Outside Influences

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Author Message Ralph Liebing, RA, CSI, CDT Senior Member Username: rliebing Post Number: 1355 Registered: 02-2003 Posted on Wednesday, November 07, 2012 - 08:16 am:    121107 OUTSIDE INFLUENCES by Ralph Liebing, RA, CSI, CDT Cincinnati, OH The design professions of architecture and engineering are being impacted quite severely by outside influences-- influences that really need to be watched, if not challenged and re-directed. The professions need to establish their curricula for their own credibility. We can mention academic curricula, the computer and software industries, and professional organizations that try to represent entire practicing professions, but which have become so large and big-issue minded that they often miss the very point for their existence-- value to members. Each of these needs to fully understand and take some positive action to change their direction so they become of service to the professions and not just sources of absolutes that the professions blindly demur to. Professional degree programs in academia have changed relatively little for far too long, holding to narrow and unwise traditions. Schools and their faculties, for the most part, decide what their curriculum will be [unless there is a rare directive from a higher source]. While there can be a claim that this is the result of insightful information, it is rather fallacious in that the true reality and direction of professional practice is not addressed [and quite often never mentioned]. In some instance and aspects, it is as if the “real” professions do not even exist. Hence the curricula have become hide-bound in extreme emphasis on design as the primary if not sole direction of instruction. [this is true of architecture, but I'm not all that sure that it is about engineering, too] Oh, there is ancillary instruction but in far more limited ways. Then too, the universities have imposed more of a “well-rounded education” criterion that takes time from the professional instruction for general liberal arts work. Admirable! Perhaps! Makes for better cocktail party banter, but too much time is siphoned off that seems better utilized for the instruction in expanding areas of practice. More balance in curricula would help to negate the need for band-aid solutions such as IDP for the architects and to a degree in the engineers’ EIT], whereby postgraduate programs are required to insert what was not taught in the schools-- but which are necessary prior to recognizing the person as a properly qualified professional. Is there something in this that doesn’t ring true? It is rather baffling that the design professions seem to simply “disappear” when it comes to anything from promoting their expertise to fostering new efforts to attract students and potential professionals. There are rather simplistic and fairly weak efforts to get “momentary” exposure and programs in the elementary and secondary schools, but nothing of true substance-- no meat on the bones! When youngsters can be and are inundated with programming on TV [if someone will route them correctly] to massive projects, and how is that made [?], they would see and perhaps be fascinated and intrigued by the machinery and devices at play to produce anything from surf boards to chewing gum-- engineering projects! In the same light, architects are almost wallflower-like - so innocuous as to be invisible. Oh, they testify on occasion when some project is proposed that is errant in concept or design-- or when some vague, subjective aspect is encountered. Architects too often are represented wholly by the miniscule number of “starchitects” and “talkatects”, who pontificate, and use rhetoric to explain their odd and bizarre designs beyond comprehension of the public; about things and ideas more remote to general understanding than riding in $200,000 automobiles—never have; never will! The professions need to fall back to human reality; to becoming “of the people” and to serving in much more obvious and meaningful ways. Testifying to review groups, to county commissioners, to Congress, etc. is fine for a small part of the professions’ needs. But the larger problem and need is to fire up the run-of-the-mill membership by supporting it and helping it with its public image, involvement —and contribution. Why even the newspapers refer to “artist’s sketch” instead of “architect’s rendering"! And the spokesman on the design of projects is totally the owner developer and never—ever—the architect who is solving the problems and making better [what?]. We need to convert "influence outside the issue" to "outside influence that impact the issues"—and the professions!