THE PROFESSION 1: ARCHITECTING WITHOUT ARCHITECTS

A not-yet-obsolete car in Cuba.

PHOTO: The Right Angle Journal

Obsolescence—“becoming obsolete,” (from the Latin obsolescere, "to fall into disuse")—is a natural process.¹ Everything has a lifespan. These days, it feels like obsolescence (planned or otherwise) is welcomed and even hurried along, encouraging us to replace anything that is old and unfashionable with something newer and shinier.

An unfortunate aspect of obsolescence is ageism—"discrimination on the grounds of age.” If something is no longer useful, where’s the harm in pointing it out? Ageism has been around for a long time also, but only recently² identified by name. It’s a destructive force that, in effect, allows us to disparage—consequently deprive us of—anything with a shelf-life, useful or not, which includes cars, food, consumer products, people, buildings, and, possibly, the architectural profession itself.

To this last point, the profession is in constant imminent danger of becoming obsolete, through deregulation, competition, or good old-fashioned inconvenience. Notably, during the last half of the 20th century, legislative bodies throughout North America put the professions on notice that they had better start justifying their unique status. As California governor Jerry Brown said, in 1977,

As the citizenry demands change and openness, the power and mystique that the professionals have been able to gather to themselves will weaken, and I think that should be a good thing.

Architecture and some (but not all) other professions managed to survive this assault, but there was another insidious campaign that the architectural profession, saw as a growing threat: the flagrant, indiscriminate use of the words “architect,” “architecture” and “architectural” by those who were not Architects. The profession, notably, here in Canada, the US, and the UK, made a concerted attempt to stamp out this misuse.

It was a serious and well-intentioned assault on the various designers, builders, technologists, etc., who were “holding themselves out” to be architects and “stealing work from us,” and the initiative succeeded within the building design and construction industries. But it was doomed to failure in the larger realm, where individuals, firms and organizations have continued to trade on, and confuse, our professional reputation by using “architect” and its derivatives to describe every undertaking from barbering to marriage counselling to international diplomacy.

Lash Architect.

Original source unknown.

Is the profession in imminent danger of obsolescence? Maybe not imminent, but the profession maintains a subtle defensive posture all the same. And there still exists an irritability among architects regarding the use of the word “architect” by those who have never spent a day in an architectural school and couldn’t distinguish a muntin bar from a Mars bar. It doesn’t help that job postings for Software Architects, Systems Architects and the like outnumber those for regular Architects, or that they offer far better salaries. What could these people possibly know about actual Architecture, and where do they get off calling themselves Architects?

In fact, many of these non-Architect architects understand our profession quite well, to the extent that the organizational aspects of their work closely mirror those of our profession, in a metaphorical, if not a physical sense.

As Ben Slawson describes in the following essay, systems architects, for example, embody the idea of “master builder” (Greek architékton), in a non-building sense, by performing many “architectural” tasks: analyzing, planning, constructing, reviewing and maintaining intricate systems. In a way, this illuminates the hidden parts of architecture. In all its guises, architecture relies on program, structure and organization—commodity and firmness, as Vitruvius would have described it. Far from threatening the integrity of our profession, these other architects may be serving it, by adding a little clarity.

But it would be nice if they could stop using the unsightly word “architecting.”

Notes:

1. In this sense, the word obsolescence has been in use for nearly 200 years, but is ironically, falling into disuse possibly because it too lacks novelty. See www.oed.com/oedv2/00161644 and www.etymonline.com/word/obsolescence

2. According to oed.com, since 1969 www.oed.com/dictionary/ageism_n?tab=meaning_and_use#8671945