statements in service of good design, 2022
As academia grows further removed from the architect’s professional reality, career designers and students alike must indicate values by which to ascribe both morally and practically, in order to resolve discrepancies that hold back change in real-world design. The fictions explored in design education are grounds for the fortification of one’s values through collaboration, experimentation, and failure.
I have spent three years completing a degree delivered primarily via screens, powering through with the intention of becoming the youngest licensed architect in the United States. I’ve been fortunate to see the world, to endure hardship, and to learn from leaders in a variety of fields. The principles below have emerged from the frictions and breakthroughs of those lived experiences.
It is integral for each student to derive their own standards (with the unbiased guidance of field professionals), and to enter the graduate and professional world in agreement of one most basic intention: engagement in the pursuit of fair, tenable practices by which all involved parties may assist in the advancement of the built and natural worlds, always for the good of many -- never to pursue the interests of just one.
Beyond this, the principles of my own practice are as follows.
I. Unlike doctors, lawyers, or other professionals trained under comparable structures, the architect is tasked with a unique broadness of whom we are able to name as a ben-
eficiary. We become benefactors to the general public, the earth and its resources, and most importantly, to one another.
II. Simple solutions make strong resolutions. With the pursuit of luxury, fame, and phenomenalization on the rise, the architect must be critical of each decision and the driving force behind it. The designer must suspend their ego and deprioritize personal goals in order to best fulfill their duties to the profession.
III. In reference to professional duty, the sink-or-swim mentality currently enforced in architectural academia and many internships is unacceptable and must be eliminated through an empathetic, equal-opportunity approach to design. This call for change must come from inside the house. Current students can reject forced competition between peers by engaging in frequent and generous mutual aid such as resource-sharing, and rejecting those who restrict opportunities, openings, and spaces.
IV. The designer must engage with how current conditions came to be, never allowing the ego to interfere with these difficult but necessary confrontations. Architecture is a byproduct of sour sociocultural hierarchies, an inherently iterative utility, and an aesthetically-oriented form of media of its own accord. Each project, idea, and fabrication must address its precedents and the context in which it was born with an aim to innovate upon the historical shortcomings, preventing them from being perpetuated.
V. Failure is certain. The phenomenon of the “starchitect”, the prevalence of students hailing from white-collar families, and the prestige associated with the profession all drown out the voices of creatives who may be more prone to failure in their early career. Resilience is learning from each failure without sacrificing the unique perspective that broadens each designer’s horizons.
VI. Each of these precepts are fundamental to the healthy progression of the field at large. They become my personal responsibility as I am immersed in a field saturated with poor hiring practices, astronomical environmental impact levels, and endless perpetration of inequities towards the most voiceless of our beneficiaries.
Good design is messy, nevertheless necessary.