Is Architecture Enough? 2017
In beginning to address the question the story explores some of the challenges facing the professions of Architecture, Urban Design and Planning. To some these are mutually exclusive fields, to others they are one and the same depending on the scale of the project. In reality it is all about developing what becomes the architecture of a place, and the recognition that each place is unique due to a number of factors that fall outside the realm of making buildings including climatic conditions and human behaviour specific to the region, meaning that what may work in one place is not necessarily transferable to another.
This is demonstrated in working on projects in Pakistan, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, as well as exploring places visited along the way. In many places it is the infrastructure that is being upgraded, considered by many to be outside the realm of architecture, until considering the impact that it has on the built environment and more importantly the impact that the lack of it has on the living environment. From exploring the Dubai Metro and new tram at the Dubai Marina, to London where the first tangible evidence of the world’s largest, probably most complex infrastructure project Crossrail, is becoming part of the public realm. Birmingham undergoing significant change, Manchester is in a similar state as public transport infrastructure is being upgraded in the city centre.
In terms of the notion of the master plan, Liverpool is experienced for the first time, where recent trends have been reversed to create a vibrant city centre. Bahrain is continuing to evolve as more elements of the masterplan set out in 2030 vision emerge from the sand. The start of the journey is reassessed in my home town on the English Riviera now being viewed not through the eyes of a child growing up in the town, but after being involved in significant urban development projects and viewing as an not only as an architect, but as an urban designer and planner, giving a view of the impact that planning strategies and government policy can have on a place, emphasising that in many cases the big decisions have been made before designers get involved in the process. Some of these can be national or regional strategies, some can be client decisions associated with land ownership such as site location for a proposed project, in many cases the project is part of a master plan developed by others that is ongoing and many of the opportunities to maximise the potential positive environmental impact of a project have already gone.
So what can we do? In university or Architecture School, a large component of the project is about how we respond to context and how we address issues associated with that context. In the real world that context can be determined by property developers whose sole aim of a projects is about building to make money. The problem with this is that many of our clients are those very people. Some architects talk about working with enlightened clients but we cannot all be so lucky.
Ongoing work on 'Is Architecture enough?' The follow up to 'Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture. ' Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris.
