Cities and Survival

This book marks a watershed in our thinking about cities. Other books have dealt with the relationship of nature and the city and the connection between landscape architecture and urbanism. But I know of no other that weaves together ecology, anthropology, urban design, and social activism with anywhere near the complexity and nuance of the essays in this book, while looking at cities across the globe, ranging from the wealthiest communities of Silicon Valley or in the Roppongi district of Tokyo to some of the poorest slums on the planet in cities like Nairobi or Mumbai. The editors call this “now urbanism,” defining it as a “critical and complex practice that is simultaneously local, regional, and global” and that “views city making as grounded in the imperfect, messy, yet rich reality of the present city and the everyday purposeful agency of its dwellers.”

I also think it will be how we think about urbanism from now on. I say that, in part, because “now urbanism” reflects a much larger shift going on in human civilization that will have an enormous effect on life in both the developed and developing world. That shift involves moving away from the mechanistic, hierarchical view of reality that arose during the Enlightenment and that prevailed through much of the 20^th century and moving toward an ecological, networked view of reality, in which the “web” has become not just a place to seek or send information, but also a metaphor for how we now see ourselves and the world around us.

We no longer envision the brain, for example, as a giant computer but instead as a neural network, we no longer see organizations as well-oiled machines but rather as social networks, and we no longer describe the natural world as a competitive struggle for survival but now as an integrated web of life. In an intellectual context in which ecology has become the new reality, it makes perfect sense to see cities the same way. As the authors here demonstrate to great effect, an ecological urbanism opens up all kinds of new possibilities and enables us to see things in completely new ways.

Ecology of Cities

In the older, hierarchical, mechanistic worldview, for example, officials either ignored slums at the bottom of the economic pyramid or wanted to eradicate them as some sort of urban malfunctioning. The newer, networked, ecological worldview turns that thinking on its head. We now see informal settlements, as KDI puts it, “not as catchments of waste and poverty, but as spaces of renewal, entrepreneurship, and activism – as well as critical components in the reshaping cities.”

As many of the chapters in this book make clear, we have a tremendous amount to gain from the ingenuity, resilience, and determination of the residents of these settlements, and a terrific asset to work with, given the rich networks of human and social capital that these communities have to offer. Rather than ignore or eradicate slums, we need to go to them, learn from them, and work with their residents not only to improve the lives of the people living there, but also to draw from them strategies that we will need to apply in cities everywhere, increasingly faced with what slum dwellers have long figured out: how to do more with less, often much less.

Systems of Survival

As such, cities have become about survival, not just the survival of individuals and families trying to improve their lives, but also the survival of whole districts in the city and of cities and regions themselves, trying to meet the growing demands on urban budgets and infrastructure with shrinking tax revenues and resources. The old hierarchical, mechanistic way of running cities has, at least in part, created this condition. When those at the top of a hierarchy think they have the answers and when they believe that a city should work as if it were a machine, too much of the good will of the people of a place goes unused and too many of the best ideas of the residents of a city get overlooked. Likewise, when we see cities and the various groups within them engaged in a competitive struggle, we fail to see the myriad cooperative and mutually reinforcing relationships that actually exist there.

“Now urbanism” completely reframes that situation. From this perspective, cities do not have deficits, but incredible abundance, with far more capital – human capital, social capital, and natural capital - than they have yet to figure out how to tap. And survival does not involve a ruthless struggle among the fittest, but a creative, entrepreneurial opportunity of reinterpreting, reimagining, and repurposing almost anything and everything. In a web-like world, cities thrive according to how well they help their residents build and sustain their networks of relationships, which requires not a lot of money, but a great deal of sensitivity to the wealth that these human interactions create and a willingness to get obstacles to that wealth formation out of the way.

Panarchy Predictions

Cities also hold the key to our survival as a species. That may sound like an odd statement, given our dominance over most other species and the apparent invincibility that our technology has provided us. But as we know from ecology, the very moment one species in an ecosystem becomes so pervasive, it also becomes extremely vulnerable: an idea explored in the work of the ecologists Lance Gunderson and Buzz Holling. (Gunderson, Holling, 2002) Their theory of “panarchy” recognizes that ecosystems become susceptible to collapse when one species becomes too dominant, efficient, and reliant on other species – as humans have become on this planet.

That makes the question of how we organize and operate cities – the most complex human ecosystems – so crucially important. If we continue to conceive of cities as highly efficient, interconnected, resource-intensive systems and design and operate them as we have in the past hundred years, we will only push ourselves more rapidly to a collapse of the human ecosystem, as panarchy predicts. If we follow the pathways laid out in this book, however, we can begin to move in a very different and less vulnerable direction. This involves, as Ben Spencer, Susan Bolton, Jorge Alarcon et al. write, an “’emergent’ or ‘bottom up’ design … of small scale, low cost, ecologically responsive interventions in community infrastructure,” and it entails, as the book’s editors say in the introduction, “selecting those interventions that suggest a path towards increased health of coupled human and natural environments.”

Urban Scaling Laws

This incremental, accessible, sustainable, and participatory approach to city building also shows why scale matters. If our dominance as a species threatens our viability, then breaking down the scale of what we do has not only practical value, but also real survival value. That relates to the work of Geoffrey West and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, which Jon Christensen discusses in his chapter. (West, 1999) The biophysicists there have discovered a universal scaling law in nature in which the metabolism or energy used by an organism equals its mass to the ¾ power (E=M^3/4). This holds true for all plants and animals, with one exception as I will get to in a moment. And the ¾ power means that organisms are “sublinear,” realizing a roughly 15% increase in efficiency as they increase in size.

As West’s colleague Luis Bettencourt has also argued, and as Christensen notes in his chapter, cities achieve these same efficiencies of scale as they grow larger, using less energy and their infrastructure more efficiently. But they also have a “superlinear” tendency to speed up the pace of life and the rate of innovation as they grow in size, which counters the tendency of large organisms to slow down as size increases. (Bettencourt, 2013) This also leads to an increasing rate of negative effects like crime, pollution, and disease, which makes it essential – especially in an era of growing megacities – that we design the metropolis in ways that minimize such undesirable impacts. To do that, we need to engage the talents of everyone including the poorest residents of a city, use the environmental services of a region as effectively as possible, and put in place as much green infrastructure as we can. In doing so, we can not only reduce crime, pollution and disease, but also improve the lives of people, the habitat of other species, and the quality of life of every urban resident in the process.

