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Architektur und Raumentwicklung

Hochschule Liechtenstein

The future of the profession of architecture

AL Magazine Issue 3, September 2009

Page 1 Page 2

FUTURE

Claiming to know the future is pointless and naive. Yet thinking about the future can be highly inspiring. It is a tool to realise what is happening now. A statement about the future sets pening now. A statement about the future sets an aim by analysing the present state of things. an aim by analysing the present state of things. Such a statement is always very personal since it Such a statement is always very personal since it contains an initial intention or hope of somebody getting somewhere.

FORMULATING A DIFFERENT WORLD - A FUTURE WORLD - REQUIRES A CRITICAL DISSECTION OF THE VERY NOW AND A VISION. WHY SHOULD THE WORLD BE DIFFERENT? AFTER ALL, WHAT DO I/WE WANT?

ARCHITECTURE

A critical dissection of the “very now” in the profession of architecture is confusing. There are architects like Norman Foster, who, before the economic crises employed hundreds of architects in various offices and have built and are building all over the world. Then there are architects like Peter Zumthor, who has a couple dozen of employees in his atelier hidden in the Swiss mountains, or Glenn Murcutt, who works completely on his own, house after house after house in the Australian outback, without ever touching a computer. Or Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who does not even have an office. All of them have won the Pritzker Prize, otherwise known as the Nobel Price of Architecture.

The parameters of architecture that they are emphasizing in their work may differ to an even higher extent. So does their opinion on what architecture and architects should and could achieve.

Anyone walking around with their eyes open must realize that this dilemma is not one of these four particular architects, but of the profession as a whole. So what is the future of this mess? Or what are the most beneficial circumstances to think about it?

A SAMPLE OF THE THINKING OF EUROPES ARCHITECTS OF TOMORROW

On the 22th October 2009, students of architecture from over 40 countries will come together in Liechtenstein with great ambitions. They will develop proactive manifestos defining their personal and professional future, and to some extent the future of architecture as such.

This will happen during an event of the “European Architecture Student Assembly”
EASA is an open and independent network of students of architecture from all over Europe. EASA is not an organisation, has no permanent body and no membership. It always was, and still is a loose network, thriving on the enthusiasm of every new generation of students of architecture. EASA is Europe’s largest platform for the exchange of experiences, ideas and visions among the Europe’s architects of tomorrow.

The scale of the events vary from random meetings between a handful of “easians”, to summer assemblies hosting up to 500 students. The event is always organised by different people, takes place in different countries and is focused on different themes. The first event was held 1981 in Liverpool, with the idea that students could recruit their own teachers and organise their own school. Since then, EASA has lived on and will be hosted for the first time in its history in Liechtenstein in 2009.

The organisers of the event choose to use this extraordinary circumstance to elaborate on the questions posed above. An essay competition in the run-up of the event has given some first
interesting insights. Some essays have been published in this issue of AL Magazine. The cumulation of this discourse will be a workshop held at the Hochschule Liechtenstein, where students
of EASA and students of this school are invited to join.

The workshop will try to keep the balance between the inevitable chaos which arises when hundreds of students are placed together in one room, and a guiding structure to get inspiring results. In this issue of AL Magazine, we introduce various directions visible in contemporary architectural practices. Each architect sets a high priority on some aspects of the profession at the cost of other aspects. Figuring out the themes of today’s architecture will help to define the framework and parameters of tomorrow’s architects.

PARAMETERS OF ARCHITECTURE

structural logic — Meili & Peter
A building has a structure/is a structure. While the context, and the programme of each building are likely to change, its materials won’t, and neither will the constructive logic of the materials. Just like a structure is inscribed in materials, it is in the human environment. The proportions of the human body, the human perception has not changed significantly, since the first human dwelling was built. Building on fundamentals that do not rely on a historic or spatial context, the highest quality can be ensured in the long term, resulting in buildings that can sustain any change in society, different uses of the building, technology. Their backbone is timeless.

articulation of history — Daniel Liebeskind
Each place and culture has its history.
Actually, history is what shapes a culture. Creating a place that articulates its history means to accumulate the timeline of a culture, giving the highest density of identity to a place.

zeitgeist — Sigfried Giedion
Architecture is the built ambition of a society, an epoque. The architect reflects upon his environment proactively. He gives shape to the spirit of his time, giving a monumentum to it that will stand through the epoques to come.

utopian — Yona Friedman
Architecture should not react to what the society requests, it should be the structure in which a new society can arise. The society of today is not the casting mould for the architecture of tomorrow, rather the architecture of today is the casting mould for the society of tomorrow. Architects need to think one step ahead of their own generation.

