My assumption about our profession

I imagine a new role for the architect, I which we take more seriously our responsibility for all form and space in the world, in which we try, first by theory, then by practice, then by craft and art, to help the many societies in the world gain control of the processes which govern the shape of the built world, so that each place may become a living structure, and so that the world as a whole may become beautiful.

Just as doctors, as members of their profession, take the responsibility for the care of illness and disease — and take this responsibility, in principle, for all the people on Earth — so it seems to me only natural that the life of buildings and the built world, that precious quality which makes or breaks the pleasure and significance of human life on Earth, must be taken most seriously of all by those of us in the profession devoted to the love of buildings, who see buildings as our task and our passion, and who — in principle — know more than other people about the nature of these buildings. It is we to whom the people of society most naturally turn, when buildings, and the quality of the built world, are being discussed. And it is we to whom they will ultimately look, for the overall quality of the built environment.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous statement “A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln cathedral is a work of architecture”, did, in its supercilious 20th-century elitism, take away from us the very task which architecture, by definition, sets out: The making of the whole created world in its geometry.
Instead, during the 20th century, and, indeed, during the whole history of professional architecture so far, the work covered by architects has focused on a limited special class of buildings, a too-narrow segment of the class of all buildings.

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