Innovate or Perish
New Technologies and Architecture's Future
by David Celento
Innovation is a development that people find useful or meaningful. To be
innovative, architects — and works of architecture themselves — must
become more responsive to their users and environments. In other words,
they must incorporate feedback from their physical and cultural contexts
rather than relying solely on conventional analytical or internal
processes of development . . . from design to construction.
— Ali Rahim, architect1
While a few “starchitects” are being showered with praise, the forecast
for many in the profession is partly to mostly cloudy. In 2005 only 2%
of architects in Britain were “very happy” with their jobs — scoring at
the bottom of thirty professions surveyed, and below civil servants.2
These sentiments are hardly limited to Britain, as Dana Cuff illustrates
in her Architecture: The Story of Practice. Many among the general ranks
of architecture are dismayed by the elusiveness of success and by their
diminishing impact.3 There are two primary reasons for these phenomena —
one cultural, the other methodological. Architects are among the very
few providing custom design services in a product-infatuated society.
This presents a profound problem, especially since few clients possess
an understanding of the efforts necessary to create custom products, and
even fewer are willing to adequately finance them. Second, while
emerging digital technologies offer architects radically new
possibilities for designing and building, current architectural
speculation remains largely confined to timid evolutionary steps. Many
in the profession are finding it difficult to leave behind the security
blanket of past working traditions, while a few are simply choosing to
pull it resolutely over their heads.
Architects’ refusal to embrace technological innovations invites their
extinction. Less hidebound professions are ruthlessly shoving their way
onto the turf once the sole domain of architects. The capabilities now
provided by furniture system designers, sustainability consultants,
construction managers, and engineers of all stripes have become so
advanced that Martin Simpson of Arup Associates suggests that architects
may eventually become unnecessary — except, perhaps, as exterior
stylists.4 To avoid obsolescence, architects need to increase demand for
their skills by embracing emerging technologies that both stimulate and
satiate consumer desires. For savvy architects with a dash of fortitude,
revolutionary opportunities for creating enhanced predictability,
complexity, branding, feedback, and economies of scale glimmer on the
horizon.
In this essay I will focus on the potentials of new design and building
technologies, centering my comments on improving architecture’s
marketplace success. I invite speculation about the profound impact
these technologies will have on designers’ aesthetic, political, and
social powers, which I will not address here.
cont'd....
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm//current/26_Celento.html