Normal people that practice the profession have experiences like this DAILY.  Instead of placing the focus solely on the client, their needs, and the work, there exists a reverence for the person that designed the original building.  The fact that this is a Louis Kahn building has nothing to do with anything.

The client needs to expand the building.

The outcry against the expansion is based upon one thing, adulation for the man that designed the original building, again at the expense of the entity that paid to build it in the first place.

Read more about this growing problem.

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It never ceases to amaze me that pretty much all published architects follow the very same, tired ideological line.  I think that we can all assume that comes from the “artist” mentality into which most architects fall.  We really do not have many STARchitects that are concerned with detailing, waterproofing, or actual construction, instead they have a tendency to look at their work as art as the primary function.  Personally, I think that Frank Gehry proves this with every “piece” of architecture he creates.

Such is definitely the case when architects or designers attempt to “solve” the problem with cities or planning.  They think very little about actual REALITY and tend to focus more on their Utopian dream of everyone living in harmonious existence, all stacked into urban environments like cordwood, surrounded by sterile, man-created “green space.”

I don’t know about you, but this is certainly NOT the type of existence that I want for my family and me.

Philips even has a design competition based on those one hundred year old concepts. Yet, Change.org is promoting an entirely different ideology after the total urban planning of Detroit has utterly failed.

Instead of focusing on attempting to solve what they perceive as all of the world’s ills, I think that architects should began to focus more on client satisfaction and try to solve the problem at hand.  When the needs and desires of the individual are met, time and time again, the ills of society are in turn abated.  Instead of trying to solve the problems of the collective world as a whole, solving the needs of the individual client produces the end result that has been desired if one is truly attempting to satisfy the world.

If you would like to see examples of buildings that we at PMD find fascinating, check out the projects of other architects posted at our Tumblr.

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