Architecture is ideally practiced artfully with an artists eye to aesthetics, proportion, and function, but it is not exclusively an art. I have known several practicing architects
who lack much sense of color, can barely sketch, much less render, and whose sense of style, history and composition would best qualify them as heavy equipment operators.
However, the best are also technically astute, competent in production of construction documents, and pay attention to architecture as a business. They make an essential contribution to their firms as either principals or employees, and should be respected for that contribution regardless of the degree of their artistic limitations. Architecture has an unavoidable technical aspect that many good designers in the aesthetic sense would rather ignore, a wayward tendency corrected during design development by the guys - and gals - that must make projects buildable, with the minimum of leaks, detail failures, and material deficiencies - and a good set of well integrated specs.
If your skill set embodies the best of artistic, spatially creative, and technical skills, good for you - not to mention site design. Most architects probably are not a triple threat, however, and mischaracterizing what the reality of daily practice is like does no service to the profession, in my view, and distorts the public perception in favor of the best self-promoting "starchitects".
Furthermore, registration simply means one has met the minimum standards for licensing, and bestows the legal right to call oneself an architect, whether one has all the "chops" or not. There is as yet no minimum requirement, to my knowledge, for artistic skill.
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Gary Collins AIA
Principal
Gary R. Collins, AIA
Jacksonville OR
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-08-2011 00:47
From: Patrick Roy
Subject: Architecture
Architecture is an Art. You have to be an artist first to be an Architect.
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Patrick Roy AIA
Principal
Patrick Anthony Roy, Architect & Planner
Englishtown NJ
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