Human Outliers

This will also require, though, an adjustment in how we define quality of life. As West has observed, the universal scaling law of nature has one outlier: us. Because of technology, human beings now have the metabolism or energy use equivalent to that of a blue whale. (Lehrer, 2010) When we consider a world made up of over 7 billion blue whales – over 7 billion of us – no wonder we have stressed the planet’s ecosystems, affected its climate, and over-consumed its resources. This makes the study of informal settlements of the sort we have seen in this book doubly important. We need to understand how people can lead the lives with so little not only for humanitarian reasons, but also because we will all need to learn how to do this – either by choice in order to avert a collapse or by necessity if or when the collapse occurs.

Cities, then, represent a survival strategy for our species. But that strategy will work only if we maximize the involvement, ingenuity, and imagination of absolutely everyone in the city, since we never know who will have the best idea, the most creative insight, or the most ingenious solution to the challenges we face. Which, in turn, makes poverty something we can no longer afford. Every person who does not have an opportunity to realize their potential reduces the opportunity of all of us to achieve the kind of innovation that can mean the difference between our surviving or not. The stakes are that high.

Urban Futures

This recalibration of what constitutes a good life would be hard enough without our also having to deal with two of the most momentous and unprecedented changes that our species has ever faced. The first involves dramatic demographic change: the rapid rise in the number of people now on the planet, having increased from 2 billion to over 7 billion people over the span of a single human lifetime, and the equally rapid rise in the number of people now living in cities. As Chelina Odbert and Joseph Mulligan state at the start of their chapter, “For the first time in history more people are living in cities than in rural areas. By 2050, it is expected that 70 percent of the world’s population will be urban.”

The second monumental shift we face involves climate change and related effects on the natural environment. As Denise Hoffman Brandt observes in her essay, there exist both “gradual effects of climate change (sea level rise, increased precipitation, higher temperature averages) and “extreme events” (storm surge, heavy downpour, heat wave, and high winds).” These have all happened with greater frequency and force than even many in the scientific community anticipated. And all of them will disrupt the “envelope of regularity,” as William Morrish puts it, “the safe and supporting urban landscapes” we seek to create for ourselves even as “our acts have produced a wilder and unpredictable nature throwing past environmental rhythms out of sync.”

Avoiding Extinction

How we deal with the intersection of those two trends – our rapidly growing and urbanizing human population with our rapidly changing and destabilizing climate – will determine whether we survive as a species or whether we join the myriad other species facing what Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin call the planet’s “sixth extinction” event because of our fragmentation of their habitat and our disruption of the ecosystems that they depend on. (Leakey, Lewin, 1996) We should not discount the possibility – nor ignore the paradox – of our succumbing to the very things that we have brought on others. Few species rely on so many other species as we do to meet our needs and the more we undercut their viability, the more we threaten ourselves.

The survival of the human species may seem like so remote a possibility or an event so far off into the future that most people might not think it worth worrying about. After all, we live in an era of “urban triumphalism” as Jon Christensen so succinctly describes – and so ably debunks – in his chapter. And we have at our disposal an unbelievable level of technological prowess. As William Morrish observes in his essay, “As a society, we’re producing and capturing more data each day than was seen by everyone since civilization began.” But the very urbanity and technology that insulates us from the threats to our existence also ironically create the conditions most likely to bring us down.

Our Viral Predators

As I have argued elsewhere (Fisher, 2013), the most immediate threat lies not in climate change per se, whose effects, however severe, will remain relatively gradual in their overall impact on humanity. The real threat comes in our having created the most efficient disease transfer technology ever devised: transcontinental jet airplanes. A virulent influenza pandemic of the sort that epidemiologist Michael Osterholm sees as “immanent” – or worse, a hemorrhagic fever of the sort that we have no immunity against or ability to stop – can now quickly move around the globe, infecting people before they know it in a rapidly spreading infection that may ultimately affect every human being. (Osterholm, 2005)

The Vulnerability of Cities

The prospect of such a pandemic relates to this book in several ways. First, it seems likely that the deadliest viruses will arise because of poor sanitation and the ease of disease transfer from animals to human in one of the world’s informal settlements. As Ben Spencer, Susan Bolton, Jorge Alarcon and their colleagues note, “An estimated 863 million people, approximately 1 out of every 3 people in the cities of the developing world, live in informal urban settlements ... By the year 2050, this number could reach 3 billion, more than a third of the world’s total population,” and as those numbers increase, so do the chances of a zoonotic disease developing and spreading.

            Second, the pandemic will travel to cities first; the larger the city and the busier its airport, the sooner it will arrive there and the earlier the infection, when we have the least capacity to fight the disease. At the same time, it will likely strike the wealthiest populations – those who travel more than the poor – first, countering the illusion of those in the developed world who may think that they have the means to protect themselves from any such illness. “In the event of a major pandemic,” writes Dr. Grattan Woodson, “healthcare services and especially hospital services will be rapidly overwhelmed. It is likely that the healthcare system will be the first societal institution to collapse.” (Woodson, 2005)

The Self-interest in Slum Improvement

Third, the best way to stop a pandemic involves arresting it at its source and slowing its spread, all of which plays to the themes taken up in this book. We greatly reduce our chances of a new zoonotic disease arising by improving the living conditions and sanitary systems of the world’s poor. Several essays here make that point in various ways, ranging from the idea of the Venezuelan Urban-Think Tank to divert the money spent on space travel for the improvement of informal settlements to the efforts of Spencer, Bolton, Alarcon, et al. in developing “small scale, low cost, ecologically responsive … infrastructure” in a Peruvian favela, to the work of KDI in engaging multiple stakeholders in participatory, multi-sector efforts to create networks of public spaces in a Nairobi slum. Given the danger that the diseases bred in these informal settlements present to the entire human population, the cost of upgrading global slums seems minor compared to the likelihood that those who have the most to invest will also be among the first to pay the price in not doing so.

Deep Engagement in Places

The other factor in reducing the possibility of a global pandemic comes from limiting or at least slowing the mobility of those who would travel from one part of the world to another. Here, the analogy of cities as ecosystems, which appears in several chapters, has particular importance. Judith Stilgenbauer writes about the landscape ecologist Richard Forman, who views “the landscape as a mosaic consisting of a matrix, patches (as the basic units that evolve and fluctuate), and corridors forming networks.” That idea of a landscape composed of a mosaic of patches and corridors, when applied to urban form, results in a very different kind of city than the highly vulnerable, globally connected, and environmentally unsustainable metropolises we have built over the last century. The remarkable localism of so much of the work discussed in this book makes that clear. When we conceive of cities as mosaics of ecosystem patches, then urban life and professional practice involves not recklessly jet-setting around the world, carrying invasive species and infectious viruses with us, but instead engaging deeply and over the long term in particular communities, as several authors in this book have described in places as diverse as Lima, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Tijuana.

