[bigbob]

The housing slump is only one factor. Less than 5% of buidings today are designed by architects, and technology is making it extremely easy to apply design automation and CAD techniques to minimize the work required by an actual architect and thus his fees. An adjacent field that is using these tools and achieving more success is that of Design-Build Contractors.

As an architect friend says, anyone going into architecture today had better have a “Plan B”.

[Vince Ferrer]

I'm sure that's all true, but it also the sign of a quantum leap in productivity in the field, which goes back to my belief that architecture is experiencing a renaissance. There will definitely be adjustments, some of them painful, if experienced architects simply want to continue what they have been doing for years, working on minor tweaks to yet another strip mall.

In the video I posted, a Chinese company has taken the franchising model and manufactured homes to skyscrapers, to build McSkyscrapers. Think of how much construction is going on in Asia to drive that innovation. . Architects will have to take a step back and let software worry about where every little electrical outlet goes, and concentrate on the bigger picture.

Hundreds of years ago, people got together and built things like this cathedral:

Most everyone who was involved in building this cathedral could not read. None of them had electricity, or a more powerful machine than a horse, and they lived in houses with no heat or plumbing. Yet they could build this.

Then we went crazy with modernism. With electricity, computers, wealth unimaginable hundreds of years earlier, this is what we build:

But when I write about a renaissance in architecture, it is because I see a true rejection of this dehumanizing modernism, and both a return to the aesthetically pleasing forms, and the willingness to go further, with new designs, new materials, to create something functional and yet beautiful and inspiring again.