Barriers to entry, to exit, and to relevance

Why has the meltdown in architecture caused its study be called the “English major of the new millennium?” The economy, obviously, plays a large part. But the roots of the today’s struggle run much deeper, and the profession is undergoing radical structural change.

The practice of architecture today, in its most common form, exists in a silo. Architects tend to remain in the profession for life, or they leave it forever. This myopia protected it once, from less-qualified practitioners, from upstart competition, even elevating the architect to an earned status.

Now, however, these built-in structural barriers are strangling the field with isolation. The lack of cross-pollination—within the work and its practice, not by cursory readings of postmodern literary theory or by stealing from artists—has narrowed the architect’s role enough that clients find it difficult to understand the architect’s value.  How can architects expand their role and reclaim relevance?

Not by limiting their vision of design, seeing themselves only as the devil’s advocate, surely. But they must define themselves by what they see as their company's purpose. One way to remedy this is to integrate their work into clients' businesses on a broader level, by becoming an advocate for a brand, but even that is not enough.

• Is your purpose to make money? Perhaps you are in the wrong field; try selling that to a client anyway and see how it goes. Or take any project that comes along based on fee, and see how fast burnout sets in among your staff.
• Is your purpose to design great buildings? Wonderful, but tell us what that means. What architect doesn't want to do that?
• Is your purpose to be a low-ego listener, to bring your client’s creative ideas to life? Terrific, so does everyone else. Now go to work as an internal corporate designer.

Here's a quote from the Salon article linked above:

Barriers to entry tighten. And there’s a lingering sense that even when the recession lifts, these industrywide problems will not abate. Record corporate profits, after all, have not led to a significant increase in design work or construction. They’re issues, of course, that increasingly face the broader middle class in the developed world as well.

These are important points that could ultimately contribute to a further undoing of the architectural profession, until there is a dramatic shift in architects’ way of approaching business. While architects may at one time have seen their profession as an artistic pillar of a global upper class, those days have been gone for some time, and the field has essentially become a simple professional services industry.

Globalization was (and still is to an extent) a tremendous boon for Western architects who found Chinese, Middle-Eastern, and other corporate-state sponsors willing to pay Western fees for design services. But like the rest of the middle-class, architects, engineers and planners are increasingly finding themselves replaced by the locals they have trained. In fact this is already happening, with new Chinese design stars featured in Western magazines and winning top prizes. As that cycle continues, globalization will come back to Western professionals in the same way that it has to manufacturing and technical support.

Architecture's self-imposed barriers to entry have the field paralyzed for that upcoming event.

As the article notes, debts from those high barriers to entry have also built a high barrier to exit, in the form of a justifiable fear of risk, and a disdain for those who don’t display a “passion” for radicality and a slavish dedication to every project. Additionally, architects are being further isolated within their field, with only the most forward-thinking groups finding collaboration with other creative types, while most architectural professionals continue to speak a language (in words, but especially in form) that primarily only architects understand or care to appreciate.

It isn't surprising; this is how architects have been trained for decades. But the effects are important.

The field’s celebration of that building language’s often-repulsive results—its isolation from actual human experience—easily cause those outside the field to question the value of any architect. Surely anyone could make such an alienating box? Are so many years of training really necessary to achieve that?

Architects seldom do themselves favors in this argument, with the AIA pushing for stricter licensing requirements in the name of the health, safety and welfare of the public. But the AIA misses the point - that is not why an architect is hired. If that is the value of the profession, a client would hire an engineer and a code consultant, and do away with the architect's reputation for ego and potential battles of aesthetics.

Architects have a knowledge of building function and spatial movement that can often, sadly, surprise clients. The design team can, and should, bring better and clearer knowledge of what a space needs in order to convey a message or to function effectively than any focus group or internal brainstorming session can derive without them.

Until architects learn to re-integrate themselves into the creative world, however, they will continue to marginalize themselves. What will that new integration entail? Society’s new ways of working, collaborating and shifting between careers will all play an important role, but architects must first accept that the old and aloof ways of doing business are disappearing rapidly.