Harvard Design Magazine 52, “I nstruments of Service” Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel (Harvard GSD, December 2024)
Sometimes a topic is both mundane and significant. Sometimes, despite the fact that we know it’s important, a subject is just so mundane that we can’t pay attention. Contracts, drawing sets, spec books, and similar professional documents—instruments of service in AIA jargon—tend to have that effect. With a construction sheet on its cover and the borrowed legalese of the title, the 52nd issue of Harvard Design Magazine flirts with this potentially banal subject to consider topics that are often regarded as happily distant from the work we do in schools of architecture.
By choosing this theme the editors, Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel (MArch ’08), suggest that their primary interest will be to interrogate the things that “architects actually make.” Yet while this may have been the impetus, it is clearly not the driving obsession. A gorgeous folio of construction drawings assembled by Farshid Moussavi, under the title “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art,” uncovers beauty in BIM models and other representations of HVAC systems and structural framing. But the magazine does not linger there. Instead the essays, interviews, and supporting material point toward concerns that might be considered more existential. As the editors point out in the introduction: “The field is diversifying and expanding in so many directions, both within and beyond the limits of professional practice, and it is unclear what will endure and what will succumb to disruption in the face of accelerating change.” There we have it: Institutions and the profession are simultaneously rigid and subject to constant change over time. Practice, however, is nimble and unrestrained, despite the unwieldy legal mechanisms that govern it; that is the ultimate, if tentative, premise of the issue. The issue works in a couple of ways: it examines the historical record to explain how the instruments of service came into being and how they’ve evolved, then it scans across the present to examine the effects of the architectural profession we’ve created for ourselves. Essays are interlaced with graphic sections that compare drawing sets, architectural details, and contracts in order to demonstrate differences over time and place, to extrapolate trajectories, and to situate our current moment within a larger context.
The editors, who teach courses on professional practice at the GSD, each owe at least some of their foundational thinking on these topics to Paul Nakazawa, who recently retired from a long and influential career teaching in the same pro-practice sequence. He developed a similar framework (his word) for dividing architecture into its disciplinary history, on the one hand, and its implementation in practice, on the other. This is a useful distinction to make, and it is a central premise of “Instruments of Service” that recognizing this division is a key to understanding what’s going on with architecture in the twenty-first century. Separating the discipline from practice allows us to think clearly about each aspect of architecture and gives architects the freedom to develop specific techniques within each realm. At the same time “Instruments of Service” reminds us (as does Nakazawa ) that while they are separate, the ultimate goal is that each enriches and informs the other and that there is a constant productive conversation happening between what we learn within the discipline of architecture and how we bring it into the world.
As a studio critic at an American school of architecture, I wonder if the generation of students now being trained thinks about our situation in these terms. Each year we in the Core I studio faculty are challenged by students who want to understand in as clear terms as possible the relevance of the pedagogy and how the project briefs translate to efficacy and meaning in the wider world. And yet for many of them professional practice courses do not become a central interest during their time at the school. Is that slippage a natural result of shifting interests, or is it an opportunity to examine how we teach practice? A good place to start may be to emphasize more entrepreneurial modes of practice, rather than the professional aspect, or to encourage the study of various strategic approaches to thinking about architectural value creation.
An essay by Claire Weisz (MArch ’89), “ Set Up to Fail: How the Parts of Design Have Taken Over the Purpose of Practice,” suggests that the profession’s apparatus limits the efficacy and range of developing practices. In her view the AIA’s standard contracts, with their prescribed phasing and fee structures, constrain entrepreneurialism in the field. She lays out this argument using her own firm, WXY, as an example. One of her office’s important contributions to contemporary practice is its long iterative and open-ended working process, which does not neatly fit the contract structure often required by the city agencies and nonprofits that form WXY’s client base.
How can we reconcile an educational model for future architects that emphasizes strategic thinking—alongside design and representation, history, and basic engineering —with the limiting factors the profession places on architects? To think strategically is to constantly imagine new value propositions as well as new ways to configure the constraints and opportunities present in every project scenario in order to produce tangible value. The contradictions Weisz points to aren’t necessary; they just happen to be common features of the profession as it is currently constituted.
Many of the essays in “Instruments of Service” describe factors that have created this version of the profession and constrained it in the way Weisz describes. “Values-Based Architecture in a Profit-Driven World” is an interview with Toni L. Griffin, Nikil Saval, and Jack Self, who collectively assess a form of zero-sum accounting in which the profit (or value) needs of the client inevitably restrain the potential for larger social value creation.
Other authors suggest ways we might find agency within the social, political, and legal elements of practice. Ann Lui’s essay, “Building Code as Battleground: Activism, Amendments, and (Co)Authorship,” makes the case that more architects ought to become involved in writing building codes. If we don’t do it, someone else will, and their versions often reflect values at odds with architectural creativity.
There are a lot of examples of architectural ingenuity throughout the issue. Matt Shaw’s profile of Office of Jonathan Tate, “Building to Extremes: The Architectural Invention of OJT,” provides a case study of an entrepreneurially constructed practice. The firm often employs alternative financing models as well as unconventional value propositions and is testing a model that would allow it to sidestep some of the profit and value misalignments discussed in “Values-Based Architecture in a Profit-Driven World.” Shaw’s profile doesn’t leave us with the impression that OJT has found a general solution; it does demonstrate that practice can be a site of invention and value propositions are waiting to be discovered—and that all of this (despite the piece’s title) might not be as extreme as sometimes portrayed.
Among the contributors there are many from the Yale community: Phil Bernstein (BA ’79, MArch ’83), Tyler Coburn (BA ’06), Michael Osman (MArch ’01), Jennifer Newsom (BA ’01, MArch ’05) and Tom Carruthers (MArch ’05) of Dream the Combine, Aaron Tobey (PhD ’24), and Jay Wickersham (BA ’78).
Weighing questions about how architects relate to the world is important and shouldn’t feel mundane. “Instruments of Service” is a reminder to pay attention. In school students learn about the past with the expectation of gaining agency in an unpredictable future. As architects we want to be empowered to operate meaningfully and viably in the world. Sometimes the professional conventions constrain us in this effort, but sometimes the constraints are our own lapses of creativity, resourcefulness, or will. Building better bridges between architectural education and practice would be one way to increase our chances of success.
—Nicholas McDermott (MArch ’08), RA, LEED AP, is a core-studio critic at YSoA. He is a partner and cofounder of New York architecture practice FE and a director of the nonprofit Design Advocates.