makeshift

I am an architecture graduate – and therefore expect to be unemployed. There is nothing controversial about that statement – which is odd, because really, there should be. It is remarkable how completely unsurprised we are by each new report of insolvent architecture practices, job losses in the design professions and mothballed construction projects. Even before the UK entered formal recession in January, the number of architects claiming unemployment benefit in the last quarter of 2008, according to the Office of National Statistics, had gone up by a staggering 544%. But no one really staggered. The news was met by a chorus of nods, and a run of smart, pragmatic discussion within the mainstream architectural media about how to ‘survive’ economic recession.  We all know that when the economy goes down, so does architecture. Design is just one of those professions, alongside car manufacturing, banks and, apparently, brothels that can be used as indicators of the state of the economy. But while many people have speculated upon what architecture says about the state of the economy, hardly anyone has asked the opposite. What does the economy say about the state of architecture? The idea that design – a profound human activity; what Bruce Mau refers to as “the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes” - is something that only happens when there is an ample supply of financial credit, is not one we should be taking for granted.  

MIS-DIAGNOSIS

Contrary to what the media's preoccupation with bankers' bonuses might suggest, the causes behind the recession are far less superficial and distracting than the personal greed of a few city workers. According to the economist Herman Daly, the financial turmoil which has snowballed out from the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market has been totally mis-diagnosed.  He argues that it is not a crisis of too-little ‘liquidity’, as it has been hailed by the stock market, but something much simpler: “The crisis is the result of the overgrowth of financial assets relative to the growth of real assets – basically the opposite of too little liquidity”. “The 100 dollars of virtual wealth I carry in my wallet are a lien on real wealth in that those dollars enable me to buy pork at the store… The problem … has arisen because the amount of real wealth is not a sufficient lien to guarantee the staggering, outstanding debt which has been exploded as a result of banks’ ability to create money, loans given out on shaky assets”. In other words,  we have created more debt (money) than there is value to pay it back.

In the case of the economy in general, this mis-diagnosis has led us to assume that the correct solution is to get back to economic growth as soon as possible– to spend loyally until the economy is strong again and can resume the creation of credit, overlooking the fact that this was the problem in the first place. The conventional wisdom that design stops when credit stops, buys into the same mis-diagnosis. 

THE BIG DEPENDENCY

What the collapse of design work demonstrates to us is that architecture as we have come to know it, and in my case, learn it, is the business of social and economic growth through the production of commodities. In other words – an amount of money becomes available and a designer is someone who can translate that money into some form of investment which might increase its value. As Indy Johar puts it so succinctly: architecture has been the business of “creating assets and inflating assets”. For example, when designing rows of speculative apartments, each of which is sold onto the property market, architects are 'creating' assets. When they are then commissioned to build an 'iconic' sculptural 'form' (be it an art gallery or a department store), what architects are really doing is 'adding value' (inflating) the price of the apartments that are nearby. After the Guggenheim, this is what was known as 'the Bilbao effect'.

VALUE

As Joshua Prince Ramus points out: architects, by selling themselves primarily for their three-dimensional and aesthetic dexterity, have actually been over-prioritising the creative design of objects, and under-prioritising the creative design of those processes by which those objects are made. Naturally, while doing that, they've also been overlooking the extent to which the form of value that these objects generate may actually exclude their users (or indeed, those who could never afford to be their users in the first place).

Actually a lot of architects have known this for a while. In voicing their concerns over ‘quality’, architects have indirectly been warning society that the buildings we are designing seem to more closely resemble asset-value than use-value. It isn’t a coincidence that in the last few years of economic prosperity, both the business and the culture of the architecture have been strangely object-centric in the face of realities which are outcome-driven, interconnected and complex – it’s been energetic, but also frustrating. Architecture hasn’t necessarily understood the value it was generating. It’s not just architecture that has done this. The word ‘Design’ itself has become associated primarily with oddly-shaped white vases or expensive high-heeled shoes - ‘value-added’ commodities – and architecture has essentially become the business of scaling these vases up to the size of cities. The very idea of ‘Design’ has come to be defined as something which can be relegated to a weekend pull-out section of the Guardian, or a wry fifteen minute interview on The Culture Show. This has been lucrative in the past – but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to professional design. Maybe it took recession to see it, but architecture, as a profession, has allowed itself to be pushed into such a small corner of what the capacity of design might be, that we are, quite literally, redundant.

WHAT ARCHITECTURE CAN LEARN FROM TAKE-AWAY RESTAURANTS

All this does not mean that architecture needs to stop making money – in fact the opposite. It means we need to publicly redefine what architecture does, and recognise that the process of design is not so incredibly narrow as merely the production of commodities, but the intervention of an imaginative, pragmatic, connected-up mindset to situations where money and resources are scarce. Architects are already good at this; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to make buildings happen. There is no reason why architecture’s existing intelligence should go fallow because it is only used to producing one kind of outcome. 

One of the surprises of the economic recession has been the soaring profits of the fast food sector. Apparently it would seem that when there’s less money around – people buy more fast food. In economics terminology, that’s called an ‘inferior good’. It’s not a disparagement; it simply means a product that is in greater demand when money is tight. There is no real reason why professional design shouldn’t be one of these. In clinging to (and allowing others to cling to) the idea that architecture is only in the business of constructing assets, professional architecture is desperately underselling itself. It’s overlooking the fact that in order to design assets in the first place, architects needed to get good at a kind of multi-scale, solution-finding, questioning, value-led, politically-sensitive way of looking at the world. As a number of people have begun to realise, the same design intelligence might be applied to different sorts of design questions, some of which only architects might be able to ask.

EXPANSION

Released from the straitjacket of busy credit-backed construction, we may actually find it much easier to have a public conversation about the kinds of end value for which design is responsible. We may be able to go public with the idea that design is ubiquitous – it’s how we distribute food, it’s how we use our resources, it’s how we spend our time, it’s how we choose to relate to one another. If big, renowned architecture firms can sell smart design strategies as easily as shadow gaps – process diagrams as easily as sections - or get paid (in the spirit of Cedric Price) for helping their clients to avoid building anything at all - they might find an untapped market they can put their name onto. Architects might even start charging fees based on a percentage of the money they save clients as much as the value they bring them. 

A MOTHBALLED GENERATION

The silent construction projects towering over city centres didn’t stall because they were morally corrupt or financially inept, they stalled because the assumptions they were founded on have shifted from beneath them.

 My career seems to have suffered the same fate. Seven years of architectural education prepared me for a world that no longer exists – but for more of us than might admit it, that is a paradoxically optimistic turn of events. Our view is that projects and businesses can be ‘mothballed’, but the reality is that you can’t ‘mothball’ several thousand architecture graduates – either they’ll give up, or they’ll change the topic. We form a kind of surplus intelligence which, rather than be expected to simply disappear, should be seen as a forced opportunity. If we all work together, the collapse of credit might signal not architecture’s retreat, but a paradigm-shift in professional design that was perhaps overdue before the first sub-prime mortgage was even issued.  So put the message out: architects can help you punch above your weight. 

*Due deference must be given to the superb phrase from which this is hiijacked: CP's lecture entitled "Technology is the answer but what was the question?" available on Pidgeon Digital.