Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and architecture

According to Abraham Maslow in 1943, each of our human needs, starting with 1:Physiology - eating and sleeping, etc. - must be met before the need above it can be addressed. If a person is not safe, they are unlikely to be overly concerned with getting people to like them, etc. For architecture, it can be enlightening to ask where the differentiators within that profession fall on this chart. In general, with some exceptions, they tend to land on 4:Esteem and 5:Self-Actualization.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, 1943

Those are difficult places to be when there is a lot of competition. Lawyers, for example, land squarely on 2:Safety, with a boost from 4:Esteem. Doctors squarely on 1:Physiology, with a boost from 2:Safety.

While architects create places for numbers Needs 1-3 to occur, their services aren’t always essential for meeting those needs. Architects like to believe that they are required for Safety (through accessibility, durability, security, prison design, etc., and Health, Safety, and Welfare requirements of the AIA empahasize this), but a technician or an engineer can perform a similar function. In most cases architects market squarely at 4:Esteem, with an occasional nod to 5:Self-Actualization, in their clients’ desires for unique experiences leading to personal growth. Almost all of the architecture profession’s awards and publications solely focus on 4:Esteem.

This is foolish, and it is hastening the irrelevancy of the architectural profession.

An architect’s skill set must go well beyond providing the latest and the coolest purely for clients' self-aggrandizement, and it generally does. They coordinate and guide the consultants, engineers and builders that provide for Needs 1-3, and give their clients the freedom to avoid this difficult planning work. They schedule the decision-making processes that a client follows in order to build the spaces their businesses require. They evaluate budgets and priorities against a client’s current capabilities and make recommendations for how and if they should move forward with new physical construction.

To achieve that, they must research, develop and understand their clients’ personal, business and brand goals in order to design an appropriate building or space. Without that, the project will fail, even if it wins major awards and recognition. Blindly accepting a budget and overestimating the importance of esteem is a recipe for failure, to the point that today an architect must assist their client in determining whether building anything at all is the right decision for them. (Williams & Tsien's award-winning New York Folk Art Museum, which we like to pick on, may be a good example.)

Architects are often essential for a client’s branding and business strategies - their corporate safety and physiology - but they typically leave those elements to others: web designers, coders, interior consultants and design strategists. There is no good reason for this except aloofness and fear of risk. Good architects are well-situated (in fact better-situated) for this type of work, but ceded these growing fields to other creatives years ago. A choice was made to climb into a shell of limited responsibility.

Over the past 50-60 years, architects have built barriers to entry around the profession - licensing, continuing ed, required years of study, years internships, student/intern hazing, city approvals - for professional protection. Architecture is difficult to enter, and difficult to return to once left.

We aren't here today to debate the benefits of those requirements and practices, but to point out that they have created an isolationism that makes architecture, as it is most commonly practiced, anachronistic. While other creative professions grow by learning from other fields, with practitioners starting new types of design businesses and overlapping different industries, the traditional architecture firm must work hard to scale those walls that well-meaning architects have built. 

If traditional architectural firms do not look outside their field, they will struggle and may die. Clients are required by cities and states to hire licensed professionals for certain architectural work, but not to hire traditional companies, and they most certainly will not seek out a dying company to address their need for B.

Most architects have skills that go miles beyond the celebrated “napkin sketch” and they must learn to love the actual needs that clients have. They have on-the-job training that is well designed to manage groups, decisions, design processes, and distillation of desires into goal-setting for thriving companies and brands.

Architects need to embrace them, and take their dated profession in a new direction.