In this episode we hear from this generation on their experience with building practice in contemporary America. The cohort is focused on moving away from speculative or gallery work and towards substantial built projects, but they describe the challenges in getting a small, academic building practice off the ground. They highlight the ways that academic bona fides no longer translate to meaningful commissions. Whereas prior generations were rewarded for their disciplinary mastery, they find themselves lacking professional expertise, competing against more resourced corporate firms, and feeling that their perspective as designers is no longer valuable to clients.
Download“I look at these names and I think it’s an incredible group of people. Then can we count how many buildings we put out there as well? We can count them on our fingers.”
“So everybody here wants to do buildings. So this is a little different than other moments in time when you’ll find the experimental avant-garde within architecture being clearly against the building realm.”
“The bigger difficulty to me is how hard it is to build in the United States anything that’s of any architectural value.”
“I remember seeing a Stanley Tigerman lecture at UIC in which he talked about a house… and then a client just emerged out of the audience afterwards and asked him to build a house. Could you imagine that happening today to anyone, right?”
“The profession of architecture is absolutely in crisis. I feel like we constantly run up against our clients being like, do we really need architects? Like why are we paying you a $100,000 you know, I think I can just go talk to the contractor and they’ll just build the thing I want.”
“For most young practices you get work if you grew up wealthy with connected parents and they can start funneling work your way. Otherwise, how do you get work? Because architecture is expensive and if you don’t know clients, you won’t get them.”
“Larger practices have a lock on the pipeline. And they’ve been able to appeal, I think sometimes wrongly, to the idea that scale of practice is equivalent to smoothness of architecture’s entry to the market for sale.”
“Fundamentally the problem starts with real estate.”
“The risk mitigation has become so prevalent that, unless you’ve already built something, then it’s hard to convince someone to risk millions of dollars for you to build something.”
“There is less and less room for architecture in the way we have learned about the field as a discipline at large. I don’t see that trend reversing.”
“The role of the architect, maybe this is some sort of 20th century profession. That is, very quickly now coming to an end, especially in the American context.”
“There are going to be different configurations of professionals and capital and material and labor that are going to be ushered toward building. Whether or not architecture as we know it, the discipline of architecture, is going to play a kind of important role and not in the future, I think is a question.”
Interviewer
Joseph Bedford
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writer
Tim Cox
Narrator
Tim Cox
Interviewees
Curtis Roth, Andrew Holder, Michael Meredith, David Eskenazi, Michael Young, Kyle Reynolds, Kyle Miller, Hans Tursack, Katie Macdonald, Kyle Schumann, Jaffer Kolb, Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet, Bryony Roberts, Meredith Miller, Anna Neimark, Neyran Turan, Michelle Chang, Ashley Bigham, Erik Herrmann, Jerome Haferd, Clark Thenhaus, Paul Preissner, Stewart Hicks, Brittany Utting, Daniel Jacobs, Mira Henry, Matthew Au, Jimenez Lai, McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, Andrew Kovacs, and Jon Lott.
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.