Mission of Architecture
Sharon Egretta Sutton
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dards of performance are implemented to protect the public from in-competence, but these standards also serve “to restrict the number of practitioners, thereby raising their incomes” (Bledstein 1976, 96).
In architecture, where protection of life safety is paramount, a min-imum of about nine years is currently required to progress through schooling, internship, and licensure — time that many persons cannot invest, especially because the average income for architects is below that of many other fields with equal or less training.1Subsequent to licensure, more capital is needed to continue climbing the ladder of professional success. To be successful, architects must have the economic resources to maintain NCARB certification, belong to the AIA, participate in its mandatory system of continuing education, and submit projects to com-petitions — all costly endeavors. More limiting is the tacit requirement for a style and habits of mind that are acceptable in inner circles of privilege. Each step of this ladder exacts a higher price, elevating the status of those who have the resources to keep moving up.
Professional privilege came into being in the United States during an era of unrestrained economic growth when the profits of industrial-ization were magnified by the vast resources of a land-rich country, es-pecially those resources (oil, natural gas, and coal) that could be turned into energy. “Energy is the backbone of the industrial economy. It is what does our work for us, moving our cars, running our machines, bringing water to farm fields and cities, moving the products of industry to markets, as well as being embodied in all the products of the petro-chemical industries, the synthetic fabrics, the plastics, and the fertilizers that make our agriculture so productive” (W. Johnson 1985, 24). The economic growth that resulted from such an abundance of energy — and its downside, increased socioeconomic stratification — was essential to the expansion of professional privilege. Architecture, in particular, be-nefited from the country’s vast resources, as well as its expanding urban population. For example, in 1881, Columbia College Trustee Frederick Augustus Schermerhorn succeeded in convincing his fellow trustees to underwrite a course in architecture because “many more architects would be needed to meet the demands for both new buildings and alterations of existing buildings in the suddenly burgeoning urban areas of Amer-ica” (Bedford 1981, 7–8).
However, constantly increasing standards of living combined with increasing human activity on the Earth have caused the demand for energy to outrun the supply, signaling the end of America’s age of un-fettered growth and creating an opportunity to dismantle professional privilege. In addition, the increasingly audible voices of oppression are demanding a reconsideration of the exclusionary values that underpin traditional conceptions of professional identity. Although spectacular technological advances have resulted from specialized knowledge, expo-nential growth in the world’s population has led many social and envi-ronmental critics to question the sustainability of organizing human experience along the boundaries of specialized, fragmented professions.
Even within the professions, persons who promote greater demographic and intellectual diversity point to the loss of talent that comes from narrowly defined ladders of success. Architects have not developed the layers of specialization or scientific clout that other professionals have used to distance themselves from their clients. Yet the field is sharply delimited by professional conceptions and credentialing processes that not only exclude “the other” but render those inside incapable of ad-dressing rapid global changes in demographics, economics, the envi-ronment, and communications, among others. Because architecture is so reliant on the energy that is fast disappearing, being able to redefine its professional psyche is crucial to the survival of the field.
How can we transform the professional culture of architecture, which was spawned during the birth of a affluent nation rich in environmen-tal resources, so that it is suited to an age of scarcity? How can we re-place exclusionary roles with ones that encompass many different types of knowledge and ways of being? How can our loyalty to the traditions of architecture be enriched by a commitment to address the significant ecological issues that are arising as more of the natural environment is designed, whether by intention or default? In this chapter, I address such questions and generate new conceptions of the profession by ex-amining the fundamental nature of architecture. Such an investigation necessarily involves a historical analysis of the recent past that spawned contemporary professional culture, as well as of the distant past when enduring attitudes were formed toward inhabiting the Earth and using its resources. Feminist historian Gerda Lerner writes: “Women’s history
is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women” (1986, 3).
I propose that architecture history is equally indispensable and essential to the emancipation of architects — a history that encompasses not just the great buildings studied in history of architecture courses but also the social and political processes through which the Earth was, and con-tinues to be, humanized. Understanding the value systems that shaped the designed environment of Western civilization, and then seeing how this legacy still permeates the architecture profession, can result in the means to unravel the myths that limit our ability to imagine, and par-ticipate in patterning, a more just disposition of the Earth’s resources.
To begin this investigation, I offer the following six propositions about architecture’s inheritance from the distant and near past, as well as its present situation and future prospects:
• The designed environment of Western civilization reflects ancient patri-archal values that sanction the use and abuse of the landscape for pri-vate gain.
• These values produced the great monuments of Western civilization, which were constructed at the expense of the less powerful to glorify dominant persons and groups.
• Beginning in the sixteenth century, a scientific worldview emerged that further encouraged disassociation among more and less powerful hu-man beings and between people and nature.
• A culture of professionalism emerged in the United States during the late1800s that combined ancient patriarchal values with a modern sci-entific worldview of disassociation, limiting the exercise of specific types of expertise to properly credentialed persons.