Moving Bytes, Not Bodies

William Morrish also highlights the flip side to this localism: the global digital revolution and the “Internet of Things” that link us instantaneously around the world. Too often the digital revolution gets viewed, wrongly, as irrelevant or even hostile to the needs of impoverished communities, as something controlled by and mainly available to global elites. While true on the face of it, this waste stream of information also has the potential, as Morrish recognizes, to provide an “open “know-how” platform of collective trust to help citizens build and maintain a civil society and sustainable city.” It also suggests a future in which we will stop moving bodies so frequently and so rapidly around the world – threatening all of us in the process – and instead will increasingly move digital bytes of data that can empower people in their local communities with the information that they need to have agency over their lives and that we all need if we are to fully leverage the human capital we need to innovate our way out of the demographic and environmental double whammy we face as a species. (Fisher, 2014)

Survival Through Cities

Cities have long served as places of opportunity and the rapid urbanization going on around the world testifies to that. As Spencer, Bolton, Alarcon et al summarize, “since World War II, political and financial capital has concentrated in cities … At the same time, lack of investment in rural areas, the industrialization of agriculture and the commodification of land in the service of corporate interests have eroded rural livelihoods. Faced with few opportunities in rural settings and drawn by the promise of a better life in the city, more than 70 million immigrants relocate to cities each year. More often than not, their hardships continue unabated when they arrive.” That promise of a better life, though, clearly trumps the hardships that continue, since people keep flooding into cities globally.

Living Off the Waste Stream

The lure of the waste stream that Morrish writes about in all of its variety has a lot to do with the sense of so many people that, whatever their challenges, cities still offer a better chance of surviving and eventually thriving. As the journalist Katherine Boo conveys so powerfully in her book about the Annawadi slum near the Mumbai airport (Boo, 2012), scavenging, recycling, repurposing, and disposing of the enormous waste stream of products, materials, and resources in the city represents opportunities that rural people rarely have, and so urbanization feeds on itself. The more people in a city, the more waste, and the more waste, the more people move to the city. As Morrish says, quoting William McDonough, “waste = food,” which remains almost literally true in the case of the residents of many informal settlements. They have a better chance at feeding themselves and their families by living off the waste stream than by trying to grow their food themselves.

In this sense, the human ecosystem operates no differently than any other. As one of the only species that generates waste that ends up not as food for others, but as garbage in landfills, we have a lot to learn from the more advanced species we share the planet with that have long established a balance among predator, prey, and scavenger. We may think of ourselves as predators, but before we become some viruses’ prey, we need to greatly increase our scavenging. The residents of informal settlements understand what a scavenging economy entails and the ingenuity it involves.

The Economy of Cities

A scavenging economy may also help us address the paradox of value that Adam Smith put at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations and that capitalism has yet to resolve. Smith asked why we value diamonds that have no use and don’t value water without which we cannot live. A moral philosopher by training, Smith thought that the invisible hand of the marketplace would solve that paradox by enabling people to do well financially and do good ethically – and environmentally – at the same time. This has not yet happened. We still over-value diamonds and under-value water to the point where large segments of the human population do not have ready access to clean water, something that, as we have seen, jeopardizes us all because of its pandemic threat.

To resolve the paradox of value, we will need to rethink – or rather finally achieve what Smith had in mind with – capitalism and begin to treasure the things essential to life – clean air, fresh water, diverse species, the human imagination – and price out of reach everything that threatens our survivability – pollution, poverty, and predatory behavior of all kinds. This will, in turn, require an inversion of social mores in which status accrues to those who need and consume the least rather than, as today, the other way around. We will one day – and soon, I hope – admire the residents of informal settlements for this reason, for we ignore them at our own peril.

The Third Industrial Revolution

In many ways, the global economy has begun to move in this direction, in what the economist Jeremy Rifkin has called “the third industrial revolution.” (Rifkin, 2011) This revolution represents a shift away from the mass production and consumption that characterized the second industrial revolution, ushered in by the assembly line process, and toward an economy based on mass customization and micro-production, enabled by mobile digital devices and “big data.”

As Rifkin describes this third industrial revolution, it sounds remarkably similar to the vision of the future laid out in this book. He sees the world’s economy moving from the “top-down organization of society … to distributed and collaborative relationships,” from “fossil-fueled” industry to a “green industrial era,” and from “hierarchical power” to “lateral power.” At the same time, this third revolution undermines the old hierarchical, capital intensive, and resource demanding production methods of the second one by empowering ordinary people with extremely low cost production methods, as Gundula Proksch mentions in her chapter.

The Informal Economy

This also alters our perception of informal economies, which as a couple authors note in their chapters, have become a major percentage of the economic activity in many countries, as much as 40% of the annual output in developing countries. Economists have tended to see this as a transitional phase as these countries become more developed and presumably move toward a larger formal economy. (Elgin, 2012) But Rifkin’s assessment of where the global economy is heading suggests that informal economic activity might grow not just in developing countries, but in the developed world as well, as design and production go virtual and increasingly happen anywhere and anytime by almost anyone.

            Here, too, the study of informal settlements and human ecosystems has much to offer. On one hand, everyone with a cell phone now has access to a vast, global market, making it possible for people to overcome the limits on their activities that impoverished places have placed upon them. On the other hand, the virtual, fluid nature of living, working, and making things in the third industrial revolution makes place, paradoxically, an ever more important concept. Innovation will increasingly depend upon our maximizing the interactions among diverse people and human activities, making dense, mixed-use, and mixed-income neighborhoods of the sort discussed in this book vital to economic development.

Place-based Thinking

This paradox of place becoming increasingly important in a placeless economy suggests another transition key to our thriving in the future. With the waning of hierarchical, mechanistic ways of thinking and of the capital- and resource-intensive methods of the second industrial revolution will come a change in how we understand and sort our knowledge about the world. We continue to convey information in linear ways, in the form of books and e-books; to teach it according to disciplines; and to store it in libraries – real and virtual – by sequential number and lettering systems on shelves.

Whatever advantages this has had in order for us to command and control the world around us, this way of storing and accessing knowledge has also enabled us to damage the world and ultimately to harm ourselves because we don’t organize our understanding of the world as it is organized: by place. We see the world topically and sequentially, while it occurs spatially and temporally. This suggests that a tool essential to landscape architecture and urban design - geographical information systems – will eventually become a major way – perhaps the dominant way – in which we will access information in the future. Because GIS layers information spatially, linking data to a given place, it allows us not only to “map” the world, but also to see the world as it actually exists, as Morrish, Proksch, and other authors in this book suggest.