sculptural quality — Asymptote
The ultimate fingerprint of a city is the skyline. It is the common symbol of all its inhabitants, their common identity. It is the shape of the city and should therefore be planned carefully. The symbolic value of a building, mainly created by its form exceeds by far its value as a place to work or live. This is where the focus should be, since that is where the actual long-term creation of a place happens.

truth of material — Peter Zumthor
The material and its inherent qualities are used as a tool. The characteristics of each material, optical, haptic, tectonic, even acoustical and olfactory are a potential and a framework within, and with which an architect can create. A framework that resists fashion and ideologies, since it is rooted in nature instead of the human mind. The human mind only makes use of it, in a more or less clever way.

duck-architecture — Robert Venturi
Advertising has been invading our cities for decades now. The competition for the attention of inhabitants of the cities gets stronger and stronger with every new banner and with every new building. The economics of attention are calling for buildings that sustain their position in the cityscape, that are not shy in symbolising what they are or even becoming the symbol for what they are.

listen to peoples dreams — Ricardo Bofill
Architecture should first and foremost serve its users. Architecture is there to let people feel protected, comfortable and at home. Throughout thousands of years of architectual history, certain forms and shapes have evolved as archetypical solutions. People have gotten used to them, like them, and feel comfortable in them due to their familiarity. If an architect wants to build for people and not for his own ego, he needs to consider the conceptions that people have, use the forms that they like in order to create a familiar environment. If they like Doric columns, why build a brutal concrete column? If they like the ornaments of Jugendstil, why use a blank white wall?

not listen to peoples dreams — Howard Roark
A client’s romantic ideas about architecture derive from glamour magazines or outdated conceptions of a programme rather than from the understanding of the matter of the complex. A person who is not educated in architecture is not capable of understanding the manifold dimensions of architecture. The architect has to make strong decisions. For the sake of the client, the architect has to design beyond the understanding of the client.

photogenic — Herzog & de Meuron
Who doesn’t know of the National Stadium in Peking or the Gherkin in London? Their influence on contemporary architecture is still huge. Our world is overloaded with visual inputs, dominating our environment, becoming our environment. While the most famous buildings are built only once, they are visually reproduced millions of times. The building should strongly consider the nature of the media of its million of reproductions, maybe more than the medium of its one original.

atmoshpere — Peter Märkli
Thought-out concepts, beautiful renderings or plans, and crazy shapes do not matter when you are inside the building. What does matter is how you feel. The intuitive perception of the space, light and materials, the sounds, smells and haptics define the experience. This is what everything else should enhance.

space — Adolf Loos
The architect is privileged to deal with nothing, with void and with space. He builds by articulating the invisible. He builds the void that human beings fill with bodies, movement, smells and sound. He builds the complement. Understanding the nothing is his skill, and directing it is his art.

fields — SANAA/Zaha Hadid
Architecture as a profession creating space and objects, improved throughout history. From caves to houses and temples, the invention of the column. the composition of space with platonic bodies during the Renaissance and the interrelated spaces of the Baroque. The shift to space as such in modernity.Today, at the height of this development, architects are going from a composition, involving a number of parts, to a field made up of particles, none of which have a name or number or identity. It’s only the field effects and qualities that matter; the particles are just fragments of a global mass.

open structure — KCAP/LIN
Buildings last longer than its inhabitants. Uses and space requirements are changing. A church can easily become a court, a swimming pool or a discotheque but hardly council housing. They all share the requirement of space where people can gather. While the specific program is changing, the archetypical quality of space remains.
A building and even more a city can be understood as an open structure that can bear changes. “Fuck the program!” as Kees Christiaanse named (in “Die programmlose Stadt”).

monuments — Louis Kahn
That visionary architects build the human environment is a naive illusion. While the architecture of architects is overly present in the media, the reality is that most buildings are built by very pragmatic developers whose main goal is to make money, and there’s nothing one can do about that. Architects can’t influence the world by building everything because there’s a serious lack of dedicated architects, but they can influence the world by searching for the strategically best point to create a building, like a chessman in the white noise of the city. These buildings will outlive fashion, and will go by unimpressed by what happens around them. They are centered within themselves, independent from its context yet defining the it, giving the cities character.

public space — Centre Pompidou/Parc de la Villette
Public space is where the unexpected happens, where you meet people you didn’t know that even existed. Public, is where no one is forbidden to enter. Creating public space that works is equal to creating a field of experimentation and exchange. While building a nice house might make one family happy, creating public space contributes to the progression of society as a whole.

