PA Potents

Three September PA amulets:

1. Kent Larson's review of the SIGGRAPH 94, which avoids
carpal tunnel dysfunction:

Architecture schools should be leading the exploration of
mean-
ingful ways to use these [VR] tools to create
architecture. Most, however,
have not measured up to the task. Just as the
architectural profes-
sion has ceded control of much of the building process to
other dis-
ciplines, architects are now in the position of seeing
other fields
amass superior expertise in three-dimensional
visualization tech-
nologies. Architects find themselves possessing little
influence over
the increasingly sophisticated architectural images that
SIGGRAPH
participants present to the public. In the end, the
exhibition in
Orlando drives home a disturbing thought: the digital
revolution is
passing architects. by.


2. Thomas Fisher's essay "Escape from Style", which avoids
presbyophrenia:

With the rise of Romanticism in the late 18th Century,
that literary tradition
of splitting form from content swept through Western
culture. By the 19th
Century, it had heavily influenced architectural thought.

Architects began to see the world, not as an integrated
whole, but in
oppositional terms: our authentic individualism against a
conformist
culture, the purity of our art against a philistine
public. . . .

Such thinking became institutionalized in the then new
profession.
The architect-as-individualist was embedded in the studio
system of
the schools, where priority was placed on individual
effort, on formal
manipulation, and in our century, on originality. This
Romantic view
of the architect also pervaded the then nascent
architectural media,
which, by the early 20th Century, were already focusing on
the aesthetic
expression of a very few architects, thus conflating
journalism with
public relations. . . .

If the Romantic tradition is so ingrained in our
profession, how can it
be overcome? You could argue that, if anything, we have
entered a
period of super-Romanticism, a highly individualistic era
in which form,
completely divorced from content, has become nothing but a
means of
personal expression. I think that there is no denying
that some of this
is going on, promoted largely by the institutions most
rooted in
Romanticism: the schools, magazines, museums. But I
think this
individualism represents the last gasp of a worn-out idea,
rather
than something that can carry us into the future.


3. Bob Gutman's letter on "PA and the Profession", which
avoids hyperprosexia:

This summer, I have been working with several small firms
to help them
"grow" their practice. The partners in all of them are
good architects
and intelligent. But it is amazing how some resist
listening to their
clients, or if they do "listen", how hard it is for these
architects to credit
the client's design ideas. They often exhibit an
arrogance which is
offensive to all but their fellow architects. In some
areas they obviously
do have a genuine expertise, but it covers many fewer
aspects of the
building and the building process than they seem to
realize.

As I say, I believe the difficulty with many of these
practitioners is the
tradtion in which they operate: their persistent focus on
what they
regard as the standards set by the star designers and the
design awards
committees. Unfortunately, as we know, the profession
continues to
give design awards with little attention to the technical
and other features
of buildings.

End PA cowries.
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