Daily Prompt: State of Architecture 

The built environment is important for our psychological health. It’s how we order ourselves in the world. The decline in art and architecture is explained away by asserting that we prioritize different things now. It makes us feel in control of the situation if we say that we did it to ourselves, like it wasn’t sabotage. We tell ourselves that we chose “efficiency” over beauty, even though those things go hand in hand. Beauty is the result of efficiency. Beauty exists when there isn’t anything extra that can be taken away from the composition. The same architect who knows how to properly proportion a building, knows how to structure it efficiently. It’s a question of quality, or high standards. Quality isn’t a luxury because every building prior to 1930 was high-quality. 

The decline in quality is due to mass production, which is the opposite of architecture. Mass production allows corporations to scale up profit by using stock plans and prefab units that ignore context. Context, such as site, terrain, views, sunlight, existing buildings, etc., is the basis of architecture. If architects resign themselves to using stock plans, they remove context from the equation, so they don’t need to respond to it, meaning they don’t need to be skilled. Skills is a problem for big developers and manufacturers who want “new professionals” to administer low-quality buildings without understanding the damage done to communities. Special interests sabotage the institutions to prevent them from teaching the profession. They don’t want skilled architects and developers working together with the community to create adapted buildings that fit with the character of the place because that's anathema to their business model.