In this essay I will focus on the potentials of new design and building technologies, centering my comments on improving architecture’s marketplace success. For savvy architects with a dash of fortitude, revolutionary opportunities for creating enhanced predictability, complexity, branding, feedback, and economies of scale glimmer on the horizon. 4 To avoid obsolescence, architects need to increase demand for their skills by embracing emerging technologies that both stimulate and satiate consumer desires. The capabilities now provided by furniture system designers, sustainability consultants, construction managers, and engineers of all stripes have become so advanced that Martin Simpson of Arup Associates suggests that architects may eventually become unnecessary-except, perhaps, as exterior stylists. Less hidebound professions are ruthlessly shoving their way onto the turf once the sole domain of architects. Many in the profession are finding it difficult to leave behind the security blanket of past working traditions, while a few are simply choosing to pull it resolutely over their heads.Īrchitects’ refusal to embrace technological innovations invites their extinction. Second, while emerging digital technologies offer architects radically new possibilities for designing and building, current architectural speculation remains largely confined to timid evolutionary steps. This presents a profound problem, especially since few clients possess an understanding of the efforts necessary to create custom products, and even fewer are willing to adequately finance them. Architects are among the very few providing custom design services in a product-infatuated society. There are two primary reasons for these phenomena-one cultural, the other methodological. Many among the general ranks of architecture are dismayed by the elusiveness of success and by their diminishing impact. 2 These sentiments are hardly limited to Britain, as Dana Cuff illustrates in her Architecture: The Story of Practice. In 2005 only 2% of architects in Britain were “very happy” with their jobs-scoring at the bottom of thirty professions surveyed, and below civil servants.
While a few “starchitects” are being showered with praise, the forecast for many in the profession is partly to mostly cloudy.
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