are tasked with solving very complicated environmental problems outside the traditional boundaries of design.

   “Wicked problems” (1) that can not be readily resolved with traditional linear analytical approaches, but instead require a more collaborative and integrated approach.
   Wicked problems dense with issues difficult to define as they rarely sit conveniently within the responsibility of any one discipline.

   I have been exploring an alternative service model; a strategic model developing an interdisciplinary perspective, where profiting from interconnections adds benefits to the project.

   An integrated approach is so commonly referred to in practice and so often INAUTHENTIC in practice.

   I ask how do we make an environment for a genuinely collaborative engagement?
   Is the process open to unmanageable risks? What are the measurable benefits? Is it simply a matter of a designer with a different attitude or does the process require significant investment to achieve interdisciplinary action? What are the tools required? Does it make the outcome a better outcome? How is that measured?

   What does this new paradigm look like?

   (1) .Wicked Problems – was a concept originally proposed by H.W.J.Rittel and M.M.Webber, both urban planners at the University of California, Berkeley, USA in 1973. H.W.J.Rittel and M.M.Webber,”Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences, Vol.4,No2 June 1973, pp,155-69.

7. 
   7 MM Jones said at 6:48 pm on January 1st, 2011:

   Great survey and essay, Rory.
   As someone who studied architecture but is not now an architect, I have often thought about how the profession, and by extension the academy (especially in terms of preparing students for the profession) marginalizes itself because it focuses narrowly on fee-collecting and form-proposing. As you mention, this has become ridiculously fetishized in the Starchitect era, to the point where a nearly-complete design is “branded” by a big-name for marketing purposes [http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20060320/starchitect-condos-2005].

   Issues outside of design, but which architects nonetheless are hugely effected by, not the least of which is finance and capital, are hardly “taught” at all in school. therefore, speaking from my experience, as an M.Arch candidate, I was learning how to make cool computer renderings and discuss very abstract concepts of space, but not on how to realize built projects, or improve cities.

   Basically, the model is: someone else (those with cash or who know how to access it), would come along and find me or my practice. Then they, because they were paying for it, would tell me what I could and couldn’t do. Normally these “clients” would have no architectural training at all.
   I still believe that spatial design has huge potential to improve the lives of people, the experience of cities, and generally help tackle a lot of our 21st century challenges. But, in my opinion and drawing from my experience, as long as “construction” and “real estate” are industries run by other people, from whom architects wait for a phone call and collect a % fee to stamp drawings, this belief will remain only a potentiality. There are models of architect/developer, but these remain the exception, when I wish they were the norm.
   I like the models of collaboration but would hope to see the designer as the leader, rather than sprinkling someone else’s process or project with a dusting of “design thinking.”
   Joshua Prince-Ramus of REX-NY has spoken pretty extensively about what he sees as the pathetic self-marginalization of the profession, which cedes authority and risk to an extreme extent, meaning architects get less money, less control, and less of what they want to see in the world.

8. 
   8 Rory said at 7:43 pm on January 1st, 2011:

   Hey Dan and Anita, thanks very much for your thoughtful (and extensive!) comments. Pleased to have prompted this discussion. Lots of questions, but first a quick disclaimer: despite having written the thing up there, I’m not going to pretend to have any of the answers, but to join you here in the comments to try to push these thoughts further.

   Firstly, to Dan, re the unique qualities designers bring, skillset, philosophy, etc. I do believe the claims made for architects and designers as ‘integrators of large amounts of information’ and ‘capable of collaborating with diverse disciplines’ – but then, I’m an architect, so I would like to believe that. If I were being honest, I’d say that project managers, developers or people like Marcus Westbury (whatever he is!) – people who thrive on planning and negotiating – might be better at it, as most architects I know are happiest when the task is clearly defined and they can just roll up their sleeves and do their work in peace. (There’s a reason we complain about clients so much, they disrupt this peace.)

   But that’s clearly a dead-end path for us architects, as I’ve said above in so many ways. Jeremy Till is great on this in Architecture Depends, where he describes an architect who is far more flexible and responsive to the inevitably challenging and changing contexts, but who acknowledges and derives strength from this instead of defending a dream. However this also just sounds to me like what Bryan describes in the piece you linked to (which was so great to re-read) as simply what a ‘good designer’ does, in which case, is ‘strategic design’ simply a PR tool to market a more diverse set of skills (as Bryan also offers as a possibility), presumably in a bid to get paid more? Which, would be great, but it doesn’t really justify all this fuss does it.

   As for designing a great space, I heartily agree with your sentiment that this aim “shouldn’t be lost – it’s just that it’s near impossible to do that at any meaningful scale or frequency (it would seem) without an understanding of, and facility with, the context (in terms of strategy, policy, business model, culture, economy etc.)” Or, as Indy Johar put it on the tweets, “[I] think you will have play all those roles to design good places [buildings, etc] – not just any one..”

   Yes, to paraphrase Tim Brown like that was a bit of a cheap shot I’ll admit. As for Sitra’s ‘synthesis, visualisation and stewardship’ definition, does responsibility come into it? As long as the designer takes the blame or praise for the quality of the outcome, don’t we need to also manage synthesis and stewardship in order to achieve a good result? In this sense, the ‘particular form of synthesis and stewardship designers do’ is perhaps more valuable because the designer is necessarily more invested in the projects success due to increased accountability.

   This is another fairly tenuous defence of this territory, and it’s not enough to make other disciplines step away, but it might have to do until we have better contracts that share the risk and reward across the entire team more equitably (I know ARM experimented with this on Canberra’s National Museum with success), which can enable this talk of collaboration and coalition to go beyond a mere hope.

   This comes back to Anita’s question re an environment for genuine collaborative engagement. (Sorry not to respond directly Anita, but I’ve written far too much already and another great comment has just appeared!)

   Thanks again all.

   - Rory

9. 
   9 Noah said at 11:09 pm on January 1st, 2011:

   Hi Rory (Dan, Anita, MM Jones, etc.),

   Nice post, thanks.

   Ultimately this is all about power; who has it and why.

   MM Jones said it right; the design profession suffers from “pathetic self-marginalization… which cedes authority and risk to an extreme extent, meaning architects get less money, less control, and less of what they want to see in the world.”

   The bad news is, there is a reason for this. At the end of the day, design is just a trade in today’s economy. No matter what we think, the vast majority of design is not about creating new value, new industries or new jobs. Worse yet, most designers are utterly untrained at the skills necessary for succeeding in the ways you mention in your post. Worse yet, we don’t even seem to realise it (see: “<a href=A DJ is not a Conductor: Different design skills for different levels of complexity").

   The reason guys like PwC hustle our lunch is that they speak a more powerful language about more important things to more powerful people. In economic terms, they're "higher up the value chain". Put another way, their advice matters more, at almost every level. This is why they win bigger jobs, have more responsibility, get paid better and are more powerful.

   If designers want to have any space to operate in the future they're going to have to start thinking (and training) a lot more like management consultants than vice-versa. It's not enough to know Catia and Revit anymore. You also need to know business models, market analysis, customer segmentation, investment strategies, etc. if you ever hope to make a difference in the world.

10. 
    10 Noah said at 11:13 pm on January 1st, 2011:

    Oops, sorry, I flubbed that link in my last comment. The correct link to the design skills piece I mentioned is:

    “A DJ is not a conductor: Different design skills for different levels of complexity”
    http://news.noahraford.com/?p=373

    Thanks,
    N

11. 
    11 Marcus said at 12:54 am on January 2nd, 2011:

    Hi Rory, Dan and everyone…

    As has been pointed out i’m not an architect or designer (or anything else you can easily put a handle on!) — although, as they say, “some of my best friends are architects and designers.” In the context of Renew Newcastle that’s actually pretty significant. Certainly, having seen Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle at various points through the prism of architects and designers was the catalyst for many of the insights that led to the Renew Newcastle project — but the fact that i wasn’t one enabled me to act on those insights in a very different kind of way.

    As much as i like the idea of architect “as a custodian of the built environment” that also seems to cut against — as you have pointed out — of how architects are trained, how they operate professionally and what their incentives are. In many respects what made Renew Newcastle possible was the fact that it was not my profession (as Rory summed it up “whatever that is!”). I was free to do what i thought would work with out being constrained by either what would make me a living (which i have mostly made elsewhere and used to subsidise the project) or the expectations of my peers, training and discipline. From an architects point of view, there was no client.

    The second thing that sort of follows on from that is a better understanding of the limitations of hard infrastructure which doesn’t seem to be part of the professional toolkit of a lot architects and designers. As i’ve argued elsewhere “if you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail” (see: http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2010/10/18/cities-of-initiative-cities-as-festivals-hammers-and-nails/) and to an architect or a designer everything can tend to look like a problem of the built environment or as something that requires a design solution.

    In many respects where we started in Newcastle was to recognise that while the problems of the built environment and planning a real they are actually second or third level issues in many respects. The problem is not “what the spaces are” it is “how they behave” from the practical point of view of people seeking to use and access them. Change how the spaces behave and you change the city in a way that is far cheaper than either physically rebuilding it or spending a lot of money through programs designed in a top heavy way to force certain things to happen.

    Dan and I have had quite a few variations on this discussion where have used the analogy of hardware and software. The hardware of the city (the built environment) is a constraining factor but so too is the software (how it behaves) — and for the purposes of a project like Renew Newcastle it is all about the software — the operating system (to some extent our cultural values but more practically the building codes, the compliance rules, the contracts and agreements we set in place to manage it’s use, the tax rules that incentivise certain behaviours and penalise others) and the applications that people want to run eg. PropertyDeveloper.exe, landspeculator.bat, etc.

    We basically started with a question about how do people about how does a city behave for people — mostly creative people — who don’t have much capital and aren’t trying to maximise their economic return and came up with the answer that it is totally dysfunctional. We then set about through various software means (new contracts, new governance models, simple compliance strategies) of trying to change that and 60 or 70 new projects later we have a made a major change to the city for a cost that is negligible by the amounts that people spend on hard infrastructure.

    The interesting question for this conversation is “would an architect or designer think to do that?” Would they or could they think beyond the thing they design to the forces that then act upon it in the real world — it’s behaviour and it’s software. I suspect that some can but that the vast majority can not.

    The vast majority of their clients don’t care — as they are mostly seeking a return measured by a financial equation that is modelled on assumptions about rules and regs, motivations and incentives, risk and return that they work within rather than change. That’s certainly not the architect’s job. Also, it’s actually part of the problem that the role of the architect (and how much they get paid) is tied to the allocation of capital — which in out case was the very variable we tried to work around.

    In Newcastle there was no capital — which gave us a chance to play with new rules, approaches and assumptions and experiment. But generally, where there’s no capital there’s no job for an architect.

    I’m possibly rambling off topic here, aren’t I?

    Marcus.

12. 
    12 Craig Purcell said at 1:01 pm on January 2nd, 2011:

    I would suggest each architect(s) just take one idea that spans the multidisciplinary divide of “design thinking” and stick with it and hammer it home.

    If you want to do something that is not formula driven and has not been done before then you have to be the first and stick to it which may take years.

13. 
    13 Rory said at 1:03 pm on January 2nd, 2011:

    I’ll try to be brief, as there’s already a great amount of stuff to get through here. Thanks to all for building up this fantastic discussion.

