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.