Architectural collaborations. How to preserve sovereignty

/ Urbanism /

Traditionally, architectural work consists of permanent collaborations — with constructors, engineers, designers, dendrologists, technologists, economists, sociologists, geologists, surveyors, historians, biologists, chemists, artists, sculptors, etc. It started not so long ago: a couple of centuries ago, when the profession of an architect, under the influence of progress and deepening of individual local fields of knowledge, first began to be divided into specializations, and then, already in a new capacity as a team design process, began to integrate new and related missions.

By the way, the presentation of the team of authors in architecture still remains an atavistic legacy of the previous, mono-architectural era: the project is presented as the work of the chief architect, the brand of the architectural firm, and in the best case, it is supplemented by the brands of stars from related fields who participated in the project.

Olga Chernova, chief architect of archimatika projects

In the presentation of our work, there is a lack of a kind of version of the final credits that end any film with a full version of the soundtrack and in which everyone is mentioned: producers, supporting actors, set designers, lighting, screenwriters, costume designers. After all, in the creation of cinema, just like in architecture, the work of each participant is important, not only the main director and his closest assistants.

Our present is increasingly expanding the palette of collaborations. And in this jazz polyphony of different professional experiences and positions, it sometimes becomes difficult to hear the architect's line, and in the further realization to find architecture.

For an architect, there is a temptation to choose an "energy-saving" model of behavior: not to impose one's own melody on collaboration partners, but to go with the flow, bypassing the factors put forward by other professions. After all, it is so respectful towards colleagues in a team way - not to speak out about your great profession and its great mission! So socially tolerant! So democratic! After all, we live in a post-authoritarian era!

When an architect loses his architectural sovereignty, the result is inevitable fiasco!

However, I am not afraid to present a rule: any architectural collaboration in which the architect concedes leadership to other professions or even a democratic generator of random solutions leads to the creation of weak, vague, uninteresting, talentless architecture. Moreover, the architecture is not sustainable, because the residents who are dissatisfied with its quality will permanently seek to remake it, or even destroy it.

And when the architect loses his architectural sovereignty (which implies the right to finalize everything with everything, setting priorities at his own discretion), then it does not matter to whom exactly he passes the helm - to a construction technologist, a commercial developer, an artist or a sustainability specialist: if the new Sternovy did not become an architect, the result will be an inevitable fiasco!

Perhaps the most extensive example of such a fiasco is the typical residential series of the second half of the XNUMXth century, which filled the endless spaces of cities all over the world. Architects, who before that created quite worthy objects, in collaboration with house-building factories, made the architecture so bad that it is impossible to call it architecture.

Architects succumbed to the unified paranoia of builders, lost their creative sovereignty. And this led to the senseless expenditure of gigantic resources: billions of tons of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere during the production of ZB-panels Khrushchev and their typical counterparts abroad, which are now subject to demolition, spoiled the climate for nothing: we will be forced to release even more into the atmosphere, to build new housing in their place...

Photo: Mike Kononov/Unsplash

Paradoxically, this global architectural disaster did not teach many of our colleagues anything.

The post-Soviet commercial developers of the discomfort class took the place of the Soviet DBKs. Architects rearranged themselves and began to sell their architectural sovereignty to new owners, stamping millions of square meters of new monstrosities. The concrete monsters are back! Now five times higher than in the first series! As in the first part, the dramatic plot covers half a century of history, and in the finale, the concrete monsters are finally demolished…

Any collaboration in which the architect loses his sovereignty turns into reckless evil. The phrase "commercial architect" acquired a negative meaning precisely due to the loss of sovereignty by architects in the framework of joint work with merchants. And as one of the sad results — 600 abandoned moles in the USA. Their construction just as pointlessly poisoned the atmosphere as the construction of the Khrushchev buildings.

Architectural historians are scratching their heads if someone suddenly wants to demolish a shop overgrown with weeds!

And now compare these situations with residential income houses of the XNUMXth century, which are reconstructed, converted, and then continue to be used fifty or a hundred years after construction! Compare with industrial facilities of the XNUMXth century. — they acquire a new function and live on! Architectural historians are scratching their heads if someone suddenly wants to demolish a shop overgrown with weeds!

Because the architects of housing and industry of the XNUMXth century, also working in collaboration with the construction industry and entrepreneurs, unlike their colleagues of the XNUMXth century, did not surrender their professional sovereignty and did their work honestly: they created architecture. And when one architect faithfully completed his work, another architect fifty, one hundred, two hundred years later will find how to use this architecture with minimal transformation.

And most importantly, this good quality architecture is truly sustainable. Persistent above all in the collective human consciousness: people want to save and find a way to reuse what they like.

Probably the same thing happens in any field of activity: if an important participant in the collaboration ends up losing the originality of his cultural experience, loses creative sovereignty, and, as a result, the product of the collaboration turns out to be worse than the product made by the participant independently before that, then such " cooperation" is EVIL!

The word "collaborator" acquired a negative connotation when, under the guise of "cooperation", Hitler's supporters, called collaborators, preferred to hand over the sovereignty of their countries to the fascists. There was a precedent of pseudo-collaboration, the result of which is the loss of its original original quality, the loss of sovereignty.

Steam locomotive depot of Baron Ungern-Sternberg, Odesa. Photo: archodessa.com

So what is the secret of architectural sovereignty, the loss of which leads to the fact that buildings planned according to all the laws of rational thinking within 50 years (or even earlier) lose any meaning?

Architectural sovereignty is based on the monopoly ability of the architect's profession to solve multi- and multifactorial volumetric-spatial problems not according to the principles of arithmetic logic (assembling boxes), but by creatively joining a structure — rational and irrational at the same time.

Specialists of other professions simply do not know how: an artist will lose creative interest in a task with a cumbersome logical structure, and an engineer will come to a dead end as soon as an intuitive, irrational choice is needed.

Architectural sovereignty is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the success of collaboration

Please note that the word "architect" is used to denote the creator of a structure that is creatively grown:

  • the architect of the reform;
  • ecosystem architect;
  • the architect of the economic miracle;
  • the architect of the new policy.

Why an architect? Why not an ecosystem technologist? Entrepreneur of the reform? An economic miracle marketer? General director of the new policy? Why not an engineer? A developer? Sculptor? But because there is simply no other profession with similar architectural skills!

However, for the success of collaboration, architectural sovereignty is a necessary but not sufficient condition: the architect must also be able to use it correctly. It is necessary to listen to each member of the collaborative orchestra, to understand their requirements and fears, to find a solution that takes into account the interests of all. And if this is not possible, then to understand which of the partners is capable of compromising with minimal damage to the overall quality, taking this into account, to propose a solution and to convince the partners that this is exactly what they need.

Photo: Matteo Vistocco/Unsplash

If this does not happen, if the architect does not hear and does not understand the partners, but only follows his subjectively constructed line, then we get the loss of professional sovereignty of other participants of the collaboration, which mirrors the loss of "architectural sovereignty". And again the result is a fiasco.

Success is only in the decision agreed by the architect, taking into account all the factors set by the collaboration partners.