Spatializing Knowledge

This mapping of our knowledge about the world also reinforces the social and economic changes mentioned above. Data-rich maps provide a visual way of conveying information across the barriers of language and to the growing percentage of the human population that remains illiterate. The book divides the literate and illiterate and, as such, has helped reinforce the power of the former over the latter. The digital divide threatens that as well, with the wealthier parts of the world having much more access to information than the poorer parts.

The web and cloud computing may help end that division by making most of what we need to know available at low cost, with “dumb” devices able to access information anywhere in the world. But there remains the problem of literacy as well translation, and so closing the digital divide through such devices will only partly close the gap that exists between those who have access to knowledge and those who don’t.

Geo-designing the Future

Which leads to a final point. The temporalizing of knowledge has, through the agency of history, helped us understand the past and possibly comprehend how the present came to be, but rarely do we venture very far into the future. We call that science fiction or fantasy in order to set such future-oriented thinking apart from what we can reliably know about the world as it is or as it once was. And we tend to see such work as somehow of lesser quality or validity than what the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

But spatial understanding has a different relationship to the future, as well as the past and present. Spatial knowledge recognizes place, rather than time, as the ultimate continuity in our lives. And while none of us can see the future as a temporal idea, we continually imagine the future of places, projecting possible spatial arrangements based on what we see around us. The design disciplines do this all the time, using spatial means to imagine what could be, envisioning the future of a place, product, or environment, and depicting that visually for others to see.  

And in that regard, “geodesign,” which uses of GIS as the basis of making decisions, may well become a key feature of how we empower communities and build our cities in more sustainable, equitable – and indeed, survivable – ways in the future. Rather than see future-oriented thinking as somehow fiction or fantasy, geodesign allows us to connect what we know about the world with what we want the world to be – not just “now urbanism” but the urbanism that comes next.

Notes

Bettencourt, Luis. (2013) “The Origins of Scaling in Cities.” Science. Washington D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Vol 340.

Boo, Katherine. (2012) Behind the Beautiful Forevers. New York: Random House

Elgin, Ceyhun and Oztunali, Oguz. (2012) “Shadow Economies All Around the World: Model-based Estimates,” Vox, Centre for Economic Policy Research. May 10.

Fisher, Thomas. (2013) Designing to Avoid Disaster: The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design.  New York: Routledge.

Fisher, Thomas. (2014) “Architecture in the Third Industrial Revolution” Architect. Washington D.C.: Hanley Wood.

Gunderson, Lance and Holling, C. Panarchy, Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Leakey, Richard and Lewin, Roger. (1996) The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind. New York: Anchor Books.

Osterholm, Michael. (2005) “Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” Foreign Affairs. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. July/August.

Rifkin, Jeremy. (2011) The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

West, Geoffrey. (1999) “The Origin of Universal Scaling Laws in Biology,” Physica A, vol. 263, p. 104-113.

Lehrer, Jonah. (2010) “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times Magazine, December 17.^.

Woodson, Grattan. (2005) “Preparing for the Coming Influenza Pandemic,” The Druid Oaks Health Center, Decatur, Georgia: www.DruidOHC.com.

(Afterword in the book Now Urbanism, The Future City is Here, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Benjamin Spencer, Thaisa Way, and Ken Yocom, and published by Routledge in 2015)

Architecture as a Filter

What does it mean to talk about architecture as a filter? And what does this analogy tell us about the four buildings in this book and also about architecture and analogies more generally? The writer Robert Grudin has observed that creative ideas do not come out of nowhere fully formed, like the proverbial light bulb going off. Instead, we use analogies to compare something new with something we already know, creating what does not yet exist on a foundation of what does. While the number of possible comparisons remains almost infinite, Grudin argues that analogies fall into two categories: intradisciplinary analogies, which are drawn from the same field, and interdisciplinary ones, drawn from another field.¹

            We judge an analogy by how well it enables us achieve something new. So how has the analogy of a filter informed the four buildings here? These buildings stand in very different locations—Istanbul, Noida (near New Delhi), Riyadh, and New York City—and so FXFOWLE has had to filter a lot of information about context, climate, and culture. But probing a little deeper, we can see how the person and the place affect the application of an analogy. Senior partner Dan Kaplan led the design of two of the buildings; senior partner Sudhir Jambhekar, the other two. When working in cultures each of them knows well—the United States and India, respectively—the approach to the design was more intradisciplinary.

            In Greater Noida Housing, Jambhekar alludes to the architecture of Louis Kahn, the mid-twentieth-century American architect who worked in India and who influenced many practitioners there. The mix of concrete shear walls and infill housing units at Noida recalls Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, and the offset forms and fin walls that extend above the top floors echo the animated skyline of Kahn’s Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia. Jambhekar filtered Kahn’s ideas in response to a different program and place—middle-class housing in the hot Indian climate—but the intradisciplinary influence of Kahn’s work on this new and imaginative residential development is undeniable.

            Kaplan’s design for Eleven Times Square in New York also refers to other architecture. The illuminated base of the building evokes the brightly lit signage covering the facades of buildings along Forty-second Street and nearby Times Square. Meanwhile, the outwardly canted glass tower that rises from that base and angles toward the corner exaggerates the looming quality of Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers and also channels the playful, fantasylike aspects of other buildings in New York’s theater district. In both cases, the architects’ deep knowledge of the culture and context in which they worked has made them more comfortable in drawing connections to their experience of a place. Familiarity and intradisciplinary analogies go hand in hand.

         The other two buildings in this book show interdisciplinarity at work. Kaplan’s Renaissance Tower in Istanbul has a pointed top, like the many prayer towers in that predominantly Muslim city. But the building’s folded and faceted form also looks like an enormous body cloaked in the full-length, long-sleeved clothing of many Muslim men and women; this nearly complete cover is worn for reasons both religious and climatic. Kaplan's reference to Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss, with its angular couple wrapped in an enveloping robe, reflects his thinking about the building in terms of the body, while showing the influence that abstract Islamic ornament has had on modern, Western art. Aspects of foreign cultures filter through the work of creative people, sometimes consciously and sometimes not.

            The same interdisciplinary approach occurs in Jambhekar’s Museum of the Built Environment in Riyadh. Here, the filter analogy seems almost literal: the building sifts people as they move through the structure horizontally via skyways and a monorail and vertically to shops, restaurants, offices, and museum. Internal and external circulation patterns are likewise split by the building as it bridges over a wadi, a recessed open space that runs under the structure as part of a continuous pedestrian path. While the traditional masonry architecture of Saudi Arabia influenced Jambhekar’s design the museum also recalls something quite different: its shimmering, glass skin of triangular scales and its bent form, uplifted at each end, evoke a giant fish about to swim off among the towers that will soon surround it. That fishlike form seems particularly appealing in a hot, dry country and especially appropriate in a peninsula nation surrounded by seas, but this design—like Renaissance Tower—also shows the increasingly cultural and biological nature of the analogies contemporary architects now draw.

