Ideology and the value of design

Sam Jacob has an interesting post in Dezeen on the value of architecture. While I sympathize with much of it, and share many of his frustrations, it is unclear what sort of ideologies he wants to be better represented in commercial and public architecture.

Yet we should be wary of focusing our argument on the bottom line. Architecture and design are fundamentally useless activities when viewed through the lens of a project manager’s spreadsheet. That’s why so much bad design is commissioned: because it doesn't make any difference when it is totalled up in a column. Project managers get fired because buildings are late or go over budget, but rarely because a building isn't very good.

—Sam Jacob

A building that is late or over budget is not, by its nature, very good. A design that is inappropriate for a project’s client, for its location, for its schedule, is not a good design. This is true for any industry, not just architecture.

Great architecture is seldom an expression of ideology or of highbrow culture, although such architecture does exist and is celebrated. But a world constructed of such architecture would be overwhelming and difficult to inhabit.

For most of society, architecture is great when it creates great streets and spaces. It enriches their lives by giving them memorable places for connections of friendship and love, for happiness or introspection. It rarely celebrates its creator’s genius, or its builder’s wealth, and never does so at the expense of its user.

And that, its focus on its user, is also what architecture has in common with art that is loved, versus art that is celebrated. Whether music, painting or prose, art that exists as a luxury or for “an echo chamber of its own making” will be celebrated but rarely ever loved. It is, in fact, a waste of money, except for the artists that produce it and study it closely.

Take, for example, music that is considered high culture. It is typically not great creatives like Tom Waits or Kyp Malone, but classical art that only a select group of (mostly wealthy and well-dressed) people care about. Art is similar: those “in the know” would select very different artists appreciated only by the wealthiest or most involved as great work, with a select few artists singled out for that distinction for reasons that would not matter to the culture at large.

And that is how architecture, as culture, is celebrated today as well, as a rarefied practice that only the few can or should appreciate. This is why the UK banned curved school buildings. They were blindly reaching for a way to build good buildings that are not a money-wasting shout into the echo chamber of architects, and don’t know how to do it. The ban was a reaction to a problem that they cannot understand.

They know that architecture as culture is in danger of repeating the brutalist mistakes of the 60’s and 70’s, except with less durable materials, and they are correct. They want to avoid those mistakes. Most architects want to repeat them, if only to promote their own artistic ideologies, ideologies that are irrelevant to the rest of the population.