When did architecture become so disconnected from cultural discourse? Sydney Shilling hosts a critical conversation about how the profession needs to engage the mainstream.
Most of my friends (industry colleagues notwithstanding) could count the number of architects they know by name on one hand; a select few could name the designer of their favourite Toronto building without the help of Google. Musicians, directors, authors and other creatives are frequently name-dropped in casual conversation — but not architects. I’ve always wondered why. As a former architecture student, I often feel as though my access to architecture was earned through study. Granted, most kids haven’t developed an obsession with Frank Lloyd Wright by the time they’ve hit middle school. Unlike arts and literature, architecture remains largely missing from the K–12 curriculum and, given the lack of accessible resources on the subject, the average person’s engagement with the field is fairly surface-level — limited to home reno shows on HGTV. And while this content may offer an initial point of connection, it doesn’t grapple with the pressing issues facing the built environment today.
The permanence of architecture, among many things, sets it apart from other issues in the popular consciousness. “Buildings tend to stand for a bit longer than a theatre performance. I can decide not to go to the theatre, I can decide not to listen to certain music, but once a building is built, it’s there for everyone,” says Reinier de Graaf, partner of Rotterdam firm OMA. Given that over half of the world’s population now lives in urban centres and the average North American spends 90 per cent of their time indoors, people interact with the built environment as much as they do with music, movies or books, if not more. Many also care deeply about the way their city looks and functions. So why are people fluent in pop culture, while architecture remains a foreign language?
It wasn’t always this way. At one point, architecture — and those responsible for creating it — were celebrated in the mainstream. The term “starchitect,” coined in the 1940s, describes this very phenomenon: practitioners whose influence not only catapulted them to canonic status within their industry but also made them bona fide celebrities in their own right. Eero Saarinen, for his part, made the cover of Time magazine in 1956. The Finnish-American was a modernist icon whose work represented the progress, technology, and optimism of the postwar period. In the decades that followed, seven more architects would grace Time’s cover — including both lesser-known practitioners like Edward D. Stone and the legendary Le Corbusier, who was featured in a 10-page profile; Daniel Libeskind ended the streak in April 2005. These cover stories weren’t just adulatory project reviews (though architecture features prominently in them). They were chronicles of the subject’s life, both professional and personal, and often featured commentary from their contemporaries. The expansive feature on Le Corbusier in the May 1961 issue of Time painted a profoundly personal picture: “His moods are as unpredictable as his talent is unlimited. He can whisk off a sketch on something that seems little bigger than a postage stamp, and it will turn out to be almost exactly in scale. He has few close friends, and though he says he enjoys having people around to talk to, it is always a rather unilateral affair.”
While it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that the starchitect fell from grace, the fact that an architect hasn’t been featured on the cover since reflects the field’s dwindling cultural relevance. Over the same period, print media have also seen a steady decline (Time magazine, which used to be published weekly, now runs only twice per month and with a much smaller circulation), and the effects of both trends have been far-reaching.
Architects’ former status as cover stars — iconic yet knowable, their ideas accessible to the masses — stands in stark contrast to the seeming impenetrability of their contemporary counterparts. “Architects used to be concerned about the perception of their buildings, and frankly, I feel like they’re not anymore. They don’t actually know how to be public-facing. They have an idea of what the public wants, and it’s completely divorced from reality,” says Kate Wagner, architecture critic for The Nation. “I would argue that they’re starting to be more engaged, but there is a sense of being above the public — which I think is bad because the public has to look at your building every day.”