Infrastructure and the Future
The second thing is that things are just getting built all the time, and that’s simply because some people lobby a lot better than other people. As designers we are not good communicators to the outside world. We’re pretty good with each other—I can split hairs with the best of them, I suppose—but our challenge is to figure out how we can really do the special interest type lobbying that the big corporations do. Other people are very comfortable with their legitimacy as a special interest group. They just go in and talk people into things, and those things are not good for any of us. Forget the whole environmental thing; it’s only good for them in the immediate, within this very tight time frame. I have never been able to convince any politician that my design is better than anybody else’s. They don’t necessarily care about the design. They care about all sorts of other performance criteria that we all know about, but that’s the least of our problems. Cliff McMillan That’s not my experience, happily. I think there are many politicians who really value good architecture and good landscape architecture. Martin Felsen I just meant the aesthetics of it, not the design… Tim Love I have more faith in good ideas prevailing in the public realm. Martin Felsen What percentage of Google Earth is well designed? Charles Waldheim Kenneth Frampton used a figure about ten years ago in which four percent of the building stock in North America was designed by an architect. About a decade ago, the American Institute of Architects—in terms of money spent on lobbying congress—was just behind the American Dog Groomers Society. There are more elected members of Congress who are morticians than designers.
75