Vision 2020: Considering the World + the Future Architect

What will be the most significant challenge facing architecture and society in 2020? What is the relevance of architecture in this future?

Never in history have the forces working against architecture been greater. Productivity in the construction sector continues its decades-long descent. Lower productivity yields a seemingly endless cycle of cost escalation out of all proportion to the rest of the economy. Higher cost in turn produces relentless pressure on quality. Lower quality threatens not only the artistic soul of the craft that we live for, but it undermines our efforts to form architecture about a deep and pervasive environmental ethic that is economically sustainable for us all.

We can no longer content ourselves with either simple shelter or thrilling form. We have to perform. We must be accountable on all fronts. It is our ethical obligation to transform this confluence of challenges from one that confounds and confuses to one that compounds and succeeds in yet unseen ways.

How will a future “architect” think/operate in 2020, and what skills will be required?

The future will require skills in research and innovation distinctly different from the design invention that we presently use in our schools and practices. If the objective is innovation – then I think we get a failing grade as educators and practitioners. If use and utility are the cauldron in which all invention is tested to see if it rises to the exalted level of innovation, of extensive use to humanity, then we really have a lot of work to do. How does one go about making an invention if one wishes that it rise to the level of innovation? Simply being new or different is not nearly enough. It has to be something that is a better way to do the simple, elemental things that human beings have always done – be it keeping a roof over your head or keeping your body temperature comfortable. So how do we educate for innovation?

Well, for starters we don’t just conduct design studios. Instead we add innovation laboratories. What is the difference? A design studio is a collection of designers working under the guidance of a designer with criticism from juries populated by collections of designers. That is not exactly teaching in the heated cauldron of the marketplace.  So the first question should be this: if teaching innovation is the goal of at least one design experience while in school– then WHO should teach it?

While design has a role in this, it is just that – a role. The other roles roughly parallel what anyone goes through when they seek to invent with an eye toward actual use. IDEO has a better model to teach and practice innovation than any school I know. The central act of design for innovation is not the thing itself but the process.

Innovation, which is defined here as the act of making something that is both new and useful, is necessary because it guarantees that the pursuit of previously unknown ideas will not be undertaken in vain. For if an idea is new but not useful, it is of questionable value. Innovation brings the user of products to a position of prominence, and promises that their needs will not be forgotten during the process of making and delivering those products. An innovation is something that is new and needed. The ability to look past the sheen of the “new” and search for usefulness within design and development should be required of architects in 2020.

Why are students uniquely positioned to address these issues?

Students today are demonstrating capacities to collaborate that will be central in the new world. One of the first acts of all design in the contemporary world is assembling the team of collaborators. Collaborators in the new world of practice often include business people, scientists, engineers and other designers of various sorts, fabricators, lawyers, and market researchers. Collecting a diverse group of this sort to teach and to take a course that crosses disciplines at the advanced graduate level is exceedingly difficult – but not impossible – in the structure of the modern American university. Students can work to demand that their education prepare them for the collaborative skills that underpin all innovation.

Lastly, schools of architecture today are finally beginning to educate for research. Research needs to move into every crevice of our souls, thoughts and actions. Research will lead the way toward innovation, toward inventions that are not merely novel but instead transform our processes and architecture into shelter that is broadly sustainable, affordable and artistically moving.

Stephen Kieran is a founding partner of the firm. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale University, magna cum laude, and his Master of Architecture, with honors, from the University of Pennsylvania.   He was a recipient of the Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome, 1980-81. Both Kieran and Timberlake were inaugural recipients of the prestigious Benjamin Latrobe Fellowship for architectural design research from the AIA College of Fellows in 2001. Recently, KieranTimberlake Associates received the 2008 Architecture Firm Award, the highest honor bestowed on a firm by the American Institute of Architects.

Mr. Kieran is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, and Endowed Professor in Sustainability at the University of Washington College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He has served as Eero Saarinen Distinguished Professor of Design at Yale University, Max Fisher Chair at the University of Michigan, and has taught at Princeton University.  He has co-authored two books: Manual, The Architecture of KieranTimberlake, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2002, and refabricating Architecture, published by McGraw Hill in 2004, which examines how manufacturing methodologies are poised to transform building construction. The partners’ latest book, Loblolly House: Elements of a New Architecture, is a case study of a single building which shows a way forward to quality, productivity and sustainability.

Mr. Kieran served as the Design Partner for the Middle School at Sidwell Friends, the Loblolly House, Berkeley, Pierson, Davenport and Silliman residential college renovations and the Sculpture Building and Gallery at Yale University.  He is currently the Design Partner for the Morse and Stiles Colleges Addition and Renovation at Yale, a new Meeting House and Arts Center at Sidwell Friends School and the new Northwest Campus Student Housing complex at UCLA in collaboration with Pfeiffer Partners.