Architecture Imperiled

The majority of architects in American have been ill-served by the institutions that support and regulate our profession. The American Institute of Architects often promotes membership over service, self-recognition over relevance and words over action. In academia and journalism, style and image are too often valued over substance and use. Government too has eroded the recognition of our profession’s authority and unique role in preserving the safety, efficiency, and beauty of construction.

This loss of credulity has occurred over the last generation and imperiled our practice with disastrous consequences in the current economic crisis.

Our Crisis of Credibility and Its Impact

This collective abrogation has threatened the historic role of architects as the voice of reason and insight in construction and compromised our worth to the common culture.

The act of licensure itself has become a test of perseverance. Rather than excellence, the wide disparity among state requirements, especially with regard to continuing education, trivializes the legal recognition of our status as society’s agents of safety, utility and beauty in building design.  Licensure is now conditioned on continuing professional education that primarily serves as a profit center for the institutions that sanction them, often providing programs of dubious value.

The creation of a parallel body, LEED certification, has further compromised the primacy of registered architects as the central arbiters of built form. In the assertion of its own value, LEED certification promotes an agenda of fabricated exclusivity, putting its organization’s interests above relevant utility. What has resulted is a de facto code of aesthetic ethics called “sustainable design” which aspires to redefine and appropriate what architects have always valued, advocated and practiced.

As architects have become increasingly marginalized in influence and worth to our culture, neither academia nor journalism has supported the historic role of the profession as a consistent voice of value in construction.  Rather than provide exposure of social relevance and innovative engagement, these beacons and mirrors of our profession remain focused on a cult of personalities and abstract formal expression. Promoting an exclusive orthodoxy, these previously objective platforms for diversity, contextual influences and craft now position the profession of architecture as an elitist endeavor, - a disastrous image in a time of economic distress.

Not surprisingly, all levels of government have responded to society’s increasing perception of our profession’s irrelevancy by creating an ever-tightening web of regulatory oversight. The perceived incapacity of architects to provide holistic relevant building design has allowed government to sanction alternatives to the use of licensed architects.

A Call to Action

There are concrete positions that can re-establish our credibility in a time when our society has questioned the value of all goods and services. We propose the following reforms and reinventions:

1. Institutions that support our profession, such as the AIA, insist that all states require a licensed architect to sanction the design of any construction requiring a building permit, including houses.

2.  Alternative forms of practice across related professions be encouraged.

3.  Continuing Education or Professional Practice Certification requirements be administered only by institutions accredited to confer professional degrees in architecture or by the NCARB with consistent national standards applicable across all states. A minimum commitment of pro bono professional practice, teaching, or mentoring be required for continued licensure.

4. All licensed architects be LEED certified as part of their licensure, updated by required Continued Education or Professional Practice Certification cited above. Alternatively, the AIA promote consistent sustainability standards nationwide on the model of the California Green Building Standards Code.

5.  Architectural education include a base curriculum that requires mentoring, internship and building experience of students with licensed architects in the tradition of apprenticeship before a professional degree is conferred.

6.  The AIA dedicate an appropriate portion of its budget to grass roots gatherings promoting regional integration of architects and their user groups, and provide for that re-allocation by streamlining its headquarters staff and downsizing of national committee structure.

7. All institutions that support our profession, including the AIA and its local chapters, recognize residential architecture as a unique discipline and dedicate an appropriate portion of their budget to that effort.

8.   That all institutions, schools or media be encourage to promote the true value of architecture to the public at large devoid of stylistic preferences.

It is imperative that this message has the greatest ability to effect change when it is presented at the AIA National Convention in June, and we seek your support.  Therefore, we ask you to endorse this message by sending Duo Dickinson an email at duo.dickinson@snet.net as soon as possible with your name and any affiliation that you may have, (AIA, CORA, SARA, etc.), and your location by state. You name will updated on the list below. With your help, we can affect change to the larger, less responsive organizations that represent us.  

Respectfully,

David Andreozzi AIA/CORA/CRAN

Duo Dickinson AIA/CORA

Jeremiah Eck FAIA/CORA

Michael Griffith SARA/CORA

David Andreozzi, CORA, AIA-CRAN, Rhode Island

Duo Dickinson, CORA, Connecticut

Jeremiah Eck, FAIA, CORA, Massachusetts

Michael Griffith, Past President SARA, AIA,