            Ample reason for these new analogies exists. Modern architecture represented not just a formal and technological break from the past but also a profound shift in the analogies architects use when designing. Most premodern designers referred to traditional buildings in an intradisciplinary way, reinterpreting a classic or vernacular precedent while making incremental changes or improvements to it. With modernism, designers began, instead, to compare buildings to non-architectural phenomena—cars, ships, and planes. And after the brief counter-reformation of postmodernism, in which intradisciplinary analogies to older buildings came back in vogue, current architecture has largely embraced both approaches, with the same architects sometimes drawing analogies to other buildings and sometimes to other fields—especially, in recent years, to biology and ecology—when called for by culture and context. The better the architects, the better they are in filtering out the inappropriate and seizing upon the essential.

            Beyond helping to develop overall form, analogies serve to clarify internal arrangements and details of plans and sections, as evidenced in the buildings here. The idea of a filter seems particularly useful, since it refers both to devices that sort out different materials and to membranes that screen different liquids or gases. The Riyadh museum and the Noida housing work more like filtering devices. The museum functions, in section, like a giant sieve, directing the flow of people to diverse program elements by means of escalators, elevators, and ramps. The housing performs as a sieve in plan: ingeniously offset wings and open apartment plans allow for cross ventilation and views in multiple directions, enhancing the livability of each apartment. Both buildings recall a time when modern architecture had a greater permeability and porosity than it typically does now, with more interpenetrating spaces and operable exterior envelopes than building codes and mechanical systems allow today.

            At Eleven Times Square and Renaissance Tower, stacked floors and sealed walls make the buildings operate more like membranes. The New York building uses different kinds of glass, with varying degrees of reflectivity, to filter light, keep out heat, and minimize glare. The lobby, with its security desks and keycard gates, provides a different kind of filter, blocking unwarranted access and catching unwelcome intruders in its architectural sieve. The Istanbul tower does something similar. A gold-colored scrim, draped like a garment over the building’s envelope, enhances the filtering capabilities of the glass curtain wall by controlling solar gain yet also maintains exterior views and interior privacy. The building has two lobbies, with security gates and a long security desk controlling access to the elevators, and it has atriums and internal stairs on upper levels that allow people to move among floors without using the elevators.

            The power of an analogy lies in what it allows us to do and in what it says about what we have done, and in that regard, the idea of these four buildings acting like filters has served them well. The analogy has allowed their architects to sort through the myriad information and influences that surround every project and arrive at a distillation in four compelling and revealing works of architecture. The buildings draw interest not only because of the simplicity and clarity of thinking behind each one but also because of their memorable qualities, all driven by a strong, coherent analogy. In this way, these buildings also say a lot about what underlies the best design. Poor design usually arises either from a lack of ideas, all too common in the modern built environment, or from too many unresolved ideas, all too common in the work of inexperienced designers. Alternatively, good design—evident in the four buildings here—typically has a single broad and powerful idea or analogy that allows an architect to explore its possibilities and to play with its implications in diverse ways. In the end, all good design demands that we filter.

1. Robert Grudin, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1990), 27.

Introduction to the book Filter on the work of the architectural firm FX Fowle (ORO Editions, 2014)

Design, Labor and Talent in the New Economy

Roger Martin, the former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has argued in the New York Times that the global economy now has three main players: capital, “the owners and investors who provide the means of production;” labor, “the workers who turn invested capital into profits;” and talent, employees who are “highly skilled and portable.” [1] Martin wrote about the lockout of referees by the National Football League to make his point. The NFL owners viewed the referees as replaceable labor, but it turns out that, after some controversial calls by their replacements, that referees are more like the players, with irreplaceable talent in demand by the fans and the teams alike.

Martin’s insightful distinction goes far beyond football. It defines an important dividing line in the global economy between labor, which capital views as an easily replaceable commodity, and talent, which has become prized by capital for the value it creates and also resented because of its portability, which capital cannot control. This leads to the question that every employee needs to ask: how can I become irreplaceable talent rather than expendable labor?

The discipline of architecture provides a particularly useful lens through which to look at this question. On one hand, architects seem to stand clearly in the talent camp because of our creative skills, but on the other hand, capital views most – but not all – of the design community as replaceable labor, with the low fees, job insecurity, and depressed wages that stem from that. As a result, the architectural field reveals some important nuances in the distinction that Martin makes that can help illuminate how to move from the labor to the talent side of the ledger.

Star Talent

To understand those nuances, let’s imagine some different types of architects at the front line of this struggle between capital on one hand and labor and talent on the other. Star designers clearly stand at the talent end of the spectrum: highly skilled and highly in demand, they have greater leverage than most architects to command higher fees. That does not mean that they pay their staff higher wages, since many star architects seem to have highly inefficient operations, but that also shows how many of the owners of architecture firms can act like capitalists, seeking the lowest-cost labor from those who work for them.

Talent can have a limited shelf life and if architectural stars do not continually innovate in ways meaningful to capital, they can disappear from public view. That cycling of talent also reflects the fact that the value of something in a capitalistic economy often depends upon its scarcity, suggesting that only a relatively few architects can have star status at any one time. As Martin puts it, capital is “not amused” by having to pay a premium price for talent and so it will do all it can to keep the number of such people to a minimum. The media aids and abets this process by continually seeking out new stars and often ignoring talent past its prime, playing right into the hands of capital.

            The more talent can boost the profits of capital, the more leverage that person has in terms of compensation. In the design fields, those whose work leads to replicable results – graphic design, interactive design, product design – seem to have more leverage in terms of fees than those who do one-off projects, like architects or landscape architects, who even when famous often have to compete mightily for commissions. On the other hand, architectural talent seems more in demand among one-of-a-kind institutions, like museums and universities, whose value also lies in the scarcity of what they have to offer.

Still, some star architects, like Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid, have expanded their portfolio into product and furniture design, whose replicable results offer capital more potential profit. Indeed, the more star designers get defined as a brand rather than as members of particular discipline, the greater ability they have to diversify their offerings and the more leverage they have with owners and investors. And ironically, the more radical or daring the work of these designers, the more distinct their brand and the longer they can hold on to the slippery slopes at the top of the talent pinnacle.

