NEW EXPRESSION/NEW PROFESSION
NOVEMBER, 2010

Architecture is unique as both a profession and body of knowledge because only architecture approaches societal issues as fundamental problems of geometry. While other professions make law, medicine, music, and words, we make – or try to make - places. This approach doesn’t solve every problem thrown up against it, obviously, but neither does a new law, a new policy, a new derivative, or a new drug. The particular type of three-dimensional knowledge that architects embody (this is admittedly a very idealized view of architects), balancing humanism and science, is much more important to society and has far greater practical application than merely the design and documentation of new buildings scattered across the landscape. If architecture as a profession ceases to exists (and we know from history that entire bodies of knowledge can, and do, disappear) or if it becomes trivialized until no one appreciates the difference between a great place to live and a clever teapot, then society will have lost a profound body of knowledge, a portal to solving some of its most entrenched problems using three dimensions, and a last vestige of the Enlightenment: the holistic thinker.

Several years ago, Dave Sobel wrote an excellent book called, “Longitude” that describes the quest for a device to accurately measure longitude while at sea. Prior to having such a device, sailors simply did not know precisely where they were or where they were going. It is stunning to think now that all of the great explorers and mariners before the late eighteenth century were fundamentally lost and moreover, they even knew they were lost (how did they spin that to their investors?). But, it is even more stunning to think that their awareness of their own ignorance did not stop them from setting sail on ever more ambitious adventures, so great was the potential reward for the shrewd and the lucky.

I hope that there is a parallel between architecture's current condition – in fact, its condition for the past 20+ years - and this period of a few centuries ago when basically everyone in the world was either lost on the ocean or stuck on the land. The risks, rewards and rationalizations were all great, and the price of doing the wrong thing seemed to be exceeded only by the cost of doing nothing.

As other mariners before us, without the benefit of a sure architectural longitude, we choose to set sail towards new architectural practices because we are sure that sitting on the dry land of past practice while it slowly sinks beneath us is folly. Architects should be energetically embracing and designing(!) new technologies that re-cast their fundamental roles in the planning, design, construction, communication, and maintenance of buildings. But, while the technology can be grand, complex and overwhelming, it is always just a means to another end, a vessel to carry the architecture profession safely from one century to another. For architecture and architects, the “end”, the ultimate goal is building better combined with practicing more efficiently and effectively so that we, as architects, can touch more buildings and play a greater role in planning and building all that is around us.

While it is important to respect the precarious position of the architecture profession in this century, a fate of obsolescence is neither inevitable nor even likely. Every treatise about the profession since Vitruvius has probably stated or implied, “there are great challenges facing architects today,” but every creative mind knows that challenge equals opportunity. Technology unlocks opportunities even as it pushes architectural design towards becoming a commodity and empowers competing professionals to encroach on the architect’s traditional authority. Technology empowers, de-mystifies, popularizes and transforms. The Internet, World Wide Web, 3D modeling, databases, and many other technologies available to architects are available to everyone and are transforming society and its expectations of what constitutes acceptable services from ALL professions. Architects must find their place in this new world because the old world is gone, but their holistic three-dimensional thinking and problem solving skills are just as valuable and ever more unique.

Sigfried Gideon said in Space, Time and Architecture: “Only when one is permeated by the spirit of his own time is he prepared to detect those tracts of the past which previous generations have overlooked.”

Dive in the deep-end and you will be smarter for it. Technology lets us express architecture differently and express different architecture. We can build walls on a computer rather than draft lines, simulate buildings over time instead of document construction sets, shop for building products rather than edit specification templates, and lead the building team and process from early concepts to construction and then through the building’s entire life cycle. Our clients expect, welcome and value this new expression and level of service. And, from our new expression we can define a new profession.