The bellyache of an architect

Architecture is the most public of the arts, and in some ways the most totalitarian.  When millions read a best-selling novel, or buy a new album, they will do so voluntarily; nobody forces them to read or listen.  Architecture, by contrast, is foisted on you by the physical fact of its existence.  Shutting your eyes is hardly an option when you need to cross the street, and moving town seems rather drastic.  Nor does time necessarily help; a building's relative permanence means that any initial offence can continue to fester through the years.  No wonder that of all the artistic debates which periodically rage in the media, it is the architectural ones which are the most acrimonious.

Pity then the poor architects.  Not for them the privacy of the workshop followed by the fait accompli of publication or unveiling. They must work with the knowledge that their final plans will pass through many hands, and be subject to many gazes. Some of the scrutineers' concerns and demands will be mutually exclusive; many will be ill-informed or the product of blind bigotry. And yet the architect is defenceless.  To build requires an enormous investment of money and time; those holding the purse-strings are bound to see them more as leading-reins which can guide the errant and wilful draughtsman.  Thus architects become the most abject of artists, forced to humour the whim of their philistine masters, to wheedle small favours out of recalcitrant committees, to compromise time and again lest the tantalising apple of a realised commission be snatched out of their hands once more.

Given the contumely which is poured upon them in the perpetual open season of public debate, and given their own sense of unending humiliation which is their calling's lot, is it any wonder that architects seem a surly crew? That their ranks are riven by constantly shifting factions is explicable by a need to band together against the enemy; the vitriol which flows so freely simply reflects that the fragile basis of their lives - an intense belief in themselves and their work - can brook no alternatives.

The situation is exacerbated by the amount of time architects are forced to spend waiting for decisions of boards and planning sub-committees and public enquiries.  During this time they may be required to tinker constantly with their original and by now mutilated visions.  Apart from being distasteful work in itself, hacking at the beauty they have created, it neither encourages commitment to other projects which will prove equally heartbreaking, nor offers sufficient distraction for the beleaguered spirit.  As a result, architects seem to spend much of this barren period firing off salvos in the form of letters to the newspapers and polemical articles in magazines.

Ultimately the architect is a sad beast.  Look at the biography of the greatest of them; many spend the bulk of their lives dedicated to the hopeless pursuit of a vision which is never realised.  Instead we are left with the detritus of their careers, the crumbs of genius. To be an architect is to engage in a perpetual and thankless struggle, to end up with miscegenated designs, and to find that the few of those which reach fruition will call forth only the obloquy of a baying, ignorant public.
 
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