Now it’s up to the architects

In the October’s editorial Nicola Di Battista invites the Italian architects to create new lifestyles for contemporary humankind, better fitted to our times and our means.

Editorial, Domus 995 October 2015
This article was originally published on Domus 995, October 2015.

 

If it is true that we are at the beginning of a new season, then what is most important for us to understand is how to approach and how to take part in that season, what role we want to play in it and above all whether we want to determine it, even only partly, or be subjected to it. This thinking concerns us from at least two points of view: one that concerns every one of us as individuals, and the other collectively, due to the craft, the profession that we practise as part of a community. Let us start then from this second point of view, the one that sees us as part of a collectivity determined by our work and by the surroundings and issues stemming from it.

We are talking here about the architect’s job, a job that can be done only by those regularly enrolled in this association, a job regulated by a set of civilised rules and professional ethics to be respected. We are talking therefore simply about a job, one of the many done by men and women.

If we turn now to the architect’s craft as a whole and its place in time, we realise what an incredible past our country has had. The past has witnessed its pre-eminence in diverse periods of history and made it renowned worldwide for having defined a certain idea of Italianity in the art of living. Even this consideration alone shows just how mistaken and misleading it is to reduce the architect’s craft merely to its statute of work. It is certainly a job, but definitely not just that, since habitation is about human beings and their entire lives.
A person does not become an architect because he has passed a certain number of exams at a school
To come back to the present, whether or not because of this inherited fame and splendid past, the fact is that we have been looked upon, for a long time and up till now, as the land of architecture, of fine and beautiful architecture. This situation has allowed us for a long time to hold the world’s undisputed record in number of architects. Almost all of these architects study and graduate in our own universities – all of them public – and are later enrolled in the respective professional associations of their home cities. The numbers rotating around the training of architects in Italy are stunning. If we include its allied activities, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people – something very relevant that calls for thorough attention and reflection.

When you come to think of it however, considering all this and the large numbers of people rotating around architecture, not only is there no lively and frank debate to animate the discipline today, as ought to be expected, but there is not even an authoritativeness of our excellence to match our numbers, and ultimately not even a big enough turnover to justify all this. Our architecture schools, with the means at their disposal, are managing today to deliver an averagely good training, even compared to what happens in the rest of the world. But we should start by answering the question: Good compared to what?

To do that however, we need first of all to answer another question: What task should be performed by a school, and by a state-run school in particular, in the training of a future architect? That of teaching a craft, training the future professional, making excellence possible? None of these tasks is actually carried out by our architectural training facilities, but then why should they be anyway? After all, these are certainly not the duties of a school.

A craft, of course, is not learnt at school, but as we well know, only by practising it. And that goes for professional training too, which requires highly specialised studies and skills. And finally, the forming of excellence requires some very sophisticated and appropriate teaching structures. So what sort of training do Italian schools offer their students?

Wanting to link them to a common goal, we can say that they do impart a university-level, hence generally higher form of education. It is a kind of education aimed chiefly to augment the students’ cognitive relation to their discipline, so that once they have finished their studies, they can properly tackle and solve the problems to be faced in their future work. In the last analysis, this means that our schools of architecture should primarily be concerned with the forma mentis of their students, in the awareness that the true architect is not a technician, not a specialist. On the contrary, he is a person with the capacity to pick the right technician or the most competent specialist to help him best fulfil his work.

