Between Fortune and Virtue

“Architects should not be consigned to only problem-solving after the fact . . . We tend to be narrow in the scope of our thinking and underestimate our natural capacity to be subversive leaders and teachers.”

– Samuel Mockbee, The Rural Studio

One of the biggest things that I have struggled with in my architectural education is (not to be dramatic) the crushing of my dreams. Every high school student that enters the field of architecture has the idea that they will be doing effective work that will make the world a better place. In reality, 99 percent of us go on to work in the capitalist industry that values money over all else. Inspiring social change through architecture just seems to be a happy story that we read about sometimes, not something that any of us actually end up doing. In school we read about theory and responsible design, but the “real world” that we end up working in for the rest of our lives is so disconnected from the original values that we had at the beginning of our studies.

Samuel Mockbee is an exception, one of the 1% that actually addresses the issues that every architect has to face at some point in their career. He acts as a servant for humanity to make a better world and his work has the ultimate goal of inspiring community, stimulating the status quo, and making responsible environmental and social structural changes. Mockbee writes “People and place matter. Architecture is a continually developing profession now under the influence of a consumer-driven culture,” and he challenges us to assert our own values–perhaps the ones that we lost along the way–that respect the greater good. As a person who grew up in a rural environment, I have a great respect and appreciation for designers like Samuel Mockbee, and it is encouraging that we share many of the same values.

Even though this is just a minor blog post that almost nobody will ever read, I’d like this blog entry to stand as a reminder to myself to not lose sight of the values I had since the very beginning of my journey into architecture.