#pid2015utsoa

[pidseminar2015-blog]

Noah Winkler_Week 5

Sandercock’s “Negotiating Fear and Desire” seems to be the direct follow-up question to Mayo’s “Urban Design as Uneven Development.” And both seem to deal with the issues this PID seminar has aimed to tackle head on. “Cui bono” - “To whose benefit,” and how we can responsibly and sustainable expand the answer to this question.

The lapse, I believe, in Sandercock’s answer as a follow-up to Mayo’s question is that the former has chosen to accept and work within the system of the latter, a system with inherently inhumane concerns - capital, capital, capital. Mayo’s city of “bread and circuses, where those who don’t have bread aren’t excluded from the circus” is still part of Mayo’s vilified system in which “business interests will sustain spatial patterns of behavior as expressed in buildings only as long as their desired profit margins are maintained.” The bread and the circus are still all an effort to circulate capital “to serve the needs of capital itself.” And it is exactly this motivation Mayo suggest planners need to get hip to and subvert otherwise remain ignorant. But where do architect’s fit in?

This all leads to the question I have been most curious about recently regarding the way we discuss our newly presented role as architects acting with the ethos of PID. Who are we still answering to and what are their motives? If a large part of this answer we are finding for ourselves is still the need for us to convince a developer that money isn’t everything and that doing right for the community has deeper social implications than a pretty building, why don’t we learn that? Where does that come into our education?

I imagine a nonsense conversation between an architect and a developer in which the developer has asked for a high-rise, high-end hotel and spa with a little bit of overpriced retail at the street level (probably a juice bar). And the architect comes to the developer and says, “actually, we (us and the community) thought it best to create a public park with a farmer’s market and a play area.” My point is, our agency starts after we are hired to design a something. And while we need to do everything we can to make that something the best something it can be for the community, how much can I do to ensure that something is not just totally wrong and what the city actually needs is something else. I’m not sure how this compares to the urban planners Sandercock is speaking to, urging them to be more conscious of the conversation they are able to have. And yes, we can and should have this conversation as well. And we are right now. But this is after we have benevolently been approached by the city with money to look into urban farming. What happens when I am hired to design a private house for a client on a lake?

Sandercock asks, “How can urban designers reshape their practice to address these issues of aesthetic inequity that are created by the political economy?” My question would be the same for me as an architect who does not get to pick my own projects. He follows by restating the responsibility of planners: “to be more sensitive and astute in their practice, urban designers must begin to shape their political thinking so that they can equitably plan and design their cities.” So if this city that they equitably plan and design is planned and designed beautifully and responsibly, and the developer is to build in it, and he or she hires the architect, how does the architect, so many steps removed from the larger planning of the city, get included in this conversation. The point I’m trying to make is that if we say we are problem solvers and not only building builders, I agree that we can go forth and design for social sustainability. But as long as we are building buildings for others who are building for money, how far does our agency reach? I really wanna know!

[pidseminar2015-blog]

Noah Winkler_Week 4

Well now this whole PID idea has me very confused. Between these articles, Steven Moore’s lecture, and the way we’ve been discussing its place in the trajectory of contemporary practice, I’m not sure what PID really is. Of course, I take no issue with its essential aim. I was once discussing eating habits with a friend and the idea of dropping certain things from my diet to achieve certain results. And they made the point that simply dropping the bad was not all it took. I also had to take responsibility and seek the good. I think the practice of responsibly understanding a client’s needs, understanding the role of your design as a piece of a larger system, and understanding its context beyond the discourse of architecture are all essential. They are the active good-seeking in the process. I can’t simply say, “alright, alright, I won’t just design the embodiment of a metaphor I find totally poetic.” I have to do more good work to design with the spirit of PID.

Where I am confused is at the point when we discuss PID as some other entity; when we say here is architecture and they make artsy looking things that don’tconsider the community or the neighborhood or the client’s deeper interests, and there is PID and they’ve done good and right and that design will last. I exaggerate the discrepancy, of course, but the point is that the interest of thepublic is always present in some degree. And the trap we build for ourselves when we call PID something else, when we trademark its title, is one in which we perpetuate the same problems we hope to remedy. The discipline of architecture is fragmented and it hurts us all.

Calling PID something else denies architecture the agency to create socially sustainable buildings. If we treat PID as one spectrum of consideration while we make architecture, we may focus more on where our education system lets us down. We don’t enter the field with the skills to engage the community. School ignored that vital skill-set, or relegates it to an elective (or a summer course!!!). I don’t think the lack of consideration for the public good is such a mystery in our field when we consider what we learn in school.

Within all this, I do think there is a thread that requires a rethinking and perhaps even the invention of an entirely knew discipline: Post-Occupancy Evaluation. Ain’t nobody got time for that! No architecture firm can objectively evaluate the failures and shortcomings of their own design. And no architect has any idea how to rationally draw out the necessary information to learn from his or her own mistakes. The creation of a new field (POE) would allow psychologists, sociologists, designers, urban planners, anthropologists, historians, environmentalists, etc., to critically examine the macro and micro effects of any single building on its social, political, economic, and urban environments. We could begin to understand what kinds of high school sends students to the best colleges, what kind of public housing reduces crime, what kinds of prison teaches an inmate compassion, and so and so on.