What tactics have emerged in architecture and design since the financial crisis? What’s the operational mode of the bust, or how do we work now?

bryan gave the Final Word

I appreciate the specificity of the question, Mimi, because there certainly is a difference between strategies and tactics. Strategy has increasing currency but tactics often attract less attention. Reading the responses thus far, as well as being aware of the general sentiment that is growing within the architecture community, it seems clear to me that there is a growing interest in new strategies of practice: flexible, nimble, agile, or whatever you want to call it.

The context of these strategic explorations also seem spread across a wide cross section of areas: rethinking the business model of architecture, re-engaging social issues, addressing politics, finding new cultural opportunities. I argue that these are different areas of content, but that they all benefit from a flexible, agile, nimble strategy. The methods, then, can be shared even though the content is different, much the way that an architect is able to transfer their learning about space from residential to commercial work and back and forth.

I look to skills such as negotiation, translation, and optimism as survival tactics in the post-2008 era. I’m taking tactics to mean skills or maneuvers that can be developed through practice. Even optimism needs to be practiced every now and then.

Whether understood on basic business terms such as negotiating a favorable contract, or in more abstract terms such as the skillful negotiation of a difficult political context, this skill is not (to my knowledge) taught in schools or even much discussed. And yet, by definition, the architect continually must negotiate (in both senses). It’s a useful example because negotiation is a “soft skill” which makes it tempting to say that it’s innate, but there are actually quite developed discourse, training programs, and communities of negotiators. Whether building social housing, bootstrapping a small cultural institution, or building a a skyscraper in Dubai, closing the deal is a necessary tactic of any flexible strategy.

Closing deals in a considered way requires the ability to translate between disparate contexts, individuals, organizations, and languages (including professional languages and jargon) vis-a-vis their incentives, desires, and constraints. Developing and honing translation as a tactic is again a ‘soft skill,’ but it can be learned and practiced. Industrial designers have been learning from ethnographers, sociologists, and other social scientists for quite some time now, but architects have yet to adopt the same skills in a widespread manner. We can now observe practices such as Quilian’s and others who are using their ability to translate the needs of communities into terms that make sense to formal bureaucracies. Although it’s much different from the point of view of content, starchitect offices are arguably translating the arch/artistis value of their projects into the terms of brand or communications, which enables them to have a more favorable conversation with clients (and charge higher fees). Translation in this sense is about making something from one context relevant to another. Or as Mark Pasanik puts it above, “to relate between scales.”

Although this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, I will close on the notion of optimism because I think it brings a useful tone to negotiation and translation as a pair of tactics that may have commercial connotations to some ears. I have no problem with commercial practice, and actually find that as a community we have done ourselves a disservice by shying away from the dreaded questions of money, but if we want to grow our engagement with issues of society or even ecology, which the market is much more ready to accept at the moment, we need to be optimistic. There is no equivalent of the stararchitect in the realm of policy/society/ecology. Consensus is by definition a multilateral act, which means it will tend to be less than perfect. To operate in this context, and to have an impact, requires persistence and the most basic sense of optimism. Luckily that’s one trait that the design community seem to have in spades.

Thursday, March 24 at 10:47am