Aaron Cayer, “Powers of Practice,” Harvard Design Magazine: “Instruments of Service,” 52 (2025).
Excerpt:
”Over the past decade, architects and scholars have reported that the architecture profession is struggling—for relevance, value, and structural equity—if not mourning its own death. In their books, articles, exhibitions, and podcasts, they cite architects’ low wages, large corporations dominating the profession and construction markets, as well as an oversaturated workforce that has left many without jobs and feeling as though they have no voice. What forms of change, they ask, are possible?
Despite the expressed urgency of these reports, they are not new. Indeed, they have served as prompts for authors writing about architecture as a “practice”—about what architects do in their studios or offices, as well as their beliefs and values—every 40 or so years since the profession formed in the US in the 1850s. In the paragraphs that follow, I consider when and why architects and scholars historically consider these questions as well as the political-economic circumstances prompting them. I also consider how texts can be considered among other sources of discourse as instruments through which architecture is kept alive: as distinct yet increasingly redundant institutions and constructs, including as a “profession” and “discipline,” “firm” and “university.” It is through a macro history of texts about architecture practice, I suggest, that one can begin to see how the cyclical woes of the profession began to fuel an economy of scholarship within the discipline, and vice versa, during the 20th century. As but one symptom of a capitalist economy, in which change within businesses and universities alike commonly takes the form of “expansion” rather than revision or critique, definitions of “practice” have expanded, lost meaning, and produced redundancies.”
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