new territories and the death of the architect: a Manifesto

Joseph Brookover

The world is entangled in complex sets of relationships and nothing is what it seems. Design disciplines are facing a tumultuous period in which the complexity and scale of global urbanization processes has moved beyond individual expertise. The period in which the designer was capable of giving a “full” truth is now over. New generations of designers are not just expected to collaborate among disciplines but also to synthesize multiple areas of expertise as agents of the design process. We are the orchestrators for a society who demand designers, politicians, and government agencies take responsibility for their decisions in a transparent and equitable manner - our client is the public-realm.

Our education at UVA is focused on designing for the public realm; the last few years has seen considerable focus by the school in a variety of urban issues society faces today. As aspiring architects, we have come to recognize a built environment that is increasingly created by the non-architect whom often reacts to short term market trends or prescribes buildings based on outdated policy. Architecture is commoditized in the process. This narrow response has little regard for the long term aspirations of societies or the new challenges of economic, social, and ecological sustainability we face in the 21st century. If architecture continues its trend towards service provider and becomes irrelevant in questioning the development of built environments at the urban scale, society will lose the ability to define its conditions of living.

To regain agency, to solve problems, architecture can take on a critical territory that theory and practice has long ignored, the territory of sprawl, or the “diffuse city”. Urbanity no longer stops at the city limits - our planet is urbanizing at an extreme rate with a range of densities, both diffuse and concentrated. New materials as a result of industrial production, coincided with a period of land use and policy experimentation, lead to the growth of the suburb and acceleration of sprawl in the post WWII era, following the natural tendency of most people to avoid dense living conditions. Decentralization and suburbanization are considered the quintessential American Dream; a social good manifest by the achievement of economic stability. Despite the best efforts of elites to dictate the pace of urban development and how people should live, efforts to control horizontal growth (sprawl) have often proven ineffective and do not directly address urgent issues of economy, society, ecology, and human occupation across expansive territories. We must move beyond ideas of “perfecting” or “redesigning” sprawl. We should no longer fight this development pattern but fully embrace it.

Today, new materials and tools are presenting themselves to architecture as a result of the digital revolution. These tools allow one to process vast amounts of data across a territory, the health of ecosystems, settlement patterns, economic viability, infrastructure systems, watersheds and food networks - the essential elements that have defined human living throughout time. We can begin grasp the inner workings of a large territory without losing focus on the people who inhabit it, the design potential is immense.

This is not a call for masterplans as typically understood but a new context that moves beyond the immediate physical aspects of the site. As orchestrators, architects traditionally bring together clients, constructions managers, contractors, and government agencies within a diverse political context to successfully propose a design and deliver a building. What occurs when architects apply their skills to a territorial scale? What happens when we bring together politicians, economists, ecologists, climatologists, anthropologists - architects, urban planners, landscape architects, and historians to design a more sustainable and adaptable pattern of living for the long term?

We are in the fading era of famous designers, the (capital ‘A’) Architects who dominated architecture at the turn of the century by mastering the globalized market economy, delivering the ultimate branding strategy based to corporations and a wealthy elite. Concurrently, the average architect has been relegated to a reduced role in decision-making and design processes through an embrace of specialization and risk-management. On dual fronts, architecture became subservient to commodified interests.

High-profile buildings push the boundaries of what was once thought possible in architecture. Changing laws and roles support a new marketplace that demands cost-effective speed and clarity of responsibility. But is this what the architect should be? Detached spacial sorcerer, deliberate risk-manager or subservient service provider—insurer of buildings built instead of ensurer of a built environment that sustains society for the long term? Who is left to serve the commons?

In a time of continual crisis, society cannot rely on commercialization or perfecting existing systems to find solutions; around the world, 20th century institutions are fracturing, failing to adapt to challenges of constant change. New political, economic, environmental, and societal relations are needed—at its heart, society needs to address how it lives. That reality directly shapes societal values and institutions—the responsibility of the architect, the built environment and the public realm are critical components in determining how we live.

architects can visual potential futures and find opportunity in complex multi-scalar systems to both imagine and communicate the compositions of our spatial realities. Through leveraging human and ecologic epistomologies through the collaboration with multiple expertise’s architects can make positive impacts in society, but decision-making power does not lie in our domain and we must endeavor to engage with decision-makers at all levels to prepare populations for inevitable change and championing alternative futures.

We rebel against the idea of the Architect as the single-minded genius who designs perfect objects of consumer art. We rebel against the specialization of the Architect who serves forces of commodification. We hope this era is the death of the Architect.

A version of this article was previously published in the September, 2016 edition of  C-Ville Magazine.