The Architectural Profession

The following meditation I originally wrote in correspondence with a friend. I found the exercise helped me clarify my position, so I have edited it and now post it here with the hope that others might also find it useful.

I completed an undergraduate degree in Architecture in August of this year. At that time I was filled with discontent with the Profession as well as with the Study of Architecture. Since then, busy not working in architecture, I have allowed my mind to clear a bit on the subject, my thoughts aggregating into more distinct forms.

In the past five years of study and practice, I can’t help but feel that Architecture has failed me on an intellectual level. Perhaps, to put it more fairly, my pursuit of architecture has failed me. This pursuit somehow took my intellectual eagerness and sapped all of the life out of it. I don’t want to say that architecture can’t be intelligently made or studied, by any means. This is not to say that it doesn't take intelligence to be a good architect! Absolutely, a good architect has to be intelligent. They also have to be creative, sensitive, observant, vigilant, and also very, very good at compromising - without losing sight of their values. Some would also add insane to this list.

My problem is not with the intelligence, but with the expression of this intelligence. For me there is too much straight ‘design’ involved in the production of architecture. Too much lining up mullions, deciding which curve you like better - picking between colours. Design has a lot to do with making decisions and knowing how to make decisions, but very little to do with really asking yourself, on a fundamental level, WHY you make those decisions. That is just too difficult, takes too long, and hardly even pertinent. A good designer makes the right decisions. A combination of training and genius allows a good designer to make stunning decisions of great intellectual value without having to break it down into its basic philosophic, political, or social implications. These implications are ‘built-in’ to the design process.

To ME, the WHY is the most important question, not the WHAT or the HOW, which are the questions that architects tend to focus upon. In school this hindered me a great deal because I always concentrated on the wrong things, spending all of my time conjouring semantics, trying to design architectural stories and polemics – losing sight of firmness, economy, and delight.

In September and October I worked as an assistant to a contractor. I really, really enjoyed the physicality and the tangibility of the building. I basked in the lucidity and immediacy of the decisions. My initial impulses have always been abstract and academic, ethical and philosophical. When I was young, far too young to accurately surmise these things, I found the social studies to be too wrapped up in themselves and convoluted - not nearly engaged enough with their immediate surroundings. Rather, I found the humanities focusing on dense tangles of ideas apparently unrelated to the world outside my window.

Architecture seemed to me a great chance to bridge the gap between the abstract and the 'real world', a chance to make philosophy manifest! But it hasn’t been this way for me. It's caught in the middle: the ‘paperspace’ between the idea and the building. Architects make pictures of buildings, not buildings.

I had felt repelled by the ‘deconstructive’ tendencies I sensed in philosophy, literature, and art theory, and attracted to the opposite pole of explicit, physical construction. Architecture had had the soothing appearance to me of a great dialectical synthesis, the wholesome union that would allow me a happy middle way. Rather than satisfying both my inclination towards really deeply considering things, as well as my need for tangible engagement, architecture satisfied neither!

Rather than a ‘middle way’, I found in architecture a disconnected ‘third way’.