Leave your Mark, Mark the Change

Explorations into the possible future roles of architects are as hip as they are necessary. Worldwide, architectural institutions, associations, faculties and the like have hosted lectures, conferences and even games on the futurity of the architectural practice, oftentimes resulting in case-studies and lookouts for each identified role.

During these efforts, possible roles of the architect are often explored and defined relative to other specialized, commercial or political stakeholders in construction. Sometimes, it seems that exploring the architect’s role is, in fact, a search for relevance in an industry that doesn’t automatically assume anymore the added value of the architect’s skill and architecture as its product.

How useful the discussion on the architect’s role may be, for aspiring architecture students it may only add uncertainty and confusion to the one question that keeps them busy anyway:

When I’m able to do anything, how will I shape my profession?

Experiment with Purpose

You are young, intelligent, creative and a little perfectionist. You have an eye for details, ideas and ideals. You know enough about everything to make your design work, but working on designing everything is enough and to spare. The world around you demands that you take a standpoint. Preferably one that remains within budget. Conceptualism has helped you to limit your options and guide your design, but your curiosity beyond this principle remains.

So, how to go about it?

You’ll probably have your answer as soon as you can look back on a substantial career. In the meantime, as an experiment, try to design your architectural detail with either one of the following purposes in mind and follow it blindly:

• Drawing attention and clearly Leaving your Mark in the built environment

• Solving a societal problem and clearly Marking the Change in the built environment

Leave your Mark

Scientific and technological advancements in an economies of scale dynamic have fragmented the complete building construction supply chain into highly specialized companies, all delivering a specific component or service to the built environment. The amount of professionals that can possibly contribute to the built environment is only increasing. Most of these people will know more than you about the functionality and possibilities of the components and services that they’re delivering.

However, you are in the privileged position to combine them all into one structure. You have the ability to materialize and construct an idea in a coherent way. If you wish to keep grip on the integrity of your design and Make your Mark, you should surround yourself with suppliers in an early stage of your process and choose a way of working with them:

• Take suppliers’ components and/or services as a basis of your design elements and tools and push the boundaries of what’s possible with them.

• Invent details, make mock-ups and challenge suppliers to mass-produce them

Leaving your Mark means taking the lead in making an impactful design.

Mark the Change

For the second principle, forget about yourself and focus on societal challenges and changes that are needed to solve them. For centuries, your predecessors have delivered structures that fulfill the needs of society. Castles, housing, towers, factories, and all other creations that humankind has used to seek shelter, live, reign, express identity, produce, save, exploit and inspire, were intentionally designed and constructed.

As you know, some of these human activities are currently under threat and they need you to respond:

• Seeking shelter is under threat, as people are increasingly migrating, moving to cities and growing out of poverty. All while the world population is growing. The need for affordable housing is imminent.

• Living is under threat, as people spend most of their time indoors, cut off from their environment that could provide them with fresh air, water and sunlight. Day to day living needs to be reconnected to the outside world while ensuring comfort.

• Saving is under threat, as buildings and the construction industry are responsible for around 30% of global energy consumption and around 40% of global CO2 emissions, while extracting many materials from the earth. We need our industry to consume less.

Make it comprehensible by solely focusing on Marking the Change and activating your specific skill that has just taken off: the ability to design a sustainable and responsible built environment using integrated 4.0 technologies.

Of course, there are the design tools like the already widely propagated visual programming and “older” concepts like FabLabs, 3D printing, CAD and BIM. All these tools have proven themselves and have ended the digital illiteracy of most designers for good. Design and architectural production processes are now inherently computational. More important are the design elements, where 4.0 technologies refer to digital, material, physical and biological building functions, expressed respectively by for example smart sensors, transparent wood, geothermal installations and green walls. These elements can be used together to conceive structures that are reproducible, healthy, comfortable and energy-efficient. Maybe even self-repairing?

Marking the Change means taking the lead in designing impact.

Example: the building envelope

The near-endless possibilities that sensors, data analysis and systems control now give us, force us to think about how we can harvest smartly from outside climate conditions and how we can redesign the part of a building that has traditionally cut us off, "protected" us, from the world around us; the building envelope.

When architectural engineers, building physicists, facade contractors and suppliers combine forces, the building envelope can be turned into the main climate control platform of the building. Following this, the future of energy-efficient, comfortable and healthy buildings and climate systems can be purely based on time-, location- and activity-specific human demand and natural supply. Like a human skin, roofs and facades will locally sense both demand (inside) and supply (outside) of all aspects that determine the energy-efficiency, comfort and healthiness of living and working environments.

Innovation without Compromise

Of course, details and constructions that either Make your Mark or that Mark the Change were never separated. But ensuring an integration will remain challenging. When succeeding, it will bring you to a sweet spot: Innovation without Compromise. Here, the design and the solution are merged and they strengthen each other.

Indeed, maybe this brings us back to tectonics in architecture, but that’s another topic. More important is that a new generation of buildings is arising in which elements like electrification and control of sound, light and air are the main drivers behind things like facade detailing, office space set-ups, wall texturing, HVAC dimensioning and so on.

As for me, I hope to see a future in which designers, architects and architectural engineers are the master-integrators of sustainable 4.0 technologies provided by specialized suppliers. It is our shared responsibility to transform our industry into the most eye-catching, responsible and sustainable one. Let us use these times to prepare for collaboration, acceleration and impact!

Maarten Ingen Housz B.Sc – Architecture M.Sc – Industrial Mangement

Maarten Ingen Housz studied Architecture (BSc) at TU Delft and, after changing his perspective, Industrial Management (MSc) at KTH in Stockholm. He has since taken on commercial/ technical roles at building envelope solution providers in Sweden and the Netherlands. At PHYSEE Technologies, he is currently co-developing the PHYSEEbility Check, a parametric analysis and sales tool that quantifies and visualizes the project-specific benefits of PHYSEE’s SmartSkin solutions. m.ingenhousz@physee.eu