Discipline vs Profession

Unpopular opinion.

Things will not get better for architects, unless architects do some soul searching to understand the real role that their profession plays in today’s economy and value creation. Economic value that is, not the esoteric, philosophical “value” many in the profession pontificate about.

So unless architects reimagine the current professional model, nothing will change when it comes to fees or the work culture. We cannot expect to get different results from repeating the same process.

Those disillusioned with the status quo either jump ship to thrive in other related professions, or try to disrupt the professional model by tapping into the endless opportunities of the discipline.

It’s discipline vs profession, and so far the profession has beaten the discipline into submission. We are vehemently encouraged to give up all the assets that we were taught at school as some sort of “cut your hair and get a job” adage. How’s that worked out so far?

Brickwashing

In London, planners like to pretend that the 1960s never took place, and that modernist architecture from the time is a drunken tryst that everyone should forget about. Swinging London? Carnaby Street? The Chelsea Drugstore? No. Planners would have none of it. It’s Downton Abbey and BBC period adaptations of Jane Austen (Bridgerton for those trying to pass as edgy or cool).

In the last 15 years, there has been a diligent effort by planners and architects to homogenise our cities to resemble an idealised past that never was. Under the planners’ tutelage, a concerted campaign to exorcise what they have condemned as heretical has erased mostly modernist architecture that dates from the 1950s-1970s to be replaced by indistinguishable new developments that are almost always clad in brick (slips):

This architectural, nay cultural, campaign can be described as brickwashing. Brickwashing, in essence, entails cladding any new building with brick to confer upon it a veneer of respectability. Brickwashing means that a building can be sterile, austere and spartan, as long as the building is clad in brick. Brickwashing means that a building can contribute nothing of value to urban space and city life, yet be deemed laudable by the planners. Brickwashing means that a building can be even out of scale, vandalising the city’s skyline, as long as its brickness makes it contextual, venerable, and level-headed. Brickwashing has become the last resort for specious reading of context and lazy design. Brickwashing is the “get out of jail free” card and the joker card and all the clichés in between. In fact, brickwashing is the ultimate cliché in architecture and urban design.

With brickwashing, it feels like the planners took far too seriously the tagline of the cosmetic brand Rimmel London: “Get the London look” - as if Rimmel only sold one type of lipstick with 2 or 3 colours.

Brick, however, is not the actual problem. It’s weaponising brick in style wars and conformist conservatism espoused by planners and the values they represent. Brickwashing feels like an attempt to expunge from public consciousness styles and trends that dared to be different, that dared to be nonconformist, that dared to be playful, that dared to embrace the spirit of the age, that dared to reinterpret context and culture outside the confines of literalism, that dared to be the essence of cities like London and dared to be the hallmark of post-war optimism in cities like Birmingham.

But forget the style wars. What makes brickwashing so insidious is that it is often an unlikely bedfellow with greenwashing - brick is seen as an environmentally-friendly building material. Worse even, brickwashing is a facilitator of greenwashing because it is an almost always guaranteed way to get planners to agree to needlessly tear down perfectly sound and perfectly adaptable buildings, throwing all the mantras about the building industry’s detrimental impact on environmental catastrophe under the wrecking ball. Literally.

Creativity on the Dancefloor: Sequels, Architecture, Saltburn.

Everyone’s talking about Emerald Fennell’s superb Saltburn, and I’m one of them.

The film is serves as the perfect case study to illustrate the concepts of creativity and talent. People erroneously think of creativity as the conjuring of innovation out of thin air to create not only what has never been created before, but also to create something that is delightful and positive; however, the uniqueness and unprecedented nature of innovation is a myth:

Fennell’s Saltburn at face value is a mish mash of so many recognisable films: Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Saul Dibb’s 2006 screen adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Emerald Fennell consciously commandeers all those known works of drama, and produces something incredibly unique, incredibly fresh, incredibly irreverent, incredibly sexy rather than a pastiche or a period drama with Bloc Party as would have easily been the case with someone else. Saltburn is not a film without precedent, without provenance, without cultural affiliations, but no creative feat ever is.

