“Are architects cultured designers or glorified triage surgeons working in towns and cities lacerated by architectural collateral damage caused by political and commercial expediency, rubber-stamped by planners?” That’s the question Jay Merrick raises in this Independent article provocatively titled “The Death of Architecture.”
From design to delivery, architecture is being corporatised and re-calibrated as part of sophisticated management systems. Architects are increasingly seen as service-industry operatives and it cannot be long before student architects’ reading lists include tomes on the management and production structures of exemplars of global corporate efficiency such as Toyota, Walmart and Tesco.
Most architects spend about 5 per cent of their time actually designing, partly because they’re up to their necks in gruelling, and often turgidly repetitive, consultations and client meetings. Their early designs are fed through clients’ value-engineering software, and if the projected commercial outcomes don’t match client expectations, the idea is shredded. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it encourages passively compromised design and, ultimately, architecturally dumbed-down places.
Image: Toyota headquarters
