Committee on the Environment

Few terms are as widely misunderstood as "value engineering". While one of our projects is in the fangs of this wild beast, I feel motivated  to address a number of misconceptions about architects, design and chiefly about "value engineering".

Misconceptions About the Architect

There is hardly an architect I know who didn't have to struggle with his client's notion that architects design "frilly things" as "monuments for themselves", or that architects are for form and engineers are for function. Any number of similar misperceptions see architects either as wimpy decorators doing nothing more than putting lipstick on buildings or, on the other end of the spectrum, but equally wrong, as heroic lone wolves that fight everybody else and cater only to their own big egos. Especially for the latter image we have to thank Ayn Rand who imprinted it indelibly into hundreds of thousands of young minds with "Fountainhead", a book still frequently read in high school. In it the protagonist, Howard Roark, an architect, spouts off sentences like this: "I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards-and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one." 
This is, of course, anachronistic in a world of teamwork, but never in history would it have been right since every artist, engineer, scientist or architect stands on the shoulder of others that came before. The image of the architect in the public mind is in such dire need for a reset that the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is currently spending a lot of money on "repositioning" the profession. The message: Although architects can imagine things that don't exist yet, they are not dreamers but team players and problem solvers who can put themselves in the shoes of others. Most notably, the can add value for the client.