Architecture for Everyone | Editorial. March 2012 By Cathleen McGuigan, Editor in Chief Last month Salon published an article titled “The Architecture Meltdown.” The piece, by Scott Timberg, detailed the high unemployment rates, the shrinking fees, and the tough climate for fresh architecture grads, weighed down by heavy student debt. It’s so bad, said one architect, Guy Horton (a contributor to architectural record), that architecture has become “the new English major.” The article’s author blamed the poor economy, of course, but he also tore into the profession as the designer of its own demise. While the media has lionized the starchitect—the solo creative genius at the top—the profession has perpetuated a culture in which architectural acolytes toil for years for poor pay, with no guarantee of eventually making a decent living.
Now “architecture is exposed to the realities of the marketplace like few other fields,” said Timberg. Photo © Michel Arnaud ----- Advertising ----- One of those markets is public-interest design. Project H. Architecture for the Other 99% - Point of View - February 2012. The architecture meltdown. When the Great Recession dawned, architecture was the glamour profession of the creative class. Extravagant, signature buildings – Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Spain’s Basque Country, Richard Meier’s white-travertine Getty Center in Los Angeles, and multimillion-dollar concert halls in seemingly every city in the U.S. – drew not only press attention but the kind of architectural tourists who once visited Italian duomos. Brash, individualistic “starchitects” – cerebral urbanist Rem Koolhaas, Iraq-born diva Zaha Hadid, gracious, serene Renzo Piano and others hailed in the press as visionaries – became the new rock stars.
Though much of the cast was international, the image built on a long-standing heroism of the architect in the United States, dating back to the magnetic Frank Lloyd Wright and the valiant, uncompromising Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” It isn’t just the celebrity figures who are frustrated, however. He bounced checks. The SEED Network | Home. MASS Design Group.