• Contemporary architects inherit the patriarchal legacy of using and abusing the landscape for private gain — or monument making — but they have not been so successful in limiting the exercise of architectural expertise.
• To address modern environmental abuses, an enriched mission of archi-tecture would replace its heritage of power over the landscape with place-making processes that are grounded in inclusive values and practices.
In this chapter, I seek to substantiate these six propositions through socially critical analysis. I begin by exploring the interrelated concepts of private property and slavery, which together comprise the traditions
of ancient patriarchal society that laid the groundwork for a few per-sons to exert power over nature and other people. I show how patriar-chal values have allowed dominant cultures to mediate between them-selves and the “madness of nature” (Vincent Scully’s characterization of virgin landscapes), producing the great architecture of the world but also incurring enormous losses to nature and subordinate individuals and groups. I discuss the transformation of ancient values into a mod-ern scientific worldview that created further hierarchies among people and nature — a view that sanctioned unparalleled abuse of natural re-sources for private gain and ushered in a culture of professionalism in which properly credentialed persons limited access to education and pres-tigious occupations, as well as to space. I look at the effects of these legacies on contemporary architects, suggesting that although our field is both similar to, and different from, other professions, it cannot re-spond to problems deriving from centuries of environmental degrada-tion with the values and methods of the distant and near past — that we cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. The chapter ends with a proposal for an enriched mission of architecture that invests in making sustainable, equitable places while also encouraging many persons to contribute their knowledge to the ongoing process of humanizing the Earth. I do not present this mission in a prescriptive manner but rather outline broad values, attitudes, and habits of mind that can transform the psyche of architecture.
A Legacy of Using and Abusing the Landscape
If I had to answer to following question, “What is slavery?” and if I should respond in one word, “It is murder,” my meaning would be understood at once. I should not need a long explanation to show that the power to de-prive a man of his thought, his will, and his personality is the power of life and death. So why to this other question, “What is property?” should I not answer in the same way, “It is theft,” without fearing to be misunder-stood, since the second proposition is only a transformation of the first?
(Proudhon 1994, 13)
Our anthropocentric worldview makes it practically impossible to understand social critic Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s linking of private
prop-erty and slavery. The concept of being above nature rather than with it — having the power to define and use it for human purposes — is so basic to the modern mind that it seems absurd to propose that the own-ership of land and people are equivalent. Yet the unwritten pages of history do link private property and slavery as the first institutionalized forms of human dominance, since slavery derived from the need to have sufficient labor to cultivate land and establish permanent places of resi-dency. Owning land and owning labor were two sides of the same coin.
The invention of private property initiated a class-stratified society in which stronger villages engaged in intertribal warfare to expand their holdings; slavery was invented when the women who resided on these conquered lands were taken into captivity.2 Just as the concept of pri-vate property paved the way for one group to “steal” the lands of an-other, so the oppression of women created a mind-set that allowed some individuals to “kill” the humanity residing in enslaved persons, thus con-ferring permanent slave status on them and their offspring. These in-terrelated social constructions — private property (with its correlative, war to defend property) and women’s subordination (with its correlative, slavery) — “were largely derived from Mesopotamian and, later, from Hebrew sources” (Lerner 1986, 11). They comprise the major metaphors that define Western patriarchal society. But how did these social con-structions evolve, how did they affect the designed environment, and what is their continuing role in the architecture profession?
Because no written histories exist for this period, opinions differ on how some men got control over other men, all women, and specified portions of the landscape. However, “from the available data, it appears that the most egalitarian societies are to be found among hunting/
gathering tribes, which are characterized by economic interdependency”
(Lerner1986, 29). Traditional societies do not perceive the social hier-archies that exist in the modern mind, but rather women and men are accorded equally important roles in relation to nature, which is experi-enced as a living, nurturing organism. During the Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods some 15,000 years ago, the social roles of women and men in Mesopotamia began to be more asymmetrical as tools and weaponry allowed increasing control over nature. Women, who spent most of their thirty- to forty-year life spans in pregnancy and nursing, came to be associated with the Earth and its magical powers of
nurtu-rance; men, instead, began to be more occupied with the violence of large-scale hunting and warfare.
Structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) hypothesized that the transformation from a hunter-gatherer society to a patriarchal one came about as agricultural production and animal husbandry became paramount. The elder males of one tribe began to procure women from other tribes for their reproductive capacities, intermarriages consolidat-ing their ability to guarantee the possession of certain cultivated areas from one generation to the next. According to Gerda Lerner, market economies resulted as scattered Neolithic villages became agricultural communities, then urban centers, and finally states. Concentration of populations and specialization of labor increased commodity production and trade of goods with distant lands. As propertied classes consolidated their power through militarism and the institutionalization of slavery, extended tribal relationships evolved into patriarchal families in which women (and their children) were subordinate (Lerner 1986, 54). Land, women, children, and slaves were reified as the property of powerful men who also exerted control over the public affairs of state, undertak-ing immense construction projects and keepundertak-ing the written records that constitute history.
