Designing Practice is a collection of conversations aimed at Moving Architecture Forward. 

Looking to the future, Designing Practice is a series that explores how the practice of architecture can evolve in the 21st century. Framed by contemporary conditions, the series asks architects and designers to consider the discipline’s broader context and imagine new models for moving architecture forward. 

The future may be impossible to predict, but it can be designed. Generating and sharing architectural knowledge has always been a tricky business, from an architect’s education to the production of a project. Architecture is created amidst constraints that give its practice definition. Throughout history, architecture has been a construct of social, economic and material conditions. Whether or not architects choose to accept them, they provide a framework under which design is generated. These conditions and realities give rise to the built environment. 

Today, the terms and trends defining contemporary practice have been heard ad nauseam...

At the turn of the 21st century, architecture began to face new conditions of production. For the last two decades, architects have sought to engage novel modes of representation, form-finding and political agency. Today, the terms and trends defining contemporary practice have been heard ad nauseam: capitalism, social impact design, social media, post-digital representation, post-human, sustainable design, privatized public space, craft and material technologies, marginalized publics, democratized design, 3D printing, housing, parametric design, and the rise of artificial intelligence, to name a few. Amidst all of these, architects continue to negotiate the boundaries of the discipline, endlessly questioning what is architecture and what is not. Form or function, art or service, ideation or production? 

While architects are taking stock of current practice, rarely are they projective. When Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Guillermo Fernandez Abascal outlined and diagramed a 21st-century taxonomy of architecture, attempting to define and categorize the various new forms of practice that have grown in popularity since the 2008 economic crisis, they expected emerging practices to have a more ideological stance than the previous generation. Instead, there was a general refusal to take a clear stance. Architects can no longer afford to be reactive, refusing to question the conditions and frameworks under which practice operates. Now more than ever, architects need to speculate, to look towards new models that can embrace radically evolving practical, conceptual and cultural structures. 

Now more than ever, architects need to speculate, to look towards new models that can embrace radically evolving practical, conceptual and cultural structures. 

There are many ways to be an architect. But what will happen if the scope of the architect is absorbed, including the design process itself? To illustrate the dilemma, take self-learning technologies. As machine learning improves spatial awareness, autonomous creativity and the ability to make judgments, the scope of architects will inevitably change. At The Bartlett, A.I. is already used in the space syntax software ‘depthmapX’ to analyze spatial networks without going on site. In a more generalized context, economists usually break employment into cognitive versus physical jobs and routine versus non-routine jobs. In a century where A.I. becomes more prolific and moves from replacing routine physical jobs to replacing non-routine cognitive work done by doctors, teachers or architects, what will architecture look like? How does practice continue to remain relevant in the coming years? Or should it? 

There are many ways to be an architect. But what will happen if the scope of the architect is absorbed, including the design process itself? 

These questions go beyond the politics of automatized software and recalibrated design agency. Barbara White Bryson looked to the future of architecture as extinction or irrelevance. She outlined architecture’s lack of scope, stability, connectedness, effectiveness, and resiliency. Amy Schellenbaum went as far to say that the future of architecture is not about architects. Is architecture condemned to continue perpetuating what Public Architecture’s John Peterson calls the “pendulum swinging back and forth,” moving between a prioritization of aesthetics and form one decade, to social engagement and pragmatic problem-solving the next decade, and then back again? To further complicate the perpetual pendulum, practice is stagnated by mediated discourse and homogeneous status quos. 

The Royal Institute of British Architects began looking at the future of practice in 2010. In their full report, they asked whether architects would exist in 2025. Various conclusions were made: in the UK, medium sized design-led practices and small metropolitan boutique practices would be under pressure, there would be an increased need for expanded modes of practice and architects will branch into general consultancy, practice and education will continue to be more integrated, and networked practices will rise. While their predictions are still unfolding, we’ve already begun to see some of these trends in the UK and across the world. 

Designing Practice seeks to approach the future of practice from new perspectives, instigating conversation on the evolution of cities and architecture from diverse vantage points. Each article features a single designer or architect and asks them to imagine how practice will evolve in the 21st century. The collection of conversations examines the progression of architectural training and its focus, and how practice will change as a result. Taking stock through speculations, the conversations aim to interrogate and discuss the discipline to imagine new forms of practice.