Humble Leaders
Samuel Mockbee highlights the servant nature in architecture in his article "The Rural Studio." He romanticizes serving communities through architecture. The Rural Studio exemplifies how to serve communities through our profession, but I wonder how can it be applied in different areas?
As leaders of architecture, it is our job to be "subversive leaders," bringing people into a new future through the buildings we create. Mockbee emphasizes it is not our job to sit back and react to the changes of the world around us. Specifically, he says:
Instead of sitting back and relying, can we push the industries that currently drive our work? Question the standards of our industry? Bring a new perspective that changes technology instead of the other way around? By maintaining a focus on the users and driving for excellence, we can better serve the communities we are working in while changing our industry for the better.
"It is not prudent to sit back as architecture and rely on the corporate world's scientists and technology experts to decide which problems to solve."
I believe that we will always be on the reactive side of things. While we are leaders of a design team, we a service driven industry, not a production driven one. I don't think this a bad thing however, I feel like each design, each application of an industry product allows us to feed our lessons back into the industry. We also very much have the choice to ignore the industry drives and go our own way, but will inevitably need to come back to it when a project physically comes to life. An ability to navigate within that structure and still accomplish our goals I believe is what architects should strive for, a sort of middle ground between you and Mockbee.
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