Are architects dead? On the crisis of the architectural profession and its role in society.

The second part of the interview with Martin Hejl, curator of the exhibition
2 x 100 mil. m² : The Collective Dream

The profession of architect is therefore in crisis. What role do you think an architect should play in society?
First of all, it is necessary to zoom back out from the 800-meter suburban plot when I talk only about Czechoslovakia and strengthen our position in how large plans are formed. Secondly, we are incredibly slow compared to other disciplines; everything takes us extremely long. And the third fact is that we are significantly disconnected from technological development. Both we and our education suffer from a certain dose of nostalgia and adoration of functionalism. It’s a rather peculiar regressive fetish. But maybe it’s okay that architects are at the end of their strength and maybe they are no longer needed in society. Today, they only build 3% of all construction. Then we are in the position of designers.

Isn’t the construction crisis a space for architects to reassess their situation and open the door for new ideas? Maybe that’s what you are trying to imply.
Certainly, it's one of those somewhat cliché formulations that when there is a construction crisis, architects have sufficient space to write books and formulate their positions. I find it alarming that we are a profession that is willing to work 24 hours, 7 days a week with zero compensation and consider it to be something that is acceptable. This is logically a method that means you have no fund for research, that you have no fund for development, etc. This is unsustainable in the long term and I believe that the conversations in the book Atomized Modernity, which describe the period after 1989 – are organized by generations; there are those from the sixties, fifties, and then my generation, the thirty plus, illustrate a certain loss of keeping a finger on the pulse of construction technology development. And we are realistically still, to a certain extent, a postmodern landscape, which is alarming. Postmodern in the original sense of the word.

But intellectually, we should be somewhere else by now, shouldn't we?
We should be, but we have not experienced any experiments of the nineties, deconstructivism or new sobriety; there are noticeable influences from Japan on Czech architecture, but that's all a matter of Bow-Wow Post-bubble city. This means that “small” is the way. If small is the way, we are in a certain phase of rocking the profession from big dreams and solving large problems, from a strong influence in society to a better craft.

And do you see any fundamental problems that architecture could solve, should solve, or can architecture really solve any current fundamental problems?
Well, I think yes, we are trained in diagrammatic thinking; we are capable of fairly large abstraction and we are able to control or synchronize quite large and complex phenomena together. This makes us extremely suitable to have our say at the moment when the energy policy of the country is being planned, when strategies for dealing with water are developed, when thinking about how to treat agricultural land, in what way forests will be divided, which rivers may need to be dammed, if any, whether our cities should continue to develop, consume agricultural landscapes, or whether we can change that. Are we able to revive our cities so that we don't continue living in medieval centers? Just the idea that the majority of people live in what has been built in the last hundred years is absurd.

So, for example, the theme of urban revival, what architects should address.
I think it’s not just about cities, but also about the countryside. The map shows this somewhat; the cities are depicted as a kind of fungus or mold or pattern or however you want to call it, or constellations that expand and consume, eliminate the space defined by that boundary. It’s not as alarming for us as it is in Africa or South America, or some Asian metropolises; however, the logic is still the same. How we manage the land, how our residential and not just residential needs are integrated into it is a question of architectural debate.

Thank you for the interview.