01.03.2023

Article by Michal Šourek: Industrialize the Architectural Profession at Last to Revitalize It and Make It up to the Urgent Needs of Our Era

The architectural profession operates in an extremely competitive environment today - and more and more evidence arises showing it cannot cope. The consequence is socio-economic problems for architects, the devastation of the branch, and substandard performance that affects the protected interests of individuals and the public interest, including urgent goals of sustainable development efforts. Obviously, any of the consequences is worth to eliminate; to turn the attention to the problems and contribute to launching the needed changes is the objective of the paper. Putting the realia of topic area into the industrialization´s theory framework, the paper puts the hypothesis that a persistence of the architectural profession in preindustrial, medieval-guild paradigm is the cause.

 

Further, the explanations of particular, today-frequented cases of the counterproductivity and, in today's social and economic conditions, the unsustainability of the processes and acts by which the profession is practiced that are based on Toynbee's theory discuss, test, and verify the hypothesis. Virtual public space and, in particular, virtual reality environments and technologies are bringing the architectural profession to the brink of a revolution. It promises to optimize the processes of architectural design and the planning of the building that makes architecture material and to upgrade the level of quality of the results achieved. Is the profession ready for such a revolution; is it ripe for it? Is it coping with the current situation, which is different from the conditions and environment in which the architect was the sovereign creator of the summum templum architecturae?

 

Can it use the technological revolution to overcome the long-standing problems and establish a new professional paradigm that renders necessary for the regeneration of the profession, for its performance in terms of securing the protected interests of individuals and the public interest, and for promoting the sustainability of life on Earth? Finally, the paper proposes a positive conclusion – conditioned by industrializing the profession at last; as the prerequisite and the path, the paper suggests mastering the virtual reality environments by the architectural profession and utilization of its technologogies.

 

You can find the whole article HERE.