rory hyde projects > www.roryhyde.com/blog/?

p=614

Potential Futures for Design

Practice
The 21st century has ushered in a radically different world than that faced
by our predecessors. The rise of globalisation and the information society,
the seemingly unassailable dominance of market thinking, the impending
threat of environmental degradation and the erosion of social sustainability
and tolerance, are just a few of the challenges we face. In addition, each of
these issues have been further compounded by the ongoing financial crisis
of 2008, burdening governments and individuals with spiralling debt and
unemployment, limiting our capacity to act.
All of this conspires to produce a design landscape of unprecedented
complexity, one that cannot be adequately addressed by the traditional tools
of the design professions.
Calls for a new kind of designer stretch back to the middle of the 20th
century, most famously in Buckminster Fuller’s description of a “synthesis
of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary
strategist.” [1] A role that Bruce Mau has more recently embraced in the
establishment of his Institute Without Boundaries, acknowledging that the
complexity of today’s problems would necessitate these roles to be taken
up by the “collective intelligence of a team”. [2] MOMA curator of design
Paola Antonelli calls for designers to adopt the role of “society’s new
pragmatic intellectuals … changing from form giver to fundamental
interpreter of an extraordinarily dynamic reality.” [3] John Thackara
similarly calls for designers to “evolve from being the individual authors of
objects or buildings, to being the facilitators of change among large groups
of people.” [4]
But with all of this demand for change, where are the results? While the
mainstream may be slow to adapt, there are designers around the world
eagerly carving out opportunities for new kinds of engagement, new kinds
of collaboration, new kinds of practice and new kinds of design outcomes;
overturning the inherited assumptions of the design professions.
Here follows a brief survey of these new roles for designers, each
representing potential futures for design practice.
The Community Enabler
The healthy boom of the past two decades has led the architect to become
accustomed to producing boutique solutions for private clients; a
comfortable scenario that has distracted us from our responsibility for
society at large. By reconceiving the role of the architect not as a designer
of buildings, but as a custodian of the built environment, the space of
opportunity and tools at our disposal are vastly expanded.

Hunter Street Mall Newcastle in full swing during the Red Lantern Night Market,
December 2009, following Renew Newcastle’s initiatives. Photo: Marni Jackson.
The Renew Newcastle project, established and led by Marcus Westbury,
illustrates the value of people in the improvement of a public space. While
millions had been spent by local government on rebuilding the physical
aspects of Newcastle’s rundown and largely deserted Hunter St mall, the
simple gesture of opening up vacant spaces for use by creative practitioners
and businesses has kick-started its revival. [5]
The Visionary Pragmatist
The stereotype of the architect as an obsessive, black skivvy-wearing
aesthete who produces detailed artefacts of beauty is a pervasive one that
may sometimes live up to the truth. This is a potentially dangerous
perception however, as it promotes our interest in form over our value as
strategic thinkers. By promoting our capacity to challenge the underlying
assumptions of a problem and to develop responses informed by a larger
context, we can hope to be invited into projects at an earlier, more decisive
stage, and not as mere cake-decorators.

Elemental, community housing, Iquique, Chile.

Chilean practice Elemental, led by Alejandro Aravena, views the larger
contexts of policy, financing and social mobility as equally important
territories for the architect to understand and engage. The multi-unit
housing project in Iquique proposed a unique solution to the issue of the
limited funding allocated per unit of social housing. By providing ‘half of a
good house’ [6], and configuring it in a way that enabled future expansion,
the residents can create housing of real personal value and utility.
The Trans-Disciplinary Integrator
The complex, manifold and integrated issues of today cannot be solved by
architecture alone. To be truly instrumental, we need to open ourselves to
new constructive alliances with thinkers and makers from beyond our
discipline.

Design Research Institute studio session. Photo: Stuart Harrison.

RMIT’s Design Research Institute, established in 2008 by Professor Mark
Burry, is a research centre directed toward collaboration and information
sharing between students and professionals from over 30 disciplinary
backgrounds. By harnessing collective expertise, the DRI is able to address
major social and environmental dilemmas that do not conform to the
traditional boundaries of design training. [7]
By transcending our own expectations and limits, we can in turn recast
society’s expectations of what we are capable of addressing.
The Social Entrepreneur
The economic crisis has been heralded as the end of architecture’s
‘obsession with the image’. What this hope overlooks however, is the
powerful narrative potential of architectural communication in catalysing
complex visions for the future. Deploying this power to address social aims
allows architects to contribute meaningfully to the future of the city by
posing the critical question: ‘what if?’

PLOT’s Clover Block proposed for Kløvermarken park, Copenhagen, 2006. Image
thanks to Felix at JDS.
PLOT’s (now BIG and JDS) scheme for the Kløvermarken park was
developed in response to Copenhagen’s acute housing shortage. Through a
media campaign which promoted their solution to provide 3000 units
within in a perimeter block without sacrificing a single sporting field,
PLOT were able to generate significant public interest in the project, which
led to the government holding a competition for the site. Although PLOT
did not win the commission, the project is proceeding nonetheless,
providing much-needed housing to the inner city, and demonstrating the
value of practical vision. [8] (I’ve discussed this project before in an earlier
post on Unsolicited Architecture.)
The Practicing Researcher
Architecture’s current model of charging as a percentage of the
construction cost does little to justify the thinking and intelligence that is
embedded in the process. The inability to distinguish our conceptual value
from our production-focused value that this model implies also means we
are not natural candidates for projects that require the approach of an
architect, but that may not result in a building.