    Firstly, in response to MM Jones and Noah, I hope this isn’t just about power and architects desire to grab hold of it, but more about trying to determine the skills designers will need in order to create quality within an increasingly complex process. I don’t necessarily think we need to be on top of the pile in order to achieve this, either as developers or management consultants. I do agree that designers as they are currently defined (which is also a slippery idea) shouldn’t try to be all of those things – which you spell out very clearly in your post Noah. Thanks for sharing that here.

    Especially, as Marcus has shown, it can be useful if the people adopting these roles of ‘custodians’ or ‘strategists’ or whatever are not architects, as not everything ‘appears as a nail’. I find this discussion of ‘hardware vs. software’ incredibly useful, and particularly the tools required to ‘reprogram’ physical spaces, whether they be cultural, contractual, zoning or otherwise.

    What I find less useful (although I also fell into this trap in my comment earlier) is to talk about what an architect ‘would or wouldn’t do’. We’re talking about potential futures of design practice, and rather than focussing on slippery generalisations about what the particular thought patterns of architects or designers are, I think for now it’s an important first step to just acknowledge these new realms so that architects or designers may become more aware and more likely to deploy them in their everyday practice.

    And finally, while it’s really helpful and instructive to discuss the financial realities of how a project like Renew Newcastle funds itself, I don’t think we can dismiss it as a strategy that architects could promote simply because there is no fee there. This is a such a great case study of an alternative way of producing a quality outcome for the social and built environment, and I strongly believe that if councils or clients can see they can get value from projects like this, architects – the enterprising lot that we are (I’m only half joking) – will find a way to make it pay.

    My hope first is that architects pay attention to these kinds of projects and see that ultimately, it’s achieving much of the same aims, but with a far more contextual and relevant approach, and that this should form part of their skillsets.

    Thanks again to everyone for pushing this along.

    - R

14. 
    14 Melonie said at 1:11 pm on January 2nd, 2011:

    There are some great comments and I commend Rory on this post, a concise summary of the territories that architectural practice has forayed into recently and hopefully will continue to do so.

    Marcus makes some salient points about what is typically in the architect’s “toolkit” and that they aren’t necessarily very well equipped (or socially networked) for the types of conversations that must/should/ought/could happen about all sorts of urban/spatial/lifestyle challenges and opportunitites that abound in most cities and towns.

    In the first instance, I believe that much of this insufficiency is tied back to what learning opportunities architecture students are offered at university and what exactly, curriculum wise, is crammed into their 5 years in the tertiary education system. As a side product of both my teaching and research, I have observed that many universities in Australia and elsewhere are trying to promote and offer studios that introduce concepts like architectural entrepreneurship, unsolicited architecture, design management thinking and community based urban interventions. This is commendable and ought to be encouraged more and more across a variety of scenarios. The difficulty, however, in expanding the range of architectural teaching with these type of studios is that by avoiding traditional architectural concerns, the complaints from the broader profession about a lack of “job ready” graduates ring louder and louder… and at the other end of this specific discussion, the profession is really its own worst enemy, worrying more about keeping the status quo of obsessive, black skivvy-wearing aesthetes perched on a very high pedestal, usually to the detriment of celebrating and encouraging the rich variety in architectural approaches and practices that have always existed.

    Noah points out too that architects need to become more savvy about business practices in general. I’m a strong supporter of improving awareness of these issues in the profession – although whether Business studies should be distilled and shoe-horned into the 5 years at uni is another question. Unfortunately I think most architecture schools would find this a tough call, even though it could promote cross-faculty teaching and research: universities struggle with what architects are capable of doing as much as the rest of the general public. UTS DAB has offered a subject called Media and Marketing in Architecture in the Masters program over the past couple of years and has made some decent inroads on this front. Admittedly though it’s a long way from the business-speak being sprouted by the PwCs of this world.

    At the end of the day, Architecture as a profession needs to get over its general and insecurities and start telling the world loud and clear about the cultural and intellectual capital it does have in its collective toolkit. Many practices operate on a business model that makes it difficult or impossible to undertake project types that are without external capital (eg. competitions, research, speculative, unsolicited, voluntary). For the profession to move beyond its self AND externally imposed constraints, alternative and new modes of practice need to be modelled, encouraged, taught and promoted. And alongside this, architects must find ways to offer and invest their skills across broader society, whether on a voluntary grass roots level, sitting on a corporate board, or indeed in politics…

15. 
    15 Gerard R said at 7:36 pm on January 2nd, 2011:

    Hi All

    Rory and I had been talking about his article and he then alerted me to this post a couple of days ago. I had many comments I was going to add but in the interim there has been a fantastic exchange of views such that most of my points would just be repetitive.

    Therefore – and as I agree with much of what has been written anyway – I will comment on a narrow but, in my view, important aspect of this discussion – and which has been cited by Rory in a tweet and referred to at the start of Dan’s comments above. I will then weld it to something Melanie noted about education.

    My comment to Rory was along the lines that much of the writing about design thinking is for some reason dismissive of “traditional” architectural practice, which I find highly problematic. Firstly, no-one would suggest that the solo violinist in a great orchestra is wasting their talent when instead they could sit at a more strategic point in the decision making chain, influencing music policy or whatever. Yet this claim is regularly made in regard to architects, who might be wasted on the limited production of a few works when they could exert a different level of influence. I think this just misses the point of what it is to produce buildings and the extraordinarily rewarding task that it is to do so – if that’s your thing. Similarly, few people would tell Anselm Kiefer he is wasting his time and instead he should be running workshops on art policy.

    Now, we all have our own boundaries here and certainly a practice like mine (TERROIR) gets far greater satisfaction from projects like Burnie Makers than luxury housing where the issue of society building are no-where to be seen, and the greatest focus might be on the detailed design of underwear drawers or bathroom cupboards, which I personally find debilitating.

    The second thing that often seems to lace these discussions is a limited understanding of the skills required to produce a good building (however I am not saying any of the above contributors have done this). Any architect who has worked on a half-decent project knows that realising an exemplary work of architecture is nothing short of an absolute miracle, requiring an extraordinary ability to synthesize a vast array of inputs, players and variables – or as Rory notes in a later post, “I do believe the claims made for architects and designers as ‘integrators of large amounts of information’ and ‘capable of collaborating with diverse disciplines’” The way in which this miracle is so often dismissed really rankles, particularly when it is architects doing so as they should know better.

    My view, simply put, is that these skills (which of course are not spread equally across the profession) are grossly underrated and yes, architects have been appalling at articulating their strengths and making a claim for them in arenas beyond the production of buildings. For example, I vehemently disagree with the idea that project managers might be better equipped to manage project procurement – it is my experience in 20 years of practice that 90% of the time the architect’s skill-set is so far ahead of the project managers that it is amazing that the profession still exists – and I counter it would not exist if there was some sort of measuring system that could be applied to project managers to assess the outcomes of projects against their initial advice. Barely a project appears which is founded on bad advice from a project manager which the architect has to spend the next 3 years un-doing by stealth in order to realise anything of quality. In particular, budget and programming advice is nearly always wrong and driven by political judgements on the part of the project manager as opposed to what it will actually cost (read Swedish architect Gert Wingaardh in CONDITIONS magazine no 2 on this topic). I should say that of course there are some excellent project managers, but they are few and far between in my experience and that of most of my colleagues.

    So, as Dan notes, it’s near impossible to produce quality buildings “at any meaningful scale or frequency . . without an understanding of, and facility with, the context (in terms of strategy, policy, business model, culture, economy etc.).” This is an extremely confounding situation and not a day goes past where I do not wonder how the architectural profession can reclaim project management as part of the discipline.

    My concern is that strategic design will go down the same path, and be populated by professionals who run great processes which clients enjoy being a part of but who might struggle to actually validate what contribution they made (refer again to project management). Whereas the architectural profession suffers from the incredibly public and exposed nature of outcomes (the buildings) which provide easy targets for critics, I wonder what the deliverables will be for strategic designers in future and how performance can be validated properly. For more on this, read Markus Meissen’s comments on consultancy in CONDITIONS, again I think its number 2 (or 3).

    This issue of the discipline and what it entails provides a means to start concluding this comment. Melanie notes the difficulty of jamming further material into already stretched courses and I agree with her that, in Australia anyway, UTS is one place making a good fist of this. I am proud to say that it will be my responsibility to advance the work that has been done from February 2011 when I take up a new post there to address exactly the issues we are discussing here. But the reality is that the architecture is a massive subject and what we are now talking about is a doubling of the disciplinary ground. My personal view is that we might need to re-evaluate the discipline completely and reposition the relation between the spatial and political components. An exciting move in this regard has happened at TU Delft where Wouter Vanstiphout has been appointed to a Chair of Design and Politics (thanks Rory).

    For, as with project management, I think there is something integral in an architect’s education (even as it is currently constructed) which makes the architectural profession the ideal place from which to source talent for strategic design roles. So, my interest is in examining the profession in such a way that these skills can be clearly articulated in the way a PwC would do so. Therefore, by building UPON the skills resident in the profession (rather than dismissing them) we might be able to reposition architectural practice in such a way that great spaces will still be an outcome of a broader play, but that broader play will involve a great number of appropriately disposed architects. It is my view that in this way we will be able to create better conditions for making the city and thus increase the strike rate to something that Dan and I might find more appropriate.

    A final volley can be reserved for the Aarhus School of Architecture where I have been Guest Professor for a year and have edited a book which is about to be published on their first year course. At Aarhus, they have taken the radical (in this discussion) position of redesigning the Beaux Arts education for the 21st century, returning to a traditional idea of the discipline with a high focus on aesthetics, form-making and the development of skills to support this work, as a core body of knowledge that, in the way it is taught, provides a platform for an array of possible careers after graduation. And in no other country do you see such an array of well-trained form-giver architects in roles such as construction, politics, process management and project management. Go figure.

16. 
    16 Gerard R said at 7:42 pm on January 2nd, 2011:

    . . sorry, and I meant to say that in the context of my above comment I think Rory’s new architectural practice models is a great way to simultanously maintain reference to the architectural discipline as it is constructed now and these future projections or possibilities . .

17. 
    17 Paul said at 11:31 pm on January 2nd, 2011:

    Hi all

    An excellent discussion written by Rory. I totally agree with Gerard that we have undersold our profession to a consultant labelled a project manager (or as I prefer to label them ‘time wasters’. I think email was invented just for them. There has also been a proliferation of other additional consultants that seem to have justified the existence of PM’s – Disabilty/Discrimination Consultant, Energy Consultant, Safety in Design Consultant – not to mention the evolution of Town Planners! Either way we need to take greater control or play a greater role in projects. That starts by educating our clients on what we can do. We also need to disseminate and share this information with our upcoming architectural graduates and architects before they view and/or accept a lesser role in projects. Before they accept project managers are the norm and do not realise the different facets and skillsets we have to offer. Again education is paramount.
    Paul

18. 
    18 bryan said at 3:22 am on January 3rd, 2011:

    A lot here, so I will attempt to respond in fragments. Not the best, but if I wait to congeal these thoughts into one coherent narrative it will be 2012.

