makeshift

That architecture is concerned with the design of buildings is one of the most staggering myths in circulation. Partly because it's so widely accepted without question. Partly because it's so reslient. Partly because theres an industry worth billions of pounds built upon it. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has been completely duped by it. By and large, once you've told someone that you're an architect, it takes at least five minutes to explain your way out of it.

And most architects don't even want to. They're happily bought into the idea. Even as they are completely ready to admit that the design of a building takes place within a complex set of conditions and systems, architects seem unwilling to engage with that complexity as designers, opting instead for spatial simplification or a simulated complexity via visual games. The first bubble to be burst here is this idea that to design 'a Building' makes you 'pragmatic' and down-to-earth, wheras to design something else is somehow abstract, utopian or escapist. There is a sad fashion among architecture students at the moment to proudly declare their intent to finish their project with a building as if to do so is to take a stand against head-in-the-clouds, theory-led abstraction - or as if somehow a building is less contrived than not-a-building. In a dark moment, you might be forgiven for reading that as a subtle side-effect of the recent economic boom; a psychology of compliant ambition filtering through architecture schools. But the idea of a 'Building' of course, is sheer contrivance- in fact it's a super-abstract idea. Much like the concepts of Warwickshire, Permanence and Wednesday, the word 'Building' is an entirely invented (western) construct. In the west especially we display a constant desire to categorise time and space. The fact that design commisions have tended to come from discrete clients who request alterations to portions of the planet identified by legistlative red lines, for a set amount of money and within a certain time interval has generated a shared illusion called "Building". Architecture will probably always have something to do with shelter, enclosure, identity-marking etc, but the word Building is becoming an increasingly useless way to describe those things. In a world where connective intensities increasingly overwhelm collective intensities, the design of buildings as isolated environments is becoming more and more obsolete; more and more a process of furnishing the status quo, more and more a lucrative career arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

If 'Buildings' are a bizarre abstraction - a hangover from several centuries of reading Vitruvius in gentlemen's clubs, capped off by two decades of Pevsner - then why is architecture still so tied up with them? A reasonable suggestion would be that the discipline is institutionally designed to resist change. This condition is a topic that deserves its own, lengthly debate, but in short: dont be fooled by architecture's rhetoric on innovation and change. Architecture is an intrinsicly conservative discipline. At the point of action, it is paid to crystallise conditions, which it does through a process of such imposing slowness as to bear comparison with an intellectual oil tanker. Being therefore expensive, it instinctively provides tools of empowerment to the wealthy, serving to reinforce power hegemonies more often than challenge them. As a dynamic discipline, the architectural sub-culture also seems to tend towards reproduction (copying)- either in the form of tutor>student indoctrination, employer>employee control, or simply the distribution of success-compliant media. Architectural media has always focused on the completed building- a means of modifying students aspirations to fit the existing value system. A profession in which the young look to the old for new ideas is not one likely to be light on its feet. As Mark Wigley points out, the globalisation of architecture can serve to exaggerate this phenomenon; in fact architecture may be systemically (if accidentally) designed to "minimise the amount of novel formulations."

Probably our most debilitating mental block is our obsession with prioritising things we can see over things we can't. Architects think in 3D objects, they fetishise details, materials, shapes. So we are naturally pre-programmed to ignore things we can't see - time - movement - intensity, power, desire, processes, systems. But what if instead of realising our ideas as objects and appearances, we thought about architecture more as a set of what Cedric Price called 'distortions'. If we see design as being a means to deliberately distort time, money, energy, territory, existing processes & resources (in any combination) then we can begin to see that 'Buildings' are only a small corner of what architecture might be concerned with. I think Football managers are about the perfect model of what a designer could be. They think four-dimensionally, they weigh up multi-layered conditions and come up with ideas. Most importantly, even though they never set foot on the pitch, and never touch the ball, they seem to be held responsible for the success or failure of the team (and they're paid accordingly).

Like quite a lot of things worth saying, Rem has already said it; "Maybe architecture doesn't have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything - a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything." The application of 'design intelligence' in this way represents a kind of paradigmatic evolution for architecture, where we can begin to think about our work not as created object, but as a distortion of social, ecological and economic conditions to achieve beneficial (sometimes unknown) outcomes.

Visiting the exhibition at the Tate Modern recently, it occured to me that architecture has really yet to have its 'urinal' moment. (It's a pretty exciting place to be in that respect). What Duchamp is widely accepted as having done for art, and Andy Kaufman for comedy, was to trigger a paradigm shift that architecture has yet to match (but desperately needs). I would contend that in fact, architecture's clue came in the early sixties:

"We should be less concerned with the design of bridges, and more concerned with how to get to the other side" - Cedric Price

It is an astounding act of conservatism that this fundamental shift in the way we might think about design has been so broadly ignored, or at times wilfully misunderstood. For architecture to stick exclusively to the design of Buildings is like art refusing to do anything other than paint oil canvases. Our building-centric view of the world is placing us at the end of a food chain that should itself be the object of our attention. In his 1969 book 'The Human Zoo', Desmond Morris made the anthropological argument that urbanism began not with the first building, but in fact the first field. The ability to intensively produce food, and thus surplus, provded man with the ability to live in dense concentrations for the first time - cities. This is exactly the kind of thinking we are missing out on. It may turn out that if we begin to apply architecture as a form of propositional geography, we'll uncover a massive industry for the kind of design thinking architects are really good at. I suspect this market already exists, unexplored, (DEGW and AMO are about the closest so far). Of all the professions, architecture is within closest striking-distance of this new design industry, but we're allowing ourselves to be distracted by our own smokescreen. There's a strong risk we might carry on letting the Stirling Prize go to an interestingly-shaped, medium-sized 'Building' every year, and slowly earn our way to extinction in the most glamorous and boring way possible.