OMA/AMO, image from the report ‘Roadmap 2050′, 2010. Thanks to Laura Baird.
AMO, the think tank of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, was
established precisely to focus on this type of work, by applying
‘architectural thinking in its pure form to questions of organisation,
identity, culture and program’. [9] The project Roadmap 2050: A Practical
Guide to a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Europe, commissioned by the
European Climate Foundation, delivers on its title with a radical scheme of
integrated green power generation stretching from North Africa to Norway.
By not being constrained to any particular building commission, this
research can operate at a scale that holds the potential for real global
impact. (I have discussed this project further in an earlier post Whole Earth
Rise.)
The Long-Term Strategist
While form is an important aspect of the architect’s repertoire, it is now just
one of a larger set of tools directed at achieving results. The challenge of
environmental sustainability has brought with it the necessary obligation
that buildings perform as designed, and can adapt throughout their life to
meet changing demands and targets. We can no longer simply design the
object, but must also design the strategy of implementation and long-term
evaluation as part of our responsibilities.

‘C_Life’ by ARUP, Sauerbruch Hutton, Experientia and Galley Eco Capital – winning
entry of the Sitra Low2No competition.
The Low2No competition organised by the Finnish innovation fund Sitra
made these long-term strategies a central requirement of the design brief.
[10] With the ambitious aim of producing an urban development solution in
Helsinki that would over time be carbon negative, the teams were asked not
only to produce an architectural vision, but a future strategy for delivering
these environmental results. By looking beyond the immediate horizon of
project completions, the strategist takes on a greater responsibility and
interest in a successful outcome.
The Design Management Thinker
One of the current buzzwords in the design world at the moment is ‘design
thinking’. Although it has many definitions, one interpretation is of the
application of a design approach to problems in fields outside of design,
such as business and management. [11] This is heralded as a potential
means for designers to expand their reach and to reclaim their
instrumentality and relevance to other disciplines.

McKinsey & Company, SOM, et al, Vision 2030 Bahrain. From Al Manakh 2: Gulf
Continued.
However, we are also witnessing the rise of its inverse; a more threatening
scenario whereby management consultants occupy the territory traditionally
held by architects. As the role of cities in the globalised world evolves from
simply being designed to deliver quality of life, to being speculative
instruments of investment, governments are increasingly turning to
financial and management consultants for advice instead of urbanists or
architects. This is particularly true in the Gulf region of the Middle East,
where McKinsey & Company has produced the Vision 2030 plan for
Bahrain, and have reportedly also been developing the plans for Saudi
Arabia’s new economic cities. [12] This potential future should be treated
by architects as both a warning and an opportunity for coalition.
The Unsolicited Architect
The potential for architects to address the challenges of the future are
limited by our reactive model of commissioning. In a concept outlined by
Volume magazine in the issue of the same name, unsolicited architects
create their own briefs, identify their own sites, approach their own clients
and find their own financing. This requires a more entrepreneurial mindset,
as the tools of architecture and architectural thinking are only powerful if
they can be unshackled from the constraints of a given brief.

ZUS, De Dependance proposal for Schieblock building, Rotterdam. Via.

Faced with the planned demolition of the building where they have their
offices to make way for encroaching gentrification, landscape architects
ZUS created ‘De Dépendance’, a counter proposal to reuse the building as a
centre for urban culture and a hub for like-minded institutions and
businesses. [13] With support from the municipality and media exposure,
they were able to turn around the developer, who now supports their
proposal. By developing a viable alternative, instead of merely protesting,
ZUS were able to steer the project to an outcome that is both equitable and
beneficial for all parties.
References

1. Zung, T. (2002) Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for a New Millennium, St Martin’s

Press
2. Mao, B. (2010) “Design and the Welfare of All Life” in Tilder, L and Blostein, B.
(eds.) Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design, Princeton Architectural Press,
p.12
3. Antonelli, P. (2008) Design and the Elastic Mind. New York, Musuem of Modern Art,
p.17
4. Thackara, J. (2005) In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, The MIT Press,
p.7
5. Presentation on Renew Newcastle by Marcus Westbury at BKK Architects,
Melbourne, 7th May 2010
6. Harrison, S. & Hyde, R. (2010) Interview with Alejandro Aravena, broadcast on
Triple R, 27th April (podcast)
7. Burry. M (2010) Design Research Institute Annual Review 08/09, RMIT University
8. Lecture by Bjarke Ingels at Monash University, 9th of July 2008
9. oma.nl, accessed 18th September 2006
10. See the Low2No brief here www.low2no.org/competition/challenge (accessed 11th
June 2010). Sitra’s Bryan Boyer has also written extensively on the architect as strategist.
11. Brown, T. (2008) “Design Thinking.” Harvard Business Review 86(6): pp.84-92.
12. Hyde, R. (2010) “Measuring the Presence of Consultants” in Koolhaas, R. and Reisz,
T. (eds.) Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued, Volume 23, Archis Publishers, p.160
13.
14. dedependance.org, accessed 11th June 2010

Acknowledgements
This piece was written in July 2010 for Architecture Review Australia #116: Future
Cites, published under the title ‘Future Practice’. Big Thanks to Mat Ward at AR, Tobias
Pond and Timothy Moore for various discussions that helped to shape the text.