Holistic Designers or just architects?

Holistic design is a term that is continually kicked around professional and academic circles as an idealistic approach to better design.    For example, if we could be more collaborative with urban planners, landscape designers, developers, local government, and local residents then our architecture would be more relevant and appropriate.  In architectural education we are emphasizing collaboration as the key to a better education that is more representative of real-world dynamics.  It is thought that interconnectedness and collaboration will save the day.  It is an idea we are expected to embrace and is viewed as the solution to many problems, including sustainable architecture.

Moshen Mostafavi presents ecological urbanism as a holistic approach to the design and management of cities.  He challenges the myopic nature of current sustainability practices in architecture where the concern for sustainability fails to expand beyond a singular project toward a more regional approach.  Mostafavi views ecological sustainability as an “opportunity for speculative design innovations rather than as a form of technical legitimation for promoting conventional solutions.”  In other words, he argues for a new approach to urbanism that mediates between the opposing forces of a healthy ecological system and urbanism that hopes to produce new innovations in sustainable urbanization through the lens of ecology.

Throughout his essay, Mostafavi rails on the limits of our knowledge as designers and challenges us to be more inclusive and expansive in our work.  He promotes interaction over separation, density over isolation, a blending of design and planning disciplines, and ultimately argues that a “transdisciplinary approach of ecological urbanism gives designers a potentially more fertile means of addressing the challenges facing the urban environment.”

Holistic design sounds like a great idea but can feel very overwhelming.  As architects, are we really expected to be landscape designers, urban designers, planners, political activists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and now ecologists?  We are moving away from specialization towards the blurry homogenous group of “design thinkers”.  Design thinking is now taught in many business schools and is a hot topic in the business world.  The fail fast, fail early, iterative process of idea > prototype > evaluate is now a method that can be used to solve any problem.

When it comes down to it, we are professional tradesmen.  We offer a skill that others cannot provide – why else does the world need good architects? The idea that we are master creators of renaissance proportion is deluded and pompous.  God is not dead and we are not gods.  We should most certainly be conscious of our surroundings on many levels, but at the end of the day we are still just architects.