Labor Becoming Talent

Too many young designers make the mistake of imitating the work of one of these stars, rather than understanding the nature of talent and seeking their own way. Becoming prized talent mainly involves innovating in a way that creates a new demand, meets an unaddressed need, attracts positive media attention, and increases the profits or at least the public profile of capital. You might think that capital would welcome such efforts, but it doesn’t make this easy. As Martin writes, “Capital is outraged because it is being beaten up by talent … and it takes out its anger on the easiest target: labor.”

So we have to earn the talent moniker in the face of capital that wants to treat us as much as possible like labor. Let’s see what this means on the ground. Consider the late-career architects, with higher wages and fewer computer skills, who have found themselves permanently out of a job; or the recent architecture-school graduates, unable to find a job with benefits and depending on a combination of freelance work and non-design employment to pay the bills; or the adjunct faculty members, cobbling together low-paid and often last-minute teaching assignments along with work in a firm or running a small practice on the side.

All of them have talent, but all of them find themselves treated, even by their professional peers, like low-wage, expendable laborers, with little leverage in the market and a great deal of job insecurity as a result. This raises other nuances in Martin’s capital-labor-talent distinction. Architectural firms will compete with each other for talented staff, even while treating others in their office like replaceable labor, and so there exists talent-labor struggles within offices having to do with the type of expertise or the nature of the talent. The more staff members can distinguish themselves in some way critical to the firm’s success, the more they will be able to compete as talent rather than as labor.

Architecture firms, of course, also compete with each other for commissions, and here, too, the talent-labor struggle ensues. Some commodity-oriented clients may not care about creativity or innovation from architects and may make their decision based solely on price, viewing their consultants as interchangeable labor. Too many practitioners accept that situation and lower their fees, sometimes to the point of unprofitability. But there always remains the potential of moving even these clients toward the appreciation of talent. As in an office, so in an interview, talent can get a client to think about a problem in a new way and to see possible profits where others have not.

How, though, can unemployed or under-employed architects move from being expendable labor to valuable talent? As the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich wrote in the New York Times about this phenomenon, “It’s important to distinguish between entrepreneurial zeal and self-employed desperation,” to distinguish, in other words, between the increasingly portable nature of talent, able to move to where it has the greatest value, and the increasingly dire situation of labor, unable to control the conditions of its employment. [2]       

To the unwillingly unemployed, proving their talent in a tough labor market can seem daunting, and almost impossible to do alone. Reich has proposed some policy ideas such as “earnings insurance,” paid for out of payroll taxes to help buffer the income decline of laid-off employees, or tax credits to match 401(k)’s or I.R.A.’s to help prevent unemployed workers from depleting their savings. While those policy proposals might help older workers who held permanent jobs for a long time, such ideas do little to aid the recent graduate who has yet to get a job or the adjunct faculty member who may have a job one semester and not the next.

Talent Outsmarting Capital

The tension between capital and talent that Martin identifies arises, in part, from the latter’s ability to create value where none existed before and to imagine new products or services never considered before. While that can bring enormous profits, which capital likes, it also means that capital cannot control – and should not want to control – talent the way it tries to do with labor. Talent, in other words, can continually outsmart capital, which offers the best way – and maybe the only certain way – talented people can ensure that they get paid well and that they not get treated as underpaid and easily replaceable labor.

The architectural profession and the design fields generally should excel at this. A design education provides some of the best training available in imagining new paradigms, envisioning better alternatives, and conceiving of that, which does not yet exist. And architects engage in these value-creating activities every time we design a new building, develop a new strategy, and devise a new solution to a seemingly irresolvable problem.

Many architects, however, do a terrible job demonstrating or even talking about the value they create. I have been in too many interviews of architectural firms in which they show their completed work as if its value were self-evident, with little or no evidence offered in terms of how their projects, for example, improved the productivity, profitability, or performance of clients’ organizations or innovated in a way that created a new demand or satisfied an unmet need. As a result, architects and their work tend to look alike, leading selection committees to base their decision on equally shortsighted criteria, such as which architects had the lowest fees or the best presentations. No wonder, then, that so many clients view architects as interchangeable entities and treat us like overworked and underpaid labor.

 This misunderstanding of design’s value on the part of designers themselves starts in school. Most architectural programs focus on developing students’ design intentions and evaluate students’ work based on how well the final project meets those goals. Rarely do schools look at the consequences of design decisions over time, with students documenting, analyzing, and assessing the performance of a completed project and the value it has created for its client and community. This represents a huge missed opportunity for both the architectural profession and the schools. While project fees often do not allow firms to return to their projects to assess the value they have generated over time, architectural schools could – and should – do that work as an integral part of the curriculum, sensitizing students to the need for this information and making it available to the profession.

Talent Stuck in the Past

This hasn’t happened as much as it should, in part, because too many architectural firms and schools seem stuck in past when it comes to demonstrating value. The profession and its first schools emerged in the 19^th century in response to the need for new kinds of buildings and new types of programs, which emerged as the result of the first industrial revolution. Talented architects thrived by providing unprecedented structures – steel-framed skyscrapers, concrete factories, balloon-framed houses – for new kinds of human activities – white-collar office work, machine-based fabrication, affordable worker housing.  In that context, the value of these new types of buildings may have seemed self-evident, with architects simply having to show their work in order to get more of it. And with the rapid growth of the economy and the relatively few numbers of architects, capital paid for the talent of those able to conceive of such innovations.

This also drove architectural education in those early years. Schools focused on developing students’ skills in rapidly developing a building’s layout and massing and on organizing design studios around particular building types, echoing the increasing pace of repetitive machine-based production in the 19^th Century economy as a whole. While that made sense in the context of the first industrial revolution, it remains telling that the curriculum in most architecture schools still follows this format. Most studios, for example, still focus on a particular building type and have the same basic pedagogical structure and even the same Monday/Wednesday/Friday-afternoon meeting times as those in the 19^th Century.

The demand for talent began to change with the rise of the second industrial revolution in the 20^th century. Characterized by assembly-line mass production and the need to boost consumption of an ever-increasing supply of goods, that economy really took off after World War II. Architects responded with the development of modern facilities for mass production and consumption, such as large-scale and often indistinguishable office buildings, factories, and malls. With the standardization of their products, though, architectural firms started down the road of becoming indistinguishable labor, with capital increasingly using competitions and fee-based selection processes to decide which firm to commission. At the same time, other design disciplines – graphic design, product design, and apparel design – began to receive more of the talent pay as they fueled consumer desire in ways that buildings rarely could.