Although the sequence of events is debatable, clearly a concept of property emerged over time that conferred on special males the quin-tessential right to appropriate the human and nonhuman world for per-sonal gain. Indeed, “Roman law defined property — jus utendi et abu-tendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur — as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law” (Proudhon 1994, 35). That is, own-ers were empowered by law to use and dispose of their property as they sawfit. Although legally owning women, children, and slaves has been abolished in modern Western society, the concept of owning land con-tinues to be a pivotal institution that comprises the primary means for accumulating wealth. “Paramount in value for many societies . . . is lin-eage. Its prestige lies in its effectiveness in guaranteeing an individual’s and a people’s immortality. Lineage signifies permanence rather than fields that can be overrun by wilderness, houses that can rot, and cities that can be razed to the ground” (Tuan 1989, 69). Property is funda-mental to lineage, because ownership is preserved from one generation to the next along with “the right to let, to lease, to lend at interest, to
exchange for profit, to invest in annuities, and to levy a tax on a field”
(Proudhon 1994, 63). This concept of land ownership is the basis for current differences in the income of workers, who derive most of their income from salaries, and affluent persons, who derive a large portion of their income from landholdings (Bowles and Gintis 1976, 197). As evidence that property is still an expression of these early notions of patriarchal privilege, consider the wording of a standard deed, in which the marital status of the owner(s) is specified. I can think of no other purchase that requires the public disclosure of such information.
The monuments of Western architecture, from the ancient castles and churches of Europe to the corporate structures that shape the temporary landscape, express permanence on the Earth, making con-crete the lineage and immortality of powerful individuals and groups.
These monuments appear wherever there is a concentration of the eco-nomic resources that enable the ownership (or theft, in Proudhon’s terms) of land. Thus the production of the most magnificent architecture is made possible by the power asymmetries of patriarchal society. I pro-pose that the link between male privilege and the production of archi-tecture has contributed to architects’ reputation for being elitist while
Figure 9.1. Photocopies of typical deeds indicating the marital status of the property owner.
greatly limiting their ability to influence those privileged persons who have granted themselves the legal right to exert power over the landscape for private gain. I return to this point later, but first I look more closely at how patriarchal values have shaped the designed environment by considering the processes through which nature has been increasingly humanized.
A Power-Over Process of Humanizing the Earth
The designed environment — its roads and buildings, its farmlands and gardens — is a cultural artifact, as are the sociopolitical systems that make its invention possible. Both the designed environment and its corre-sponding organizational framework are edifices of the human imagina-tion and, as such, are expressions of a society’s dominant moral vision.
Geographer Yi-fu Tuan (1989) has looked across several Western and non-Western cultures to explore the ethical dilemmas that arise as soci-eties attempt to order the world through their constructions. Accord-ing to Tuan, “When cultivators clear the bush to create a landscape of fields and houses, they do so in answer to the needs of survival, but that cannot be all: the humanized world, existing visibly and tangibly before them, gives shape to their lives and serves at the same time as a flatter-ing and reinforcflatter-ing mirror of their humanity” (68).
Viewed against modern anthropocentric standards of living, the so-called barbarians of hunter-gatherer societies were destitute — without education, unable to alleviate disease or access the basic necessities that make a wholesome existence possible. However, such standards were an invention of Neolithic societies, who were the first to fear death and conceive life as a linear evolution toward greater and greater control over human frailties and nature. As the legends of many early civiliza-tions suggest, pre-Neolithic societies conceived the world differently, associating the humanizing of nature with a loss of simplicity and fun-damental decline in the quality of life. For example, the Taoists of sixth-century China believed that all of nature had once been tame. In an original Eden, the ancient Chinese could tread on serpents, grasp the tails of tigers, and entrust their children to be nurtured by birds in their nests. As their culture evolved to include hunting, fishing, and other forms of environmental control, nature became cruel and
unac-commodating. Consequently, people had to work far harder to survive and lost their sense of unity with the world around them. Likewise the Greeks envisioned a Golden Age in their distant past in which nature surrendered her fruits unasked. According to this fable, the Greeks lost their innocence and the protection of the Olympian gods as their cul-ture evolved and people learned to slaughter animals for consumption (Tuan 1989, 70–80).
These Chinese and Greek myths parallel the Judeo-Christian view of creation in which it is said that God gave Adam and Eve “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepth upon the Earth.” God placed them in a planted garden that contained “every tree that was pleasant to sight, and good for food, including a tree of life as well as a tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
Adam and Eve were enjoined “to dress and to keep” their garden, and to eat freely of its trees except for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but Eve allowed a serpent to convince her that she could possess this tree and its knowledge. Such human audacity resulted in a fall from Grace — the serpent condemned to crawl in the dust, the man to till
Adam and Eve were enjoined “to dress and to keep” their garden, and to eat freely of its trees except for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but Eve allowed a serpent to convince her that she could possess this tree and its knowledge. Such human audacity resulted in a fall from Grace — the serpent condemned to crawl in the dust, the man to till