Creating what has never been created before in vacuum is a logical impossibility. The creator belongs to a shared human experience and is influenced by context. Creativity is the ability to stake a claim in a landscape of accumulated cultural experiences, by drawing inspiration from so many precedents to create something unique, albeit with a long lineage and also a sense of familiarity. Creativity is the spark that owns the otherwise derivative and stamps it with innovation.

But this is half the story: Creativity is so often underpinned by talent. Talent is the confidence to produce something that is refined by flirting with what would otherwise be vulgar and tawdry. It’s about the ability to be so understated even with a gaudy birth. It is the ability to cobble together so many ingredients that would almost certainly give one food poising but end up with a Michelin-star dish. It’s the ability to court kitsch and still come out on top. One can be creative without necessarily being talented, but talent is the spark that elevates creativity to the stuff of legends.

Film does it. Music does it. Architecture does it. I think of the intense curiosity of OMA’s architecture which designs buildings and spaces that are so interesting, yet that could easily be a dog’s dinner in other hands. Only with OMA, not only do these buildings work, but they succeed. Unfortunately, so much architecture is beaten senseless into diffident conformity by a toxic work culture and a seriously flawed development landscape that yearns for creativity yet only pays heed to the underwhelming, a development landscape that relies on a USP to thrive but that has been domesticated to accept the generic and the derivative. Far too many architects play it safe, and they mistake aesthetic conservatism for good taste and faithful reproduction as good practice.

But this would be akin to sequels in the film industry. Sequels are made to capitalise on the success of the original production, but regurgitate the same formula to try to curry favour with viewers, especially those who loved the original, but more often than not, sequels are flops. Architecture is a world of failing sequels, increasingly failing to capture consumers. Perhaps the property development world is waiting for an Emerald Fennell-type designer to capitalise on the success and iconic recognition of trailblazing architecture, yet own this fact to produce something so distinctive, so disruptive as to deliver shock to the status quo of property development.

Naked victory dances are optional.

A Dictionary of Received Property Marketing Jargon

Are developers getting their money’s worth with the marketing that is being pumped out to promote and let their developments? Building branding and marketing literature are essential components in promoting developments in real estate to achieve lettings or sales but are they really being used to their full potential?

What makes this rather odd is that the landscape of marketing and PR in London is on a different planet in terms of innovation, ingenuity and engagement. In a league of Ogilvy, Saatchi and Saatchi and Leo Burnett, why does property marketing come across as cutting-edge as a soap advert painted on a brick wall in 1890? Oh, but there’s a website with punchy graphics so that levels the field.

Bland brochures with the same regurgitated format of location photos and restaurants, a lazy rehash of the tube map, dated CGIs as sexy as dad jokes and floorplans.

And then there’s the jargon, which sounds more like Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues with such language being ubiquitous in almost all property marketing literature:

Stunning New Development - said every marketing brochure about the same cookie-cutter, brick slip shoebox that looks like every other new-build development since 2010. Planners and architects have done a sterling job of turning London into an austere Soviet-style city albeit with copious amounts of brick (slips). Marketers have done a commensurate job of labelling such built form “stunning”.

Exciting Retail Opportunity - Am I missing something for not getting excited about a shell-and-core retail unit? I guess “exciting retail opportunity” is the soulmate of “active frontage” that architects wax lyrical about. The universe of retail is indeed very exciting but how is this captured here?

Sense of arrival - To yawnsville perhaps. You’d think they’re describing Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) making an entrance to his own theme tune by Francis Monkman in The Long Good Friday, or Susie Bannion (Jessica Harper) arriving at the school/witches coven in Dario Argento’s Susperia. But alas, they’re talking about an uninspiring reception space.

Encouraging Wellbeing - Cyclist facilities and operable windows, which are quite common staples in office design, are described as unique and consciously designed to promote wellbeing. A new addition making the rounds is “encouraging people to take stairs” - which is a fantastic design move; however, this description is being gratuitously applied to spaces where the stairs are tucked away and value-engineered in sad enclosed shafts, not spaces where stairs are features and prominent.

Beautifully tailored spaces - delivered in new offices by an avalanche of white plasterboard, off-the-shelf fire doors with vision panels, lazily cobbled together patterns meant to be a feature wall or art or whatever; winding corridors and almost unlivable layouts in housing.

