The Design Process' Public
"The term has been applied to figures ranging from head-bricklayer to God... it has trapped them between the frustrating suspicion of not achieving the minimum and the exalted vanity of arriving at the maximum." -De Carlo
The question of the right amount of power for an architect to exhibit during a project seems to depend on the level you trust the other people in the process. The process of consultants, engineers, architects, and developers that has become the norm of builds today provides a microcosm of the public input process that De Carlo and others talk about. Architects are not omnipresent building making gods. We receive input from a host of people with other priorities that may or may not be best for the project. Evaluating what is good, what is bad, and what you just have to live with, is the ob of the architect. The common snarky comment that all engineers can't consider design, not true, implies that all architects are perfect, absolutely not true.
From this, architects need to, and are beginning to, include the users and the public in this back-and-forth process. Like with consultants, this does not mean that everything the public requests is a critical thing, or even a good idea. But the input adds another large of information that will make for a richer project.
FUN FACT:
I worked at a firm that was accused of "Colluding with the Russians" by an angry old man during a county council meeting. (This is an example of unimportant public input)
The question of the right amount of power for an architect to exhibit during a project seems to depend on the level you trust the other people in the process. The process of consultants, engineers, architects, and developers that has become the norm of builds today provides a microcosm of the public input process that De Carlo and others talk about. Architects are not omnipresent building making gods. We receive input from a host of people with other priorities that may or may not be best for the project. Evaluating what is good, what is bad, and what you just have to live with, is the ob of the architect. The common snarky comment that all engineers can't consider design, not true, implies that all architects are perfect, absolutely not true.
From this, architects need to, and are beginning to, include the users and the public in this back-and-forth process. Like with consultants, this does not mean that everything the public requests is a critical thing, or even a good idea. But the input adds another large of information that will make for a richer project.
FUN FACT:
I worked at a firm that was accused of "Colluding with the Russians" by an angry old man during a county council meeting. (This is an example of unimportant public input)
Great post. Totally agree. As important as public input is, not all public input is critical or even an good idea. I think this is the main challenge for us as architects. Deciding what is relevant and what is not that influences the design. It is hard because some times we are not even in charge on making that decision. A.K.A. some BAR's do it for us so that public input because tricky and politicized. My questions is how do we manage that?
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