Servants for humanity? (week 10)

“All architects expect and hope their work will act in some sense as a servant for humanity – to make a better world. That is the search we should always be undertaking and there are no clear-cut definitions or assumed pathways.” – Samuel Mockbee

While Mockbee may be taking liberties in assuming the first part of this statement, the second is very compelling. We spend a lot of time attempting to define the role of the architect. We’ve considered the importance of user participation, influence from outside professions, contextual conditions, as well as the design expertise of the architect him or herself, where even the definition and scope of that expertise is fairly ambiguous. The differing approaches to discovering where architects fit into the physical, social and professional spectrums should suggest an expansion of this role rather than a whittling down. Perhaps there is no way of defining the role of the architect, and maybe that shouldn’t even be the point.

During last week’s class regarding spatial justice, Sarah brought up a fact that should be at the forefront of these discussions: architects possess the rare skill of design thinking. The value in an architectural education lies not in the ability to draw a wall section detail, but in the ability to attack a problem from unseen angles and work in a non-linear fashion to form an innovative solution. Mockbee states that architecture requires civic engagement. I believe this is true to the extent that this engagement is not merely the means to a drawn and constructed end, but used as a tool removed from the profession to improve the social and political circumstances which impact so much of the world we live in (including architecture).

It is unfortunate and probably wasteful that most architecture students do, in fact, follow an assumed pathway, one that often leads far from our ideal notions about the capability of architects. As thinkers and problem solvers, our intellectual skills have the potential to serve humanity on all scales and in many realms of society. Maybe architecture can’t fix the world, but maybe architects can.

Design Thinking - Daniel Newman