The endemic ennui created by the architectural profession has been contagious, and if architecture is so insipid, then what can brand consultants and marketers do? Lazy words seem befitting for lazy designs. This is only one facet of the problem. The other facet is that the process of building “design” and building “marketing and PR” are siloed and not integrated. Architects as lead designers should be liaising with agents and marketing professionals to work hand-in-glove to strategise and develop architectural designs and produce desirable spaces where branding is pivotal in the design process .

Architecture and property development are screaming for a paradigm shift: Developers, architects and marketers need to view real estate development as a commodity and the users as consumers.

Watch that space.

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)

Fake Designer Handbags: Designing Buildings in London Today

What if there were another way of designing buildings?

Currently, most architectural output follows the same process: Developers ask agents (not architects) for guidance on aesthetics and style for the developers’ speculative schemes, so the agents observe popular market trends and counsel developers to copy what’s already being done relatively successfully. The architects receive the creative brief, then negotiate policy and codes and pretend to know more about construction than the construction specialists: the contractors, whom architects are desperate to be employed by (or novated to). Then comes the marketing (and branding if one is lucky) so websites and brochures with punchy graphics are produced. The marketing literature (especially for commercial buildings) almost always follows the same structure: pictures of nice restaurants in the area, punchy graphics to rehash the ordinance survey map of London and a reboot of the tube map, then visuals of the spaces with awkwardly curated people reveling in the “sense of arrival”, followed by floorplans, and finally lofty claims about opening windows and having cyclist showers as if this were the epitome of ingenuity or even science fiction.

This process has stymied innovation and creativity in the production of space and cities since, among many other reasons, copying successful trends means that these trends are overused and already on the way out, so the developers are getting lazy and tawdry copies of other developers’ buildings not much different from counterfeit designer handbags sold in dark alleys and off car boots.

All this may be just about fine in booming economy or in a predictable market, but the mere whiff of an economic downturn or unforeseen circumstances, this model flounders. Housing may be fine for now (although who knows with the nascent mortgage crisis) but one only needs to look at office buildings and commercial stock to realise that the commercial sector is in serious peril. Ditto for retail - signs promising “exciting retail opportunity” notwithstanding.

So, what if there were another way of designing buildings? Of branding buildings? Of marketing buildings?

I believe there is another way, an alternative professional model for architecture, and it all starts with reframing the discipline:

Space is a Commodity. Design is a Service. The occupier is a consumer.

(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)

Killjoys

Architects in the 20th Century have, with great success, signaled to society that they are anguished artists or sympathetic anti-heroes. This image has been enshrined by film and TV. Think of The Fountainhead, Indecent Proposal and How I Met Your Mother. This signaling has been arguably successful, so successful in fact that those who believed it the most were architects themselves, not the public at large. To the rest of the people, they cannot figure out what we do and how the work we do is relevant to them. Yes, some may find the anguished artist persona somewhat amusing but that’s as far as it goes. Why we are there or why engage us or what justifies our fees are still questions many ask. When asked, architects pontificate about “value” which encompasses the same cliches that sound like mantras of self-help from the noughties. This failure in communication is largely responsible for articles like the particularly vile piece Giles Coren penned for the Times a few months ago. The profession cannot be blamed for Coren’s venom but its lack of messaging has created fertile grounds for it to fester.

But the recent trends are even more worrisome, because most architects have sought refuge in moral authority, perhaps out of genuine conviction but also because it is self-serving. The smug contentment in being sanctimonious has ironically steered the discipline of architecture from what should be an admired discipline into a tacitly loathed one replete with self-righteousness and virtue-signaling.

If architecture is a discipline replete with innovation and bringing delight to people’s lives, is it being signaled by the profession accordingly? Or is the sanctimonious and didactic tone doing the opposite? If we are agents of positive change in society, then why are we such killjoys?

