We stand on all pairs! What slows down innovations in architecture?

/ Architecture /

If you don't spend 2019% of your money and time on innovation in 10, you'll be lagging behind those who will. If you did not spend at least one-tenth of the resources available to you on innovations last year, in order to keep up this year, you will need to spend 20%. And if they didn't spend 10 years?

Probably, in that case, "this train is no longer yours." If you have a competence that your competitors who keep pace with progress do not have, they can offer you a "ticket on the train" - collaboration. And if they can do everything you can, they will simply move on, leaving you without a job.

Olga Chernova

In fact, keeping up with progress in architecture is not such a difficult task: the train of global progress in the architectural industry is by no means running at full speed! In comparison with neighboring industries, it weaves, and specifically in our country, it even stops on spare roads in the breaks between rare bursts!

It's no secret that the real estate industry as a whole and architecture, as a part of it, are generally not recognized as leaders in the introduction of innovations — we, for example, are far from the automotive industry (let's remember what year the robotic assembly of cars was launched and imagine when robots will start assembling homes? ). At the same time, one of the top managers of Microsoft said the following about the insufficient pace of progress in the automotive industry back in the distant 90s: "If the automotive industry had developed at the same speed as the computer industry, cars would have been able to reach 600 km/h a long time ago." . An imaginative top from Ford Motors then countered: "If a car worked as reliably as a modern computer, we would have to stop and reboot every mile of the road." But let's leave the discussion of this point to historians - the bottom line is that even electric cars controlled by autopilot continue to crawl at the speed of a turtle (and, by the way, they still do not fly, but they should be furrowing the sky above the cities for two years, if based on the forecasts from the film "Back to the future").

Automobile chassis on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company plant, 1925.
Photo source: Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection (Library of Congress)

The automotive industry is definitely slowing down compared to the IT industry, but it turns out that we, architects, like all other players in the real estate market, are slowing down even more! So what is the reason? After all, the specificity of an architect's work is that each new project involves a new combination of initial ones. And in order to respond to them adequately, every new project must be started with a clean slate. Are these not prerequisites for permanent innovativeness?

But let's remember how Le Corbusier described his architectural innovation - Dom-Ino - a hundred years ago: "A house is like a machine for housing, designed no less ergonomically optimally than a car of a modern train." A natural question arises: why not less? Why not significantly more? Why wouldn't the master leave the adjacent machine-building industries far behind?

A hundred years ago, it seemed that mechanical engineering, unlike architecture, was free from aesthetic prejudices

Over the past century, these aesthetic prejudices have been rejected more than once, new ones have been created in their place and also rejected. However, a robot on a construction site, unlike a machine-building plant, is, to put it mildly, still a very rare guest!

Is it possible that real estate lags behind "movability" precisely because it does not move?

A million identical cars printed by robots mix on the autobahns with other millions produced by competitors, but an area built with not even a million — hundreds of identical houses — is terrible! And if you want to remain an architect, you have to design every next house individually.

It turns out that there is no place in architecture for the effective introduction of new technologies of "super-optimized stamping" — it will not be possible to print a million really cool identical houses at a factory, as is the case with cars, smartphones or airplanes. More precisely, they learned how to technically stamp typical houses even more than half a century ago, and even now they stamp in some places, but you definitely cannot call this a successful result.

As part of the Burj Al Babas project, the Sarot construction company built 2014 identical villas in the Turkish province of Bolu in 732. The developer was declared bankrupt. Photo: ADEM ALTAN, AFP/Getty Images

Perhaps the key reason for the relative innovation backwardness lies in the humane tolerance for laggards, which is deeply rooted in the foundations of our profession:

  • "The caravan moves at the speed of the slowest camel"
    projects are developed at the speed of the slowest neighbor, the speed of construction is determined by the slowest contractor;
  • Anti-vandalism:
    architectural solutions provide a reaction not to the most enlightened, but on the contrary, to the wildest part of society. Architecture is not only considered as a barrier that excludes unauthorized actions, but also from an aesthetic point of view represents actual values ​​in a language understandable to the maximum number of people.

And finally, is it possible that its all-encompassing, all-uniting and all-connecting quality prevents architecture from being a pioneer of innovation? Maybe the innovative-revolutionary situation in our sphere will occur only at the moment when all branches of human activity, which are linked by architecture, themselves undergo these revolutionary changes?

However, no matter which of the listed reasons is actually the main one, it is obvious that architects, builders and developers have a lot of time to prepare for the introduction of innovative trends - while they are still being implemented in related industries. There are no technological revolutions in architecture! Technological evolution is taking place in architecture!

An area built up with not even a million - hundreds of identical houses - this is terrible!

