What it means to be an architect in a time of crisis
By Jonathan Oswald
“Sorry to bother you on a Sunday — can you be in Scottsbluff tomorrow?”
Four weeks into working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I received this text from my boss. My firm, HDR, had been asked to complete several facility assessments in rural communities throughout Nebraska, so we were deploying teams from Denver and Omaha to those sites with less than 24 hours’ notice. I was given the chance to lead one of the teams, an opportunity I was excited to accept.
Despite the short notice and the seven-hour drive from Omaha to northwest Nebraska, I jumped at the chance to use my skills to help — in any small way I could. While these communities were hardly the epicenter of the outbreak, the work we had to do would make a real difference in the health of the people there. Generally, rural towns across Nebraska will send their sickest patients to Omaha to receive specialized care, assuming there are enough beds in the larger community. If that isn’t the case, local health systems could be overrun. Our task was to prepare reports on several hotels to give government agencies an idea of how much work and time it would take to convert them to inpatient facilities.
I’m telling this story not to convince you of my status as an up-and-coming citizen architect — I wouldn’t even describe myself as particularly civic-minded — but because I believe I’m an unremarkable example of what any architect would do when presented with a chance like this. Few architects go into architecture without care for the qualities of the communities their work will shape. The problem is that the way architects see ourselves is not always in sync with the way the public we serve sees us.
While the days of architects as caped (sometimes literally) crusaders — tripping in and out of studios dispensing arcane wisdom only they possess — are fading within the profession, that figure still looms in the public consciousness. Architects have realized the problems we face are too complex for any one person to solve, so instead of top-down direction, we build and lead teams of specialists to tackle wicked problems. But the marketing engines the modernists built still hum so effectively that architects face an uphill battle trying to convince everyone else that we’re not as great as they think we are, that we may not in fact have all the answers, even though we do have some.
So what is the solution? If the public has been trained in an outdated concept of architecture, they can be retrained. And the best time to challenge and retrain these perceptions is during a crisis. A crisis has a way of stripping out all the hype, all the spin, and showing companies and people for who they are.
The public often wonders whether architects provide value or knowledge beyond a flashy rendering. For the architect, there’s no question of value when you’re helping a community or a hospital prepare for tomorrow when they could have no more patient beds and a line out the door. There’s no question of delivering on your promises when the structure is finished before the renderings are done. There’s no question of commitment or skewed priorities when you’ve stood beside a client in their defining moment, fighting for their interest and their needs, instead of your aesthetic.
For me, a trip to rural Nebraska in the midst of a pandemic became a chance to reshape public perceptions of architects. As I met with hotel managers and facilities staff — all of us following strict social distancing and safety guidelines — they saw firsthand that architects will show up during a crisis because we possess specialized knowledge far beyond Photoshop and are eager to apply that knowledge in service to a larger community. I stumbled upon a better answer for that common conversation when telling someone I’m an architect:
“Oh, so you make those cool renderings?”
“Yes, but behind those renderings is a thought process fixated on improving the lives of the people who will live with that place. Let me explain …”
I reached a half-dozen people with this new understanding, but what would happen if all 100,000-plus licensed architects in the U.S. took that same understanding to their children’s baseball games and neighborhood get-togethers and city council meetings? Could we kill the caped crusaders entirely and replace them with a concept of architects both more accurate and more meaningful?
The bad news is that we will have more opportunities of this kind, as crises become more common and more intense. The good news is that we possess the knowledge, skills, and will to serve our communities in the midst of the crisis and remain there after it has passed. And if we do that effectively, maybe those crises will be fewer in the future.
Who’s the next community leader we should be talking about? You are. You’re an architect.
Author Bio:
Jonathan Oswald, AIA, PMP, LEED APOswald is an architect at HDR in Omaha, Nebraska. He graduated from Montana State University with degrees in architecture and philosophy, and serves on his local AIA board and the Central States Region EP Committee.