For a discipline predicated on innovation and making human experience better, somehow the notions of joy and delight are shameful taboos so most architects seek solace and purpose in stoic misery. This is why the profession signals negativity and stern morality which makes people feel guilty and bad about themselves rather than upbeat and excited. In other words, rather than take people on a journey of wonderment and excitement about fantastical opportunities and joyous possibilities, we drag them them kicking and screaming down the road to hell, all the while while we’re deprecating them.

Take the example of cross-laminated timber (CLT) which the profession sanctifies as the panacea to the climate emergency and the silver bullet to environmental depredation. Venerated for its supposed sustainable credentials, how do architects convince developers and users to adopt something so many architects are zealous about like CLT?

The way many architects present CLT to the public (as well as to their peers) goes something like this:

Concrete is evil. There is no acceptable material other than CLT. If you are not a fan of CLT’s, you’re a selfish, evil person. If you question CLT, then you need to be cancelled. If you don’t like CLT, you’re single-handedly responsible for the environmental catastrophe. How can you even consider anything else?

PS_Did we tell you that we’re award-winning?

In other words: doom and gloom, pontificating, patronising and judging.

Whereas more useful messaging could go more like this:

CLT is cool. CLT is sexy. It looks great. It feels great. It smells great. Oh, did I tell you that it is ethically and sustainable sourced? CLT would be touted as the must-have material in any environment. CLT spaces would be all over Wallpaper, GQ, Tatler (not the trade press which would automatically relegate it to the realm of the uncool, or to quote W1A’s Siobhan Sharpe: “ you’ve bought a one-way ticket to yawnsville”).

I don’t personally endorse CLT nor am I comfortable with the zeal to cut down trees nor am I convinced by the messianic hype surrounding in my professional circles (nor am I particularly against it - horses for courses). What I am talking about here is how architecture, which is both a service and a product, needs to be framed. Our discipline has a lot to learn from advertising which successfully combines innovation in service as well as innovation in product with innovation in communication. Advertising also capitalises on human psychology and behavioural science, so it is a discipline of understanding the user and winning them over, not bludgeoning them with assumed morality.

Signal(ing) Failure

Architecture, both as a profession and subsequently a discipline, suffers from a serious communication problem which leads to architecture punching well below its weight. The message architecture sends out to the public at large is confused, and the value it brings to human life is hushed, esoteric even. Architectural signaling epitomises the crisis of the profession.

The profession signals to people that architects are a crossbreed of anguished artists and rational builders. But are they really? Architecture may be both a service (design) and a product (building), but not in equal measure or worse, design is not subservient to building as is widely promulgated by the current professional model. I argue that architectural design in essence is a service that adds value to property in simple economic terms. This is why developers engage architects, not to build rational, efficient structures but to create exciting places and spaces that can be marketed to and sold/let to people as such. The best metric to measure how lucrative good design is the financial premium “architect-designed” properties fetch on the market compared to mass-produced edifices. Good design makes life delightful, and this is harnessed by the market whether in property or in advertising or in fashion or in tech.

But when the architectural profession is oblivious to its latent potential or even ashamed by it, the confused signaling it sends out to society makes it very difficult for people to appreciate the merit of architects or even whether architects are relevant, a fact that is exacerbated by the strides in technological advances contractors have made in construction as well as AI with platforms like MidJourney. Focusing inordinately on construction like the profession has done in the last 40 years hasn’t helped, nor has the virtue-signalling that aims to carve out a niche for architects by guilting and shaming people into it.

In fact, by framing the discipline of architecture in such reductive terms of practicality and sanctimony, a whole generation of architects has egregiously under-performed and written itself off to irrelevance. How useful has our contribution been to the future of the workplace? What change have we effected in housing and domestic typologies? What can we say about how seismic changes in society and behaviour have influenced space and cities? We are always catching up rather than leading because we have delegated the role we had the best training to perform to others like planners and estate agents. Planners and agents are the go-to authorities on cities and space, not architects, and although the role planners and agents play is incredibly positive, it is almost always retrospective and emulative of what has already been done not of what the future looks like. Much like in advertising, Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland argues that market research is pointless to innovation because it looks to the past for clues. Innovation lies not in giving people what they want but to find something that they will want or to exploit a gap in the market. Are the homes and schools and workplaces that are being designed innovating and mirroring developments in society or are they simply regurgitating more of the same old spaces and places?

