Young Architects Forum

 View Only

2020-03-19_1206.png

Quick Links

Who we are

The Young Architects Forum (YAF), a program of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the College of Fellows (COF), is organized to address issues of particular importance to recently licensed architects.

FAQ: What is a young architect and what is an emerging professional? Young architects are architects licensed up to ten years of initial licensure, and the name does not have any relationship to age. Emerging professionals are professionals who have completed their academic studies up to the point of licensure or up to 10 years after completion of their academic studies. Although young architects are now defined as distinct from emerging professionals, many components refer to these groups similarly. For example, a local YAF group may include emerging professionals and a local Emerging Professionals Committee may include young architects.

Q4 Connection 2019 - Editor's Note

By John J. Clark AIA posted 12-30-2019 12:31 AM

  
As we approach the end of 2019, this issue looks back on the highlights of the year, including the highly impactful Women’s Leadership Summit, while keeping an eye on the future of practice through the lens of technology. View the full PDF on Issuu or see the individual article links below.


For our cohort of young architects, much technology is an invisble, prevasive reality in our hyper-connected lives. This publication, like much of our work in practice, is a credit to digital technology and a mostly virtual community of professionals that has been drawn together around it.

This type of digital collaboration and remote work is the new norm in 2020, even in our slow to evolve architectural profession, mainly because of accessible, simplified, user experiences. This unseen, accepted technology quietly impacts practice in ways that are unnoticed at the surface. In terms of this publication, consider the fact that technology allows for anyone to contribute, collaborate with our editorial team, and have a voice in influencing the profession.

Through a few pieces in this issue, we hope to inspire thoughts on the technology that is still largely unexplored and unfamiliar in practice. Many speak about data, parametric design, and programming in practice, but such tools are stigmatized as inefficient, inaccessible, and unmanageble. As young architects we should be imagining the impacts and potential of these tools and embracing them.

Kristofer Leese of Belzberg Architects in Santa Monica, Calif. and Jess Purcell of Shepley Bullfinch in Phoenix, Ariz. both show why negative characterizations of these tools are false by giving examples of practical ways programming, data, and parametric design can be used to solve design and management problems. As Leese notes, such technologies need not be the focus of any practice but instead as part of “a digital toolbox that allows us to enhance our ability to problem solve and develop creative solutions.”

We owe it to ourselves, our firms, and our profession to engage with new technologies to help in optimizing design, office management, project development, construction documents, and fabrication tasks. This is especially important considering that the future cohorts of architects are true digital natives and will come to expect such uses of technology in practice in the near future.

A new digital kit of parts and the nature of our new hyper-connected, globalized, cross-disciplinary, virtual world will allow for new ways to complete both mundane and creative tasks, while allowing everyone a voice in solving problems. Fortunately as architects we have some large problems to solve.

Author bio:

John J. Clark, AIA, NCARB
Editor in chief, YAF Connection
Clark is an architect with RMKM Architecture in Albuquerque, N.Mex. Clark is a graduate of the University of New Mexico and is the 2019-20 Communications Director for the AIA National’s Young Architects Forum.
0 comments
24 views