As if they were something special. Outstanding, knowledgeable. A touch of artist and bohemian. Wise above the rest. Educated for decades by the sweat of their brow, forged in the universities. Competent and brilliant. Endowed with that language which appears so intellectual, that sounds so good. Sentence formations that confuse, but come across as elegant. But then, let’s be honest, you don’t quite understand them. Architects.
Meanwhile we are all highly competent when it comes to building. Walking daily through houses, through urban space, through green parks. Proudly at home in our more or less well-organized and rationally planned cities. Ich bin ein Berliner! Or also an Istanbulite, a Nairobiite, a Singaporean. At some point or another, moreover, we all inevitably become space creators ourselves: playing with the dollhouse, furnishing our first apartment, or building the family home. We all are architects.
Inevitably, many of us consider ourselves to be competent architectural critics. We often encounter the built environment with pre-conceived judgments. We reduce it to common questions such as: Is it beautiful? How much did it cost? Is it solid? Not that this is wrong. But the well-read architect argues that architecture and the city are a complex, often contradictory structure, in which the various facets of human existence overlap. Cultural, political, economic and social interests materialize. Architecture is the built representation of our values which must be constantly renewed, adapted and reinvented. If you reduce the complexity, look at and name the individual layers of the various realities, then you begin to understand. And ask new questions.
