OPA moves ahead with G¡a, The Serial.

This is a letter to all of you who have read my posts and a call to move forward.

I am continuing with the OPA.earth G¡a series. My writing will continue to explore how architectural professional practice can reach its natural role. That requires that people want what architecture is and what it can do for us, because it’s about people.

There are a lot of architects who will be confident that they are verifying that what architects produce now is actually what people want. The profession has been expressly bending over backwards to appeal to the financial and technical needs of clients and builders for my life time. And before that, the profession was configured to make sense of and then to exploit our contemporary machine ages technology. The sense that the professional is exactly representing the prospective client’s wishes and needs predominates for sure. Given decades of refining the current process within the current paradigm, the market as it is seems clear. My work responds to the waning fortunes of the profession.

The caveats that create a space around this market are that we question where there are more clients,

1) with our relatively small numbers, and the shrinking value — both relative and absolute in every way you measure it — of the work that is going on that architects participate in, and

2) the ongoing disjunction between professional degree education and the firms of architects, whereby the value of the practicing architect is anchored in somethings that the business of architecture cannot value. And that teaching has not gone away.

That very very difficult schism in consumerist society, where our relative wealth has us imbibing a lot of things that are not very good for us. Traditionally and spiritually it is the schism in everyone between doing things for pleasure and doing right. We are destroying the environment within and without; it is toxicity from pornography to doom scrolling, our food through the killing of ecosystems. Our pillars of rectitude are being absorbed in maniacal politics and corporate hallucination.

Not the majority of humanity, but certainly a potential quorum, are not clients of all this. These would be the clients of architects if the professional practicant accords with values that counter these toxic elements in our cultures. This includes the traps of contracts, insurance, banking, and legal and regulatory complexities that have arguably grown cancerously far beyond the common sense that they are there to facilitate human wellbeing.

We are coming to the threshold of comprehending something ...

The project of G¡a by the Office for Presencing Architecture is about comprehending the re-correlation of the ‘customer’ and the product of the architectural profession according to the heart of what architecture really is. Architecture is much more than aesthetics or creativity, although all of that is part of it, as is ‘design’ and technology, and well, not so much, ‘business’. Income to support the work and lives of architects is certainly a core issue. I challenge the concept of business in the sense that the economy of finance is an arbiter of trimming the built environment down to value engineered irresponsible toxicity that represents a financial spread sheet. Architects participate in transforming those spread sheets into our environment. There is no bad architecture just as there is no bad nature or spirituality. That is simply not architecture.

I am asserting that places by which we experience architecture means places where we have valued humane aspiration that support that we are healthy, grosing and that we evolve spiritually. Architecture supports humility and the purpose of the life we have, and how we with the aspiration that makes us. We honour nature and ourselves as part of nature. That place that we have made has become a way for us to feel all that. This transcends language, and even conscious awareness, although there are languages that bear more terms for this realm than English does.

There are millions of us who know that all that we do is to support the quality of life and that the quality of life revolves around how we feel. How we feel is qualitative and can be evolved. There are enough of us who know that this qualitative aspect is our real power. Architecture is the higher quality environment that supports this, but it is not merely higher quality. It emanates from a categorically different origin than building and material amounts of stuff. Architecture emanates from consciousness and its purpose.

That is what I write of here in the G¡a series and the articles that engage things that are going on now, such as alarm at its constantly downward trending Billing Index.¹ The profession as it is arguably faces its doom, and its dogmatic rigidity and claims of long experience are symptomatic.

The tone of my writing for G¡a may seem aloof to a lot of what goes on here on Substack and on other similar media. I am not breathless and agitated about some topic that is a specific pain point or response to that or just simply having enough of this or that. That is not architecture; architecture is not allopathic. Although it happens every day and is immediate (or would be, were there much architecture anywhere), its intensity does not tick with the ticking of clocks, or social media.

Architecture in not very common in most of North America. Railing against poor environments and miserable buildings is not architecture either. The devastating atmosphere in many New York subway stations, nevertheless, brings up a sense of familiarity and comfort. That is based in a feeling our own ability to make our character and will power central to a place. I take that as literal battle grounds where I have felt myself collapsing to my knees waiting for the train as weakness overwhelmed me. Yet, I still feel that I love New York city and those places are part of it. A warrior will feel at home in the battle field.

This intensity of being in places is part of every person and it is inherent in the human mind and all of our minds as we participate. It is our potential and our capacity. If channeled properly in a person and in a community and all of humanity, that potential is realized as our capacity, it happens. It happens for an architect or for a team. We have many many examples over millennia.

Over the past almost 3 years I have taken an entrepreneurial approach to practicing architecture. I am not registered where I’m living, so it’s not called architecture. Attempting to work to provide these qualities without saying it is architecture is strangely a kind of freedom. Proposing architecture without the designation is helpful for me to learn what is important about it for people all around us. I am writing as a registered architect with a North American professional degree. I am registered in more than one jurisdiction. I have been involved in the profession since my teens and was first registered in New York State 30 years ago. When I speak of not ‘being’ and architect, it is because I am not legally certified where I am sitting as I write this. I am telling you all that I am not an architect because the local architects will go after me if I say that I am an architect. I am not.

The waning fortune of the architectural profession is symptomatic of not selling what we say we are. This sentence is so devastating to the professional. The client side demands architecture even less than the professional. That is the profession's doing. We need to be nominally architects because what we would produce has been left off. We have eroded that fine point of distinction over decades of becoming technicist through subverting our calling to the business of construction. Buildings are not as magical as architecture — speaking as an architect — I feel architecture is like magic. Managing a building project does not require an architect. There are many jurisdictions where engineers are dominating the profession of architecture, while the architects cannot define why they are different forcefully enough.

We are deeply within a time where a couple of generations of architects have not received the core teaching with an intentionality to break that habits of the early machine ages that we haplessly propagate. We need not listen only to the successful architects or the corporate firms. This is a certain minority, a kind of 1%. We can struggle to enter that zero-sum game bubble, or we can make a bigger bubble.

It is my heartfelt wish that architects in a jurisdiction take up this need and join to begin to develop this as a movement and eventually a juggernaut. There is technically or legally nothing stopping any registered architect from doing anything that I am proposing. There are just very vanishingly few architects who will venture into this space. My aim may sound too extreme or too difficult. It is not because it correlates with the calling of architecture.

Everyone has the freedom to produce architecture. A profession is necessary. But not one that capitulates in production agreements against architectural value itself. It is OPA’s aim, through the work that The Goal in Architecture already did, serialized as G¡a posts, to express how the paradigm to provide for architecture is realized.

1. https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/the-architecture-billings-index-sounds-an-alarm?utm_source=newsletter&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=AN_022426&