Lunch & Learn
Anyone who has worked in an office has at one point or another been subjected to a “lunch and learn” where a rep for an architectural product manufacturer gives a presentation on an AIA approved topic while plugging their company’s product. These are great for a lot of reasons, they provide AIA continuing education hours, connect you with experts in the industry, and expose you to new products you may not be aware of, however at same time they can reduce architecture to selections from a catalog.
“It also implies a battle of competences between what was historically the “solo voice” of the architect and the increasingly noisy “chorus” of experts, encouraged by companies and manufacturers of environmental technology” – Inaki Abalos
As Abalos suggests there is a very noisy chorus of experts that permeates the industry, but we can’t allow these voices to define us, but merely guide us. We have to be the arbiters of the built environment and remember just because something is mass-produced and corporatized it is not the end all be all of an architectural product.
I like your notion that the industry standard should be a guiding one, not a defining one. In the age of globalization it's very easy to choose products in a vacuum to slap onto our building. I agree that we should strive to be more than that and continue to innovate on what's best for our buildings on case by case basis, continuing to learn from and adapt to our different environmental situations and cultures.
ReplyDelete