In America fifty years ago, safety and security were on everyone’s mind. Crime ran rampant, serial killers stalked, children disappeared. What were architects’ responsibilities in the face of all these societal problems? How would we correct for all the unsafe spaces we had so thoughtlessly and carelessly made in and around the buildings we designed and instead create “defensible space.” Sociologists, behaviorists, criminologists and public health officials advised us on how to design buildings.
Then came climate change, the subject changed and architects were only too happy to respond. We endure fatuous, self-aggrandizing proposals for floating cities and ski slopes on power plants. But most environmental issues related to building are political problems (international, national and regional land use policy) and engineering problems (global resource utilization and generation) -- that is, problems both created by and now to be solved by politicians and engineers.
Now with COVID-19, we hear predictions that commercial office space will disappear (everyone will work at home) or double (social distancing forever). Public spaces will vacate (a traditional idea if ever there was one) and operable windows will ventilate our schools’ classrooms (if sustainability didn’t do it maybe a global pandemic will). We get gratuitous talk that our “perceptions of space” will never be the same. But the global spread of a disease is a public health problem to be solved by our public health systems and (perhaps with the exception of minor modifications in hospital design) only at the margins does architecture have anything to do with it.
What is it about our profession that prompts so many to so immediately look to us for -- even instruct us on -- solutions to society’s immediate social, political, economic, and public health problems or worse, that we so immediately volunteer them? Indeed, architecture does contribute to the vitality, health and well-being of society and it is understandable that we as architects want agency, to be helpful. It is the immediate part that is delusional. In today’s America, it is not all that exciting to do your job in service to future generations but it is nevertheless still our job. Like any artist, we want the attentive audience, but we play the long game anyway with or without the attention.
In the 1970s, in response to the incriminations of the sociologists and the behaviorists, there emerged the concept of “autonomous” architecture. It was an unfortunate term but it meant this: “we have been building buildings for a while now, there is a reservoir of experience from within the discipline from which we can draw to make wise decisions, we got this.” This is sometimes referred to as “tradition”, but referring to tradition would not have had the avant-garde punch that was prerequisite in the 1970s (and still is). In the wake of the overreach and the consequences of the (often misapplied) tenets of early modernism, “autonomous” was instead interpreted as “we only care about the buildings not the people in them.”
Things do change. Societal relationships and hierarchies, cultural frames of reference and tastes, circumstances, materials and technologies are in a constant state of flux. We are not passive receptacles of these changes, we absorb them and respond and contribute to them in ways that are evolutionary, rarely revolutionary, mostly at the level of analysis of the situation at hand, more local than global, engaged not autonomous, informed by experience always with the long term in mind, and met with by the repertoire of tools at our disposal (drawings and models).
But that we continue to make bogus claims in a misplaced effort to claim currency distracts us from what we do best. We ask too much of architecture to think that it can solve society’s problems and too little of it by not demanding and investing in the level of excellence that can only be achieved with exacting work informed by experience and focused on the future. When faced with any new situation, we need not ask so quickly what we will do (the answer will always be what we have always done—we got this) but rather how we will do it.