    @rory: your question about whether responsibility should be part of the core requirements of design is one that I think we can safely assume is implicit. A professional undertaking must be done under good intentions with a level of professional responsibility. The question is responsibility to who… and this is particularly difficult when we come to questions of buildings and cities because the multiple groups that we must be responsible to (namely the current owner, the public, future owners, etc) are not always easily represented for decision-making purposes. This brings me to pet peeve #1 when discussing architectural process with product designers. I’ve heard many variations of the question “why don’t architects do user surveys?” Does it need to be more common within architectural practice? Yes! But how do you survey the needs and desires of the person who will occupy (let alone walk by!) your building in 30-50 years time? The time scale of architecture is something that our current modes of ownership (from both financial and moral points of view) are not able to deal with.

    To speak more directly to your comment that “the designer is necessarily more invested in the projects success due to increased accountability” I would respond that this is a result of the specific positioning of the architect on the pivot between “analysis” and “execution.” Groups like management consultants are in the business of doing analysis and handing it off for someone else to execute. If there’s value in a design-led method that approaches management consulting, it’s that we move beyond the role of strict analysis and are obligated (whether professionally or personally) to be involved in stewarding the execution. I also argue that it’s this involvement with the execution that is the real value proposition of the strategic architect because it forms a feedback loop which provides valuable insights into subsequent analysis phases. I’ll get back to this below under the heading of “matter representative.”

    @gerard and @rory: one of the common threads between both of you is the rightful identification of how damn hard it is to produce a nice chunk of the city. Without placing blame on the profession or everyone outside of the profession (ultimately a futile discussion) I point to what seems to me a basic fact of contemporary culture in the developed ‘west:’ we’ve been bamboozled by the internet. I say this as someone who has been quite involved in the commercial web since its inception, so I’m not a luddite detractor, but my point is that the consequences of material and spatial decisions are generally not understood in any sophisticated manner within our culture(s) and specifically within decision-making in the contexts of business and government. If PwC (or McKinsey or Boston or Doblin…) have been successful it’s because they have been able to offer decision-makers tools to make what they feel are better decisions. I take pains to point out that I have not written “make better decision” but “what they feel are better decisions.”

    I choose this specific phrasing because I believe, echoing @Anita’s comments above, that we’re often involved in wicked problems whether we like it or not. Paul Nakazawa is brilliant on this topic by describing the role of the contemporary, forward-thinking architect as operating in a space which is “pre factual.” If you are doing interesting [work that has spatial or material consequences] you will be operating without all the facts. This is no different than the upper echelons of finance where the specific intricacy, and in some cases fragility, of the instruments in use are not known to all players, let alone the majority of players involved, if ever knowable at all.

    This begs an interesting question: would architecture be more powerful, profitable, and enjoy a more central role if it were more opaque? I hope not, but that strategy certainly has worked out for the financiers.

    I’d like to add to Dan and Marcus’ discussion of hardware/software the notion of contingency. Contingencies between various bits of software and hardware are an important consideration in development and one that we could probably make better use of within architecture. How many times have you had a client ask for a change that cascades necessary adjustments across many other aspects of a project? We need better rhetorical, planning, and even software tools to deal with contingencies in a timely manner.

    In conversation with Dustin Stephens, a friend and architect in California, he suggested that some architects create value for their clients and others satisfy the basic need for shelter, unquestioningly drawing up their client’s stated desires. To me this seems like a slightly troubling, yet very useful way to divide up the various ways to practice architecture, or perhaps more broadly to create chunks of the city. It seems as though the available tracks of architectural education are not helping very much. We simultaneously have over-educated draftsman, like many of my classmates who graduated from Ivy League schools and are now doing glorified drafting for starchitects, and under-educated architects, those many developers and contractors who are busy building our cities all day every day.

    Medicine has doctors, nurse practitioners, and nurses. Lawyers have paralegals. What do we have? We used to use technical aspects to divide our roles (e.g. draftsmen vs. architect), but perhaps we need a staged definition of professional roles instead. The reality of current architectural education is that it’s not tooled up to produce enough students, no matter how smart and strategic they are, to have an impact at scale. This is the justification that Roger Martin uses when he says that business schools must teach design thinking rather than letting design schools get their act together. Martin asserts that design schools simply don’t have enough students to make a difference. It’s an exaggerated claim but ask your self seriously, how exaggerated is it? Not very.

    Which leads me to a comment which touches loosely on notes that Dan, Gerard, Marcus, and Rory have each made. If you believe my assertion above that contemporary society does not fully comprehend the spatial and material consequences of basic decisions [1], then Rory’s excellent list in this post is missing the “matter representative.” Apologies in advance for a bit of Latourian bastardization, but someone needs to figure out how to more convincingly argue for/against material decisions. Same goes for spatial decisions.

    To be truly effective here is to provide an enhanced decision-making capability which is currently missing (as I stated above) in many businesses and governments. Light weight spatial analytics (GIS), more sophisticated post-occupancy analysis, and a new diagrammatic language of spatial/material/cost accounting are three areas of work that desperately need smart people to devote some attention.

    IMHO, universities are failing to hold up their end of the bargain at the moment. Schools are doing a mediocre job of training students to see the bigger picture of strategic issues at play which will quite narrowly define their sandbox as run-of-the-mill architects. More damning, perhaps, is the fact that no universities are (to my knowledge) producing basic research which bolsters the profession’s ability to operate in the decision making contexts of the contemporary world, nor make explicit the value of architectural practice beyond its “cultural contributions.” Where is the robust dialog of post occupancy analysis? Where are studies of the great architectural failures of the 20th century? Where are the careful studies of all of the external factors for those failures (I’m thinking here of something like Pruitt-Igoe which is often blamed on the architect when in fact it’s a failed social experiment that no amount of skillfully crafted matter could have mitigated)? Yes, it’s a difficult and messy discourse with a tarnished image from the 60s-70s, but that doesn’t make it any less imperative. A lawyer or doctor without a demonstrable record of success is a quack, not a professional. Ouch.

    [1] This was the subject of my thesis research on the US Capitol/US Congress. What were the organizational consequences of spatial decisions made without any spatial understanding? http://www.ofthiswearesure.com/capitol/paper_viewer/

19. 
    19 MM Jones said at 4:32 am on January 3rd, 2011:

    Melonie’s comment about the curriculum was great, and I would totally agree that “adding on” to what is already quite long and quite expensive course would be even more confusing and unrewarding for the student. Maybe there should be different degree tracks rather than just one single M.Arch? In so doing the academy might claw back some of the emerging “Real Estate” studies programs (eg MIT) from the business schools and into the design schools (see UMiami and Penn for promising pioneers). The ultimate goal might be a shift away from the $ expertise driving Building to design expertise driving it.

    Melonie also commented about graduates being perceived as job ready by firms. It makes me think: well, job ready for what? Right now, the goal seems to be entry level associate, 19 hours a day detailing a curtain wall. What if instead, seeing a vacant lot in your downtown and working out what would make a great design there, and then figuring out how to finance it, construct it, lease it, etc.? Both COULD be architecture degree-holders.

    Then what might result is collaboration structured within practices So that project developers/finance guys, within architecture offices, went down to the bank and took the loan, raised a fund, etc.

    My point is, we’ve done all the work and spent all the school fees to get degreed, trained and licensed, when to trade in property does even require a high school diploma. Just money.

    Rory used the word Power, which is a interesting word to introduce. I don’t think I employed it in my previous comment, although its basically what I mean by Control. I think so many are drawn into study and practice by lofty ambitions that we have an aversion to what we consider to be (or maybe even are taught to view as) the vulgar and mundane issue of Money. So we don’t take on that role, don’t consider it, don’t teach it, don’t learn it, at least not until later, in practice when we see how the world really goes round.

    Really, really liked hearing what Gerard and Marcus offered: exactly the sort of model/war story/lodestar that architects could use.

    Especially liked Marcus’s “custodian of the built environment” definition. That seems both fittingly polymathic, nicely hieratic, and inherently more proactive than the present circumstances. I also think its OK that “the vast majority” of architects cannot or do not want to become entrepreneurs, money guys, etc. Its not practical to expect that all designers will be businesspeople. I do appreciate the challenges, complexities of building, and breadth of intelligence and skill required (from personal experience, too). But still conclude that architect’s professional positioning is bizarrely timorous.

    The entire profession, as Noah puts it, is only a trade. That is, all architecture students are trained for basically one role in the larger system; there is one slot in the model where architects fit in, and most any other aspect of the process is fair game for whoever else comes along: PwC, construction companies, owners’ reps, etc.

    In a sense, Architects are already PwC, consultants of another stripe, but even in this marginal role, I sense that we are losing ground to the big boys of Management. Notice how IBM and Siemens are now urban planning/smart building PMs [http://www.fastcompany.com/1692991/ibms-cityone-simcity-for-a-smarter-planet] / [http://www.siemens.com/entry/cc/en/building_efficiency.htm?stc=usccc010020]/[http://www.fastcompany.com/1710342/the-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-smart-city]

    Thats maybe a different topic altogether.

    Thanks everyone for a great discussion, really enjoying exploring this topic in such esteemed company.

20. 
    20 Noah said at 3:26 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    Hey guys,

    What a great conversation this has become! Far exceeding the boundaries of a simple threaded conversation like this, but I’ll do my best.

    A few thoughts and responses:

    1) Whilst this is not just about power or control, part of the “architects don’t get any respect” narrative actually is about feeling put out and marginalised by other professionals involved in city-making. Gerard, Brian and MM Jones’ example of the project manager having less knowledge but commanding more influence (and salary) is a case in point. Why is this the case? Why can someone else like a PM or a management consultant command double, triple, or in the case of PwC, 10 times the hourly rate and influence an architect can?

    Perhaps more importantly, why aren’t architects content with their role in the complex process which is city-making? Why worry about it? A plumber doesn’t complain that they get less respect than the general contractor. That’s just their job; they do it and they get recognised for a job well done. Why should architects be any different?

    I also like Rory and Gerard’s ideas that the actual tacit skills and sophistication required to design a building are vastly underrated. I totally agree with this.

    But don’t we just have ourselves to blame for this? Getting back to architectural education, how much of our entire culture of design is based on hero-worship and architectural “theory”, which is really little more than grandiose fantasies of world-building and the Fountainhead?

    Perhaps we’d all be a lot happier – and respected – if we were content with becoming masters of the small bit of city-building which we had influence over.

    Lets leave the grand city-building aspirations to a larger, more diverse group of people and interests from which it really evolves. Maybe, paradoxically, the future of design will be one of renunciation of aspirations for power instead of the reverse. Maybe only then can we embrace what we are uniquely skilled at and be happy with our role in the world.

    Thanks again for all your thoughts everyone… what a great community you’ve formed, Rory!

21. 
    21 Dan said at 3:57 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    Look Rory, we made a good old-fashioned blog-comment conversation happen! Takes me back …

    I’ll follow Bryan’s lead in terms of un-congealed thought-fragments (though his were remarkably congealed really. In a nice way.) Sorry this is so long …

    Gerard, the music analogy is a great one to bring in, as of course one appreciates the value of Gidon Kremer, say – which as you say is hardly a waste of talent by being a pre-eminent violinist, and you wouldn’t want him to be anything else – but to change music itself strategically is a different matter to having exemplary craft skills. Here, the role of composer, arranger, producer, maybe conductor might be more relevant. So we look to Bach, Stravinsky, Gil Evans, Brian Eno, Phil Spector etc etc. Miles Davis was not simply a good trumpeter (his technical virtuosity was no greater than many others) but he changed the course of music several times through arranging scenarios, finding new ways of working with texture, timbre, and ultimately editing as much as melody, through a form of personnel management (no matter how loose), through creating a scene or synthesising popular culture with the avant garde, or setting a direction through ‘prototyping’ and iteration (to use a terminology more akin to design than music.)

