~ Art and Architorture ~

Architecture has become strangely vulnerable to fashion.

A few weeks of extreme heat in Europe, and my LinkedIn feed has turned into an endless parade of green walls, rooftop forests, potted trees, urban cooling, CO₂, air conditioning issues, energy consumption, and governments supposedly failing to act.

Six months ago, the climate was... the same.

The only thing that changed was the weather and the algorithm trend.

This isn't a change in knowledge.

It's a change in attention.

Every few months, the profession discovers a new moral imperative.

Everyone rushes to post about it.

Then, just as quickly, it disappears, replaced by the next fashionable cause.

The cycle repeats.

Most of these posts achieve one thing very effectively: they make the author feel involved.

They make the reader feel virtuous.

They rarely change a single square metre of the built environment.

Buildings are not improved by trending topics.

They are improved by architects showing up every morning, listening to their clients, resolving constraints, balancing budgets, coordinating engineers, and making thousands of intelligent decisions over months, sometimes years.

Architecture is a discipline, not a news cycle.

After doing an autopsy at the morgue, it’s a good idea for doctors to wash their hands before delivering babies.

A few hundred years ago, Ignaz Semmelweis proved this now-obvious insight about hygiene.

Doctors don’t scrub because it’s fun or convenient, they do it because it’s a powerful way to create better outcomes.

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes go to Fantasy Island, a low-rent amusement park not far from my home. I soon figured out that while the spinning rides seemed appealing and daring, they would always make me sick and ruin the whole day.

The good idea?

Don’t go on the spinny rides.

Our culture creates traps and opportunities.

There’s social and commercial pressure to engage in activities and jobs that don’t serve us very well. If horror movies give you unsettling nightmares, don’t go.

No matter how many times your friends invite you, no is a complete sentence.

If being in debt is going to cause a long, stressful spiral for you and your fiancé, then don’t have an expensive wedding.

If doomscrolling your social feeds puts you in a bad mood, put down the phone and go for a walk instead.

And if the sight of blood makes you queasy, perhaps you should consider a form of medicine other than trauma surgeon.

Persistent emotional turmoil can undermine our peace of mind, and it might be caused by an ongoing spiral that’s fueled by the short-term choices we make.

Cultural and economic pressure can make those choices feel non-optional, but if we can protect ourselves early, we may be able to create enough value for others that our hygienic choices easily pay for themselves.

There are countless opportunities to thrive.

But we might have to make hard choices to find them.

Don’t go on the spinny rides.

We need you at your best.