The architectural profession has siloed itself. With increasing focus placed on image and form, the agency of the professional architect can be seen to have steadily diminished over the last 50 years. As the environments in which architects work grow in complexity, official reports chart the demise of the profession.(note) Routes to building no longer necessarily start with the architect; what remains of the architect’s services, reduced to accommodate other statutory, construction and management specialists, now occupies a smaller space in the decision-making process. However, there is a growing practice of architecture that is breaking free from this mould, embracing the complexities of politics and people and finally admitting that architecture without these influences is just glorified furniture design. This new mode of practice is emerging with a very different set of role models, creating new types of outputs that relate to a very different set of role models, creating new types of outputs that relate to a very different set of values. While the profession begins to wither, the discipline of architecture is re-emerging. (Bryant, Rogers, Wigfall, 2018)

This Elective course is intended to be a discussion platform around the role of the architect in the 21st century. Often reduced to the simple role of a consultant or service provider, the architect’s socio professional status is being challenged by the forces of contemporary neoliberal urbanism. Nonetheless, this context has also engendered an increased diversification of the definition and scope of the architect’s role. New organizational and operational models as well as more engaged political strategies can be seen in young emerging practices around the world. 

In this elective course, we want to develop a body of research centered around those new roles. From the architect-entrepreneur to the architect as a political agent, a lot can be learnt from those practices. New forms of resistance—whether they be non-profit organizations, cooperatives, traditional company structures or start-ups—all, in their own way, open new paths for the future generation of architects. We start this discussion with Jeremy Till’s own insights on the book he was writing,

First, architecture is a dependent discipline. Second, architecture, as profession and practice, does everything to resist that very dependency. The book explores that resistance. [...] but what if that book is about the clash of those two truisms and the gap that opens up between them? The gap between what architecture—as practice, profession, and object—actually is (in all its dependency and contingency) and what architects want it to be (in all its false perfection). What then? (Till, 2009)

Footnotes:

Chris Bryant, Caspar Rogers and Tristan Wigfall, "The Changing Forms and Values of Architectural Practice", New Modes: Redefining Practice, Architectural Design, vol.88, September/October 2018, p.7.

Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2009, pp. 1-2.