The Specialized Life
“Although we need the Word to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense was a form of wisdom.”-Heraclitus
“My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind” -Agnes Martin
My fixation with The Great British Baking Show, though not uncommon, took me some time to understand. I enjoy cooking, but not baking. And I don’t love cooking; I’m certainly no foodie. In fact I usually enjoy food in what my spouse might describe as a utilitarian fashion. But, up until this moment, the ineffable charm of the show kept drawing me in. The day after finishing the latest season, I hopped on the bus and thought about the work that lay waiting for me at the architectural office I work for. My task that day was drawing kitchens, a fairly simple one that in today’s world layers in hidden complexities and regulations: building, electrical, and accessibility codes, in conjunction with the city development agency’s design standards, which are often in ambiguous conflict with the former codes.
As I was determining which way to orient electrical outlets in preparation for potential unit accessibility, which includes the lowering of cabinets and counters should someone less able move into the apartment unit, I imagined the perfectly arrayed counters in the baking show, envisioning the chocolate cakes the contestants made for the final round. I contemplated the simplicity, or rather the purity, of the successive ingredients that were added to the cakes. Plenty could, and did, go wrong, but there was something alluring in the narrowness of the scope of each decision in the baking process. If the icing was not sweet enough, add more sugar. If the batter was too sticky, leave it in the oven a little longer. The wonderful thing about these decisions, and being a baker in general, is the ubiquitous existence of an intimate connection with the physical stuff that comes together to form the final thing. In other words, one has not yet encountered the alienation common in today’s technologically dominated world; bakers have the rare luxury of nothing digital mediating their experience between themselves and their end goal, unlike the drawing of my kitchens that yet exist. Maybe this is why we are all obsessed with food shows.
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In his interrogation into materiality in the 21st century, curator and writer Glenn Adamson begins his essay, Do you know your stuff? (for Aeon Magazine), with an ostensibly benign series of questions: “Are you sitting comfortably? If so, how much do you know about the chair that’s holding you off the ground – what it’s made from, and what its production process looked like? Where it was made, and by whom?” I have to confess that though I am currently standing, I’m not sure of the answer to any of these questions in regards to the chair I do sit in when taking a reprieve from my standing hours. This is especially awkward considering the profession I have chosen for myself. And, if I pose the questions towards the computer I use to perform the complex tasks of drafting and 3-dimensional digital modeling I do everyday, I’m even more confused.
Adamson, a curator of art and design, and currently a scholar at the British Art Center at Yale, spends much of his essay in a sort of material-based existential dread. He notes that until relatively recently, most people knew alot about the physical things they were working with, much like today’s baking superstars. However, during the industrial revolution, the proliferation of technological complexity in production produced a distancing from such materials and things that only continues to deepen. Diagnosing the ills of contemporary specialization, i.e. “deepened knowledge usually also means narrowed knowledge,” Adamson notes that even those who make our products today have been transformed into specialists, with factory workers’s labor divided and subdivided into technology-based, not craft-based, mastery. As such, we continue to move not to a place of interaction, but of “remote control.” Algorithms, automation, and the usual litany of twenty-first century technological horrors are the main culprits to our lack of meaningful material engagement Adamson is nostalgic for. It’s difficult to argue with this, as I type on a keyboard that is connected to my computer via bluetooth, a term I’m still not sure the exact meaning of.
Considered the generalist profession, architecture is being bombarded by the material-based dumbing down of its existence Adamson describes. The proliferation of technology has necessitated a cadre of consultants, manufacturers, and sub-contractors ready to analyze, inform and propose their idiosyncratic knowledge for the purported betterment of the building. The list of consultants for my current project is not limited to: structural engineer, MEP engineer (which includes three sub-specialists: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing), civil engineer (think roads, infrastructure, etc.), landscape architect, passive/energy/sustainability consultant, lighting designer, roofing assembly manufacturer, geothermal engineer, accessibility consultant, expeditor (i.e. city paper work relations), professional renderer, etc etc. As different kinds of technology are created, and created in increasingly complex ways, there are more people focusing on a smaller scope of work in order to master each emergent technology. In other words, the more stuff we have added to buildings, the more stuff that needs to be managed. Architecture is not alone in this situation, though the problem feels especially acute considering our unique relationship with the built world.
