What profession are parents most likely to see their children in? A recent study showed - it's an architect! It is known, the conflict of generations, but to dislike the offspring so much? The matter was lightened a bit by the latest Pritzker and Kutno market.
The research was conducted a few months ago by the YouGov research service. The results were unequivocal: architects top. Most, seventy-one percent, of parents in Poland would be satisfied if their child became an architect. Quite sadistic. After all, a designer working on his own is often a combo: businessman, lawyer, marketer, coordinator, documentation porter and, yes, sometimes also creator.
Perhaps parents are hoping to optimize? It used to be that if you had four children, it happened to steer each toward a different profession that was useful to the family. Today, a child of one, tops two. An architect is several professions in one, so voilà!, let him work for his unborn sisters and brothers. Worked up to his elbows, frustrated and not too rich. But for that, supposedly, respected. Because although the average salary in architecture is far from, say, the salary, excusez-le-mot, of an MP, in the 2019 CBOS survey, the profession was one of the least respected. Architects are at the other extreme. So the prestige.
Why this sudden attentiveness? Since when has an architect been noticed at all in a country where, according to the media that ignores architecture authors, buildings design themselves? Suffice it to recall the survey of the National Cultural Center, which Zuzanna Maciejczak-Kwiatkowska, Malgorzata Retko-Bernatowicz and Rafal Wisniewski did a few years ago. In it, only five percent of those surveyed replied that they remembered the name of some famous architect. It gets even more interesting further on.
Whom did the survey respondents crank out spontaneously from memory? You'd better sit down. On the podium they got: Gaudi (thirteen indications), Wojciech Zablocki (seven) and, mind you, sit more comfortably, Canaletto (five). Other important names were mentioned once, but the sample was not huge either: five percent of the respondents were a mere sixty-three. Why these and not others? Let's speculate. Gaudi, because strange and Barcelona? Zablocki, because also a fencer? Finally, (let's leave out that not the profession) Canaletto, because the reconstruction of Warsaw? If so, Gdynia was designed by Kwiatkowski.
The designer - an unknown and invisible figure. So it is difficult for him to be associated with something unpleasant. At the same time, however, "architect" sounds dignified, even if you don't really know who it is. Let's take another study with the meaningful title "An architect is being". It was conducted in the capital by Maciej Frąckowiak and his team. Among other things, he came out that the prestige of an architect comes from "a certain mystery of the act of creation." There was a whiff of mysticism, but, as it turns out, it could be about trivialities, such as architectural drawings that are not fully understood by the layman. We go on to read the obvious: that the architect-creator thus imagined is nowhere near reality. Where, then, do folk swarm about his position? From "pre-war imaginations" and "the efforts of architects themselves, who sometimes create such an image of their profession for self-promotional purposes (obtaining orders)."
So you can see that anyone can spin wild fantasies about architects, even financial ones. For example, that an architect not Obajtek, but the money seems to have, a house of five hundred meters and a red Porsche. It is known, the man of offices and houses. Developers earn coconuts, it drips and architects. Unemployment is not threatened, because to build so many offices and apartments plus. These apartments then need to be arranged. Here's another clue. For Kowalski, an architect is sometimes a celebrity for nice apartments. The NCK survey also pointed out as famous architects known from TV... Dorota Szelągowska and Martyna Kupczyk.
Such celebrities, it is known, are not poor. Perhaps some parents dream of just this kind of career for their child? Only that the real architects really suck at it in our country. Poznan designer Szymon Januszewski, author of the fairest residential houses in the city, recently told me in an interview that in relation to earnings, the risk in the profession is so great that - on common sense - it should not be practiced. He made a good point: sometimes it's better to do nothing. Only for less sad reasons.
For behold, in March the Pritzker was awarded to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. In addition to putting up and remodeling a bit, they happened to refuse to design. They explain: "sometimes the answer is to do nothing." Once they decided it wasn't worth redesigning a square in Bordeaux (because everything is fine), another time they didn't jerk off to build a neighborhood from scratch, but transformed old blocks (demolition is a pointless cost). Laziness, abnegation, a blow to the national GDP. And those did not starve to death. On top of that, there was a sprinkling of awards, including the latest Pritzker.
We are closer to solving the mystery. Those surveyed by YouGov are not sadists. It's just that: earlier than the rest, they discovered that an architect is also the kind of guy who can refuse to work, yet earns and gets awards. Live not die. Only, dear parents, not in Poland. With us, the Anthropocene is in full swing, there is a constant enthusiasm for construction. Concrete has to pour down the river, the investment has to be eye-popping, and not remodeling the square is already heresy, as evidenced by markets "revitalized" with kilotons of cobblestones and - a fresh masterpiece in this field - turning the square in Kutno into a gabardine parking lot. You won't unpick the footprint - you're not serious. The investor will not grasp the refusal, and some architects will never say no.
By the way - this year's verdict shot into the ongoing discussion of awards and competitions thanks to A&B. Its initiator, Tomasz Malkowski, praised, admittedly, the estate from Lacaton &Vassal, but the matter of the square in Bordeaux might not be to his taste. But let's leave it at that. There have been enough polemics, it's time for a constructive three cents: how about a new award for not completing the project? Or, in general, for refusing to design where investment harms or is unnecessary. It's just worth thinking about some kind of fund for refuseniks. I once paid a street player not to make music, but to stop pestering an accordion. It worked.
Or maybe the prescription is the so recently fashionable idea of guaranteed income?
Well, and imagine the conversations of these proud parents:
- My daughter is an architect.
- A great profession! What she hasn't done already!
