One of the effects of the ‘professionalization’ of the design and building trades is a kind of exclusive and incestuous quasi-intellectual pursuit that values only that which supports the leading line of thought of the day - which as far as I can tell is primarily just self-preservation, resistance to the predictable decay of the design professions, and the further entrenchment of the various ‘disciplines’ of building. There is an unspoken agreement between the academy and professional institutions which claim to represent the building and design professions to discard and scoff at anything that might be considered folk, ‘unprofessional’, ‘undisciplined’, etc. The irony is that any kind of intelligible intellectual ethos guiding the design and construction of our built environment is seemingly entirely absent in mainstream work in this post-industrial age. In other words, rather than prove it’s value through praxis, the industry has resorted to litigious and other conniving means to ‘protect’ it’s place in society - a battle that it continues to lose ground on. Craft, and therefore culture, have given way to the commodification of everything.
At the same time, trained designers are quick to fetishize the so-called ‘vernacular’, grasping at cheap symbols supposedly representative of folk craft and traditional building. But what is the vernacular? It is architecture without architects. It is a complete undermining of the whole, flimsy contemporary underpinnings of the profession. It is the very thing that the professional guard has been out to destroy.
By fetishizing the vernacular, we admit that folk building has something to offer that ‘professional’ architecture (that is, architecture by architects) does not. A common defense against this self-inflicted undermining of the architect’s own authority is the Critical Regionalist’s line of thinking that suggests that the architect should acquire contextual symbols representative of a place’s building tradition and reassemble them within the rigor of contemporary intellectual frameworks. Because of course, folk building methods and forms in themselves are not worthy of serious consideration until they are inflected with the ‘professionalism’ of the architect.
While I admit to finding the Critical Regionalist theory intriguing and even useful, it’s seemingly done little to combat the most common, well deserved and most difficult to refute critique of the contemporary architecture practice - the overwhelming ubiquity of bland and soulless spaces, structures and cities, disconnected from culture, geography, climate and the human experience.
Perhaps, despite the continued doubling down on the narrowing and specialization of the various building and design trades, there is still something great to learn from those who have done what we do without the extensive training and ever-increasing professional limitations. Not that I expect an admission from the academy or professional institutions on the merits of folk craft and building - but without a true acknowledgement and course correction, I expect that the legitimacy of the professions will only continue to erode.
More than 100 years ago, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus crowd sought a re-union of craft and art - of design and construction. They witnessed what was on the horizon - the consequences of the machine age. The ‘robotization’ of the individual when craft is reduced to commodity, and building is left entirely to the constraints of the machine, without the creative direction and intellectual purpose of the designer with agency and mastery over their tools. In the age of AI, the pace and scope of this displacement has only increased - but the consequences are the same. Artificial intelligence will never replace human craft - but without the intentional and persistent resistance to the act of giving more and more of our agency to machines that we do not understand, it may destroy it.