Architecture Art Or Profession

Architects are perhaps the most important people involved in shaping the built environment, so the ideas they receive in the course of their training are a major influence upon the buildings and cities of the future. Crinson and Lubbock present a bold new perspective on the evolution of the British architect from Wren to post-modernism and beyond, and provide the first general history of architectural education, making an important contribution to current debates. The Prince of Wales' views on modern architecture and the need for a change in the way architects are trained, has attracted enormous support from the public, resulting in architects and their training being under the spotlight more than ever. The drive to define and promote the architectural profession that began in the eighteenth century and reached its apogee in the 1960s has now begun to unravel. How has this happened? What relation does an architect's education have to the built environment? What lessons are there from the past? This book will be of interest to students, lecturers and all those interested in the debates around contemporary architecture.

Dana Cuff delves into the architect's everyday world in "Architecture" to uncover an intricate social art of design, resulting in a new portrait of the profession that sheds light on what it means to become an architect.

Although architecture is the fastest-growing profession in America, its private context remains shrouded in myth. As Dana Cuff shrewdly observes, it is filled with contradictions, particularly in the realm of practice. She delves into the architect's everyday work world to uncover an intricate social art of design. The result is a new portrait of the profession that reveals what it means to become an architect, how design problems are construed and resolved, how clients and architects negotiate, and how design excellence is achieved. Cuff concludes by discussing how the design profession, particularly the schools, can take advantage of these observations to strengthen the profession and lay claim to the whole design process.Cuff shows how architects fashion a meaningful place in society by working in collaborative settings, although attributing singular importance to the creative individual. She addresses the discrepancy between the many competencies required by practitioners in complex settings and the narrow teachings of architecture schools. Throughout, she questions whether architecture is essentially the domain of specialists or of qualified generalists.The different components of Cuff's cultural model of architectural practice are described in full. These include history and demographics; the differences between design problems in practice, in the academy, and as construed by the professional organization; the metamorphosis of layperson into architect; the culture of the office and its influence on interactions with the client.Dana Cuff has taught as a social scientist among architects and as an architect among social scientists. Her participant/observer studies for this book,carried out over the past decade, involved nearly 200 individuals representing 80 different firms. She is Associate Professor of Architecture and Planning at the University of Southern California.

This is the first in-depth study of how the architectural profession emerged in early American history. Mary Woods dispels the prevailing notion that the profession developed under the leadership of men formally schooled in architecture as an art during the late nineteenth century. Instead, she cites several instances in the early 1800s of craftsmen-builders who shifted their identity to that of professional architects. While struggling to survive as designers and supervisors of construction projects, these men organized professional societies and worked for architectural education, appropriate compensation, and accreditation. In such leading architectural practitioners as B. Henry Latrobe, Alexander J. Davis, H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Stanford White, Woods sees collaborators, partners, merchandisers, educators, and lobbyists rather than inspired creators. She documents their contributions as well as those, far less familiar, of women architects and people of color in the profession's early days. Woods's extensive research yields a remarkable range of archival materials: correspondence among carpenters; 200-year-old lawsuits; architect-client spats; the organization of craft guilds, apprenticeships, university programs, and correspondence schools; and the structure of architectural practices, labor unions, and the building industry. In presenting a more accurate composite of the architectural profession's history, Woods lays a foundation for reclaiming the profession's past and recasting its future. Her study will appeal not only to architects, but also to historians, sociologists, and readers with an interest in architecture's place in America today.

The Architect traces the role of the profession across the centuries and in different cultures, showing the architect both as designer and as mediator between the client and the builder.

Merlijn Hurx is assistant professor at the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University. He defended his PhD thesis at Delft University of Technology in 2010, which was published as Architect en aannemer by Vantilt (Nijmegen) in 2012. He was awarded a Veni research grant (EUR 250,000) from NWO (The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) for his project?Architects and bureaucrats? in 2013. As of 2013, he holds the position of Secretary of the European Architectural Historian Network (EAHN), and he has been a member of the Scientific committee for the EAHN third international meeting in Turin, June 2014.

This important book looks at the relationship between the architectural profession and the built environment in the context of the great political and social cycles in the British post-war period.