More and more I think architecture has nothing to do with it.

So, here’s my beef with Architecture:

I picked Architecture because I thought it might be a good starting point to finding myself in a place where I could make some kind of impact on, as lame as this sounds, human life.

People. I want to make life better for people. Not just some people, not just a particular constituency. No compromises. Everyone.

Yes, it’s impossible, it’s naïve but that’s what I want. With architecture you change the fabric of an environment and the spaces everyone moves through to go about their daily lives. The theory is you change the surroundings you change the lives of those within them.

Last week Alex Laupunzina, the director of the program I’m in, held a lecture on the grand question “What is Architecture?” Sounds pompous but it’s a really hard question to pin down. In this lecture he asked us what it was to “think architecturally,” to which I thought but did not respond “to think altruistically.” I kept the thought in my head, where it would bother and annoy me, laying in the corner of my mind unfinished, unelaborated on, uncommented on, un-critiqued. But to me that’s what it is; thinking unselfishly towards those who will live portions of their life within the spaces you’ve defined.

Unfortunately, I’m beginning to think that this is not what Architecture is and even if you try to make it that way it doesn’t really matter. There’s a quote by Rem Koolhaas, which is apparently famous enough to be on his Wikipedia page where I found it, that goes something like this:

“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it’s habitable.” (link)

As much as I dislike Koolhaas and his cool-for-the-sake-of-cool, non-rationalist approach I’m really beginning to think he’s right. The more I’ve been around architecture the more I’ve missed literature and politics. The real change that I see happening doesn’t come from those milling the built environment.

I’m playing devil’s advocate a little bit here but I feel that if you want to make solid change it has to happen, not within the built structures people have created for themselves, but within the social structures they’ve created for themselves. If real good and change are going to come from anywhere it will be from the law and governance a society has defined for itself. From a federal senator down to the now oh-so-trendy community organizer, these are the people that can create positive impacts because they’re working with the nuts and bolts of the system collectively defined to be the means of organizing civilization.

This all comes at a time when I’m trudging through pages upon pages of architectural history spanning the Romans to the Baroque and rather than finding the intricacies of gothic architecture I’m finding uncertainty. I don’t care about the progression of gothic ornamentation because I feel like it’s petty. I know this is wrong for a lot of reasons, but first instincts are that it’s petty and analyzing it is only something a pompous clique of white guys do so they can bounce essays back and fourth to one another like they’re inside jokes. I just don’t like reading about how seven hundred years ago architects were doing the same exact thing that they are now: trying to make the biggest, most elaborate, most decorated, proportionally correct, expensive cathedral they could get a commission for. Dubai comes to mind.

I don’t quite remember how but I had it in my head so it all boiled down to this: it’s occurring to me that the least tangible things we have might be the most real. What really matters except what we feel and how we treat those around us?