    Similarly, I’m more interested in the collective that put on ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel in 1956 than Anselm Kiefer – it simply had more *influence* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Tomorrow … Even though I would enjoy a particular show by Kiefer. In the context of strategic design and the questions and problems we’re setting it up to address, I find more in Cedric Price than Peter Zumthor, even though the latter is completely brilliant.

    I’m more interested in George Martin than Ringo Starr (although I’m bloody bored by The Beatles either way, to be honest). The issue here isn’t that I’m being dismissive of architecture at all (as any reader of City of Sound would know, and you know from our conversations, Gerard) – except in that most architects are more Ringo Starr than George Martin, unfortunately. Most people are. (Then again, someone had to play drums.) The few architects I know in this conversation (Bryan, Rory, Gerard) are great thinkers, with broad perspectives way beyond their design education and practice, and it’s their ability to think and act strategically that I find more interesting than their particular craft skills in terms of ‘the play of masses brought together in light’, good as that may be too. It’s in that broader, strategic thinking that the sparks fly, when really profound possibilities emerge. For me, at least.

    Again, not to diminish craft. There should be increased value placed on craft if anything (particularly here in Australia, but even in the more amenable terrain of Netherlands, Denmark and Finland, say.) The value of a Zumthor, SANAA, Glenn Murcutt et al is profound, extraordinary. The failure of, say, Murcutt, is that he has had little or no impact on the way the average Australian lives, works and plays, and the built fabric in which they do that. I don’t blame Murcutt for that, necessarily (though his luddite tendencies irk me, particularly compared to the possibilities in Bryan’s brilliant points on ‘three extensions for enhanced decision-making capability’, to which I’d add that the diagramming should include urban process/behaviour/production) but I do blame the broader context of architectural practice and the built environment business. To be clear, not in terms of *drawing* Pruitt-Igoe in that particular way, but in no-one really addressing the conditions that actually led to its demise. Great craft within its discipline, even accomplished with the note-perfect quality of Zumthor et al, does not address these broader issues. Doesn’t come close. Great craft applied strategically, to the next wider context, as Pallasmaa’s quote goes, might. So if we are to address these interconnected problems (I struggle with “wicked problems” as it reminds me of Ali G) like climate change, education, health, demographics, sprawl etc., we need a strategic response.

    Strategic implies using the power of systems – particularly networked systems now, picking up Bryan’s point about the internet – to achieve outcomes which are beyond the reach of particular individuals, no matter how brilliant. I’ve personally found that, sooner or later, you have to redesign the systemic context around a service, product or space in order to enable better design (systemic context = political, organisational, cultural, economic etc.) I’d argue this is valid in terms of validated contributions, even if it involves momentarily switching focus from the particular craft of the service, product, space etc. to the system that enables that craft to achieve a higher pitch, with greater effect, more frequently. (Though I’m keen to follow up your references on CONDITIONS, Gerard, ta.)

    Bryan’s point about architecture usually being financed through construction costs is key here, and easily indicates the systemic and structural problem there.

    How would architecture change if it was financed through operational costs instead? Or through a product, rather than a service? Or through a venture capital funded investment agenda, rather than the problematic fee?

    This would imply an engagement/involvement with a process, system, product, over and above service-for-fee … The Low2No project – http://www.low2no.org/ – is particularly instructive, and hopefully ground-breaking, though working as a designer on that, you’re aware of how much you’re working against the grain of the business in terms of trying to enable long-term thinking, iterative design, operations-based assessment, curation of occupancy, participative design etc. etc. Less so than other projects I could mention, mind.

    This is the nub of the issue around post-occupancy, and here there’s a slight issue in terms of portraying architecture as the “pivot between analysis and execution”, Bryan; as you rightly point out in your preceding paragraph, there is a lot more design going on after the traditional execution phase as overseen by the architect, given that the fabric is around for 30-40 years (or 100 years if it’s a subway). So there’s a much greater ‘ongoing execution’ – or ongoing, iterative design – at work here, which again calls for a more strategic view.

    This is one of the potentially interesting things about the operating system metaphors that Marcus Westbury and I have been kicking around, after Marcus first suggested it. It provides a way of articulating the ‘soft infrastructure’ around cities, in terms that indicate something over and above ‘the architecture’ (at least ‘the architecture’ as traditionally understood) which can conceive of multiple uses at different paces over time …. A vocabulary and practice for the behaviour of urban spaces, as Marcus points out.

    This aspect requires a deep understanding of urbanism (nb. not architecture, necessarily, though along with urban sociologists, historians, some other social scientists, architects clearly have a good head start here. As well as “whatever Marcus Westbury is” (Marcus, I’ll enjoy discussing this further when I see you next! Along with the Ashes …)

    And ‘MM’ (sorry, not sure I know your name), this is what will set back the likes of IBM, CIsco, Siemens et al in terms of their ‘smart cities’ work. Cities are simply not in their DNA. While this could be acquired, over time and at expense, it will limit their strategic effect – although some of their strategic input from the particular DNA they *do* possess will be vastly useful to cities, potentially. This is partly to do with a lack of facility with spatial intelligence on their part (though as long as that’s conceived in the broadest sense of spatial intelligence, as I know Gerard would.) Or the understanding the spatial implications of decisions, as Bryan implies. This is not to say the tech companies won’t pick up that smart cities work of course, but that the work might not produce great results. But as you say, MM, this is another discussion.

    Bryan, yes to contingencies. And this leads me to a notion of toolkits or skillsets i.e. how do we build up a body of practice that draws, say, contingency or, for instance, some equivalent of representational state transfer or info viz from networked systems alongside, say, the ability of architecture to create conditions that can adapt for the long term or articulate entirely new ways of living?

    What I was getting at was a bit of a deeper investigation into practice. For instance, Norman Potter wrote about a designerly form of synthesis in ‘What Is A Designer’:

    “To an ability for sorting, ordering, and relating information he (sic) must bring qualities of judgement and discrimination as well as a lively imagination. There is a diffuse sense in which the seemingly ‘objective’ procedures of problem analysis are in practice discretionary, embedded as they are in a whole matrix of professional judgement in which relevant decisions are conceived.” (Potter, 1969)

    As a designer, I recognise (and value) that kind of synthesis. I’d guess that other consultants from non-design discplines might not (though they would offer something else.) It’d would be interesting to really unpack what we do when we do, say, synthesis, visualisation, stewardship, as well as other components that we can exert in strategic contexts.

    (Having said that, I appreciate your point, Rory, about trying to define futures rather than “slippery generalisations of thought patterns”.)

    One of the many enlightening moments I had when working with Alejandro Aravena this last (European) summer at Helsinki Design Lab was his disarming but confident statement of the ineffable “magic” (his phrase) that the designer can bring to situations. I usually express that slightly differently, but along with Aravana’s subtle interventions in terms of making ideas concrete (or landscape perhaps) – at some point, we have to describe the form – I think this is also pushing it closer to Jack Schulze’s idea that “design is cultural invention” i.e. we have a role to play in terms of invention itself, not simply refinement of the existing idea of, say, a station, a phone, an address book, a hospital, a holiday. This will lift it beyond simple ‘evidence-based’ approaches – which might only describe previous conditions, how things are – and not indicate how things should be. And closer to foresight and scenario work, in a strategic context. Of course, design research can, if done well, suggest a link between various kinds of observation and analysis and the development of entirely new products, services, spaces, conditions. (A kind of design in the space between a priori and a posteriori.)

    Again drawing from Potter, this is designer as “culture generator”, in his wry classification (the others, for the record, are “impresarios”, “culture diffusers”, “assistants” and “parasites”.)

    But there’s something in our approach to synthesis that makes it the synthesis that is done in ‘strategic design’ as opposed to, say, the synthesis that a good consultant at PWC or McKinsey would do. We have a long way to to to get the value of this recognised, for it to be capable of being deployed in genuinely meaningful circumstances, though I have faith in the people in this conversation, and elsewhere.

22. 
    22 MM Jones said at 6:28 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    More great stuff! A couple of follow-up comments to Dan:

    The myth of the loan designer is great to bring in, especially the irony of that enduring fable within architectural culture and design media when in reality architects are only a small part of the realization of a building, yet the tale is always told of a single visionary’s masterpiece. How well do students really understand that even the geniuses are figureheads of large, complex organizations, whose successes are often the result of navigating challenging and competitive marketplace?

    I’d like to explore the invasion of Corporate Management Consultancy a bit further, as it only the most alarming example of architects’ marginalization in the proposal and production of space. I’m curious, does IBM hire architects, urban planners? Therefore, is design part of their DNA, in terms at least of human resources? If we were to spin this off into its own conversation, I’d be interested to explore this, and also compare it to a more arch/engineering corps conglomerate like AECOM. Maybe some other time we could pick this up.

    Loved especially the comments about architecture providing a product rather than a service. If the building is owned by the architects/architectural firm, and then financed through operational costs, then there is no great hand-off event at Occupancy, and the rent goes to the designers. (And on the intellectual side you control the purity of the design in its initial construction and future renovations; you get to demand the level of craft you want, against the numbers, rather than having a value engineering consultant come in, etc.)

    Also definitely important to emphasize the dichotomy of single-site development by private enterprises and the larger urban planning schemes which almost always involve government and other parties much more. But still designers could be the instigators, whether through broadcasting the unsolicited or otherwise taking more a leading role in the effort.

    Cheers,

    Matt

23. 
    23 Rory said at 6:40 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    A good old-fashioned blog conversation indeed! It is a bit exciting, I’m really blown away by what this has become. There’s so much excellent stuff here by Gerard, Dan, MM Jones, Noah, Bryan, Melonie and everyone – and yet it’s become so extensive that I’m also feeling strangely anxious for taking up all your time during the holidays. So get back to relaxing, the lot of you!

    Having said that, I thought I would add just one thought regarding education. I agree with Melanie in that more and more shouldn’t be shoe-horned into an already crammed five year + degree, but it does get you thinking about what could be thrown overboard. It’s worrying that Bryan’s Ivy-league classmates aspire to churn away in a starchitectural render farm – and in my experience, this culture runs deep. This idea that you might split the profession (as per Bryan’s example of medicine) was actually the original starting point for the piece, triggered by this quote of Robin Boyd’s* from 1957:

    “I believe one man may produce either an architectural poem or a businesslike report, just as one man may have it in him to write, according to the circumstances, about mathematics or Alice in Wonderland. But if we must have one man for each job then we will have to produce somehow more complete building artists and, separately, more complete building technologists. This clearly does not mean leaving the practice of design as it stands now and calling this architecture, while extracting those people who can’t make pretty drawings and training them as engineers. It means, eventually, eliminating the architect as he stands today in the place he has been occupying for two centuries or so, and replacing him with two men: a complete technologist and an unapologetic artist. At present it is hard to estimate which is needed more desperately.” [1]

    Obviously, this proposed split between ‘artists’ and ‘technologists’ says more about the state of architecture in 1957 than offering a useful template for today. But I do find it a nice precedent for these same kinds of concerns, as it shows there has always been tension between different approaches within the discipline. (However I intentionally left the quote out of the piece as it seems to run against the concept of a ‘professional generalist’ – which is a role I very strongly believe in.)