Post-modern Marginalization

Post-modernism emerged in the late 20^th century as an implicit acknowledgement of architects growing economic marginalization. The recognition by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, for example, that many commercial buildings had become little more than backdrops to billboards or neutral enclosures for media-driven experiences highlighted the problem of architecture having become a commodity and its practitioners, an interchangeable labor pool. [3] The architectural profession tended to focus on the aesthetic and theoretical aspects of Venturi and Scott Brown’s perception, while paying relatively little attention to its implications for practice or pedagogy. If buildings had become commodities, for example, then maybe architectural talent needed to look elsewhere for more fertile areas of innovation?

That question has become even more pressing in the 21^st century, as we enter what the economist, Jeremy Rifkin, has called “the third industrial revolution.” [4] This revolution has moved us away from a mass-production and mass-consumption economy to one characterized by mass customization, in which new digital technologies allow consumers to personalize the information they receive, the services they seek, and even the goods they buy or produce themselves. Just as the first industrial revolution saw the rise of innovative building programs and structures, and the second, the rise of innovative spatial experiences, the third has seen the miniaturization and integration of digital technology into almost all aspects of our lives and with it, a disruption of almost every industry that has depended on the making of physical stuff, whether it be compact discs or printed newspapers or, in the case of architecture, retail malls now competing with e-commerce or corporate office buildings now competing with telecommuting.

People still need shelter and places to gather and buildings remain even more in demand with a rapidly growing human population. But the role of architecture has dramatically changed. The third industrial revolution has raised the possibility of people downloading design files and fabricating parts – or even the whole – of buildings themselves using digitally controlled equipment. In such an economy, the value of architects lies in how well we customize a design not only for fee-paying clients, who will constitute an ever-shrinking amount of work for architects, but also for the masses of people who previously had no access to design services. Rather than a scarcity economy, the third industrial revolution also recognizes that humanity needs to move to an economy of abundance, using renewable resources, making information freely available, and leveraging the vast untapped potential of people’s social, cultural, and intellectual capital.

At first glance, this economy of abundance, with much that’s free, may look like the final triumph of capital over talent and a fatalistic acceptance of architecture as a commodity produced by the lowest-cost labor. But that will happen only if the architectural community lets it. Viewed from another perspective, the third industrial revolution represents the ultimate revenge of talent and its liberation from the repressive hold that capital has had on us for so long. How so? Because a digitally enable, mass-customization economy puts the means of production in the hands of the workers, as Marx might have said. The technologies fueling this economy – 3D printing, CNC fabrication, virtual reality, e-commerce – all have relatively low purchase and operational costs, allowing ordinary people to kick-start companies and launch products and services without the high capital costs and organizational structures that the previous two revolutions required.

This has profound implications for a field like architecture, which has suffered over the last century from capital’s success in treating most architects as expendable labor and in keeping the number of high-paid talent to a minimum. With such low capital requirements, the new economy gives everyone with access to these technologies an opportunity to demonstrate their talent and to succeed according to how well they meet the needs of the greatest number of users. Capital no longer guards the gate by doling out funds in ways that keeps most people in perpetual labor with little reward. As we have seen in this socially mediated environment, innovative ideas have gone viral, companies have kick-started themselves to prosperity, and talented individuals have come seemingly out of nowhere to achieve amazing success.

Many of these success stories have also had a design undercurrent, be it President Obama, who once aspired to become an architect before taking up a political career, or Steve Jobs, who mentioned graphic design and typography as his favorite course in college, or Brad Pitt, who also wanted to pursue architecture but chose acting instead. On one hand, such stories may indicate how much architecture, in its current underpaid and often-underappreciated state has lost some of its appeal to talented people. But these stories also show how people with an architectural orientation have taken that design way of thinking into new areas and accomplished great things. Talent combined with a design sensibility can outsmart capital by envisioning what others thought unimaginable (an African American president), by creating something people didn’t know they needed (Apple’s products), and by doing something no one else dared (Make It Right Foundation).

Reimagining Ourselves

We escape the trap of low-paid labor to become higher-paid talent, in other words, not by complaining about our plight or claiming that we deserve it or even by collaborating to join or form a union. As Martin observes, capital has so successfully “worked to diminish the power of unions,” that “labor (has) been forced to capitulate entirely.” In the new economy, talent arises out of meaningful innovation. That has probably always been the case, but it seems particularly true today, in a world very much in need of new and innovative ways of living, working, and making if we hope to sustain ourselves on this planet with over 7 billion mouths to feed in the midst of a changing climate and diminishing resources.

Design offers one of the best educations in innovation. It teaches us how to develop creative solutions to wicked problems and to conceive of compelling ideas that have not occurred in exactly the same way before. But the design community needs to apply its own methods to itself. By not doing so, by adhering to professional practices and educational methods that date back to the 19^th Century, too many architects find themselves getting treated as replaceable labor even as they continually come up with innovative designs for their clients. It may seem as if architects simply need to do a better job explaining and demonstrating their talent and they will get recognized for it and compensated accordingly. But that will not resolve the paradox that many architects face. Architects will cross the line from underpaid labor to higher-paid talent when we finally recognize that buildings represent just one of many ways – and maybe not the best way – to address many clients’ needs.

            In the new economy of abundance, innovation comes from figuring out how to accomplish the most with the least: the least cost, the least disruption, the least impact on the planet. People will still need buildings, but buildings as we have traditionally conceived them represent not only a huge cost, but also a great deal of disruption and resource use. Capital will increasingly pay for talent that figures out how to provide the shelter and gathering spaces that humans still need, with as minimal a cost and impact as possible. This will, in turn, demand that the architectural profession redefine itself as strategic thinkers rather than as now, the designers of buildings. The most highly paid architects in the future will be those who figure out how to meet peoples spatial needs by building as little and as lightly as possible, and maybe not building something new at all.

            This may sound odd to a field that has, for so long associated itself with buildings and been paid according to how large and lavish the building. But as in the past, the new industrial revolution arising all around us promises to overturn much of what we took for granted in the old ones. And in that lies the key to architects being treated as well-compensated talent rather than under-paid labor. The latter does what we already know how to do and what has already become a commodity service. Talent surprises us, doing what we have never imagined before and didn’t know we needed until we saw what it can do for us. The new economy has made the potential of becoming talent available to everyone, and those who don’t take this opportunity – those who remain laboring in the ways of the past – have nothing to complain about.

Notes

1.     All quotes of Roger Martin’s come from his essay: “Talent Shows”, New York Times, September 28, 2012, p. A23.

2.     Robert Reich, “Entrepreneur or Unemployed?” The New York Times, June 1, 2010, p. A27.

3.     Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972)

4.     Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power is transforming Energy, the economy, and the World. (New York: Palgram Macmillan, 2011)

An essay published in: The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, edited by Peggy Deamer (Bloomsbury Publishingm 2015)

Welcome to the Third Industrial Revolution

By 2050, the third industrial revolution will be well underway and with it will come dramatic changes in the practice of architecture and in architecture itself. As with the first industrial revolution of the 19^th century, in which we mechanized hand labor, and the second industrial revolution of the 20^th century, in which assembly lines replaced stationary construction, the third industrial revolution will bring a shift away from the mass production and mass consumption of the last hundred years toward an economy based on mass customization. Digitally based technologies will allow people to 3D print, laser cut, and CNC fabricate not just consumer goods, but also the parts and even the whole of buildings.

