Architecture is one of the numerous creative fields goals of which have evolved drastically with the passing of the time. An architect used to be a professional that understood the properties of physical objects in such a way that he was capable of putting them together to create a shelter appropriate for comfortable living. Economic progress, availability of better techniques and materials caused for the demand and its quality criteria to rise exponentially, thus shifting the economical value of architecture as a profession to the rank of “high-end” fields that now primarily focus on the aesthetic aspect of a dwelling and not only the engineering of it.
It is not surprising that such work guidelines precondition certain misconceptions in the minds of architects, making some of us believe that the product of our work, a building, carries a lot bigger value for the psychological and physical well being of the society than it actually does. We often get lost in the design process, perfecting the building from inside out, proposing to use the best materials in order to emphasize the “parti” of the design, completely disregarding the importance of considering the impact of the new building onto its immediate surrounding long term. A building is not as easily affordable as a piece of clothing, thus can not be replaced at somebody’s wish. It is erected to stay in place for decades to come. This psychological misconception of the business side of architecture also results in the shift of supply-demand curve, thus producing too many architects who do not get as many commissions as their craft is getting consistently less and less affordable/desirable to the client, meanwhile the clients also wish to achieve the most economically profitable and aesthetically pleasing one time deal and not experience the need for future additional investments into the given commission.
Nevertheless, architecture continues growing as a multifaceted field ranging from the scale of a pavilion to a building to an urban plan. The only possible way for it to continue progressing in the future, as opposed to being replaced by personalized do-it-at home computer initiated design, is if it encompasses all of the design relevant factors, such as the client and his financial capabilities, the surrounding vicinity of the building, its influence on the urban scale and the economic sustainability. Architecture has no longer the luxury to be a primarily decorative field of design, but rather needs to vigorously and consistently address the current environment it is in and how it will possibly influence the future of our cities and society in general on the grand scale of things. Having learned numerous examples from the Digital Cities work by Neil Leach, it is clear that many architecture offices around the world are persistently working on developing the architecture of the future. The kind that only has the most aerodynamically sound shape, but is also made out of the most sustainable materials currently available on the market, and that will be tightly integrated into the surrounding infrastructure, drastically minimizing the city-scale travel time as well as enhance the overall economical and energy sustainability of a living conglomeration as a single organism.
While I am a firm supporter of the technological advancement and progress, I am not entirely convinced of how the current parametric side of architecture as a field is going to allow for a smooth transition between the architecture that we have inherited from the preceding centuries and the optimized architecture of the future. There seems to be a significant gap between our ideological designs and what+how we can actually construct them nowadays. This gap is often mediated by project developers, who are aware of the monetary differences between using more expensive/higher quality vs cheaper/more temporary materials on site. More often than not they seek for economical profitability and cost savings on the majority of the projects, which allows the final built result to be a middle ground between a more unrealistic, idealized material proposal done by an architect and cost-effective economical approach. I believe that this stepped and inconsistent push-pull process of implementation from the conception of the design project to its construction is the main reason why the evolution of architecture as a field is relatively slow, but on the other hand, due to this inefficient process we are still able to preserve our architectural heritage of the past and transition into the future more gradually.
To conclude, Architecture has evolved into a field that is dependent on technological, economical, societal aspects, where an average construction developer and his choices are in some way similar to the behaviour of singular agent in a swarm. All its members must function, fail, succeed, advance and regress in sync or else there will be no progress.