    But just perhaps, if it’s possible to articulate meaningful distinctions between different aspects of this one huge discipline, it could go some way to clarifying in the eyes of the public what it is we can actually contribute to the city.

    The title ‘architect’ has become synonymous with ‘expensive’, ‘fussy’, ‘elitist’, and ‘aloof’ – how can we change that to ‘smart’, ‘engaged’, ‘visionary’ and ‘worth it’?

    Who wants to secede!

    [1] Boyd, R. (1957). “The Future of Design Practice.” Architecture in Australia 46(3).

    *for you non-Australians, he’s our mid-century hero – the original architect as public intellectual.

24. 
    24 Dan said at 10:29 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    Great to see that Boyd quote, Rory – it’s funny, I’d actually mentioned Boyd in the draft of my second comment (yes, I draft comments – too much time on my hands etc. etc.) and then deleted, but I think he’s a great example of an architect who attempted to exert influence beyond his core craft skills, as sublime as they often were e.g. the Small Homes Service with The Age newspaper, something I keep meaning to find out more about – http://www.flickr.com/photos/canberrahouse/2317660749/

25. 
    25 MM Jones said at 11:03 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    I didn’t even know about Boyd before, among other references here that are new to me. Thanks for those.

    And yes, I draft comments, too. Ha

    By the way, no more insight from Alice? shame.

    Matt

26. 
    26 Claire said at 11:17 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    “The title ‘architect’ has become synonymous with ‘expensive’, ‘fussy’, ‘elitist’, and ‘aloof’ – how can we change that to ‘smart’, ‘engaged’, ‘visionary’ and ‘worth it’? ”

    Or how can remove any preconceptions at all? Could each architect be synonymous with some mood, rather than the profession as a whole? I’d rather work on becoming a less stereotyped profession than just trying to re-brand the stereotype.

27. 
    27 Christoph said at 11:19 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    Great conversation (and great article) to start 2011 – perfect!
    Thanks for the wonderful quotation of Boyd R. (who I unfortunately didn’t know). To be honest, I have concerns about the ‘professional generalist’. Isn’t there the danger that we expect the architect to be a polymathic person, remarkably in any field? I like the comment of MM Jones to split the professional education into different degree tracks rather than just one single M.Arch – or maybe even better: separating design from building. Simply spoken: I doubt you can detail beautiful facades and simultaneously win competitions. Anyway, hope future architectural practises can get some kind of “design-consultancy for the build environment”.. Happy 2010! Cheers, Christoph

28. 
    28 Lee W said at 11:27 pm on January 3rd, 2011:

    Firstly this really is a great discussion thread and a thoroughly worthwhile one with too many wonderful points to cover in their entirety, so I will just add my 2p worth to the pot.
    I like Rory believe in the Professional-Generalist idea, perhaps because I have always had disparate skills myself floating about, somewhere between out and out geek and artist. A lot of the points made above have crystallised in much more eloquent form ideas that I’ve considered at length in the past, the software/hardware model particularly has a lot of merits to my way of thinking.
    This complex type of role for architects as I see it was a reason for me dropping out of the architectural education system at undergraduate level as I didn’t feel it was taking me in the way I wanted to go, yes there is duplication and yes the starchitect culture runs deep. To paraphrase Jeremy Till (Dean of Archi School at Westminster Uni) just prior to Christmas, “There is the potential to work in groups on projects at Diploma level [at Westminster University] but we find people don’t want to, top architecture students are a competitive lot.”, I find this a worrying start for potential Trans-Disciplinary Integrator’s if they can’t work in groups during education.
    I have over the last 4 years (since leaving university) looked at a number of courses to further the skills I want to develop and think that possibly the best route to develop the skills needed to be a “Community Enabler” or “Trans-Disciplinary Integrator” would in taking a sociology led masters course looking at cities and urban life with a leaning on real world practical work. See one example here: http://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-world-cities-urban-life/. There are a number of courses that link architectural education with engineering and planning but I can see a huge benefit for an architecture-sociology combined course, equally as has been mentioned an economics course could also link well with architecture I think (Keynesian vs Post-Keynesian architectural interventions perhaps!)
    Unfortunately I currently don’t have the funds to fund a masters course (particularly as grant funding has been cut back in the UK) so am instead seeking to go back to my architecture diploma (for which I’m still eligible for support funding) and seek to approach the course from the perspective of some of the roles outlined originally by Rory. I am concerned though that as things stand there may be limited scope to explore the issues (particularly collaboratively based on current studio culture!) without having to bring back work to a frame of reference that the current education system demands.
    I’d be interested to hear your collective thoughts on whether you would go back into the current education system in my position or whether you’d seek experience elsewhere. I’ll also throw up the question of whether the title “architect” (which is fiercely protected by the profession in the UK) is actually more of a weight around the neck rather than badge of honour when it comes to the perception of the skill set that an architect can offer. Are we boxed in by our collective title, and should we perhaps be seeking to rebrand ourselves into a new role rather like the “Project Managers” (though hopefully more useful) of the 21st century?

29. 
    29 Dan said at 1:30 am on January 4th, 2011:

    I credit ‘Alice’ for starting the whole thing off, of course.

    Lee, thanks. Picking up on your point of protection of title in the UK, as a non-architect (but a designer), I’m mystified by the protective nature of the profession, and even registration itself. I can see no particular virtue in aligning oneself with doctors, lawyers etc as ‘professions’ – particularly in the 21st century.

    First of all, it’s not as if it brings any more kudos or influence. I’ve worked on projects where Pritzker Prize winners can be effortlessly sidelined by mid-ranking money men or project managers client-side or developer-side (again, partly due to the structure and culture of the built environment business.) If a Pritzker can’t do it, what chance have the rest of you got?! As Bryan points out, financiers – far far more influential, unfortunately – use mystique and opacity to exert influence without the need for the equivalent of ARB registration (John Lanchester’s ‘Whoops’ or ‘IOU’ is brilliant on them, as is Taleb’s ‘Black Swan’).

    Equally, it’s really nothing to do with responsibility, safety, liability etc. (or shouldn’t be) as many designers with far more responsibility for public safety i.e. industrial designers of cars and aeroplanes, or software designers of air traffic control systems, or service designers of hospital triage processes, for example, are responsible for their work, and their users’ safety, without the need for professional ‘qualification’ through registration as per architects. So that’s a red herring.

    I think the whole process leads only to that further marginalisation I spoke of originally. Protection is not a strategy for the 21st century. And really, people outside of architecture don’t care. The discipline needs to stand or fall on the quality of its work, as with every other design discipline. And that further reinforces Bryan’s point about demonstrated record of success (which in turn points to Gerard’s, about validating work in the first place.) The likes of Jonathan Ive, Naoto Fukasawa, Dieter Rams, Milton Glaser, Paula Scher etc etc. – and perhaps more importantly the teams and practices they lead – don’t need registration or the protection of industry bodies to be valued, influential.

    Secondly, the value I saw in Rory’s original post, which led to me picking it up a bit, was not in saving the practice of architecture. I’m really not interested in that.

    What does seems interesting is scoping out *new territory* in this emerging nexus of skills, disciplines, philosophies, all aligned around design being applied for strategic influence and effect. Architecture has no particular advantage here – it is not better or worse than most of the other design disciplines. It has no *particular* contributions to make in, say, synthesis, visualisation or stewardship, over and above those from industrial design, interaction design, service design, communication design, software design and so on (and in fact, is often less useful in many aspects). To Gerard’s point, that’s not being dismissive of architecture – it’s actually trying to recognise what its true values might be, and noting that it is simply one of many (or several?) design disciplines that can significantly contribute to the formation of strategic design. That’s all. The opportunity is to draw on the many virtues of an architectural education, practice and ‘structure of feeling’, if I can manhandle Raymond Williams concept to apply to the culture of a discipline, and synthesise them with the qualities of other design approaches, and apply these to terrains traditionally outside the reach of design, such as governance, policy, economy etc. To be clear, there are many things of huge value in spatial intelligence (particularly when I see it exerted brilliantly by Gerard, Rory, Bryan et al), that can be applied to these broader contexts, but let’s keep it in perspective, otherwise it becomes a discussion that can be too easily sidelined as a discipline’s solipsistic self-preservation/marketing strategy.

    Having said that, I really like Gerard’s point about building on the particular qualities of architecture “to reposition architectural practice in such a way that great spaces will still be an outcome of a broader play, but that broader play will involve a great number of appropriately disposed architects.” That seems fair, and smart. Then again I also see a lot in ‘professional generalist’ and the attempt to be polymaths (hammer sees only nails etc.)

    (And to those non-Antipodeans coming to Robin Boyd for the first time, you’re in for a treat. Worth reading almost anything he wrote, as well as surveying his wonderful designs. I’ve written about him a couple of times, obliquely e.g. http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2007/09/in-every-dreamh.html and visited one house designed by him (not a classic necessarily, but still wonderful) http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/08/lyons-house-syd.html … but his seminal book ‘The Australian Ugliness’ has just been reissued, and is really worth reading by non-Australians. His interest in Japanese architecture, from vernacular to metabolist (‘New Directions in Japanese Architecture’ also worth reading), and in prefab and other technologies, as well as direct engagement with media, and understanding of the symbiotic relationship between design and culture, made him a great role model, particularly in a relatively inhospitable climate for public intellectuals and design.)

    And MM, there are a few architects/planners kicking around IBM, Cisco etc. now, but very, very few. There is no particular affinity for that approach there (although IBM has a strong design tradition of its own, of course.) You can incorporate that over time, but until there’s a high value perceived in architecture/urbanism thinking, why would they? I work for Arup, so closer to the “arch/engineering corps” you describe (although we’re not a corporation) and the smart city work I’ve been responsible for there does try to build on a tradition and facility with urbanism and urban systems. And we’re getting there bit by bit … But as I say, you can see those tech companies picking up a lot of that work there – we need to make a better case for the value of urbanism if we’re to be valued.

    Again though, I’m more interested in moving forward into the new terrain scoped out by Rory, with a richer toolkit of design at hand – and in this context I meant to post also the ideas from Martti Kalliala and Hans Park too http://www.ok-do.eu/articles/new-architects-atlas/ (via http://helsinkidesignlab.org/blog/new-architects-atlas)

30. 
    30 Noah said at 1:56 am on January 4th, 2011:

    Hi guys,

    I am all for the idea of “rebranding” the profession, but as Rory, Mike and others have mentioned, architects are but one small part of the city-making food chain. We can rebrand ourselves to our hearts’ content. The vast majority of us will still remain responsible for building design and building design alone. We’re not strategists, we’re not economic development experts, we’re not even policy advocates or analysts. We build buildings and spaces, all of which are shaped by decisions made by a hundred other actors before we even pick up the phone.

    And that, in almost all cases, should be ok!

    Per Dan’s point, however, a lot of those decisions may seem stupid or ill-conceived once they make it down to us. Thus we try to get into systemic redesign, which firmly plants us back in the realm of other people’s expertise.

    A knowledge of those content areas should be essential. But as an ex-urban designer turned strategist turned management consultant, I know for a fact that we designers know far less about how and why those decisions are made (or that they even -are- made) than we think we do.

    But what we do know is incredibly valuable, particularly because guys like IBM and PwC don’t understand cities like we do. This seems to suggest more management consultancy / planning / design firm partnerships in the years to come. Being able to speak both languages will be a tremendous asset for those who can help bridge this divide.

