I have gone on a journey through my career in a way that has given me insight about what it means to be an architect. Through a sometimes turbulent process of disillusion and evolution, I’ve gone from immersion in the artistic side of architecture, to engagement in science and the human environment, to finally emerging with a more balanced perspective, whereby I saw benefits and problems with both views, but also understood their potential to be mutually beneficial. Through this growth, I more clearly understand the factors that can influence the social relevance of the profession, and I have therefore gained the perspective needed to render a more complete service as an architect.
I began my journey with emphasis on the notion that architecture is an art. This orientation tends to be rhetorical and values the expression of ideas in buildings. It sees architecture as a language, capable of providing commentary about human experience. The type of knowledge involved stems from the humanities and the liberal arts, and is philosophical in that it relies on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods, and literary in the sense that it attempts to analyze “human experience and synthesize the findings into a unity”. It attempts to produce practitioners with a refined appreciation and awareness in matters of taste and feeling.
After experiencing the realities of the building industry and expanding my knowledge of urbanism, I began to see a disconnect between my work and the ideology I acquired while in school. I could see that the artistic and rhetorical theories of architecture were often highly disengaged from society at large. There was a sharp divide between architecture and other fields, and architectural theory was highly internalized and self-referential. Architecture was done for its own sake, and the profession seemed to be getting more and more detached from reality.
I began to see how some theories of architecture couldn’t be substantiated, which even for something like normative theory which is rooted in values, was important to insure social relevance. Different schools of thought became simply matters of taste, and I developed the cynical view that some theory was more a tool for marketing an architect that for insuring good design. In fact, “good” design was not the objective so much as dictating “correct” design, and this difference hinged on the notion of taste. On the battlefield of distinction in the art market, this was all that mattered.
Architecture began to seem more like a competition to develop the most novel spatial geometry or formal system and support it with a new and original theory. Design rationales seemed increasingly personal and idiosyncratic, with some architects going so far as to call their work an exploration of the self through built form.
So as the battle for novel formal systems raged, the specter of cities filled with self-referential statements rooted in novelty loomed over me. I saw the consequences for the built environment and realized that architecture was not just a playground for ideas, it had to serve as the place where we live. As a result I retreated from my roots and, through exposure to urbanism and the building industry, began to emphasize the view that architecture is a science.
The science orientation tends to rely on hypothesis and deductive reasoning to construct theories, and is founded in empirical observation. It sees architecture as the built human habitat, and attempts to make generalizations about the world that are reproducible in different contexts. The type of knowledge involved is factual and blends with fields such as environmental psychology, sociology, ecology, and economics. Methodologies that are objective and value-free are seen as assured pathways for social progress.
The romantic and artistic view of architecture rejected science as mundane. But rather than reducing and sapping the life out of architecture, I saw science as a key to understanding the world that was not previously available to me. I found that making things understandable through science didn’t make them any less wonderful. In fact, wonder only increased with greater knowledge.
However the failed experiments of the modern movement showed me the dangers of a naïve view of science. The statistical and modeling methods used were inadequate tools for studying the level of complexity present in the built environment. They were inadequate to predict the answers to the types of problems posed by human settlement.
Also the idea that science was value free came into question. While the values of objectivity and disinterest are explicit in the scientific program, the hidden implication of this was that the dimensions of a situation that couldn’t be contained in a model were ignored. Also, while the ideology of value-free research ostensibly cleared the air of contentious debate and self-interest, it effectively served to grant legitimacy to technocratic control, for better or for worse.
Finding myself in a conundrum about the true nature of architecture, whether it is an art or a science, inevitably I came to the obvious realization that architecture had the unique quality of a dual nature as both an art and a science. However, both domains play a role in limiting the social relevance of the profession. Science for its loss of esteem as the arbiter of objectivity and control in environmental design and planning, and art for its loss of accessibility to the widespread culture as a source of substance and meaning. Clearly there is a mutual relationship between the two. If the science domain becomes more adept at solving problems of design, social relevance may yet be hindered by inaccessible cultural expression. Conversely, if the art domain becomes more accessible to the broader culture, social relevance may suffer at the hands of dysfunctional environments.
