by David Celento for Harvard Design Magazine
I've been debating myself lately on the topic of architecture and success. How could a young Architect achieve success in an already saturated construction market. Marti Neumeier already addressed some of the facts that make good design a success in his slideshow "The Brand Gap - How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design" posted on SlideShare. Be sure to check it out.
"Architects are among the very few providing
custom design services in a product-infatuated society. This presents a profound problem, especially since few clients possess an understanding of the efforts necessary to create custom products, and even fewer are willing to adequately finance them."
"To avoid obsolescence, architects need to increase demand for their skills by embracing emerging technologies that both stimulate and satiate consumer desires."
“I have to admit that the guy who drives a BMW or an Audi (whose parents drove an Oldsmobile) is not doing that only because he knows the Audi looks better — he is also doing it because of the status that ascribes to that name, and now, that status is available to (and sought by) a far broader segment of the population than it once was.” Why don’t people lust after fine buildings to the extent that they do BMWs and Audis? The answer is simple — they can’t. Architecture is sold in units of
one."
People are consistently learning more about good design, and also getting it from a mass production market, apple has made it clear that good design sells. Their portable audio products, and now their Iphone that has invaded an already saturated market with a product that offered something new. This has achieved the impossible-to-ignore task of stealing clients from other carriers and faithful cellphone users. Proving once again that innovation and good design are critical for the success of any design for any consumer.
The saturation of manufactured goods today has had a profound impact not only on consumers, but also on providers of custom-made goods. Consider the once flourishing tailoring trade, which, as a consequence of mass production, has shrunk to one sixteenth its size from 1920 to 1990. Today, industrialized societies have gleefully traded fit, finish, and durability in exchange for savings, variation, brand-name identity, transient fashions, and immediate gratification.
Today’s consumers fundamentally lack an understanding of the complexity of creating anything tailor-made, let alone a substantive (and emotionally complex) object like a new building. Architectural clients soon find themselves lost amid a bewildering world of possibilities and complications that they are unprepared for because of their customary reliance on mass-produced goods. Rather than being exhilarated by the process, they are often left with remorse, since they must eliminate countless desirable options along the way. While a few may enjoy the ambiguity, attention, cost, and complexity of the architectural process, many conditioned by the modern conveniences of ready-made products, web ordering, and overnight delivery are simply frustrated by it.
If fifty years later Houses of the Future were envisioned as daringly, they would surely be the offspring of a union between digital design and automated rapid fabrication. Not limited to simplistic adobe-esque load-bearing styles, these homes would come in a variety of forms ranging from traditional to avant-garde and would be available in many durable colors, textures, materials, and translucencies. Complete with injury-free, pliable children’s rooms, these structures (likely constructed with five-axis extrusion heads and sonic welding already used for utility piping) will be capable of complex shapes that would make even Gaudí envious. A significant side effect will be that ornament will again proliferate, since complexity will no longer have a direct relationship to labor cost.
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