After asking in last week's blog, "What is Urban Design," a question that kicked off a lively debate, this week the question is, "Why does the work of architects seem so elusive to non-architects?"
An employee in my firm used to tell me how his mother asked him: "now that you are an arch-e-tett (first syllable pronounced with a soft "ch" and last without the "c"), tell me again what exactly do they do?". The mother isn't alone, many people seem to be befuddled about what architects do.
Even architects themselves are sometimes uncertain about their profession or occasionally befallen by the "impostor syndrome," well known to many artists. "Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty." John Lennon supposedly said.
The artist's impostor syndrome may be explained with the fact that the arts entail things that reside in the zone between reality and imagination, a zone for which there are no clear metrics indicating what is good and what bad, what passes or what fails. Aesthetics are not easy to measure even if one doesn't follow the relativist's assertion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A mason or a farmer would probably be less likely to feel like a fraud since the work product is real, measurable, tangible and easy to assess, not that much is left to question.