Ninety-five thousand people don’t join the AIA begrudgingly. They join optimistically, and this year I’d like to facilitate this hope. People who want to make a difference through architecture have innumerable opportunities. Architecture has an undeniable and proven potential to marshal individuals who want to create a healthy and prosperous world. I am an optimist too, and no, I do not apologize for it.
I have always worked with young designers and architects to help them figure out what’s in it for them when it comes to a career in architecture. And so for the next 12 months, I want to talk about the opportunities in architecture for all of us. Most graduates of architecture school last May are still waiting for their first day of work thanks to this pandemic and this recession. Your own workloads might be a lot different now than they were in May, too. But now is the time to raise each other up, young designers and architects alike, and seize the opportunity before us.
Here’s how I think we can start:
Ahead of last fall’s election, the AIA published the Policy Platform 2020 outlining three of the most consequential issues we face together—healthy and equitable communities, climate action, and a future economy—for legislators and architects. The word “infrastructure” appears several times in the AIA’s guidance, and I think it’s important to make a distinction. On one hand, you have the vertical infrastructure of schools, hospitals, affordable housing, and museums and institutions that support education for a civil society. On the other, you have the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, not to mention coastal and inland resilience. Both types of infrastructure have a place in the healthy America we all would like to see in 2021 and beyond. Both have the capacity to incentivize sustainability and carbon neutrality. Both require human capital.
The opportunity that these two kinds of infrastructure represent could be activated by “buying clean” in the public procurement process. Some organizations like the Carbon Leadership Forum have suggested this approach, and I think it has merit. It could also be about methodically and pervasively enacting green building codes at the local and state levels, as the AIA and others have long advocated. I am pleased to report that it can—and will—be about the AIA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., on which we have begun the design of the retrofit that will take us toward net zero.
Yet these opportunities and others must be about more than just agreement on our parts. It must be about tireless coordination and unrelenting action. Why? Because elections themselves do not intrinsically solve problems. Real problems are solved over months and years, and they constitute the work of policymakers and the private sector—the helping hand, the invisible hand, and the hand that feeds. Real problems define the mandate for competent leaders. Real solutions can and must be activated with sweat equity today, because the price of fixing our biggest problems is too high to be mortgaged for the next generation.
As I said, people don’t join AIA begrudgingly. They join optimistically. There have been a lot of job losses in the last year, and many new graduates are wondering where their first job will be. They are wondering what it was all for.
We are a strong profession, made more so when we help each other. The losses I mentioned represent another opportunity that we can address right away while the AIA’s Policy Platform gains momentum on Capitol Hill and in state houses everywhere—an opportunity to help someone directly who has lost their job, or to help hundreds of people indirectly by volunteering as a mentor or as a committee member. If you joined the AIA optimistically, as I did all those years ago, then be an active member constructively, as I intend to do in all the months ahead.
