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.
You make a great point about architects and their ivory towers. I think being present in a design is integral to its success. How can you ever design a space for someone if you can't at least imagine yourself in their shoes. I also think it's just as important to conduct post construction analysis on places and really understand what's successful and what's not so successful after a building has had time for people to really experience it. To continue learning about the very issues we design to fix.
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