Designing Ivory Towers

 

Margaret Crawford’s everyday urbanism deeply underlines the importance that architects flee their ivory towers and live amongst the cities and people in which we seek to design. The cardinal sin of the modernists was this very flaw, they saw themselves as saviors of an era of citizens which they had very little link to, for the most part. It took the Philosophers of the 60’s such as Guy Debord to upend this notion and return the idea of urbanism to the people who inhabit it. 

The beautiful thing about architecture is that, as much time as you spend with your head in the clouds, you have no choice but to come back to earth in order to make your dreams a reality, this works to ground the lofty ideas that we often portray. If we as architects hope to make meaningful change to the built environment, it is virtually impossible if we are not connected to the very issues we hope to address. Get outside of your comfort zone, go places you do not usually go, talk to some people you don’t usually talk to, in my opinion this is as important as anything in architectural education.