Beyond building: Redefining architectural production

The fascination with architecture as built artifact eclipses the much broader expertise of the architect and establishes a misrepresentative binary of built and unbuilt. Mel Dodd discusses how we might reconsider professional and public views of architectural production.

The architectural profession and its journals, publications and prizes tend to focus on architecture’s value as built artifact. The corollary to this is that the unbuilt has less or no value, or at best that it comes in a poor second place. This binary is a consequence of a professional body of knowledge that focuses on buildings alone and that arguably misrepresents the fuller dimensions of our practice. Rather than exposing the broader knowledges that go into architectural production, it commodifies the notion of “building” as object. Consequently, what architects actually “do” at work is often undervalued by the public and there is a mismatch between the public’s perceptions of an architect’s work and what it is that architects actually believe they are doing. And if architecture is diminished to a narrow bandwidth in which the labour and expertise of the architect is collapsed into three-dimensional form alone, then the two-dimensional expression of that form, as epitomized by CGI renders, is allowed to dominate. The spectacle of the architectural render becomes a lens through which our discipline is framed, arguably stripping it of all except taste and aesthetics. Worryingly, the profession often actually promotes its services using these same principles – for example, through the architectural competition and its presentation boards. Not surprisingly, the real value of architecture is therefore poorly understood and we are in danger of allowing ourselves to be represented through global architectural competitions and on redevelopment hoardings as a pure commodity.

So what is it that architects actually do? What is this hidden unbuilt work and, more importantly, what is its impact? We need to shift from a monodimensional view of practice that emphasizes the delivery of built form toward a multidimensional engagement in our society where architects are responsible, alongside others, for maintaining the complex, ongoing and contested ecosystems of the city.

As a profession, architecture emerged in parallel with the growth of cities and we still have an enormous role to play in their sustenance, especially in light of contemporary ecological and societal challenges. Cities are more than just physical places; they are complex interconnected systems of hard and soft infrastructures, environments and ecologies, economies and services. As an interrelated matrix of “things,” cities are in constant need of maintenance, repair and attention by a network of actors and players, contractors, makers, designers, maintenance operatives and users. Architects have the opportunity to act within the wider public domain of local government planning and service policy alongside multiple stakeholders across civil society, industry, business and the public sector. Our engagement with these multiple other knowledge systems offers the possibility for great impact, relevance and innovation in sustaining equitable urban systems.

In redefining the unbuilt, it helps if we reverse the way we look at what architects do, in two ways. First, rather than seeing architecture from the outside

as object, we need to understand it as a form of production, from within.

This concept was discussed by Brazilian architect and exile Sérgio Ferro in the 1960s. A recent translation and appraisal of his essay “Concrete as weapon” explores his intention to “demystify” architecture by re-orientating how we critique a discipline “whose role in the real world lies mainly in the reception of its built products, and not in their material production.”1 In using the term “material production,” Ferro means more than just detailing a building. He is discussing the realignment of the profession with respect to industrial capitalism, acknowledging architects as active protagonists rather than the consumers that we have arguably become as a profession.

Coalitions of architects and educators such as Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) provide an excellent example of what that might mean. WBYA? emerged in 2011 as a result of protests over workers’ rights as construction began on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi by Frank Gehry. The organization’s founding members began a process of intervening in the American Institute of Architects’ Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct in light of the shocking hesitancy shown by architecture firms to investigate unethical construction practices – including worker exploitation – on bigger transnational and ethically dubious projects. Research by WBYA? has exposed complex networks of transnational subcontractors, such as curtain wall manufacturers, who use evasive tactics to circumvent labour laws and ecological codes of conduct. In this instance, WBYA?’s unbuilt work exposes the unethical activities of large construction projects and provides a tool for making visible what is normally invisible. Ironically, such a reorientation returns us closer to “building,” but with a more emphatic and clear ethical framework that we can incorporate into practical codes of conduct, advocacy and even legislation.

This reorientation in approach from “reception” (of buildings) to “production” brings us to the second, more radical idea for reversing our view of what architects do. We need to move away from the notion of the “built” as a noun (with its corollary “unbuilt” denoting absence) toward the concept of “building” as a verb. We need to emphasize the notions of practice and the practitioner. Reconceptualizing the terms through an ethnographic lens will bring us toward an understanding of how practice “produces” or materializes knowledge as a fuller set of operations involving actions, tools, objects, systems and networks. This means a focus on architects as workers, and on the skills and knowledges they hold, rather than on architecture as an abstract body of knowledge. Architects will likely already find that this approach mirrors their own intuitive understandings of what they do. Reorientating from architectural object or “architecture-as-noun” to “the effect of various doings (architecture-as-verb)”2 opens up new possibilities for how we frame our actions. Structuring architects’ work around systematic and sustained acts of maintenance (acting within), as opposed to the invention and novelty of imposition of the one-off building (acting upon), fundamentally refocuses our agency and acknowledges that architecture does not privilege the material over the social nor the technical over the cultural, but rather engages in them all as a critical set of knowledges, producing and effecting actions and consequences. In such a definition, the “unbuilt” does not take second place; quite the opposite, it opens up a rich matrix of activities that literally keeps the contemporary city going.

Returning to architecture’s value and the binary of built and unbuilt, establishing our value(s) across a richer matrix of knowledge exchange and production is critical to restoring the ethical relevance of the profession. Practically speaking, it’s also timely because current existential challenges present in the climate emergency have brought forward the need for systemic change – for paradigm shifts, even – in how we use cities. Bizarrely, the current pandemic has prototyped some of these changes, including reduced mobility, the reconsideration of the workplace, the repurposing of the home, and localized and distributed production. Ironically, reassembling a more robust architectural engagement in material production, and reasserting the role of the practitioner as a protagonist, would provide the connective ties back to the material, technical and tectonic dimensions of our environment – but this time with a clear ethical mission that allows agency and leadership in the face of challenge.

— Mel Dodd is an architect and academic responsible for practice-based research and pedagogy that bridges the gap between the academic institution and the profession, industry, government and society. She has recently been appointed professor and head of architecture at MADA, Monash University, in Melbourne.

Footnotes

1. Sérgio Ferro, “Concrete as weapon,” introduction by Silke Kapp, Katie Lloyd Thomas and João Marcos de Almeida Lopes, translated by Alice Fiuza and Silke Kapp, Harvard Design Magazine 46, Fall/Winter 2018, iii.

2. Jane M. Jacobs and Peter Merriman, “Practising architectures,” Social and Cultural Geography, vol 12 no 3, 211–222.