Network practice and the products of networking

Tom Verebes

pp. 206-217

in: Georg Flachbart, Peter Weibel (eds), Disappearing architecture, Basel, Birkhäuser, 2005

Abstract

Professional architectural practice faces increasingly constrained design parameters as a result of deterministic planning policies, building codes, and the overly litigational context of the construction and manufacturing industries. Given these apparent inadequacies in the pervasive model of practice, the discipline of architecture is doomed to ever more impotence as a cultural activity, unless it is imbibed with innovative design, production and manufacturing techniques, as well as with a wholesale reformation of the ways in which architecture is practiced. Clients, architects and other building industry professionals must either open their eyes to the cultural and economic value of experimentation or face extinction, only to be replaced by the mediocre professional managers, technicians, cost control specialists and bureaucrats.