31. 
    31 bryan said at 2:36 am on January 4th, 2011:

    I’ll join in everyone’s appreciation of the conversation here. Rory, I’ve been slowly working on an essay around some of these ideas, so this is a great way to alleviate me from having to finish that!

    It seems safe to summarize many of the comments above by saying that there is a general desire to find a way of being more effective.

    There are two questions which are touched on a number of times. I’ll replace architect/architecture with XYZ since the term is potentially problematic too:

    1. How do we educate the XYZs?
    2. What is the business model for XYZ?

    XYZ EDUCATION

    I love the idea of rethinking educational paths through design school. And as has been pointed out, there is already a very full curriculum in many nations because the licensure requirements mandate that a certain set of courses are taken. I’ve also heard similar frustrations from colleagues teaching at architecture schools in the US, including my colleague Marco Steinberg who is very articulate about the difficulties of expanding the curriculum to include things like finance, economics, etc.

    In the US this leave a school two options: give up on having an accredited program which will graduate students on a pathway towards licensure or find ways to change the accreditation requirements (set by the NAAB). If you give up the license you have a very tough sell to prospective students, whereas seeking to change accreditation is a huge effort that likely takes a long time. I’m curious here how effective programs like Harvard’s Master of Design Studies 2 yr. programs have been. Where do people in those kinds of non-accredited degrees end up? What are they doing?

    Let’s take a tangential moment to consider all of the students who attend an architecture school and go off to do something else. A baby step towards legitimating the XYZ may be a comprehensive survey of all of these ex-architects and what they have done with themselves. I can say that in our anecdotal experience at Sitra/Helsinki Design Lab, we have found interesting and successful people in any number of unexpected places who happen to have an architectural education in their past.

    To some extent the role of XYZ already exists, it’s just that those people are not calling themselves “architect” or XYZ, but “mogul,” “senator,” or what have you. I bring this up because I think one of the dangers in these conversations is that we see the task of creating a whole new profession (!) as overwhelming and therefore difficult to impossible (not that the voices in this thread are falling into that trap).

    XYZ AS A BUSINESS

    Similar to how the education of XYZs is made difficult by a lethargic academic definition of what it means to be an architect, I can speak from my own limited experience in the US and say that our American Institute of Architects is not helping the profession. Basic things like the terms of the standard contract are… weak. I can’t come up with any better word for it.

    To think about how much time, energy, and obsessive effort my friends in Silicon Valley pour into the writing of their term sheets (for venture capital financing) I am surprised how little it seems that the average architect thinks of contracts, business model, and even fee structure as design problems.

    We need to be better business people. Full stop. And not just in terms of commanding a higher fee for our services, but more importantly drafting the legal/business end of our work with as much intent as our work on form/space/material to *make accomplishing our goals in form/space more achievable.* Fewer conferences about some shiny new CNC technique and more about awesome contracts. Sound exciting, right? It’s about as exciting as drawing plumbing risers, and yet just as important.

    For me there are two relatively modest do&document pairs which will help lower the barriers described above. Of course we can also talk about how to renovate institutions like the NAAB and AIA, but that’s a whole different conversation:

    A. Be better at engaging atypical consultants (like economists, politicians, etc) and atypical collaborations, as per Noah’s comment above about “speak[ing] both languages” which I completely agree with

    B. Be better at giving full credit, including both the collaborators mentioned above, the client, and the given context. The hero myth is baloney, let’s be in the habit of regularly reminding ourselves of this by giving full credit.

    C. Take more risk in the kinds of projects we take on and how we engage in them. This is easy for me to say as a youngster, but it’s a pretty simple reality that without risk there is little progress.

    D. Celebrate in whatever media/events we can those offices, groups, and individuals who are taking on new roles and pulling it off.

32. 
    32 Dan said at 4:38 am on January 4th, 2011:

    Good stuff Noah, Bryan.

    Agree with all your A-D, Bryan, though I’m also have Rory’s earlier comment echoing in my head implying most architects, sorry, XYZs, may not want to engage with this debate, just as they may not want to wrestle with synthesis (though I thought ‘engineer’ when you were talking about the desire for clearly defined problems; that’s a subtly different mindset to designer, albeit recognising the large overlap). Hence the stasis around AIA etc. It takes a particular designer to want to do this, just as it takes a particular designer to engage with ‘responsibility’, and to question/redesign the brief with that in mind (another core design skill, but not often done well.) That may ultimately be so different as to be effectively a different discipline? I guess this is what you’re saying about the need to ‘pick our battles’, for want of a less war-like epithet.

    Great point RE Silicon Valley. This is surely also the value of many architects not ending up being architects i.e. wider experience of different cultures, businesses. Or perhaps multiple ‘languages’, as Noah would have it. Perhaps there should be mandatory internship in ‘anything-other-than-design-studios’ at the start of one’s career? Again, this pushes outside what AIA et al would have an understanding of.

    With respect to your point B, one of my design heroes is the great English architect Charles Holden (Senate House, much of the great 30s Tube stations etc.) because he twice declined a knighthood, stating that buildings were a team effort. A brave statement, particularly in 1940s Britain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holden

33. 
    33 Gerard R said at 9:50 am on January 4th, 2011:

    Hi

    Another great batch of stuff. I have been trying to think about how I would make a shorter comment by slicing through the issues of education, registration, articulating our disciplinary strengths and Dan’s earlier comment that someone needs to be able to articulate future visions (in his reflection on the issue of visualisations). I also wanted to find a way to put another 2 cents worth in for Kiefer who I think has also been profoundly influential, just in a different way to the group show Dan cited. My interest in Kiefer is not an interest in some singular hero figure (I suspect that’s why Murcutt and Zumthor entered the mix) but in his profound ability to articulate stuff that no-one else could before him.

    So, at the risk of being completely indulgent, I am going to quote my own partner in the practice, Richard Blythe (who is also Head of School at RMIT) on the issue of design research:

    “Design research operates on the premise that the very act of designing results in new knowledge, in other words, that design is not simply an application of knowledge gained elsewhere but rather through the action of designing we come to know the world in ways that we did not know it prior to designing.
    What is critical in design research is that the observing is intrinsically tied to designing. Without the designing happening there can be no meaningful observation.

    Not all design is research. Design research is that kind of design that is motivated by a question(ing) rather than focused primarily on providing solutions to defined problems. Design research is in this sense venturous because it seeks to move beyond that which is currently understood – it moves boundaries, both of practice and also of the tangential and associated fields in which design becomes entangled. Design research challenges and extends current technique. We understand from history that some design projects change the way that practice happens and others change the way that we understand the world. These are both examples of design research.

    Design thinking is future oriented (rather than dealing with existing phenomena), and is propositional in this sense. Design thinking is both spatial and relational. It has the capacity to deal with partial information. Design thinking is ‘conflict savvy’ in the sense that design often finds opportunity at the crossing point of different value sets. Design thinking is synthetic and operates on the basis of suspending current limiting conditions long enough to allow unpredictable outcomes to emerge. Design thinking embraces the exedra.”

    That might be a “dorothy dixer” or it might make sense to the various correspondents.

34. 
    34 Dan said at 7:26 am on January 5th, 2011:

    Gerard, I see your point RE Kiefer now, and fair enough.

    And great quote from Blythe – I think in non-architectural contexts (where design research has been investigated rather more deeply, it has to be said i.e. Brenda Laurel’s book Design Research (MIT Press) but many others) design research would also very much include deep understanding of existing conditions, existing social and cultural relationships, via ethnographic research etc. NB. This in no way means focus groups (who no-one except major political parties seriously does anymore), or simply ‘building what users say they want’ (which of course users can’t do) – and it very much captures the more explorative, prototypical sense of design research Blythe is describing – as well as the kind of deliberately prejudiced and subjective synthesis that I described in that Potter quote. So you’re not harnessed to existing conditions, trapped by them – but you are using that deep understanding to spot gaps, possibilities, potential, and so on. This is something I’ve observed lacking in architectural education and practice-but of course Bryan’s point looms large here. How to do that projecting 50 years out? A very fair question … but not one that removes the responsibility to understand the users of the next 5 years, say.

    “Exedra” as in a kind of recess, or remove, or interruption, for philosophical reflection?

    You’ll also have to explain ‘Dorothy Dixer’ for the non-antipodeans. As I understand it (as a non-antipodean) means a very soft question, right?

35. 
    35 Doug said at 10:05 pm on January 5th, 2011:

    I appreciate all the comments and after practicing architecture for 30 years, I still sometimes question the role of architects in our built (or unbuilt environment). Any time we work for money, the program is altered. Clients have different needs and we try to satisfy their needs and provide a
    little light and magic for the users of the buildings. Energy efficient, warm or cool, attractive (matter of opinion), cost effective, and accessible to all….with
    respect and admiration for all involved in the process of construction. Architects are not anymore special than any other tradesperson. We like to draw and create spaces/places that people will enjoy. We like to have fun and support creativity in order to make our world a lot more fun to live in…..Best Wishes, Doug

36. 
    36 bryan said at 10:56 pm on January 6th, 2011:

    Gerard, I like the quotation from your partner about design research and I’m wondering if we could replace “design research” with the more broad term of “doing.”

    Edit: OK, having read over this response which I intended to be quite quick, it has gone a little off the deep end!

    “[Doing] operates on the premise that the very act of [doing] results in new knowledge, in other words, that [doing] is not simply an application of knowledge gained elsewhere but rather through the [act] of [doing] we come to know the world in ways that we did not know it prior to [doing].”

    This holds true for a professional sportsman just as true as it does for a designer. Why else does a football player practice kicking a ball so many times if not to understand the specificity of the world through the act of kicking?

    The argument I’d like to make is that executing on a plan, whether done literally with one’s own hands or under their supervision, introduces all of the micro, macro, and fundamental misconceptions that the plan harbored. This is something that all intentional professions share to varying degrees. For me the question is what your learning cycle is and how quick your feedback loops function.

    (This reminds me that I need to dig into the Action Research literature more deeply.)

    By way of example, let’s think about drawing a straight line — remember the frustrations of trying to draw a straight line during your first days in architecture school? or maybe that was just me! Or an issue much more complex such as trying to get a rocket into space. NASA as an organization learned tons while trying to launch their first hunk of metal into near-earth orbit, and I’d argue that they benefitted from a very tight feedback loop.

    By extension, I would like to rephrase the value of the work of an architect (which I use separate from designer because I believe this to be something which designers can escape if they choose, but architects cannot) as instructive because (the best) architects are translators between abstract intention and concrete social things. They operate at the crux between planning and execution in a unique way. Whether through the *creation* of diagrams, drawings, models, or the carrying out of construction administration, there is a tight feedback loop which benefits the work-in-progress as well as any future work that the designer may undertake. Over the past 6-8 years we’ve seen the tech and business world catching on to the value of prototyping which is evidenced most clearly in the profusion of websites permanently in beta.

    What makes the crux role of the designer unique from, say, and engineer (most engineers?) is that architects must synthesize the hard facts of gravity, budget, and others, alongside the softer and more abstract notions of culture, the client’s desires, politics, and notions of architectural correctness (whichever flavor one subscribes to). This should probably be re-written to say that *the best architects* are able to play this role. C.f. “Not all design is research.”.

    (The best) Architecture is forever haunted by its non-art non-science status.

