On Liability

"I believe our profession is actively running as far and as quickly as we can from liability.  And as we run from liability we are finding ourselves marginalized from the most core fundamental elements that allow us to do good design.  Now, we are an intelligent group, so we have re-branding that retreat as conquest, and we have created an artificial schism between creation and execution.  Precisely because execution attracts liability, and execution requires expertise.  So we have created a false condition in which we overvalue individual creative acts and shun those processes by which we could execute those individual acts.  Now saying this is as implausible a proposal as saying that three minutes of fornication is the creative act and 40 weeks of gestation, and, God forbid, twenty-four hours of child labor, are merely execution.

So what do we, in essence, need to do as architects?  We need to stitch together these two independent roles as individuals: project architects and project managers.  And in particular we need to stitch creation and execution back into the authorship of processes, not the authorship of objects.  

Now, in order to author processes, we have to assume liability.  And if we assume liability, we have to be sure that we are very good at navigating everything from contracts to fee structures, to complex programmatic analyses before design, to dreaded escalation and cost analysis.  All the way through probably the most important thing: the ability to author design and procurement strategies.  And if we can do that, we will be in a prime position to accept liability and therefore in a prime position to return back to the center of design, and therefore actually to have renewed freedoms."  -Joshua Prince-Ramus, Yale Building in the Future Symposium, October 2006 <http://www.rex-ny.com/approach/yale-building-in-the-future-symposium> 

Sounding the retreat into the Ivory Tower means that when you peek out to try and build a building, it must be built in a completely normative way [no matter how unconventional it seems aesthetically] because you do not have the expertise to deal with the contractual apparatuses or construction systems in any meaningful way except to acquiesce.   Taken in this light, what is difference between the Denver Art Museum and a WalMart big box?