Why the Architecture Profession Must Die
Venezia 2004, via Wikipedia
My phone begins to ring, I lean over to see who’s calling, it’s my business partner calling from New York. It must be two o’clock in the morning for her. I hop out of bed, grab my phone and laptop and walk out onto the terrace overlooking the canals of Venice in Northern Italy.
Her excited voice comes over the line, “I can’t sleep, I have a great idea on how to improve the natural lighting scheme in the lobby and atrium!”
From my laptop I remotely connect to her computer and I watch as she goes over the design with me. We conference in our third partner in California and by 9am local time the design solution has been agreed upon. We forward our markups to the production team in India and by the end of the day we all receive an email saying the design renderings and animations are ready for final review.
For the last eight weeks the three of us have been able to dedicate all of our time to this design competition, it has been the highlight of our careers. For the last two months I have been living in Italy, enjoying the weather and gaining inspiration from the works of Carlo Scarpa scattered throughout the city.
If we win the competition we will be busy for the next two years in the production and construction of this building. If we don’t win we’re going to all move to Ecuador for the next year and volunteer our time with Architecture for Humanity.
This is the future of architecture. The framework for a distributed global project team isn’t new. Technologies like remote desktop software and high speed internet connections allow project teams to work anywhere in the world.
What may be new to some is the idea that the Architect doesn’t need a mountain of paying clients to support themselves. How can my project team devote two months to work only on a design competition and then turn around and expect to continue to work for free for the next year? Did we just finish a string of highly profitable projects that have padded our bank accounts? Maybe, but we didn’t need the work. Did we win the lottery? No.
School is finally coming to an end. This weekend Cal Poly is hosting the second annual 5th year architecture show in the Chumash auditorium in the University Union. Yesterday Crystal, my parents, Michelle, Rick, Lucas, Lauren, Peter and my boss Gary all attended the official opening.
