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 19th
century, in which we mechanized hand labor, and the second industrial
revolution of the 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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)
No comments:
Post a Comment