Guy Horton Stating the Obvious

Catherine Rampell used cold hard facts at the beginning of the week in The New York Times, causing architects to huff in to their black turtle necks by calling on kids not to bother majoring in architecture. In response to this the object of my all time professional crush, Guy Horton, commented a more coherent reply along the lines of, ‘will you all stop being gurney elitist fannies?’

What Horton is pointing out is that architects got all pissy about Rampell’s article because they hate people who are not architects pointing out that we are isolated, disconnected or underpaid. Horton rightly points out that the architecture profession is like this because it cannot communicate with the very people that they need and are supposed to serve, those people being the wider public.

While this is definitely not a new thing, it is just very apparent in this type of economic climate as money gets tight and a stick is sharpened and pointed toward anything what’s worth is not obviously tangible. 

The obvious conclusion to Horton’s note is that architects should endeavor to communicate to the public that they need us as much as we need them. Other wise every thing built in the world would end up getting built by developers and end up looking like the nicer parts of Aberdeen.

Personally I don’t want to live in a world of weather stained concrete and tiny windows. I also would prefer to live in a world without architecture wank chat. All that talk about architecture, to architects, in architect speak, is totally blinkered in an utterly introverted world of opinion under a cloak of mystery – no wonder the rest of the normal world are suspicious of us and wants us to perform at the lowest price!

I really like reading articles like this that call for folk to get out their own arses and do some graft that makes the profession more relevant. Architecture is not just about our tiny part of wider ‘culture’ or what we learned at school, it can be so much more when everyone is included. It’s adventures to want a whole system from education to retirement to change; I just hope this pretty little dream can be realized in some small form for at least one moment.