52: Instruments of Service

COMING SOON!

Blue type that says Harvard Design Magazine No 52 Instruments of Service on top of a colorful drawing

At a moment when the word “design” has come to refer to everything and thus nothing, this issue examines the hidden mechanics and visible output of design practice in order to track the shifting role of designers in society and to gauge the capacity of designers to effect change in a world of mounting crises.

The issue poses a simple question: What do architects actually make and how is this changing?

Guest edited by Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel, assistant professors in practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, issue 52’s exploration is grounded in architecture. Once upon a time asserted to be the “mother art” (Frank Lloyd Wright) and as “the ultimate goal of all creative activity” (Walter Gropius’s introduction to his Bauhaus Manifesto), but over the past century it has lost its purchase on such sweeping and grandiose claims to creative primacy and world-building. At the same time, however, architecture remains a ubiquitous point of reference for a wide range of disciplines, practices, and protagonists that influence the design of the things we use and the environments we inhabit—including fields not only directly related to architecture such as landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design, but also fashion, industrial design, graphic design, and digital design.

The issue’s title, Instruments of Service, carries a double meaning. As defined in standard American Institute of Architects contracts, “Instruments of Service are representations, in any medium of expression now known or later developed, of the tangible and intangible creative work performed by the Architect and the Architect’s consultants under their respective professional services agreements. Instruments of Service may include, without limitation, studies, surveys, models, sketches, drawings, specifications, and other similar materials.” Instruments of service are the instruction manuals that architects—and other designers—make so that others can make something. They define the architect’s relationships with labor, construction, clients, and society. And these relationships—along with the agency of architectural practice—are changing as a growing number of external pressures force instruments of service to change.

Architects and designers can also be seen as instruments of service to society, responsible to a continually shifting set of values. At a fundamental level, the designer’s job is to imagine and articulate a better future. In a time of crisis and competing value systems—market returns, cultural relevance, environmental response, social equity, automation—the role of the designer in society is ever more important and increasingly accountable to divergent interests that call into question the raison d’être of design practice itself.

In the end, what we make is inextricably tied to why and for whom we make it.

Table of Contents

Special

A Counterfactual Architect

Tyler Coburn and Siqi Zhu with Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, George B. Johnston, Grace La, Michael Osman, and Jacob Reidel

Documenting Complexity: The Evolution of Contracts and Construction Documents

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel

It’s All in the Details: Interpreting Practice Around the World

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel

Wholeness in Architecture

Christopher Alexander

Roundtable

Architects, Builders, and the Failed Promise of Deep Collaboration

Gregg Garmisa with Phil Bernstein, John Cerone, and Alexis McGuffin

Contracts and the Evolution of Architectural Practice

Chelsea Spencer with Bryan E. Norwood and Jay Wickersham

Expertise in a Changing World

Jeffry Burchard with Evelyn Lee, Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, Mary Smith, and Daniel Susskind

Tools, Technology, and Design Value

Ingeborg Rocker with Andrew Heumann, Tyler Mincey, and Martha Tsigkari

Unionizing Architectural Labor

Ana María León with Andrew Bernheimer, Andrew Daley, Maya Porath, and Fiona Riley

Values-Based Architecture in a Profit-Driven World

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel with Toni L. Griffin, Nikil Saval, and Jack Self

Essay

Architectural Specifications and the Division of Labor

Katie Lloyd Thomas

Architecture Becoming Finance: A Means to Ethical Real Estate

Matthew Soules

Breaking Barriers, Breaking Blueprints: How Practitioners can Thrive at the Technological Frontier

Michael Caton

Building to Extremes: The Architectural Invention of OJT

Matt Shaw

Crisis? What Crisis? Exposure Therapy and the Future of Architectural Practice

Reinier de Graaf

Database Architecture

Aaron Tobey

Models, Notations, and the Twilight of Modern Reason

Mario Carpo

Powers of Practice: The Symbiosis of Architecture’s Profession and Discipline

Aaron Cayer

Profession at a Crossroads: Reconciling Architecture’s Past with the Demands of its Future

Renée Cheng

Set Up to Fail: How the Parts of Design Have Taken Over the Purpose of Practice

Claire Weisz

The Adventures of Making: A Pragmatist Perspective on Design

Albena Yaneva

Who is the Architect?

George B. Johnston

Visual Folio

Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art

Farshid Moussavi

Editors' Letter

Instruments of Service

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel

Interview

Dream the Combine: Rewitnessing with Two-Point Perspective Drawing

Sala Elise Patterson

The Architect’s Ghostwriter

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel with Aaron Pine

Colophon

EDITOR IN CHIEF
Ken Stewart

MANAGING EDITOR
Meghan Ryan Sandberg

GUEST EDITORS
Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti
Jacob Reidel

GRAPHIC DESIGN & ART DIRECTION
Alexis Mark

COPYEDITOR
Rachel Holzman

PROOFREADER
Mikhail Grinwald

RESEARCHERS
Robin Albrecht
Juman Barazi
Elitza Koeva
Pablo Castillo Luna
Vivienne Shi

SOCIAL MEDIA & MARKETING
Gillian Hause
Kate Schreiber

PRINTER
Grafiche Veneziane, Venice, Italy