In this issue, we profile architects—or people educated as architects—who have chosen to apply their knowledge, experience, and insight in ways other than everyday architectural practice. One can frame this idea either as an expansion of practice or as an alternative to it. Taking an alternative route can be an expression of any number of motivations, and some of these are understandably critical of the profession: the concern, for example, that architectural services are not typically available to the neediest among us.
The expansion of practice can be critically motivated, as well. An expanded practice—one that addresses, for example, not just the composition of a building’s form but also the composition of its pro forma—can help architects gain a greater voice in deciding what gets built, where, and how. Strengthening that voice brings valuable expertise to bear in the shaping of the built world, which is a good thing.
The motivations for expanding one’s practice are, nevertheless, inevitably mixed. However sincere we are about bettering the world, we are also looking for ways to make a dime. (The “we” here is not rhetorical; I’m looking to make a dime, too.) In that search, it can become unclear whether added services are in fact an expansion of architectural practice, or whether they’re something else altogether. Not that it matters in any particular case. If you’re good at some service—architectural or otherwise—that a client needs, more power to you.
But there is the danger that, the more architects are seen to be doing things other than designing buildings, the less important the design of buildings may appear to be. Heaven knows, we don’t want that.
I have one suggestion for avoiding it, which may be obvious, but it bears saying. It is, that we should take care how we use the word “design.” In unguarded moments, it’s easy to say “the design” when what we really mean is “the way it looks”: “I like the design, but the construction is poor,” or “It’s a nice design, but it doesn’t function very well.” We know better: the design includes the construction, it includes function, and—not unimportantly— it includes the way it looks. When we’re expanding our services as architects, it includes, as well, financial analysis, development strategy— indeed, everything we bring to the table. What we’re bringing is not a grab-bag of services, but an integration of factors, the relations among which may be hard for others to see.
The integration of apparently unrelated things— lumens, column spacing, and social space, for example—is the core of what we do, and it would serve us well if we reserved the word “design” for that integration. We should be prepared to demonstrate, through vivid examples, how design can serve a gamut of interests, from the fiscal to the social to the visual. And whenever anyone uses the word “design” to mean anything less than this rich synthesis of concerns, we should call them on it. Because anybody can put together a grab-bag.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2005, in arcCA 05.2, “Other Business.”
