First major problem: the very large — How to enlarge the architect’s responsibility , broader scope with larger impact

If there is such a thing as living order of the kind I have defined in this book, an order which comes from the particularities of individual people and particularities of place — then we must ask: How is this order to be generated on a worldwide scale? That is the first problem we confront when we face our real professional responsibility.

In principle, one architect could take responsibility for such a large part of the Earth. But it is certainly far beyond what one architect can design directly using today’s conceptions and today’s techniques and today’s processes. It could only be done if it were done indirectly, by indirect generative means, so that this one architect sets in motion processes which allow hundreds of others (users, builders and so on) to do the necessary volume of work, but to do it in the right way.
That means, to do it using processes which allow ordinary people — the people who live and work there — with only help or guidance, to generate order by generative means like those described in this book. From the architect’s point of view, this would mean he, or she, would be working with these people by guiding, helping, and steering their work — while allowing them a great deal of power and decision-making influence — essentially thus magnifying the impact of his/her effort, and allowing much of the detailed adaptational order to come from the place it has always come in past societies — from people themselves and their local craftsmen.

I start to get a very different understanding why Excel is such a successful programming tool: it does exactly that — gives a tool to people to solve their own problems with it.

But the architect might well become, in a future society, a person who is responsible for creating such generative systems, making them work smoothly, making languages and ways of building which hundreds or thousands of people can use to make their own beautiful surroundings by themselves — and, when needed, with his/her help. That is what I mean by the architect’s new role in creating order.

In my vision of this activity, I propose that the architects view themselves in this activity as creators, that they take responsibility for the beauty, order, wholeness of the result, so that they have a very great deal invested in their success in defining languages which people can use successfully, because it is then, through these people, that the architects are able to make beauty in the world, a hundredfold or a thousandfold as large in its extent, as anyone can manage today.

Because of the numbers (population, area, and number of architects), the methods as architect must use in the 21st century, to have the right kind of relationship to the environment — can only be indirect methods. We can only accomplish our aim, by finding some way of creating living structure, without personally having to design every bit of it, without personally having to shape it all. This must — can only — lead to an indirect, generative method.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/21 The role of the architect in the third millennium#