Architects voice fear of extinction at conference

Mark Wigley (centre) at the Institute of Architects Conference with Peter Davey (left) and Nigel Ryan. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Bloody architects. What are they good for? Minister of Building Issues Chris Carter has just opened the Institute of Architects conference celebrating 100 years of the profession in New Zealand. He's talked a lot about "weather-tightness", the phenomenon more commonly called leaky buildings. It's a sodden issue very much on his mind, especially as he lives in an architect-designed house which, he tells the assembled, has "not a sign of weather-tightness in it" when it rains.

The point is seized on by Mark Wigley, the keynote speaker. "Architects have never been valued for their ability to provide shelter. If you don't want to get wet, you don't hire an architect."

Wigley, a New Zealander living in New York, is introduced as "a bit of a rockstar". It's an apt description. Not just because he is at the top of his game as Dean of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. But also because there are clearly adoring fans in the audience.

Plus an uneasy squirming among the establishment that this edgy performer could, and probably will, say something outrageous. Wigley obliges. "I believe our discipline will become splendidly irrelevant, if not extinct, unless new forms of engagement are cultivated."

Not the sort of thing the profession wants to hear just as it's poised to have a greater say in Auckland's urban design. Architects have been active in the Mayoral Task Force on Urban Design which has just released its Designing Auckland: a springboard for action report. It aims to halt Auckland's ugly buildings through a master-plan and two key appointments - an "urban design champion" outside the council and a "city architect" to renovate the council's planning department.

The city's ugliness gets some airing at the conference. "It's not really very bad, it's just terribly second-rate," says British speaker Peter Davey of the downtown cityscape. And there's plenty of discussion about what needs to be done. "No more spastic planning," says Chris Moller, a New Zealand architect and "urbanist" working in the Netherlands.

"You have to start genuinely working with developers and not spurning them," says Amanda Reynolds, another architect abroad, working on masterplanning solutions for "brownfield" sites in London. "Developers have to be controlled and constrained - you have to work with as well as against them."

Reynolds, who was a prime mover during the 90s Rethink Britomart campaign, is pleased to see her crusade continuing in the work of the architect-led Urban Auckland lobby group which has targeted waterfront apartment blocks in its campaign to improve the city's design. Keep "irritating the system", Reynolds tells the audience.

But she also astonishes everyone by praising the Resource Management Act. "It's a fantastic piece of legislation. It's world leading. Nobody has yet done anything that good. In fact its major shortcomings are that it doesn't contain enough regulation." This is astonishing because the recurring moan of the conference is the increasing bureaucratic constraints and "permission time" required to get anything built.

But Reynolds is unrepentant. "New Zealand needs more and clearer regulations that are design-led."

Which is exactly where Auckland City regulation appears to be headed - with its Designing Auckland report advocating "a scoring system to assess the urban design merits of all development". The council has also set new design controls placing minimum standards for apartment size, ceiling height and separation distances between buildings.

But it's precisely this sort of design-by-numbers approach that Wigley suggests will be the downfall of the architect. He points to the alarming globalisation of "highly regulated generic" accreditation standards being applied not just to the profession but also to architectural education.

"This kind of standardisation is in my opinion the death of education and ultimately the death of architecture."

Wigley says calls for more regulation and in particular the self-regulation of the profession are a terrible mistake and reveal something of the "inner masochism" of the field. Its effect is stultifying, boring and results in architectural blandness.

"To be consistently, every day, mediocre is a difficult thing and we're working hard on persuading the entire planet that we're exactly that."

He says the protective core of accreditation standards is mistakenly seen as the basis for society's confidence in architects, missing the point of what architects are good at.

"We're not good with shelter. We're good at talking about shelter. We reflect upon it intellectually. We turn practical demands into interactive discourse - we allow people to see shelter differently."

Heady stuff which gets headier still when Wigley suggests the architect needs to be rebuilt as a "public intellectual" - one who literally thinks and speaks in public through his or her buildings, an "activist synthesiser of various forms of knowledge and an elegant commentator of the world".

Wigley points out that architects in practice get a very small portion, about one per cent, of the built environment to think about. But even though it's a small amount of building, it's more than enough for architects to use - as "a platform for encouraging the entire culture to think differently about its environment".

So what exactly is it that architects - public intellectuals - do? Wigley says despite the outward, super-confident, arrogant and authoritative facade, the architect is actually someone filled with uncertainty and doubt.

"The secret of the architect is that we just don't know what it is that we do." In the same way a painter doesn't know what a painting is, which is why they paint, Wigley says an architect doesn't really know what a building is, but keeps at it, crafting the thing in order to understand it. Architects are in love with architecture and like everyone in love, don't really know what it's about, but know that the relationship is more important then anything else. "This love of the built environment, this capacity to see in the built environment new kinds of opportunities, new kinds of thinking is what it is I think we [architects] should offer."

Nigel Ryan, a New Zealand architect working in Rome agrees. "Architecture is an act of love," he tells the audience.

Maybe in Rome, but in Auckland City what passes for architecture is often more like an act of violation. Amid the camaraderie and fine food of the conference, and the parade of stunning slide shows of stunning work, it's hardly surprising that thoughts about the profession's impending demise are lacking.

At the plenary session no one mentions Wigley's contention that the profession is on the verge of extinction, largely irrelevant to most of society, and just as bland as the Auckland cityscape. But in a coffee break conversation someone is heard to ask what would happen if the conference room housing the 700 attendees - the cream and bulk of the profession in New Zealand - was destroyed. Would the built environment suffer? "It wouldn't make any difference," is the reply.

The conference is called "Taking Stock: what have we done, what we are doing, what should we do?" But though stocktaking is apparent in the book launch of Exquisite Apart: 100 years of Architecture in New Zealand - featuring gorgeous "iconic forms in the landscape" - little looking forward seems to be occurring.

Globalisation is on the agenda. But few are concerned about its creeping effects - a globalised sameness of design. Fed by an education system that increasingly complies with standardised qualifications defining minimal levels of achievement, the profession wraps itself ever more tightly in standards of accreditation to define minimal levels of expertise. And architects now rush headlong to embrace design rules to provide minimal requirements for the city. In such a regime the architect can be little more than an expert negotiator of red tape. Architectural intelligence has left the building.

But buildings like the 14-storey apartment blocks along Auckland's Nelson and Hobson Sts - described by Reynolds as "beyond awful" - do demonstrate why better design-led regulations are overdue in the city. Whether such rules produce much better buildings or better-designed blandness is far from certain. The redesigned Queen Elizabeth Square, part of the rethought Britomart complex, even with its flaming rock and spindly kauri stand, is still as windswept, empty of people and desolate as it ever was.

Already shabby and with an expensive glass canopy that doesn't keep pedestrians dry when it rains, it's hardly an example of great design. If architecture is the great public art, or as Wigley prefers "an art of thinking out loud in public", there isn't much art, or thinking, in this public space.

Yet, the Mayoral Task Force on Urban Design, through its slim Designing Auckland report, and Urban Auckland through its harassment campaign, are publicly agonising out loud. And architects have undoubtedly reactivated architectural debate in a cityscape struggling with residential density and an onslaught of ugliness. Architecture has made a comeback, if only, so far, into conversation. Whether the conversation goes on to produce architecture or simply a superior brand of mediocrity, remains to be seen.