It somewhat feels like the third season of BBC’s Ashes to Ashes (2008), where the protagonists feel an increasing sense of malaise and that their world is shrinking. Something does not feel right but we don’t know what it is. This is true of the world today, but this is especially true of the architectural profession for the last 40 years. The system seems to have died and running on autopilot because no one has bothered to shut it down. People feel it but they can neither diagnose it nor articulate it. The profession has been at the throes of death but those in charge keep it on life support, not because of any nefarious agenda but rather because of not being capable of envisaging an alternative or simply because of panic. Architects felt that the world they operated in until the 1980s had been changing beyond their comprehension: They misconstrued change for loss and opportunity for bereavement. With a world around them centred on services and on specialisation, architects felt that outsourcing construction to contractors was dispossession although they hadn’t particularly enjoyed construction before. Like a child who is bored with a toy, somehow the toy becomes desirable when another child is playing with it. The same applied to blockwork and waterproofing and dot-and-dab. Just because contractors took the lead with design-and-build, somehow architects wanted nothing else but a contractor’s remit.
A few generations ago, some architects had bold visions and a commanding voice to shape the world around them. They knew their position in the world and the power (and limits!) of their discipline. They were not indoctrinated to feel shame of their vocation nor were they oblivious to the way the world worked, and whilst it is true their role was more encompassing to comprise an element of construction, but so did barbers who used to moonlight as dentists in the Middle Ages. Architects today are like some centrist politicians with no project, no stance and no vision, politicians who rely on fickle opinion polls and fashionable causes to concoct their policies piecemeal, always striving to give the public what they perceive that public wants to hear. Such people are managers rather than leaders, administrating events rather than making them; so, they are always surprised by these events and always two steps behind. Like in politics, the profession has tuned to populism by following the diktats of estate agents, planners and contractors; worse still, the diktats of other architects who regurgitate what the estate agents, planners and contractors instructed. Agents and planners only reflect on what has been done and what has hitherto demonstrated success so they seek to emulate it. This means that their advice is always retrospective rather than forward-looking, which, although valuable, goes counter to the essence of design: innovating and sowing the seeds of the future. Agents and planners know their game and practise their trades well but somehow they have been forced to do our work on our behalf without the knowledge or training. All of this would have been fine (not really) if this were expressed with candour. But no. Practices still have the temerity to weave their bland administrative role into “award-winning “studios where “people come first”. What are these awards and how do people come first?
To compensate, architects wish to express their agency by espousing grandiose-sounding yet anodyne and out-of-context causes that look good for optics: like placemaking, contextualism and CLT. These are safe and decontextualised causes that are unlikely to court any controversy but unlikely to have any meaningful impact because the profession approaches them so superficially and with an inflated belief in the power of architecture to play politics (architecture can stop wars and end famines). What’s even more tragic is that architects hang on every word uttered by their own peers. They ignore the world to seek approval from other architects or most likely, not to be at the receiving end of their counterparts’ derision - which they will get anyhow. Architects pretend to be contractors to appeal to developers and pretend to be sanctimonious street preachers to appeal to their counterparts; however, they fail on both accounts because they stopped being architects.
In other words, the professional model today is permeated by grandstanding albeit jejune dogmas: money is greedy and corrupt (although it is the way of the world), aesthetics are superficial (although it is why clients pay architects fees and what people find joy in), intellectual discourse is academic, nay, immature (although it has revolutionised the world, like psychoanalysis has with advertising), lifestyle is pretentious (although architecture belongs to a cultural and stylistic zeitgeist), popular culture is vulgar (although it is people for whom we design, not other architects). Architectural dogmas are redolent of Orwellian tropes: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. What does this leave us with? Managing construction (we’re not contractors), administrating codes (we’re not lawyers), running mindless repetitive tasks (we’re not AI algorithms). and shaming people for seeking joy (we’re not street preachers). Those in charge of the profession are content to be middle managers with no clout and no influence, bureaucrats whose opinions don’t matter much and whose input into property is incredibly ineffectual; furthermore, Architects’ contempt for money and lifestyle conveniently obfuscates that fact that their profession is enmeshed in what they find contemptible, like teenagers refusing the authority of their parents yet having no qualms about the same parents fielding the expenses.
Since the 1980s, the architectural profession has gone into intellectual administration. No project, no vision, no purpose, no role and no commanding voice. Like a ghost ship bereft in the ocean that everybody forgot about but where the ghosts still hold a party like it was 1983, architects just don’t fully appreciate that their current business model is dead, and had been slowly dying since the 1980s. Architects can have an influence to really promote good practice and laudable causes by sticking to what they were trained to do: to observe, to research, to design, to imagine, to innovate and to narrate. Had architects not abandoned design to focus on production, they could have been a reputable authority and opinion makers when it comes to property, not irrelevant receivers of the dogmas of others. Architects disregard pivotal disciplines intertwined with them: Trends in style, technology and sociology. The profession has refused to play the game in engages in by being oblivious to the tenets of the economy and being willfully aloof to lifestyle and popular culture. Instead of observing behaviours around them and trying to innovate typologies, architects latch on to feel-good causes that will make them look morally superior but benefit no one.
The Labour MP Gerald Kaufman once described Labour’s 1983 election manifesto as the “the longest suicide note in history”. He could well be talking about the current architectural professional model. The thing is, some of us do not wish to die with it.