Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas mentioned once he is driven by his sense of responsibility, which is a surprisingly traditional, because Calvinist, statement for this avant gardist. His sense of responsibility explains his continuous commitment to redefine the role of the architect. This came from an interview by Charlie Rose:
Any architectural enterprise takes at least 5 years. Today, in this economy, in this political system, globally, almost no ambition, and no coalition and no agreement lasts for more then 3 years. So there’s a painful discrepancy between the slowness of architecture and the constant turmoil with which everything moves and changes and mutates. (…) Maybe we could apply architectural thinking in its pure form without necessarily building.
This approach moved Koolhaas in founding AMO as a think tank counterpart of his architect’s office OMA. This comes from Wired:
What’s interesting about AMO is not that it will develop things that aren’t buildings, but that it will continue to work architecturally – to sell clients its analysis of the relationship between human behaviour, built structures and the invisible networks of commerce and culture.
Considering architecture is primarily an literally about housing processes (regarding our daily life as a process), architecture as Koolhaas describes it would be about shaping processes in whatever possible form. It would bring the work of the ‘hardware architects’ like Koolhaas closer to the work of the ‘software architects’ that we know from ICT. Moreover it would mean that everybody that is involved in management or policy, principally could be regarded as a designer (as Gilberto Gil does, see here and here).
This is not new. When architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) got involved with the cathedral of Florence, the Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore, he did not just design the building. He designed the whole construction process. To this purpose he even designed construction devices that were so sophisticated that Leonardo da Vinci studied them thoroughly. In Brunelleschi’s view a cathedral in itself is not architecture. Building a cathedral is architecture.
It would be exciting to see what happens if we replace the polarized thinking that is so common in management and policy with design based thinking. Design considers contradicting factors as possibilities rather than obstacles. It aims to combine contradicting factors into a new design, the whole being more than the sum of its parts.
That would be progress.
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