I have a great deal of respect for the intelligence, tenacity and staying power that it takes to become a specialist in any given subject. The Architectural profession is no different to other professions in that our members come out of the university system that for a whole number of very good and practical reasons is dominated and lead by “hyper specialists”. Because of course to rise to the ranks of leadership of any respectable university a Phd is the absolute minimum requirement. In order to obtain this honor and this status you are required to contribute to the creation of “new knowledge” and on order to do that, your thesis better be pretty dam specific and specialized otherwise the knowledge cannot be counted by those dishing out Phd’s as being “new”.
The problem though is that in order to survive in the real world, it has for long been know that to become a “one trick pony” is a specifically risky endeavor. We all know the countless stories of the fifty something highly specialized bank employee and specialist in a very specific method of finance or administrative process who is unceremoniously retrenched and finds that he falls all the way to the bottom of the social and economic pile and ends up waiting tables at the Spur! Yet still entry into our professions is controlled and guided by those that have an unavoidable bias toward the kind of mind that tends toward specialization.
Specialization is a trap. It is a curse. Specialization is for insects.!! To be fully human and express what it is to be human requires you to be flexible, knowledgeable in many fields and to not be intimidated by novelty or change or the requirement to join dots that you have not previously joined.
This has been true for the longest time but is become more and more obvious as we enter into an era where it has become increasingly difficult to compete with constantly improving AI experts and specialists. I am not a prophet and thus have great difficulty seeing the future, but my guess is that the coming years belongs to those that can bring together experts and players (AI and human) from many disciplines and many fields in such a way as to respond efficiently to a need in the market.
And to my Architect friends I say – You are all very well placed to position yourself in this time, but (and a very important but) is that you have to take the courage to step up and to lead. Are you ready for this?
noh ARCHITECTS 