manufacturing taste
In the property sector, who had the training and the panache to advise clients on design trends? Who had the analytical tools to research design benchmarks? Who would have been well-versed in analysing target consumers and translating the data into inspirational built form? Who would have excelled in shaping public taste and tapping to people’s needs and aspirations? Who had the ability to introduce to clients innovative materials and stylish finishes? Who should have been an authority on architectural design?
Letting agents and project managers. Obvs!
I would have argued architects, but they have been terribly busy with waterproofing packages and aspiring to talk only to other architects.
Since the 1980s, architects have left a cavernous void behind them that had to be filled somehow. They were too busy becoming bureaucrats that they lost sight of who there really were meant to be. Whereas almost all other white-collar professionals embraced outsourcing and specialised, architects abdicated and opted to play second fiddle to contractors, nay, sub-contractors even. Architects had pressing matters to tend to like blockwork elevations and lintel schedules.
Letting agents had to step up. The traditional role of letting agents is to find tenants for developments yet over the last 40 years, they have blossomed to an incredibly influential class of advisors with so much clout on the design of buildings. Agents dictate to clients what needs to be designed, what finishes to opt for and what furniture and fittings to select. Many agents are truly brilliant, but many others have no design background at all. They end up emulating what has already been done. This leads to developments becoming derivative. All new spaces are facsimiles of each other. The market is inundated with clones. This is particularly true of speculative commercial developments: It usually takes a visionary and stylish developer like Derwent London to unveil a completed project for agents to take a cue from it and perpetuate copies of it for the next 5-7 years.
As for architects, on the other hand, their finger is resolutely not on the pulse. Many in their ranks are alienated from mainstream trends, let alone emerging ones. What never ceases to amaze me is how incurious most people in the profession are: There is an egregious dearth of curiosity about what projects are being designed and constructed around them or who’s designing what. There is a lack of curiosity about clients and developers and what these developers are up to. There is a lack of curiosity about market trends in property: what sectors are dead and what sectors are buoyant. What typologies are plateauing and what typologies are nascent. Which clients are out there buying and renting spaces. There is a lack of curiosity about materials, finishes and FF&E. There is a lack of curiosity about what’s in style. There is even a lack of curiosity about innovations in structure and building services.
There is a missed opportunity for collaboration between architects and agents to manufacture taste. Collective taste is manufactured and propagated until it is internalised by society. The trend setters and the influencers, in cahoots with media and film, music and branding agencies define the style of the age and the taste spectrum for people to subscribe to.
Stripped of style, innovation and curiosity, what else is there in architecture but a utilitarian building trade that can be delivered efficiently by contractors and engineers?