    There’s something to the obsessiveness of architectural planning that is also unique in that it is not applied evenly to an entire building. If we start from the most banal of details, the door jamb, we can zoom out through the layers of the building asking new questions about intention at each of a number of levels of zoom. But! Between each ‘zoom level’ there are implicit questions which the architect does not plan for nor specify except in the most extreme cases. As a young architect I’m still learning to accept that builders do not /always/ follow the details that I draw, they use them as representations of intention and apply their own knowledge to achieve the desired outcome in the best manner possible. So here there’s something about the staccato focus of an architect at certain common scales (site, floor plan, detail, for example) which is unique to the profession. Implicit in this ‘I’ll draw the dots and you connect them’ approach is an understanding that there are questions which have not been answered and that answering them all is probably too complicated or expensive to be realistic. I choose to interpret this artifact of the architectural process as something which may have developed out of the need to reduce the workload to something manageable, but may now be considered in its own right as an extremely useful paradigm through which to think about any ambiguous and dynamic problem.

    (The best) Architecture is propositional.

    And to get back to that door jamb, I cannot let go of the fact that (the best) design’s fixation is on using material to create non-material impacts. If there’s something here which we can offer it’s a “deep understanding to spot gaps, possibilities, potential” as Dan puts it, which I posit is the result of being sensitive to the feedback loops that feed in predictive knowledge about how the spatial/temporal context of a proposed design works (or doesn’t). Within this seems to be a kind of material empathy that (the best) designers (or XYZs) develop by observing the ways that planned things create unexpected affects when materialized according to seemingly perfect plans. I include services here as well, given that services thread through multiple devices, screens, person-behaviors, and so on.

    More so that the points above, I’m interested in the designer’s closeness to material reality and their ability to see the upstream implications of material decisions (often referred to as “poor design choices”). Rory, perhaps you remember the name of the Tasmanian philosopher that I mentioned to you and who I met in Torquay? During the course of a two day “design thinking” event sponsored by Swinburne this this man reinforced the the same cutting point: descriptions of “design thinking” sound an awful lot like descriptions of “good thinkers”. Linking the work of design/architecture to an understanding of material implications is to me one unimpeachable way to escape that critique — not to mention a potential source of great value, as evidenced by the eager work of the management consultancies described above. This begs another question which has come up above in the comments of Doug and others: is the knowledge of design/architecture different from that of craft? It feels more propositional, forward thinking than craft, but I’m not able to fully articulate it.

    At the moment thanks to the lack of study devoted to what social, political, and financial affects buildings create, this makes us designers more like Marie Curie: we know exactly what we’re avidly handling on a daily basis but might only know the affects of our work after it’s too late.

    Since I’m now re-treading previous comments I know that I should close this post. Sorry, Gerard, if this was a bit of a hijack!

37. 
    37 Rory said at 9:05 pm on January 7th, 2011:

    Ok, well I’m just going to take some notes on what’s been said since I last chimed in. No excuses, but I’ve been flat out tied up with other things the last few days, so it’s been nice to watch this bubble along, another couple of thousand words to digest. It really is overwhelming in a good way.

    Yes the Boyd quote is great isn’t it Dan? Perhaps needless to say, he’s my personal hero, my patron saint. Someone who could juggle a sharp tongue, sharp design sensibility (albeit one articulated uncompromisingly as ‘modern’ – while the works often exhibit a playful bagginess, which for me outstrips the rhetoric) and most of all a public voice (with all it’s patronising elitism). Thanks for those useful links, I’ll second The Australian Ugliness as the best entry point to the Boyd archive.

    To Christoph, my understanding of the ‘professional generalist’ is – with a nod to Bruce Mau cited in the introduction of the original piece – perhaps made up of a team, not necessarily an individual renaissance man. I’ll admit, the title is a bit misleading in that regard. What’s important is that the field of awareness (and in certain cases, activity) is expanded beyond the arbitrary limits of the discipline. Not that I claim to be achieving anything like this in my own work (yet!), but naming my practice Rory Hyde Projects, in lieu of ‘architect’ for instance, is one way of trying to articulate that ambition for a studio of generalists. And I don’t believe this is just marketing spin, it’s helped to trick myself to be exposed to a wider range of possible ‘projects’ – curating exhibitions, a radio show, making magazines, unsolicited actions, for instance – to all of which I inevitably bring along my architectural brain.

    Regarding courses Lee, I’m really only familiar with the Australian context, and as outlined in the original post, RMIT’s Design Research Centre could offer a useful precedent. Importantly, the disciplinary boundaries aren’t dissolved, but you are instead placed in teams of students from other faculties and work explicitly on group projects. Having sat as a critic for a number of studios there, I can say that the work genuinely steps into territory that no single discipline could achieve alone. Whether it is a model of the ‘real world’ is a good question, but it is real collaboration, and the competitiveness of students is more than satisfied by the rivalry between teams.

    This might also add something to the issue Bryan raises of the bind schools find themselves in between offering an accredited course and expanding the scope of subjects on offer. I do still think there is a role for a real generalist, an integrator of sorts, but to use the hackneyed phrase, they might be ’T-shaped’ (Tim Brown again?), and come still come from a particular specialist background. And there’s no doubt we all need to be better business people, as you also say Bryan, this shouldn’t be considered going ‘outside’ the discipline, but simply to ‘make accomplishing our goals in form/space more achievable’. Excellently put. (Oh but hey, can you just give me the distilled version of that conference on awesome contracts you’re off to? I’m definitely busy that weekend…)

    Dan, completely agree with your tirade against the protection of the title ‘architect’ – it’s insanity. If somebody wants to call themselves an architect, I say go for it. If a child can draw a house, she can call herself an architect, it doesn’t mean I will hire her to fit out my apartment. We are evaluated on our skills and experience all the time, not our titles, that’s how it works. (And one of the best things about jettisoning this title might be that we could also jettison the impulse to try and ‘save’ the profession.) This might enter territory of rampant free-market liberalism, but it’s the internet age, we are all accountable for ourselves now, and we can’t hide from our service records, we can only seek to improve them. (An aside, the extent that our histories will follow us has led Google to suggest that children of the internet age should be granted a name change as they enter adult-hood, to ‘disown their youthful hijinks’.)

    Thanks for sharing that quote from Richard, Gerard, more than just as a definition of design research, I think it’s safe to scale it up to form part of a definition of what makes good design (or indeed even just ‘doing’, as Bryan suggests). I can’t think of an example of a type of project where a predetermined solution will do, or where it would be unnecessary to be ‘motivated by questioning’, or to combine observation with designing. Excellent stuff.

    (Oh and again for the non-Aussies, I think I’ve got it right in saying that a ‘Dorothy Dix’ is a pre-rehearsed question from a plant in the audience that enables the speaker to bring the discussion around to their preferred territory.)

    Woah nelly! So, I think we all need to hear this again, because for my money Bryan has nailed a question that I feel has burdened this discussion since Dan posed it in the very first comment (well, if you exclude Alice’s encouraging opener), what are the ‘particular qualities that designers bring?’:

    “Implicit in this ‘I’ll draw the dots and you connect them’ approach is an understanding that there are questions which have not been answered and that answering them all is probably too complicated or expensive to be realistic. I choose to interpret this artifact of the architectural process as something which may have developed out of the need to reduce the workload to something manageable, but may now be considered in its own right as an extremely useful paradigm through which to think about any ambiguous and dynamic problem.”

    Seriously excellent stuff, I’m going to print up some motivational posters for all the aspiring former-designers looking for a justification of their skills in foreign territories (admittedly a niche market perhaps). I couldn’t think of a better way to wrap up this discussion so far, it really feels like progress, thanks for sharing it here.

    (Oh, and the Tasmanian philosopher I think you refer to Bryan is Jeffrey Malpas).

38. 
    38 NUNG CHONG said at 8:09 am on January 8th, 2011:

    Great blog Rory !
    I agreed with what Bryan said about how untrained architects are regarding business and finance.
    All architecteure schools should provide a few semesters of very detail courses about the nuts and bolts of running a business. This should be taught by real architects who own and run a real firm.

39. 
    39 Ingo said at 12:55 am on January 10th, 2011:

    Thanks Rory for initiating such an interesting discussion. At the risk of repeating all the good stuff that;s been said, I wanted to contribute a few thoughts concerning the ‘business of architecture’ and hopefully provide a way of seeing where the business resides, in particular when it comes to the making the city. Firstly I must say that the article was very interesting and I agree with the breakdown of disciplines although I agree they are competencies which must reside in the one ‘city making professional’ or generalist as is promoted in the discussion
    For the most part I think that the changing role of the architect is commensurate with the shifts in the capitalisation of architecture (in particular as a political tool) which in turn reflect some profound shifts in the consumption of space.
    If we accept that architecture is fundamentally concerned with explaining the production of space as a response to consumer patterns (the client’s agenda) then it stands to reason that ‘space’ like all ‘things’ has been cast as a complex tool of the client in the mediation of their social relationships.
    In the case of the architect (and I’m not a fan about liberalising access to this title), the production of space typically concerns the making of buildings. It involves every aspect of an ‘economy’ (ie the productive system of living by which we organise ourselves for life), the material basis to this economy (ie the building itself embodying connotative and denotative value) and hard and soft infrastructure. Coordinating the various disciplinary contributions is part and parcel of being an architect, that is, they enable the contribution of other professionals to ensure that what is being built is consistent with the investment aims of the person who wants it built. Now not withstanding the additional trauma of having to disambiguate architecture from building, the role of say an architect in making the city is fundamentally the same, it is simply a matter or scale and how the architect is able to coordinate and max the impact of various interventions.
    And herein lies the critical challenge and dare I say it, the hurdle. While the education which underpins the making of your stock standard architect ensures that a horizontal proficiency occurs across all related disciplines in the making of say a ‘home’, it is wholly inadequate when it comes to making the city. Most architects who attempt the transition (eg Foster, Piano, Nouvel, Gehl, etc), find that what was once a capacity and ease in thinking/ coordinating across the ‘horizontal’ (strategic/ making ‘home’) has now become a limited and constrained existenmce in simply being in and of themselves, ie in the vertical (in and of itself/ simply of ‘building’). The consequence of simply enacting building (and the determinism which underpins it) is that the making of the city and the city itself is trivialised. Recent examples include Dubai, various urban renewal initiatives in China, pick a spot in Sydney (Darling Harbour, Barangaroo, Green Sq, Homebush), several initiatives in the North of England, etc
    That said, I think there are some architects which have made very interesting transition into this larger domain, ie Hadid, Droege, Venturi (and his disciples) etc
    For an architect to ensure that a ‘place’ underpins a City in the same way as the ‘home’ underpins the house, it must develop a horizontal competency. They must first develop a capacity for seeing the city in terms of the economy, they must understand resilience in the face of drivers of change and therefore all the complexity of social processes underpinning the production of space. This means lurching from the everyday to the strategic one-off investments in for example, the enabling of domestic energy security. It means understanding the complex politics around enacting the urban condition and being able to ‘sell’ complex and sometimes confronting policy directions, it means binding those who are required to invest in change to the specific areas of change required. This is often in the soft, abstract investments and not in ‘the object’.
    Now this is not to say that architects don’t and can’t go on to become capable urbanists, strategists and eventually development facilitators. It’s just that the capacity isn’t gained through a traditional system of education which prioritises the object to the point of farce and parody.
    Architectures move away from an education which solders the making of space to the social and favouring in stead the deterministic and the phenomenological is at the heart of this crisis. The value of architecture lies in the subordination of the way space exists to why it exists in the first place.
    If we fail to move away from the technical then architecture simply becomes building design. And as far as I know there are TAFE courses for that.
    Thanks for the opp to contribue

40. 
    40 bryan said at 10:12 pm on January 10th, 2011:

    Just came across this, which seems apropos of some of the above threads:

    The Pruitt Igoe Myth

    http://archidose.blogspot.com/2011/01/pruitt-igoe-myth-urban-history.html

41. 
    41 Letizia said at 12:52 pm on February 5th, 2011:

    Hi,

    I just wanted to thank you all for the ideas you are sharing.