urban/city/country planning — Studio Basel
Architecture is the only profession seriously and deeply trained in understanding space. The rapid progression of settlements are lacking consideration and judgement concerning their large-scale and long-term spatial impact, something that clearly reaches beyond the calculable work of engineers. Who if not architects could do this?

critical public intellectual — AMO
Due to his training to find and solve problems, and driven by the urge to improve their environment, the architect may investigate where no one has asked him to, because no one saw the problematic situation in the first place. The architect should serve as a public intellectual, pointing at the wounds of our built environment, communicating them and proposing a therapy for it. Instead of building little houses and integrating them in the machine of our society, he should step beyond and propose improvements.

cost efficiency — Lacaton&Vassal
New materials and structures are emerging every day and the costs of materials are fluctuating from place to place and from day to day. In this constantly changing environment, pragmatism meets creativity in the recombination and alternative use of any material, ready-made and available in order to achieve a high-quality and efficiently used space at low costs. Compromising familiarity with the creation of a new kind of quality.

sustainability — William McDonough
The priority is to make any building, any city self-sufficient with no waste, no carbon, no pollution. The density, the surface of the buildings, the skin and the whole process of building needs to be optimised regarding their environmental impact.

scientific results — REX
Today, we have the scientific tools to measure the quality of a space. We are now able to calculate and optimise architecture in regard to pragmatic parameters like daylight, noise, temperature, structure, surface. A building is a result of mathematical decisions. Any additional aesthetic decision would be counterproductive for the quality of the building.

copy left architecture, shared creativity — Cameron Sinclair
Do we want to be celebrated as geniuses or improve our environment most efficiently? How about the latter option in order to reach the prior one in the long run? In making use of, instead of fighting the possibilities that the age of information offers us allowing effortless reproduction and organisation of information, a new paradigm is arriving. Sharing knowledge globally. Sharing your solutions. Sharing your skills. A new network of architects could organise itself to make each single building significantly better at the cost of authorship.

technology — Norman Foster
Involvement only at the forefront of technological development allows you to build the best possible architectural solution at a certain moment. The progression of technology is adding new layers to the building structure and process every day. Not recognising and used, it is necessarily anachronical.

interdisciplinary — EM2N
The genius of the architect does not lie in his ingenuity, but his ability to find the right persons with the right profession for whatever problems there are and collaborate with them. Instead of trying to pull everything out of his soul, the architect knows where he can get inspiration, forming an efficient network, and organises people in order to accomplish a creative task that he himself alone could not.

ESSAYS

Below is a selection of three of the many essays that were submitted for the competition. The winner however has not yet been determined, and will be announced during the “XL,L,M,S,FL” exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein.

Cut the Crap — Thomas Cattrysse (Belgium)

The automobile, the airplane, the computer, the walkman, the internet, the cell phone, facebook, twitter... Mass globalization has rapidly shrunk the world to the size of our palm. Time and space have become irrelevant. The digital, on the other hand, seems to be very real. Write a sentence, press a single button and your thoughts and emotions are going around the world, public, for everybody to see.It is the age of the voyeur and the voluntarily stalked. A big brother society we chose to live in. It’s also a time of public fear, terrorism, crisis, climate change... A catastrophe seems inevitable and maybe even is. In these times, architecture has become an almost ancient profession. Instead of architecture, we now settle down with the live action building of renders made by, what we like to call “Star Architects”. What is shown today on television and on the internet are for many people the only sources of information and thereby seen as always true, is not architecture, but a nice looking image of something that is supposed to be a building. Image is the keyword. It would now be very easy to blame the downfall of architecture on those Star Architects, but I’ve decided not to do that. Instead I pity them. They are victims. Their work has been exploited by those who have money and power. The Star Architects are being raped, every day a little more. And it’s not only Star Architects. Far too often it’s also the architect next door. Hell,it might even inflict you and me someday. So far, the bad news. So where do we go from here? Do we accept the current position of architects as mere image makers? Or is architecture about something else, and if so, about what? As almost always there is no clear answer. It is impossible to give one correct comprehensive definition of architecture, however, it is possible to give a notion on what it can or cannot be. There is only one certainty in life and that is death, this is the human condition and everything is bound to it. Architecture is so to speak a matter of life and death. Contemporary architecture is loosing its grip on reality, it’s trying to be bigger than life. Its mocking death and it will be the downfall of the profession as we used to know it unless we cut the crap! Context, style, image… These are all inventions by man. They all change in time, so in a way they are meaningless to the architect (their meaning only exists in the discussions made by architects for architects in a certain period of time). The only parameter that counts and has always counted is the human condition. From that perspective the future of the profession of architecture is actually not different from its current or past situation. It may seem paradoxical, but having only one parameter makes it only harder to make architecture. Sometimes it even means we have to stop designing and leave things for what they are. Namely, an unfinished building stands way closer to the conditions of life than a perfectly designed world. Giving architecture to life is a never-ending quest, the reason is simple, each life is unique, so should be each building. I cannot give you a manual, I can only give you this.

