Infrastructure and the Future
I’ve listened a lot to the panel and it’s very inward-seeking. It is one of the flaws of the profession, and it needs to be able to develop a language to talk to the public at large. It needs to develop an ethos that encourages architects to become engaged in those very public issues. George Thrush For any of you who know about this school, you know that we are more engaged than most in public issues. We’ll certainly continue to be, but one of the things that I take away from this conference is the call for vision. Who’s going to produce these visions? Well, in the absence of senators who are architects, presidents who are architects, etc., I think universities are extremely well suited to do that. Tim Love That’s related to Marilyn’s comment, which is that I’m not sure if practice itself—as the very large practice—is the place where that kind of thoughtful research can happen, outside of a particular client and a particular revenue stream based on a fee. George Thrush What’s very interesting, and some of you may not know this, but Tom Fisher, the former editor of Progressive Architecture Magazine and the current dean at the University of Minnesota, has been working very hard with lots of people to create this National Academy of Environmental Design. This is finally a tiny stepchild of the big institutes for health and science and so forth. This is the first step in the direction of having a depository for ideas. In other words, when the National Institute for Health chimes in on how to treat a disease, people listen because it is speaking for a large body of professionals. Because we speak largely through firms, it is harder for us to do that. This National Academy of Environmental Design is also trying to find a way to fund research and work with universities. So I think there are some positive signs.
89