    I am a first year architecture student and I am in the process of realizing what my job will be.

42. 
    42 qwetrader said at 8:24 pm on February 5th, 2011:

    This is huge information. Thanks for the benefit of sharing.

43. 
    43 encageniDem said at 7:12 am on February 9th, 2011:

    Enter comment here.

44. 
    44 Tom Fiord said at 11:49 am on February 17th, 2011:

    I’ve read all your comments and cannot but more or less agree with Alice. In my experience (as a developer with MArch btw.) I have come across many architects. There are basically two types – the thinkers and the doers. The thinkers are usually those, who’s aesthetic isn’t “appreciated” by the public (mainly because they haven’t the faintest idea how to design a great building) and since they usually come from privileged backgrounds (like most architecture students) they don’t have to worry so much and just procrastinate and produce that kind of pseudo-academic twaddle you write about. Sometimes they pass on their wisdom at some low paid teaching post. The other bunch is better at doing things – and usually have to, since they do not have the advantage of fat trust accounts – however since they are not comfortable in producing pseudo-academic twaddle and are similarly clueless about great buildings they work for one of the thousands of nameless architecture firms around the world producing rubbish like shopping malls and office parks.
    What both of those groups essentially aspire to is to be like Rem Koolhaas, Peter Zumthor, Jacques Herzog, Zaha Hadid or some other of the few starchitects or at least get a job in their office so that a bit of their star dust rubs off on them.
    It is as simple as that. In the meantime, I pick up a phone and commission yet another fashionable hack in dark jeans, black cardigan and $300 sneakers who will work on some banal project into the wee morning hours for me at super low hourly rate, thinking that he is the next David Chipperfield.
    That is the “business of architecture” you talk about and until I, the guy with the big bank loan pay, you will do as I say, whether or not it fits within your concept of architecture as art.

45. 
    45 David said at 4:13 am on March 13th, 2011:

    Tom, I’m not sure why you are bitter toward architects, and feel compelled to make condescending remarks. That aside, if your story is in fact true, that you were trained as an architect and are now a successful business man, that’s exactly the point of the blog post: architects can do more than just design buildings. Not sure why you are being disagreeable as you are (supposedly) living proof of the truth of this statement.

    In response to the blog itself, I can’t agree more that the biggest and most challenging problems that need solving today will require people to think like designers, and that architects are in a great position to offer solutions and be catalysts for change. In particular, I find “unsolicited architecture” a incredibly inspiring idea.

    bravo.

46. 
    46 Greg J. Smith said at 2:00 am on April 14th, 2011:

    Rory, your great post (and the ensuing conversation) inspired my most recent column for Current Intelligence.

47. 
    47 Brendan Murray said at 1:18 am on April 24th, 2011:

    I just stumbled upon this thread.

    As a young practitioner in Sydney, this is an extremely relevant topic of conversation. Never have I heard it discussed so articulately, so expansively and informatively as this.

    Thankyou Rory for your initiative in opening this thread. Guided by Gerard’s insights, I find this thread enlightening -and even inspiring. Appropriately, I think it concludes with exemplary diplomacy from David in response to Tom’s equally exemplary honesty. This is the kind of leadership that is needed to move forward.

    How refreshing to see a glimmer of hope kindling for our profession. Anyone feel like starting a movement?

48. 
    48 miki said at 2:32 am on May 3rd, 2011:

    “Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Considered the most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of more routine or fundamental skills.” Goldstein F. C., & Levin H. S. (1987). “Disorders of reasoning and problem-solving ability”. In M. Meier, A. Benton, & L. Diller (Eds.), Neuropsychological rehabilitation. London: Taylor & Francis Group.

    David, I agree with you when you say “architects can do more than just design buildings”. It is my opinion (similar to the point expressed in the blog post) that the architect is a thinker, a problem solver, not simply a person offering a service. Nowadays the architect is a professional figure able to solve a broad spectrum of problems. The architect has to keep in mind the quality of life of the community (community enabler) and future generations (sustainability of the area), furthermore it may deal with very broad projects (as in the case of Kløvermarken park or Roadmap 2050: A Practical Guide to a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Europe).

    Developing a project means finding solutions, however one can have an active or passive attitude in this task. I recently took a course of Professional Practice. In class we spoke about the relationship with the clients. In particular, some architects working in their own firm came to our class to answer our questions. One of them clearly said that “you need to educate your clients, not only to the responsibility towards the environment, but also what design are feasible and what do you offer”. I agree with him and believe that an architect should not only satisfy the requests of a client but should try to actively suggest solutions.

    Moreover, the way to find clients changed when compared to last century. As ZUS did in the project De Dépendance, some architects see a problem, design a solution and start to look for funds or clients interested in realizing their project (my professor, D. Sink, explained similar strategies in class). I believe that this strategy often works, however one has to keep in mind that finding funds takes time and effort. Another modern strategy to find clients is to be present on the web. We spoke about this in class with some young architects (ex alumni). They suggested us the use of social networks (linkedin, facebook and wordpress) or personal websites as a mean to maintain and increase our personal network. Personally, I have a question: Do the clients use internet to find an architect? I believe that internet is consistently becoming a fundamental part of our work, but as an architect told us in class “ it is important to get involved in the community to create new contacts”. Hence, I think that the internet alone is not enough to find clients.

    From “Potential future for design practice” I inferred other two main, similar concepts. Namely, the profession of the architect may require also to work in teams, and the architect should also develop ability in marketing and business. In my opinion this is totally true. Often, there are several architects working in a firm, leading to a division of the skills and responsibilities (The American Institute of Architects, The architecture student’s handbook of professional practice, Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley, 2009. 78). Hence, we have to able to teamwork with our colleagues in the design of a project (one of the guests –ex alumnus – that came to our class underlined this concept). Moreover, an architect has to be able to work with many other different professional figures, such as businessmen or engineers (for instance, in the role of consultant). The ability in marketing and business is fundamental not only to speak with businessmen, but also to prepare a business plan of a project and to sell your firm and ideas (The American Institute of Architects, The architecture student’s handbook of professional practice, Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley, 2009. 80).

    Concerning the word ‘sell’, I recently had a discussion with my professor, W. Janz. He noticed that people in our field always use this word. However, we are thinking, creative people, and problem solvers, we are not objects. Hence, is it right to utilize a word mainly used for transactions of objects to express the concept of diffusing your philosophy and ideas?

    To conclude, the role of the architect is changing. According to “Potential future for design practice” the figure of the architect is becoming less subordinate and more proactive. This is the same feeling that I have after the course of Professional Practice that I just took. Can we expect in the future to have a broader area of competences? Can we expect in the future a leading role in the management of the built environment?

49. 
    49 JB Randall said at 9:00 pm on May 3rd, 2011:

    “Design thinking” is starting to make its way into architecture curriculums as well, and as I student I learned a great deal from it in my design skills and my approach to practice. I recently took a studio in which architecture students worked with entrepreneurship students on developing a business. I encourage all professors to think about teaching one studio as a design of a business model and product or service.

    Going back in the conversation a bit, I loved Marcus’s analogy that “If you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail.” In school I have learned something that many here have discussed; if architects see their main tool as creative thinking rather than just the ability to design space and produce drawings, it will take them a great deal farther in professional life.

    While working with students studying entrepreneurship, I found that architects have a couple of skills that few other professions can claim. And these are skills with which the entrepreneurship students did not understand in the same way as designers. Designers are capable of thinking of more than one solution to a problem and weigh the options (a skill that many professionals should have but with which they can often struggle). Designers can also tap into the activities of people today in order to see how they could live tomorrow, if only they had a few key resources or a few small but significant changes in everyday life.

    Architects spend a great deal of time producing, but sometimes we need to step back and look at how we are approaching the product, especially as periods of recession are becoming more and more frequent. We are in the business of transforming the way that people live, and many of us see a need in transforming the way that we make our own livings. I think we can start by coming to the realization that our skills can apply to both business and design of the physical environment. Thank you all for the discussion.

50. 
    50 Berkshire Review said at 1:24 am on May 14th, 2011:

    I’m late to the party, but terrific to see an intelligent, respectful conversation on the internet. Well done to Rory for writing the initial post.

    I think it’s fitting that Alice’s comment opened the proceedings. I don’t agree with its content or tone, but this conversation assumes a certain progressive mindset which I wholeheartedly share, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think that most architects spend their time interrogating the role of the profession in making a better world. In other words, there are a lot of terrible architects out there doing work which is destructive. They see their job as designing the maximum floorspace which can be built for the least cost and still gain development approval. It’s cut and dried for them.

    I’m all for expanding the role of the profession, but I’m very sympathetic to Gerard R’s view that in the world we live in, realising a good building is almost a miracle. Architecture’s great strength (and here I’m talking about good, critical, progressive architecture) is creating spaces which delight people. Great architecture speaks for itself. People feel good in it. That sounds obvious, but it’s really a kind of magic and if architects morph into a kind of “design ideas consultant” I fear that they are ceding their greatest strength. As the limitations of the virtual world become more evident in coming years, being “masters of physical space” will be a pretty good position to be in.

    I have been in so many discussions lately where an image is worth far more than a thousand words (that cliché remains true in spirit, but in the age of jargon, an image is now worth perhaps ten or a hundred thousand words depending on the company). Look at the comments underneath most Elizabeth Farrelly articles and you’ll see how stale the public debate is about issues like urban density. We don’t want to end up like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, with “only words to play with.” Amidst such staleness, the ability of an architect to produce an image which illustrates an idea is immensely powerful. Whether you like his proposal for UTS or not (and I do), Frank Gehry’s scale models and two dimensional drawings gave a clear idea of his intention, allowing the debate to at least be based on something everyone can understand. This is the opposite of what has happened with Barangaroo, where the architectural image exists to serve an advertising campaign.

    Think of what I regard as the best thing Australia could build for itself right now, a high speed train between Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. People are already saying silly things against it. This project will likely be mired in reports and studies for years to come, but architects can visualize just how such a project would improve people’s lives, how it could solve the problems of our big and small cities. An image can show that Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne are in a straight line for heaven’s sakes.

    Rather than adding business studies to the architectural curriculum (or producing the CAD monkeys some in the industry might be clamoring for), I think architecture schools would do well to produce more graduates who would feel confident seeing at least a small building project through from start to finish. It may be my own fault, but I certainly didn’t feel able to do this when I graduated. That means more drawing, more site visits, more hands-on and more history in the curriculum. Any further expansion of the profession will grow out of the architect’s unique ability to turn ideas into spaces.

    If this all seems a bit heavy, you may get a kick out of Jefe Anglesdottir, a “superstarchitect” alter ego I created to explore some of these problems:

    http://berkshirereview.net/2011/02/lapidary-discourse-a-sound-play/

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