The true architect is a person who, by nurturing the ambition to imagine, design and sometimes to realise the places where people live, undertakes to assemble the specifications proposed by a client, community, or even simply those expressed in general by the human spirit of their time, in order to elaborate, summarise and transfigure them into architectural forms, into buildings. Clearly, a school therefore cannot and must not be the only form of higher education available to an architect, who will learn his trade only with time and in certain conditions. A person does not become an architect because he has passed a certain number of exams at a school. The vast mass of architects graduating from schools is formally an architect inasmuch as each possesses a diploma to that effect. But if they have no context, time or condition to become one in effect, they never will be real architects.
Among the innumerable architects in this country, there are certainly some very good ones, and certainly some excellent professionals. Conversely, there are only a few specialists, and above all very few real architects, in the sense outlined above. This implies that the true architect is not only the product of an architecture school, but also of a context, a place, a community that expresses and also supports that architect. If we have few real architects in our country today, it means simply that in recent years we have failed to produce them and have been concerned with other matters. On looking at our surroundings today, we realise how short-sighted and senseless that choice has been, and how much damage it has done to civilised habitation, having transformed what was once the Bel Paese into what is now quite an ugly country.
We have so far talked about architects generally, by referring to all of those practising this profession, and to the schools that train them. But we ought now to start thinking about the individual person, the individual architect. As an individual, everyone is responsible for what they do or don’t do, and even if there are always excellent reasons for doing or not doing a certain thing, we cannot afterwards feel exempt from any obligation to judge what has been done. From this point of view, we cannot say today that in the past years we have done everything possible to make things change. For a long time too many of us have remained uninterested in the outcome of the work itself, treating it as a fact, without judging it, without understanding its qualities and failings, without understanding whether or not it had attained its goal.
Architects should go back to being architects, innovating while prioritising humanity over clients

The result of this work has no longer been, for too long and for too many architects, the touchstone by which to judge one’s own and other people’s capacities. In this way the architect’s work has lost authoritativeness, and the architects themselves have no longer thought of it as something to be proud of. And so they have strayed farther and farther from their objectives: to succeed by their efforts in giving people better lives. We have thus lost the capacity to recognise the quality of a work and the extraordinary gifts that it may possess and transmit to us when it is genuine and innovative; we no longer recognise how its unexpected and surprising results can arouse wonder.

We have ceased to judge our work as architects for what it produces and achieves, or even for what it prefigures through its design. In a word, we have too often avoided the issue and been content, perhaps in good faith, even with partial or lesser results, which may perhaps have seemed momentarily rewarding and left our consciences clear. But in reality they did not advance our discipline by as much as a single inch. But all this by now can be left behind, overtaken by events and already part of the past. It will very soon all be forgotten.

Our times consider our recent past to have run its course, and above all as no longer credible. Instead they offer increasing scope for a collective sentiment that is gradually growing stronger and loudly demanding a renewal. Our times by now demand something else, which is why it is up to architects to intervene. And that applies to those who are already real architects, but also to those who could or would like to be. Young and not so young, there is a big need for all, and now is the time. We know that it is by now indispensable to imagine and to create new lifestyles for contemporary humankind, better fitted to our times and our means. So-called civilised society is beginning to realise this, and its better part is talking about it openly. Likewise, there is an equally strong awareness on the part of many cities, even outlying or minor ones, and of their administrators, that a rebirth is necessary and at last possible, starting precisely from the cities themselves as a common asset.

In the face of this reborn awareness of what needs to be done to renew the designing and governance of our houses and neighbourhoods, cities and land, all the places of our private and public life, architects still seem to be missing, continuing to apply old and obsolete methods in their work. They are not listening, and above all, they are failing to give form to the new demands and needs, to the new requests and also to the new dreams of our times.

If until a short while ago architects could, and rightly, complain of the lack of a context or of the absence of a question to be answered with their own efforts, today there are all the symptoms of a striking change. Of course it takes determination, patience and time to seek them, because they are not yet solid and consolidated, but they are already undoubtedly and irreversibly there. For this reason it is up to architects now to seize this new situation and turn it into forms to fit it, forms that can be shared and convincing. And they must do so before others appropriate the same terms in favour of yet another ideology or ism, after which it will be too late.

And then it will only remain to complain, once again, that our craft has been stolen by other professions or disciplines. Architects should go back to being architects, innovating while prioritising humanity over clients. Let them seek in the spirit of their times what to place at the base of their work as the content that will support it, as they push and strive, perhaps take on risks and venture even without a safety net into territories they might not be so familiar with. Now is the time for architects to act, to renew the role that they have had at other times and that they could regain. The choice is ours.
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