Because such fundamental conflict between the interests of development and those of the general public can not be seen in the perspectival pictures of reality created by architects, new laws and institutions were constructed to maintain public health, safety, and welfare. Principal among these was the professional registration of architects in the United States in the late 19th century at about the same time that architecture and engineering became legally distinct disciplines. Architects were then characterized by American lawmakers as a unique class of professional citizens who had accumulated specialized knowledge that might be employed to check the economic interests of development on behalf of the general public. In exchange for professional licensure by the state, which granted professionals a kind of limited monopoly to design public buildings, architects accepted a fiduciary responsibility to guard the public health, safety, and welfare. The result is that modern American architects are now legally and ethically bound to the interests of those who commission their services, and the competing interests of the general public.
Serving two masters is certainly fraught with difficulty, but the matter is made even more complex because, like any discipline, architects are engaged in a discourse that strives toward autonomy. This is to say that in addition to the competing demands of the client and the general public, architects also strive to achieve creative satisfaction and recognition amongst their peers. These very human needs are usually associated with artistic practice and can also be in competition with public health, safety, and welfare.
It is within this triad of competing values and interests that modern architects practice. Each seeks to establish some kind of dynamic balance within the triad, but most opt to privilege one corner of the triangle over the others. We can refer to production architects as those who strive to serve the varying interests of their clients; star architects as those who serve the interests of art; and eco-social architects as those who serve the marginal interests of society and/or the environment. These categories are, of course, reductive which is to say that we should recognize that some architects strive to satisfy two, or even all three of the interests that compete for their allegiance and that a few are occasionally successful in doing so.
At issue here, however, is not so much the allegiances or intentions of architects, but how their often split allegiances lead them to edit alternative realities in one way or another. This question suggests that all architectural drawings are political because they implicitly or explicitly edit the information that public and private decision makers have available to help them decide how they want to live in the future.
To investigate the politics of editing pictures of the future we concluded that the collection and analysis of empirical data would be more helpful than philosophical speculation because the issue at hand is not only what is rational or ethically desirable, but what architects actually design and what citizens actually perceive. It is the gap, if one exists, between the intentions of architects and the reception of citizens that should influence a philosophy of design because the size of the gap in the meaning of the picture reflects how successfully the picture produces a common end-in-view.115
To understand this phenomenon better we employed a research design that limited our empirical investigation to a single international architectural competition, the Connecticut Museum of Science and Exploration of 2004, in which computer generated presentation drawings, or renderings, were employed by the competing architects. All of the renderings employed conventional architectural techniques of representation, including linear perspective. This strategy ensured that the renderings were constructed in response to the same design problem and limited to similar graphic formats. We selected nine images from the competition materials, three each from the three competition finalists - Cesar Pelli of New York, Zaha Hadid of London, and Behnisch & Behnisch of Stuttgart.
The next step required by the research design was to review the professional literature and document statements made by the architects themselves regarding specific designs as well as general claims made by architecture critics on behalf of the designers. These were summarized as representing the intentions of the architects.
We then randomly selected University of Texas students to sort the images, but excluded those in the art and design disciplines as emerging experts, thus creating a representative sampling of the larger body we hoped to assess - the non-expert but educated citizen. We chose students, rather than a random sample of the general population, because we presumed that as highly educated citizens, they were likely to be future decision-makers. Thus, our sampling is class-sensitive, rather than truly random. To collect respondent receptions of the nine drawings we employed an empirical research protocol that sociologists call a “free-sort” in which respondents sort visual images into piles of their own making. Respondents are then asked to describe the common characteristics of the renderings placed in each pile, or category. After respondents completed the sorting exercise we asked if they had any general comments. These specific and general descriptions were documented and subsequently interpreted using the methods of content analysis.
In the interest of full disclosure, we conducted this protocol three times. In our first series of sorts we determined that we were asking the wrong questions. In our second series we determined, with the help of colleagues, that the directed-sort protocol we employed was troubled by circular logic - meaning that the proposition being tested was implicit in the direction given to respondents. Our third sort, however, produced findings that we deemed reliable on the basis of what social scientists call “emergent design”.116
In each set of renderings studied we found that slightly more that half of the respondent interpretations were logically consistent and could be collectively understood as a dominant interpretation, or reception. This majority of respondents grouped the nine renderings into three piles by architect, perhaps because they could recognize consistency in the graphic style in which information was presented. Among all respondents nearly equal numbers volunteered a strong preference for or aversion to the abstract rendering (Hadid) and the conventional rendering (Pelli). No respondent, however, volunteered a preference or aversion of the explanatory renderings (Behnisch) which may reflect its open-ended disposition. The other (less than) half of the respondents used a variety of criteria to sort the images, but these secondary or tertiary agreements were statistically less significant. The dominant interpretation of the renderings described them in language that we have characterized as conventional (Pelli), abstract (Hadid), and explanatory (Behnisch). These categories are, we found, directly related to well-known professional and/or academic discourses.
115
The gap between the intentions of artists and the reception of the public has been studied by those engaged in
116
The same images were used in the initial two sorting procedures, but, in keeping with the methods of a “directed-sort” task, respondents were provided with three categories based on our analysis of the intention of the architects, in the form of short descriptive sentences, and asked to sort the nine images into those categories. The descriptive sentences used changed between the first and second procedure, but the directed-sort procedure itself remained unchanged.