How do the majority of domestic colleagues in the industry use this spare time? No way! They just sit and wait for the moment "oh!" to come, when they will be left to babble "unlike us, who are hopelessly backward, in the West (as well as in the East, South and North), everything has long been designed, built and lived in a completely new!". And only after the panicky, self-destructive, apocalyptic realization of this fact, they convulsively rush to catch up with yesterday. And who prevented this belated, devouring chasm of resources "revolution of panic and hysteria" from developing systematically and evolutionarily all these years? Meshal LSM — Wicked Slavic Management!

A typical example: the Wicked Slavic Manager flies into the meeting room half an hour after the start of the meeting on a raven horse and starts "shooting in Macedonian", bombarding his colleagues with questions as far as possible from the topic of the meeting organized by him. Deafening the confusingly answering specialists with insulting definitions, the LSM collects a picture of the initial data from panicked, spontaneous, unprepared and unverified answers and immediately makes a decision, the quality of which, alas, does not depend on the intellectual abilities of the LSM himself (sometimes, by the way, quite worthy) and is predestined to be clueless initial Why? And because once upon a time! Then the LSM sits on his crow and gallops off to be late for the next meeting.

Photo: Mikkel Jonck Schmidt

Ideally, the cycle of working days of the LSM consists exclusively of such meetings - for some of them, our hero is late, for others he arrives on time and even a little early, waits together with other specialists of the higher LSM hierarchy, so that they themselves can answer a stream of random questions, determining with his stupid answers to the boss's decisions. If one gathers courage and asks LSM why he always has no time, the answer will be something like: "that's why there are always moments of ``oh!'' and it is necessary to quickly solve something". But the moments "oh!" exactly what happens because of hasty and thoughtless decisions of the LSM itself!

So the circle closed: short-sighted decisions create prerequisites for the appearance of force majeure, and their endless series forms an environment that completely excludes the possibility of making proactive decisions capable of reducing the number of "oops!". All decisions of the LSM are exclusively reactionary in nature, and at the same time, the Wicked Slavic Manager is the only one who can at least somehow save everything from complete collapse!
This, in fact, is the whole secret of the mysterious, thorny Slavic path that has been winding past progress and innovations (the main driving force of the development of civilization) for about five hundred years now.

Irrationality and disorder are indispensable companions of development, invented, discovered

Having dealt with the question "who is to blame?", you can move on to the question "what to do?":

  1. It is necessary to prepare for meetings (and any other methods of consideration and decision-making) in such a way that the LSM extravaganza becomes meaningless and superfluous. After all, if LSM arises as a reaction to specialists who are not ready for force majeure, then why should the specialists themselves not only begin to predict the probability of their occurrence, but also think about neutralization options in advance? And, of course, you need to choose a job in those companies and in those projects where the series of force majeure events is at least not so dense!
  2. The exclusion of prerequisites for the only possible-resultative behavior in the LSM format creates conditions for the formation of a new proactive management.
  3. And the most paradoxical thing is that as soon as the conditions for proactive action arise, some even the most ardent LSM immediately transform themselves into proactive managers! And the places of the rest of the LSM, unable to transform, are occupied by specialists who know how to oppose the rational approach to the "Macedonian shooting".

Photo: Luca Bravo

However, if you give the rational trend the opportunity to reach the phase of absolutism, there will be no innovations either. But it will simply be the other extreme, which excludes creative development in the same way as the anarchy of the LSM. The fact is that irrationality and disorder are indispensable companions of development, invented, discovered.

"Crazy inventor" knows how to find the necessary solution in the chaos of his workshop, which until then no one else had thought of. Do not expect any creative breakthrough from a person with perfect order on the desktop - I have to state this, despite the fact that according to the horoscope I am a Virgo, and I am originally aimed at order, even sometimes with elements of absolutism! When you penetrate the possibilities of creative work in an innovative creative environment, you begin to value it and need it. I endlessly love that after visiting the most orderly "super-Minsk" everyone returns to Kyiv, to the unordered environment of creative, adventurous, inventive, creative and innovative people!

"Crazy inventor" knows how to find the right solution in the chaos of his workshop

When we compare Kyiv with Copenhagen, London and other leading cities in terms of the quality of the urban environment, we have to state that we are "in the back lane". This happens because these leading cities spent 30% of their budget on innovative programs for 10 years! And all this time our municipality was under the management of a series of changing LSM teams and, to put it mildly, was focused on other aspects. But I am sure that even in our beloved city in the very near future it will be possible to send all the Wicked Slavic Managers to write memoirs, and the representatives of the young creative class, which in recent years felt the opportunity for free creative development, will finally get the opportunity to focus on city innovations .