It is perhaps high time architects took back control of their discipline and capitalised on its strength to research, observe, analyse and innovate. Architects need to reclaim their rightful role as an authority on space and cities but to do so, perhaps they can start by addressing the signaling of their profession to the public at large.

Easy Words: Anatomy of a Profession

How do most architects describe themselves or communicate their brand to other people? Almost universally, practice profiles and “about us” sections are likely to include the same lofty statements. But what do these statements truly mean?

1. We are award-winning. I mean, what architecture studio isn’t these days? These obscure “awards” sound more like marketing vessels for manufacturers like the “award for best mastic joint”. Are such awards about the architecture or the products used?  It always brings to mind the expression whether people are laughing with you or at you. Conversely, why should architects care at all about more “prestigious” awards when they are only getting accolades from their peers in this insular echo chamber? Why are architects so obsessed with being validated by other architects?

2. We are design-led. What does “design-led” mean? Architecture is both a service and a product. Had it not been for the service aspect which is design, the discipline would be described as construction. If there is no design, it cannot be called architecture. To describe an architect’s practice as design-led is tautological. Worse still, it reduces design to the stuff of trite Hollywood films or How I Met Your Mother where it is an epiphany or a grand gesture rather than a process.

3. Our architecture is not about buildings but about people. Every other architect harps on about putting people first. How? I’m asking seriously. How do you put people first when you work on speculative schemes, and every step in the design process is decided by someone else from planners to estate agents? How do people first manifest in the same layouts open-plan kitchens and the same brick-slip facades? Unless you mean photoshopping smiling people in CGIs. Even then, using stock images, you have really not read the room by not selecting the right people or the right clothes these people wear in such spaces because… waterproofing.

4. Sustainability is our USP. Claiming that sustainability underpins our work as a USP is something to proudly brandish and boast about in 2005, not 2023. Nowadays, sustainability has become an integral topic rightly enshrined in legislation. Being environmentally conscious should be a given, so do not expect medals for doing the right thing.

5. We unlock a site’s potential. Again, with a feasibility and brief outlined by clients, planning restrictions and industry guidance like the BCO, how do we unlock potential or how do we imagine? Is the open-plan kitchen born out of imagination or the brick-slip façade out of innovation?

6. Our ethos is.. This is the most egregious sin in the profession. It’s all about the sanctimony and the virtue signalling by adopting fashionable causes to appear morally superior, nay, to display contempt so gratuitously to people we judge to be sinners. People with genuine moral convictions should practise them as human beings, not flaunt them so flippantly on their websites. How about spending less time posthumously loading your buildings with nebulous hot topics like post-it notes and more time creating better spaces?

7. We give the most for least, or something along these lines. This feels like a meeting out of W1A without the pearls of wisdom from the inimitable Siobhan Sharp. Again, no accolades for doing your job so perhaps stop boasting about it. This is basically tantamount to stating that what sets us apart from other architects is that we design buildings. What sets us apart from other doctors is we treat patients. We are good structural engineers because our buildings don’t collapse.

Some of these statements might make some sense if they are genuine and spoken from the heart; however, those architects who are true to their word but who use such platitudes are inadvertently writing themselves off by borrowing PR speak rather than expressing their own words, not to mention that these platitudes have other architects as their recipients.

Not only do most architects paradoxically describe themselves and their work in boastful terms when they are producing lacklustre spaces, they are also unaware that their somewhat pompous tone is nothing more than the same litany of anodyne cliches and generic PR-speak that mean nothing at all and make no contribution to the real conversation. The oft-repeated statements do not hold up to scrutiny and rather than conceal what a dry, irrelevant profession architecture has become, they exude it by virtue of being so regurgitated and cheesy.

But this open secret would seldom be admitted by most architects. Either because of genuine belief or because of pragmatic willingness to conform, most architects wax lyrical about a profession that is creative, so creative in fact it only exists in websites. I often hear about design and innovation yet I don’t see much evidence of it in the insipid, dystopian built environment around me. I feel like Alice Ayres in the film Closer who asks: “Where is this love? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words”

And therein lies a significant part of the problem: Easy words.