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.
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