A new era of globalisation, increased mobility, dominance of information technologies, but also severe environmental decline has already emerged. Architecture as part of social context is affected by all these rapid changes. On the other hand, Architecture itself affects people’s everyday life, even societies as a whole. — Elena Antonopoulou (Greece)

Architects know how to collaborate, to work in groups.
Architects are familiar with information technologies and work with them.
Architects like to travel, to explore, to communicate, to be in motion.

Therefore, architects can easily adapt to this new reality.

The future belongs to teams, to the power of the group which, by using the technological improvements in the globalised societies are able to communicate, to get organised in order to move on to a more democratic way of planning.

A “bottom-up” architectural process means to design in collaboration with the users, taking into consideration their specific needs, desires and dreams.

Different users of space and architecture have different needs and different expectations. But they do have some notions in common; they demand a better relation between the artificial and the natural. Architecture should go in that direction and achieve a better equilibrium between the built and the natural environment.

Don’t forget to think green!
Architecture also exists beyond building!

Architecture =
_action in the city or beyond it
_activation of terrain vague
_bottom-up planning
_collaboration
_critical thinking
_ecology = economy
_energy
_multi-events
_global + local attitude
_networks
_political state
_praxis + theory
_social awareness
Architects possess the power to transform the drawbacks of a globalised world into effective tools for collaboration, communication and action. “Star architects” still exist, but they already belong to the past. The future belongs to the networks, collaborative young architects in action! Don’t loose time! Take part!

Surprisingly, Most Builders Don’t Own a 3D Laser Cutter.
Surprisingly, most architects don’t own a saw (or know how to use one). — Paul Farrell (UK)

So the future of architecture is digital realisations of algorithmic computer generated... blah blah blah. Personally I’ll take any excuse nowadays to get away from an electronic screen (imagining “pop ups” in my real vision is surely a sign that moving from screen to screen all day isn’t healthy, or that I’m mental). To think that everyday architects and builders are anywhere near these advanced levels of technology is retarded.

Back in the padded world of architecture school I was torn between two ways of thinking. The ultimately more enjoyable but totally unemployable beliefs of our aging hippy tutors – just hand draw it, photography, collage, sculpture, dancing in space (that actually did happen). Then there was the second way, computers, and nothing but. Obviously the speed and efficiency are the strongest aspects of digital production, copy/paste etc. This performs well for the technical aspects of architecture but has somehow also managed to infiltrate every other aspect too. If we lived our lives with this mentality of speed and efficiency we would only drink water, eat boiled rice and speak German. To employ the computer as another tool within ones own toolbox will lead to richer, more dynamic and human architectural experience. Once moving into practice from school, the now compulsory digital face slapping begins. Everyday, every employee clicking away for a solid ten hours (as well as being bad for your eyes, or mental health) leads to a real disconnection with the real world. The real world where the plans and details will be made, which the architect is creating on his little screen. The model room in the last office I worked in was stocked full with the same materials and tools that would too be used on site; a great place for experimenting and becoming familiar with the ‘tools of the trade’, now just used for the odd cheeky cigarette when it is raining.

I’m fully aware that architects are designers, not craftsmen, (I had to show a group of architects how to put a drill bit into a drill once) but having little to no knowledge of craft and how a site really works is like having a blind man coaching a football team.

Of course there are emerging computer driven machines that can produce form from a computer drawing, but these are still far from common, even in the developed world. Like with the Concorde, economics will hinder the progress of science.

So, for a change, try switching off the glitzy software and picking up a hammer. Get to know your materials and how they are transformed into architecture first hand. It’ll result in finer architecture, a smoother working process between architects and builders, and make you look tough in front of your architecture pals.

I didn’t want to try to write an epic essay on the grand future of architecture, as I honestly don’t have a clue, but hopefully, if anything, designers and craftsmen understanding each other’s world a little more may lead to catcalling and porn becoming commonplace in architecture offices and schools worldwide.