Also, since, if we began designed hybrid econocar had the soul and heart of a lambhorgini, or perhaps a fine bmw, or just a good looking car, rather than a dork-mobile, that would have so much more of a positive impact, thrusting the socially and ecologically responsible technology into the mainstream market... the reality we are faced with... Isn't it better to empathize, rather than impose our morality on others (both for business, and for the betterment of society)?

Why can't people be love their architecture and be sustainable too?

I'm rambling, something that has been on mind lately at work...

But sometimes I think changing culture can't be done with a stick, it's best done with a carrotstick... :p

Sorry for the typos...

Sorry for the long rant... Alot of that made no sense, but just had to get it out of the system...

Ever had one of those days? Where you are tired and self conflicted and argue with yourself, mumbling while riding the bus? I need therapy... Okay I've taken my chill pill... Love and dandylions! Love and dandylions... Okay...

bRink..Dont argue with yourself..remove it on the client.

Everything in life can be solved with violins. ;)

I think this is a really nice topic, or 'conflict' you have going here. Most up to date research suggestively point to the fact that while we think we are using our 'mind' (i.e. rational), we are most of the time tacitly swayed by our 'heart' (i.e. irrationality, bias, intuition, you name it etc.). Someone won a nobel prize for this and someone is going to with his new book. Anyway. So at least for me, the distinction don't hold very much.

What you seem to be arguing, at least from my interpretation, is that since we pour so much soul, passion and love (i.e. 'heart') into our works of design, it should intuitively be 'logical' that the selling of these works should unitarily involve the heart as well. There should never have been anything 'artificial' in construing a sell in architecture.

Of this I can think of two responses. One, that the assumption you took is unjustified. What we pour our heart into does not necessarily mean that the selling part should belong to the domain of the 'heart' as well. Take the Ipod. It is all about style and belonging, which is arguably of the heart. But I don't think it can go around not telling (esp. to Americans) how much disk space it has and what it can connect to and so forth (i.e. technical data). Same with architecture: to argue that the Fallingwater is a beautiful residence is not to negate the part that it has passive cooling and so forth. It is to the kudos of the designer to meld the two together than to assume one over the other.

Two, and following one, there is already some of that in architecture already. Surely to buy a Savoye or a Turgenhardt is not a decision solely in the rational domain: there is always an impulse decision to be the first and only on the block in 'architecture' defined in this modernist sense. But architects are rarely involved in this exercise at this level of marketing or consumption. Though theorists love to exhort that architects should sell less, architects actually sell less than they love to admit. What we sell, really, is labor, and not the product. There are some architects who sell products these days (and we know who in the west LA region) but those are few and far between and their buildings are all kit of parts: enlightened home depot. Furthermore, the 'ecological' extends beyond the building itself into social practices and habits. If you have a community which dumps used alkaline batteries along with their garbage, you are not going to benefit much from a high ranking in LEED. On top of that, some of the LEED logic is not compatible with the logic of what constitutes a good design according to that individual architect, depending on how he was trained ans so forth.

While it is easy to think that the most passionate product should beget the most passionate reception, the lexus ls460 article on today's LA Times should answer your very interesting question!

BTW, great case study in engineering if you are interested: "Why should my Conscience bother me?" by Kermit Vandivier. Should 'engineers' or technical experts be concerned about the ethical problems of their design or product?

one of the first things they teach at Harvard's real estate development program is how to take advantage of Architects because of their altruistic nature or 'heart'. they tell how to whittle down an architects fee by playing on the architects innate design nature of wanting to do a 'good' project.

we're to blame too. we're always whining about no-one ever wanting to do a good project, clients don't want this or that, blah-blah-blah... i am starting to develop my own projects, as should more architects it's the only way out of the viscious circle, and you learn about the reality of development. we'll never change anything being relegated to a service industy, 'servicing' individuals and developers. we are one of the only professions left that actually has 'ethics', and they are wasted if we don't start taking control or our own direction.
(officially off soap-box now)

I guess what I'm getting at is: isn't the architect in the business of selling ideas, perhaps even imaginings as much as the quantifiable value?

Perhaps the architect should play the developer... Ethics aside, whatever your value is, my point is that the market is not, basically rational... I don't think its so much about the architect wanting to do his own good project according to his own great architect notions of 'good' so much as:

We are human beings, we are market consumers, consumers of our product as much as any of our clients, so what it comes down to I think is what we consider valuable knowledge that makes us better equipped to empathize... There IS knowledge that comes from the heart, or things that are based on intuition that are every bit as much, if not more TRUE, and convincing, and perhaps less 'dumbed down' than any hard data that is supposedly collected through objective "scientific" means... The data is valuable to an extent... But placing too much faith in the limited inductive information from case studies and the supposedly rational information to be had there I think runs the danger of discounting the real value of the much greater inductive logic of life experience... All of the innumerable personal observations that collected over the course of all of our human interactions with our real environments and people every single day of our lives since we were born amount in many cases to something that is not so much instinct, but something that we know to be real, that sits in our gut, and probably more relevant and directly relateable, using deductive and inductive logic to a client... Even without words... Perhaps even with a single image...

I'm not sure that any design decision can be wholely rational, instead people see through intuition, data counts, as a tool, but only in so much as we have the smart empathy as human beings to understand what the message is for the client, and, where that data moves the client... even if it is moving their pocket book.

Social "pseudo-sciences" IMO have a danger of forgetting that they are human sciences, and there is so often a sickening pretense of objective fact, and when we are dealing with people, experience is the only thing connecting us with reality. Architectural market research and data mining should be research classified in the humanities as much as in the sciences.

The numbers don't sell themselves I don't think... But these are questions, I'm pretty one sided I know, not sure what to think sometimes, maybe this is just my own personal subjective morality playing out in my gut that wants to believe that we've learned something about people through life experiences...

I believe in intuition, that it is not really magic, it's equally or maybe more informed than any pseudo-scientific experimentation, just not in the directly frontal cerebral kind of way...

<ok... seriously off my soap box now>

I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying d-j, only that I'm not so sure that "heart" is not realistic development... It is just a different kind of market research.

In the UK at least, I love those shampoo adverts by L'Oreal and the like that feature images of attractive women then jump-cut to more attractive women in white lab coats with a voice-over along the lines of: 'new anti-oxidase monobase hydrators work deep in the scalp to produce shiny, beautiful hair!'
Selling architecture's a bit like this: some spurious pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo belying some genuine technical development blended with an alluring image.
I olook forward to the day when sustainable and / or ecological architecture research reaches some kind of credible fluency... I guess it must be getting there but, at present, there are too many mixed messages.

bRink, can you give us a description of your situation? It sounds like you're working for a hard-nosed developer who might not care about quality as much as profit.

design_junky, then there is something wrong with harvard as an institution if they teach students how to exploit other professions. This is tantamount to teaching business leaders how to exploit labor in all its different dimensions at the HBS or how to solely focus on increasing test scores in a child's education at the GSE. I don't believe in this. Either you had a bad teacher, or a good one who adheres to bad ethical practices.

There are many ways to change the world. There are some who does it with the sword, and there are some who does it with the pen. Then there are some who does it with love. The idea that only by being a developer can one change the world is simply not true. FLW or Le Corbusier was not a developer but yet they managed to change how we view design in cities and within a larger scheme of things.

If I have learned something from my old product development classes and subsequently in new product start-ups, it is that ideas don't mean a thing as far as the tangibles of the company goes. How to implement the idea; to be accepted by all the stakeholders and then motivating them to go all out for it to make it a reality, that is the profitable factor.