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PROVOCATIONS
January 1998



"It Takes an Architect"

by Padriac R. Steinschneider

I am known professionally primarily as a person who creates buildings: fifty years ago, I would have been understood to be an architect.

Unfortunately, as our litigious society erodes the viability of being the "one" responsible for anything, I have seen the practice of architecture implode to the point where, in an effort to restrict liability, the architect's responsibilities have become so limited that the architect can no longer function as the "one" who has created a building.

Instead of being the master builder overseeing the creation from inception to completion, the architect has become a component in the process: often taking what someone else has programed and defined to the point where someone else can take the architect's drawings to get the necessary building permits and proceed with construction.

As far as I am concerned, this is not architecture nor is this functioning as an architect. Unfortunately, my beliefs are incongruent with how the legal profession, through its approach to liability, has redefined the term "architect" and so, to avoid confusion, I no longer define myself as being an architect.


As a point of reference, so that this is not misperceived as my personal lament, the etymology of "architect"is composed from the Greek "arkhi" which means "leading" and "tekton" which means "builder:" the person we understood fifty years ago to be the "master builder."

But this is not what I want to talk about. While I am known as this person who creates buildings, I received my Masters in Architecture from Columbia University as my second degree. One of my majors for my Bachelors Degree, also from Columbia, was Environmental Science: a field that used to be called "Geography" but which would better be understood today by being called "Ecology."

While we sometimes perceive ecology to be a study of nature, it is really the study of how people exist in the world - how we are dependent on the world for our survival and how we are impacting the survival of the world. To complete my major in Environmental Science, I had to take a class about soils and the closely related issues of erosion and sedimentation.

The first thing I want to pretend to talk about here is soil stability: What determines the stability of a soil and what happens to soil when the stabilizing parameters are changed? There are numerous different soil types in an extensive classification system with each type defined in terms of composition, permeability, and depth. Integral to the soil type is the type of vegetation present.

One cannot be understood without the other: Rich, well drained, and deep soils support lush vegetation and lush vegetation maintains rich, well drained, and deep soils. A key relationship between vegetation and soil stability is the root structure. The fragile netting of roots from the largest trees to the least significant weeds provide the reinforcing in the soil that resists erosion. If the vegetation is removed from the surface, this root system dies. With the decomposition of the root system, the soil is no longer reinforced - held together.

Small rivulets of surface water runoff that previously would have had little impact on the soil and would have been permeated into the soil and been absorbed by the root system feeding the vegetation are now able to carry small soil fines downstream. This removes the soil and is the definition of soil erosion. Sedimentation is what happens when all of these removed soils are collected in the downstream system. To get perspective on the significance of this process, remember, the Grand Canyon was caused by erosion and the Mississippi Delta was formed by sedimentation

But of course I am only discussing soil stability as the allegory for my real concern: the erosion of social structure that continues to destabilize our communities and, as far as I am concerned, is the primary cause of what we now perceive to be the erosion of family structure.

Pick up a magazine and there is a good chance you will find an article related to the problems of family instability. The article may be about the quality of our schools, crime patterns or someone's failure or success in obtaining personal fulfillment but somewhere in that article will be a mention of family structure.

Listen to teachers lament the challenges of teaching in difficult communities, and the issue of the lack of support from parents for the education of their children will surface. Speak with a police officer about juvenile crime and you will hear about the failure of parents to accept responsibility for the actions of their children. Turn on the television and watch any of the ridiculously numerous talk shows and you will have to listen to family members berating one another for their failures: parents lamenting the failure of their children to behave and children lamenting the failure of their parents to raise them properly.

The children blame both their parents and teachers. When the parents aren't blaming the children for failing to raise themselves properly, they blame the teachers. After they're done blaming the community for its failure to adequately support quality education, the teachers rightfully acknowledge that their job is to teach, not to raise the children, and they blame the parents for not doing their job. Police blame the parents and parents blame the police. Hillary Clinton is inclusive and blames everyone who does not understand that raising children is the responsibility of the Village. The question that consistently stimulates the talk show circuit remains: Who is really to blame?

I blame the architects. The problem is with the way we have been designing our communities.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was popular to believe in the potential of the built environment to shape society with the intrinsic potential of correcting social ills. This belief spawned social experiments with housing for low income families and the disenfranchised. The results were seldom successful and often disastrous. The final solution for several of these experiments was dynamite.

Eventually, to obviate their sense of responsibility for these failures, the self-image of architects as social engineers was abandoned. Where professors in 1968 architecture schools tried to impress upon their students an obligation to correct the social inequities of our culture through good design, professors in 1978 viewed interests in social engineering with disdain and encouraged their students to focus on the latest aesthetic "ism."

Unfortunately, while quick to involve themselves with the social experiments in public housing, architects missed the real social phenomenon that hit our society like a tidal wave during the 1950s: suburban development.

I am not really talking about the type of suburban development that had been evolving with the railroads during the late 1800s and early 1900s but rather the kind of suburban development that sprang full-grown after WWII with the highway system and an automobile culture.

The real social experiment during the 50s and 60s was not in the public housing projects designed to solve the needs of the poor but in the miles of tract housing designed to serve the middle class.

continue to p. 2 of 3

Padriac R. Steinschneider is principal of Gotham Design Ltd, an architectural design firm in Dobbs Ferry, NY, that focuses on designing new buildings and the adaptive reuse of existing buildings within a community context.


PROVOCATIONS is an online journal of architecture and ideas.

Editor: Susan Bilenker, info@design-site.net.
Publisher: Susan Bilenker Communications for DesignSite™ .
Opinions expressed by authors published in Provocations are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Provocations, DesignSite, or Susan Bilenker Communications.

last update: 1/8/04