January 18, 2008
architecture and social relevance
As I looked around architecture schools in the 1990s, I was impressed by the large percentage of women students enrolled and graduating from professional programs in architecture. Now more than ten years later, I look around for those same women in the ranks of the profession—and I find very few of them. A good number have decamped to the university; others cannot be accounted for. It seems that gender integration happened in academic architecture, but not in the world of professional practice. This would seem to indicate a failure of nerve on the part of female professionals, as if the conditions had all been set up for them to succeed in the profession, but that they have been unable to take full advantage of a new palette of opportunities. The same story is roughly true for minorities, with the notable difference that their representation within the architecture school seems seldom (if ever) to have risen to commensurability with the minority population in America as a whole.
In fact, these 'failures' simply indicate the depth of a serious problem. One aspect of it was long ago sketched out by Linda Nochlin, in her seminal, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (ARTnews January 1971: 22-39, 67-71; reprinted in Women, Art and Power, and Other Essays, 1988). If Nochlin's essay helped open the professionalized world of art to more women by indicating the historical-structural limits operating on women artists over time, it also indicated a deeper problem that has less to do with the university and more to do with market capitalism and the ways in which it has constituted contemporary professions.
For much of the 20th century the question of a growing middle class, with its concomitant influence on the development of mass culture, was a concern for architecture, practitioners and academics alike. For the last decade, however, the profession has lapsed back into an elitist model that endangers the future of the field in the 21st century. Architecture, like professions such as business and law, continues to rely on inherently race- and gender-biased professional behaviors and ethics that have been designed around the needs of middle- and upper-class white males, but that function much less effectively for people from less conventional backgrounds, or for people for whom a male career trajectory is not operationally practical. The ethics of the architectural studio (and the workplace) allow for the participation of women and minorities so long as they "walk the walk" of their white male counterparts. This Cold War attitude in the face of mandates to broaden the field has understandably achieved poor results. (Click here for a recent report in the New York Times). In fact, increasing professional specialization over the course of the past century tends to suppress diversity of all sorts, rewarding conventionalized behaviors that maximize workplace efficiency by increasing competition and reducing exceptions. Capital proliferates best in an environment of maximum efficiency.
And yet, in an era of mass-customization and ever-burgeoning industrial design and prefabrication, women and minorities have no need of a profession that excludes them. If it marginalizes large subgroups of the general population, architecture will continue the ongoing slide into irrelevance that has accompanied its modest market share since the 19th century. But there may be other consequences to architecture’s old-fashioned self-definition as elite practice, rather than as formative influence on the built environment. Could it also be that the lack of women and minorities in the profession of architecture is both a consequence of and results in the perpetuation of its boutique identity?
If so, we can begin to establish a link between the creation of an increasingly diverse professional population and an increasingly diverse (and populist) array of building tasks. Given that architecture for some years now continues to be redefined in the face of other outside forces that challenge the ways buildings are traditionally made, shouldn’t there also be a redefinition of the discipline’s professional tasks and its audience, as well as its priorities in choosing professional representatives? In other words, can the lack of diversity in the profession be put under pressure when its constituencies in the society at large are broadened? As the population grows more diverse, shouldn’t it demand a more diverse professional cadre, both in terms of the make-up of the field's practitioners, but also in terms of the breadth of tasks architects are called on to perform?
Architecture is slow to diversify its corporate body. Schools of architecture have done better, but primarily in terms of numbers of women and minorities, skirting questions that have long since been successfully attacked in many other academic realms. It is high time for us to examine the consequences of maintaining a profession conspicuously lacking in diversity, in a society that values diversity as an ever more pressing issue with local and global repercussions, and to broaden the relevance of our field to society as a whole. But what will it take to encourage change in architecture schools in the wake of affirmative action defeats, so that its members begin to see questions of diversity as relevant to the primary mission of education?
By focusing lectures on the question of diversity this year, TCAUP can begin a discussion of how and to what degree a broader social base for the profession of architecture matters to our continued growth and development. For the sake of survival, the field of architecture is urgently in need of a new academic and professional ethic, one that understands diversity not as do-gooder soft liberalism, but rather as pressing economic necessity and a base condition of contemporary life.
Posted by zimclair at January 18, 2008 11:03 AM