Professional Schism

PROFESSIONAL SCHISM

To be clear, architecture is not losing ground to sub-contractors and sub-specialities, it is being altogether superseded by contractors, project managers and the redefining of its contractual obligations. Alex Rankin would blame this turn of events on the architect’s holistic and generalist nature. Yet, although this inevitably complicates the edges of the profession, it does not, as he proposes, fully account for architecture’s current vulnerability. Businessmen and ‘management professionals’ continue to thrive in their own, highly technical, hyper-specialised milieus, and most professions operate under a surfeit of information, if not greater, then at least comparable to that of the architect. If architecture has not been able to achieve a state of poise, it is not too be blamed, as is currently fashionable, upon the breadth of its dependencies alone. There are other factors at play, prominent among them being the architect’s hybrid conceptualization of ‘professionalism’. As such, while the agglomerations of structures and agents which compose the field of architecture have been undergoing a process of marginalization, this blog post posits that architects are unable to counteract this process, not because of the nature of their profession, but because they are themselves confused as to the purpose of professional practice.

Until the middle of the century, the ‘professional status’ of law, medicine, and engineering in Western Europe was safeguarded by state organized bureaucracies: civil servant hierarchies with aristocratic roots that often linger to this day, especially in academia. The anglo-saxon conception of a profession though, is altogether alien to such state controlled cultural mechanisms, for it arose from a group of people doing similar work in a capitalistic market-place. Professions, in their truest sense, arose, and continue to persist, as a means of replicating the symbolic capital provided by the state in a North American climate of private competition. Thus, a Frenchman`s elite status is garnered by being the graduate of such and such a school, while a Canadian`s elite status is primarily dependent upon the standing of his profession. While these different means of cultural signification create difficulties in all lines of work, they have been altogether devastating for North American architects that seem to have neither given-up, nor embraced a definitive model.

As Magali Sarfatti Larson explains in her sociological studies of architecture, like all to-be professionals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, architects embarked on a professionalization project: the defining of a market for architectural services in a way that distinguished them from those services offered by competing professions. Crucial to these monopolistic efforts were the accrued authorizations of state sanction, formal education, and professional credentials. While such a project did, until a time, succeed, it is currently unravelling. Architects wish to endow themselves with the ethical and socioeconomic trappings of a profession, while nonetheless believing themselves privy to some esoteric community that could never be bounded by the limits of its own regulations, and thus, paradoxically consider such validations auxiliary.

Whereas most professions have responded to their increasing bodies of knowledge by creating specialisations, the architect`s European conceptualisation of status, itself encompassed by the provenance of one’s education, denies this from happening. Architects therefore contribute an increasingly diverse skillset without bothering, except in some `green` exceptions, to benefit from accrediting the type of work they do. For the architect to be unsure whether to specialize or not is one thing, yet for the public to be unclear as to which architects are experts in a domain, or as to whether any architect is an expert in any domain, is another matter altogether. Sheena Sharp`s remark that the lack of accreditation among architects is better suited to the exchange and growth of architectural skillsets is valid, yet it also makes the assumption that most architects are able to recognize the differences between their peers, and the assumption that the public is able to do so as well. Meritocracies are defined in the arena of public opinion. The type of work one does is important, but so is the type of work one is perceived of doing by his peers, and neither of these is nearly as important as the type of work one is perceived to be doing by the client. Project Managers have not come to chew away at the architect, not because architecture is holistic, but because the profession is perceived as holistic in the eyes of the public. To be clear, the deficiency of perceived holism is something more or less applicable in North America. It should be noted that in European centers of design, the trend to hyper-specialize would perhaps be detrimental: might remove the cachet the architect requires to operate. The situation being portrayed then, is the unfortunate North American double code: the worst of both worlds that forgoes to give the architect the benefit of specialised credentials, yet nonetheless disallows him the freedom of inter and intra professional migration possible in a European system.

An undecided accreditation system, vacillating between a European and Anglo-Saxon mindset is worst than none at all. It burdens most architects to jump through hoops, yet allows non-accredited practitioners, such as, for instance, (and this is just an arbitrary example) Andrew King, almost all the socioeconomic privileges of the accredited architect While there may be nothing wrong with Andrew King practicing architecture in of itself, an accreditation system that attempts to fulfill its professional obligations cannot allow it to become ubiquitous for non-architects to practice architecture. While this may be a functional norm in Japan, where design not only holds high cultural value, but professional status is based upon the employer, not the profession, as well as many European countries, for the historical reasons already provided, it undermines the professional monopolies required for the architect to function in a North American system. Best then, to either enforce or dissolve the accreditation process altogether, for it is, in this case, the self-contradictions of professional practice which harm the architect
A great deal of this professional confusion comes to affect, and is perpetrated, by the pedagogical systems which are integral to the profession. Architecture schools want the prestige of les Grande Écoles, and the Ivy League, yet they want this status without its non-vocational taint- that is, the arts background these universities provide at the undergraduate level. One would assume then, that architecture schools, would champion technical proficiency, yet such takes a backseat to the beaux art cachet of studio driven education. As such European and North American systems of signification clash to the detriment of the student. Architectural education being neither specialised nor general, neither professional nor holisitic, has no recourse but to survive via tautological means. Thus, some schools have come to consider the incompatibility of architectural practice and architectural education to be a given- the running joke being that architecture students make poor interns, but will one day make great architects.

Although this is meant as another example of the architect`s `non-professional` professional stance, the incompatibility of practice and theory, while fairly perverse in architecture, is a state of being amongst all professions. As such, one could make the argument that it cannot entirely be blamed upon a warped conception of architectural professionalism. After all, academia is a place of experimentation and curiosity, a place which, by definition, favors theoretical research. Unfortunately, this counter-argument only stands if indeed architecture schools produced PHDs and significant research publications, which they, as a general rule, do not. In the United States, social worker’s doctoral production per undergraduate is ten times what it is for architects. Architecture schools have negated professional education in a desire to retain a theoretical cachet not unlike French or Italian universities, while at the same time, negating higher-level education by considering it anti-professional.

In conclusion, architects want to have their cake and eat it too. They want a professional accreditation system, but do not see the need to respect it. They want to stop their work from being accomplished by engineers, artists, and project managers, but do not see the point of defining and differentiating their skillsets through specialisation. They want to teach professional practice but don`t see the point in doing so critically, in a way that moves beyond professional anecdotes. It is no surprise then, that some architects wish to dismiss the architectural profession altogether; believing that unshackled from the remnants of what has become a pseudo-profession, they could better apply their talents. Yet if there`s anything this essay wishes to advance, it`s that the failed orthodoxy of professionalism is something to be fixed, not by dismissing it, but by re-asserting it. To maintain symbolic and financial capital using, what has been broadly stroked in this essay, as European means, is no longer tenable, was never tenable. All professions fight to maintain their monopolies, and whether natural or not, whether too the benefit or the detriment of the public, such debates are irrelevant. The fact is, architecture should do the same if it wishes to escape marginalisation.