This will disrupt many of the relationships and alter many of the practices that have characterized the building industry over the last two centuries. The now-clear distinction between producer and consumer will blur as owner-builders increasingly construct their own environments. And the moving of building materials and products around the globe, as we do now, will become much less common as technology facilitates the local fabrication of goods, enhancing the competitiveness of local economies.

This may seem contrary to the world as we know it, one in which global companies and the global economy have dominated local ones. But as happened in the previous two industrial revolutions, the apparent invincibility of a system marks the point of its greatest vulnerability and the moment in which it stands poised to fall. We know that the dependence on fossil fuel makes our current system unsustainable, and by 2050, the reality of that will have completely transformed the ways in which we live and work.

Mass Customized Cities and Buildings

At the urban scale, we will see the gradual disappearance of sprawling, disaggregated cities. Instead of separate residential and commercial districts, with large-scale manufacturing and big-box retailing in their own single-use zones, we will see a reintegration of living, working, and making in the same districts and even, as happened before the first industrial revolution, on the same block or site. This has already begun to happen in cities, as denser, mixed-use communities arise to accommodate new economic activity and as ever greater numbers of people work from home or live within walking or biking distance of where they work.

            Architecture will change accordingly. Along with single-use zoning will go single-use buildings, replaced by highly flexible structures, able to adjust to residential, commercial, and light-manufacturing uses with minimal change. Such buildings will have durable, adaptable structures, with easily reusable or biodegradable interior fit outs. They will also generate much of their own solar, wind, and/or geothermal power, with district utility systems supplying the rest. The collaborative nature of the third industrial revolution will lead building owners and inhabitants to recycle what they can no longer use and share what they cannot make or generate themselves.

A Performance Art for Public Health

For architects, this will alter practice in profound ways. We will see a move away from the architect-as-global-star and toward a field in which the professional will serve as a facilitator of processes that involve design expertise. This will also enable others – clients, communities, and collaborators of all sorts – to participate in and help create the environments they inhabit. With that will come a change in the way we view our field, not as one primarily associated with the visual arts, with an emphasis on the vision of a sole practitioner, but instead as one more closely related to the performing arts, with the architect viewed more like the conductor of a symphony or the director of a play, orchestrating the work of many people to achieve an aesthetic end.

We will also see a shift away from current practice, in which architects produce mostly one-off designs for individual clients on particular sites, toward a field in which the profession also provides designs that people, who could never afford the fees of architects or the cost of custom design, can download and adjust to their needs. While this will not end architecture’s service to fee-paying clients, it will greatly expand the scope of architectural practice. In addition to the current “medical model” of practice, in which architects provide individual solutions to client’s specific needs, we will see the emergence of a “public-health model,” in which professionals will evolve designs appropriate to – and able to be appropriated by – the over 90% of the human population in need of architectural services and unable to afford them.

The services that architects offer fee-paying clients will change as well. Most practitioners now spend a tremendous amount of uncompensated time chasing building projects, which leads to the extraordinary inefficiency and financial insecurity that plague the professions. By 2050, architects will have made a transition along the lines of that made by attorneys in the 20^th century, who established long-term relationships with commercial and institutions clients that involve legal services beyond that of going to court. For architects, building design will represent one of a growing number of services architects provide clients, with a building increasingly marking that beginning of a relationship with a client, not the end, as often happens now.

The research and programming phase of an architectural project will become much more important as a result. That phase will determine whether a client needs a building at all – always the first question every architect should ask – and will reveal the myriad other design-related needs of a client. Those needs may have nothing to do with the building itself, opening up other kinds of services – organizational design, experience design, service design, system design – that will become a ever-growing and ever-more-profitable part of architectural practice.

Such services will eventually lead to mass-customized firms, in which a core group of practitioners will partner with a much wider range of disciplines than typically happens now. Architects may ally with ethnographers to help clients rethink their organizational design, with public-health physicians to help clients create a healthier workplace, and with data visualization experts to help clients see new opportunities in the mass of information available to them. By 2050, the most successful firms will have become design strategists, bringing together whatever disciplines clients need to help them achieve their organizational goals.

Architectural Education in the New Economy

This will, in turn, require a change in how we educate architects, as has already begun to happen. Although accreditation standards pose a real barrier to change by enforcing a very traditional, building-centric view of architectural practice, students have begun to vote with their feet, taking courses in a wider range of subjects and even opting for more flexible degree programs that allow for the hybridizing of architecture with other fields. Many students seem to recognize the implications of the new economy in which they will work, sometimes better than their professors, many of whom continue to teach a 20^th century version of the discipline. By 2050, building design will have become just one of several tracks – and maybe not the dominant one – in architectural education, much as happened with trial law in legal education.

That will require a change not only in accreditation standards, but also in higher education more broadly. For all of its cutting-edge research and field-shaping theories, higher education remains one of the most conservative and hidebound institutions, perpetuating assumptions not just from the 20^th century, but also from centuries before that. The pedagogy in most architecture schools, for example, reflects the mass-production mentality of the old economy, in which students move through a required set of courses and pop out the other end of the educational assembly line with an accredited degree.

While there may be some need for that in the future, the vast majority of the challenges we now face in the world require a much more interdisciplinary and integrative form of education, in which students and faculty work with colleagues across the university and in the community on the social, economic, and environmental dilemmas that continue to confound us. A mass-customization economy will require a mass-customization education, and architects should help lead both.

Architecture’s Leadership Opportunity

Indeed, by 2050, leadership could become on the most recognized and well-rewarded skills that architects have to offer. Too many of today’s political leaders remain in power by playing on people’s fear of the future, preventing nations from dealing with the enormous challenges facing civilization, ranging from an exploding human population to persistent income inequalities to global climate change.

Architects lead by helping people imagine futures different from – and ideally better than – what they have now. Every time we design a building, we show people what could be, make concrete plans for how to achieve it, and assuage the fears of those who do not like change and of skeptics who discount anything they have not seen before. Every building project, in other words, builds our leadership skills, and by 2050, humanity will need those skills for problems that extend far beyond those of buildings. Time will tell if we can rise to the occasion.

(Architectural Design, 2015)