Collectible architecture and decline of criticism

Much like a furniture piece in a home, or a specific artist for a museum, celebrity architects (or "starchitects" as some like to say) have become little more than collectible goods for cities. Architectural criticism has become a joke when referencing many of these architects' works, with the deference and boosterism approaching that of an amateur art enthusiast fawning over Hirst or Koons.

In fact, their branding and appeal is similar to that of a well-known living artist selling to a museum:

Get one now, you need to have one to be current, to be world-class! Visitors will see you as having sophisitication and intelligence! Let the world know that your cultural organizations are on par with those found in the major gateway cities! Don't fall behind the high-society curve!

It doesn't really matter if the city is collecting a Gehry, a Zaha, a Koolhaas, a Calatrava, a Libeskind or one of the others, but there are several key considerations:

1. They must collect from the right list of designers. This is no different than going to a city's art museum to see a painting from each of the pre-approved masters that people have read about. People feel smart, and they feel cultured when they see the requisite Picasso, Warhol and Monet, and if they don't they're disappointed. I'm sorry cities, but a Lake/Flato, a Bing Thom or a Kieran Timberlake just isn't going to cut it, no matter how acclaimed and lasting those architects' designs may be, and no matter how much good they do for the neighborhood-- they're not on the weird/cool list.
2. Try to look a tiny bit original. Just as most city museums normally don't invest all their money in one artist, a city needs to pick a new celebrity architect from the list each time. Visitors want to build familiarity with the same architects on different trips in order to feel smart, but they will want to see different ones in the same town.
3. The project must appear bizarre, and shouldn't improve the city's sidewalks or livability. Ideally, it will appear as if it were 3-D printed, with no trace of the workmen that built it, and preferably will not look like a building at all. It might go unnoticed by the casual observer if not, and that would defeat the whole purpose.
4. It must look like other work from that architect. There's really no point of hiring a celebrity architect if visitors don't recognize their work, and the moderately informed dilletante won't be able to if they don't repeat the same formula over and over again. The arguable exception to this is Koolhaas, but he is almost in a league of his own in this regard, since the primary requirement for his projects is the lack of any sort of human scale on the exterior and a jarring, brutal appearance.

This works for about a dozen architects, tops. The reason that it can't work for more than that is the same reason that too many talented artists can't ask the same prices as an (arguably bad) artist like Damien Hirst. They simply don't have the public critical approval or notoriety, and the moderately informed public simply can't remember too many names.

Hirst in London

If you can afford it, and you buy a Hirst (I'm not sure why you would, but bear with me), you will be talked and written about for your purchase. You can overpay or get a great deal, it doesn't really matter. You will find validation and you may (who knows?) find a good return on your investment

If, on the other hand, you find an artist that speaks to you, whose work you adore, you will need to have a much higher degree of confidence in yourself and in your own taste. You probably won't be wirtten about and you probably won't be validated. In fact, there's a good chance that others might not like your new painting at all. Worse, they might see another piece by the same artist that they dislike, and therefore think your purchase was silly.

That's not to say that others will like your Hirst. But if they don't, it won't matter because the art world has pronounced it "good," and you don't need to think further than that. Your personal purchase from a talented and sophisticated up-and-coming artist won't have that same pronouncement, no matter how good it makes you feel whenever you pass by it or linger in front of it.

In this way, the celebrity architect's work is almost exactly like Hirst's. It has been pre-approved and you can promote it as an example of your sophistication. Odds are fairly high that it won't make you feel good (improve your city's urbanism in any way), although it still might (Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim has that reputation, for example, despite the city's resurgence coming primarily from improved train service). But your new building will stand out like mad, and you can rest assured that visitors will notice it and talk about.

The unknown, or lesser-known, artist whose work speaks to you personally, who is talented and hard-working, but known mainly in professional circles, is much like the skilled architect that focuses on making your city better. You will be happier on a daily basis with the results, but the local arts society members aren't likely to celebrate your choice. You won't be written about in flashy magazines, even if the local artist community (or urbanist and pedestrian group) respects your decision.

Gehry in Biloxi

Ironically, these radical projects promote a global homogeneity and an inability to find anything specifically surprising about a place. It's exciting to learn about George Ohr in Biloxi, Mississippi, and his reliance on the local clays and culture. Frank Gehry's twisted metal forms are ultimately much less compelling, or at least compelling in a wholly different way that is unrelated to the mad potter himself.

In this same regard, we see cities building expensive art museums that deliberately look just like the shopping malls, holocaust museums, church additions or other art museums in other cities, with different post-design justifications for their required appearance.

What we're witnessing is a global flattening of culture that extends outward from our museum collections and into our built world. Perhaps this isn't new, but it's easy, because if viewers can be just a little bit informed, they can feel smart without ever being challenged.

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.

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.

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.

Politics

We noticed that we lost many followers on our main site, just after posting Jim Hightower's column on parks and politicians. We considered changing the quote to a less incendiary one from the article, one that didn't specifically call out  “right-wing” politicians for stealing parks from the public. Ultimately we left it just as it was in the original post.

It is not our intent to make this a political blog, but it is impossible to ignore politics when discussing public space. The use, the funding, even the access to public space are all political issues, and can be highly charged ones at that. As a site that is focused on scale—the scale of architecture, urbanism and human activities—we don’t see how to avoid it. Our views on climate change should be clear to longtime followers of our main site, as well as our views regarding the devastation of the natural environment in general.


We don't have to call each other names for our views, but we do have to be honest about who is threatening important aspects of public space, and who is privatizing shared resources. That distinction currently belongs to the right, and conservatives that are honest will explain why they believe their legislation or actions are the right things to do, and will not shy away from a genuine discussion.

Unfortunately, too many writers on non-political platforms will shy from this, concerned that airing a disagreement amounts to choosing sides or appearing biased. We must choose sides on issues that matter to us, and no one is better situated to do so than people that are engaged with and knowledgeable about those issues.

The political beliefs of elected officials are extremely important to our built world, not only to the world beyond. Any architect who has simply looked at zoning regulations at the start of a job is intimately aware of this. To avoid talking about political views is to ignore most of the debate on the shape of our important places; those that care about urbanism, environmentalism, architecture and design must lobby those in power on issues relating to our expertise and experience.

This lobbying must not be restricted to one political party, or to right or left, as all sorts of leaders need input. It is clear to us, however, that notions of communal ownership of public space are most definitely less supported by those on the right and more lobbying may be in order in that direction. That is not to suggest that the left has more solutions, but that successful urbanism is simply in most cases more relevant to their concerns, and that they are in general deliberately more familiar with the needs of city dwellers.

Centralized planning and organic growth both have their advocates on right and left for different reasons, and both require us all to pay careful attention to their proposals and especially to their policies.

We will continue to post what we think is relevant to public space, to urbanism, and to scale, but want your input as well. What do you all think?