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If we are collectively moving away from materiality, then where are we headed? A contradiction of this situation is that though individuals continue to further specialize in their fields, such as the consultants I’m forced to manage, and the factory workers Adamson laments, they aren’t specializing in the sort of material ways that might be expected of a master chair maker:
“This [specialization] tends to obscure awareness of the extended production chains through which materials, tools, components and packaging are sourced. Nobody – not an assembly-line worker, not a CEO – has a comprehensive vantage point. It is partly a problem of scale: the wider the view comes, the harder it is to see clearly what’s close at hand.”
While specialization has been a historic trend, the advent of mechanized production and digital technology (not technology in the sense of the greek root tekhnē, meaning craft, art, or skill) has shifted the focus of our collective bandwidth from the material to the immaterial, from the general to the specific, from making to managing.
Even the act of establishing an architecture office (or any office) is something that can’t be done without the aid of a sub-specialist. Before the computer was a necessary part of office life, one could go to the store and buy tools necessary for the profession of architecture: drafting boards, drawing instruments, and paper. Though our tools used to involve manual mastery, admittedly, my self-indulgent comparison to bakers ends here, as architects are designing and thus always working with the future (i.e. immaterial, though it is in anticipation of something material). However, for a vast majority of the history of the profession, drawings were created manually on paper; the “digital turn,” to borrow a phrase from historian and critic Mario Carpo, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Today, one must consult an IT company to help not only purchase computers, but also establish a server for file sharing and management, unique logins for computers, drivers for printers, etc. When surveyed, the necessary infrastructure is truly staggering. There are audible gasps during the rare moments when we lose power in our office, a crack in the facade of our mastery of machines, our pathetic dependence on them instead laid bare: what do we do now?
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“Let’s cultivate our material intelligence” is the simple solution to the simple questions Adamson begins his article with. Indeed, the world would probably be a better place if we were all a little more in tune with the physical stuff around us. He continues: “If we anchor ourselves in this way, attending closely to the objects near us, we might just be able to regain our bearings, and take greater responsibility for our actions.” He waxes-poetic about his favorite mug, a chunky diner-style type that is personally valuable both because he understands its origin in a post-World War II porcelain factory, and because he is able to meditate on how it performs and feels. I have no doubt a great appreciation for my used truck tarp messenger bag and the bench made by an artist who reclaimed pieces of homes destroyed in New Orleans; they are some of my favorite objects, and they happen to perform incredibly well. But does this appreciation translate to anything other than liking things more?
I recently finished the process of becoming a licensed architect. Before graduate school (a required 3-year professional degree in addition to my pre-professional bachealors, with plenty of debt to show for both), I served with AmeriCorps in New Orleans, doing direct construction to help rebuild homes post-Hurricane Katrina. Though I entered this work with altruist intentions, my professors and mentors noted, with an especially meritocratic view of things, that this would also be beneficial to my career. Naively, I agreed; it seemed obvious to me that working in construction and leading volunteers would teach an architect something about buildings and project management. It’s the sort of work that Adamson would describe as participating in the “supply chain” of the building, but in this case in reverse: I’ve actually swung a hammer, so to speak.
While I feel, from a humanist perspective, that I gained knowledge not possible from behind a desk, knowledge that runs deeper than my career choices, the kind that informs more of who I am than what I do, the harsh reality following this experience was indicative of what a specialized culture really values; turns out, not much. In fact, my time in New Olreans only delayed and complicated the hyper-professionalized path towards becoming a licensed architect that had begun when I entered college, pre-approved for a major in architecture. Over ten years later, when I was finally ready to submit my record and completed exams for approval, I was notified by the state that my time with AmeriCorps did not count towards the three year experience requirement. In fact, even earlier, during my initial job search, my experience was generally viewed as a liability to potential employers, categorizing me as someone with “0 years” experience. I may have been materially intelligent, but I wasn’t specialized enough.
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Towards the end of his essay, Adamson notes how his own privileged position allows him to personally engage with the material world: “As a museum curator, I found a line of work that brings me into contact with makers, which reminds me of the beauty and vitality of things. But the feeling that I am trying to describe is open to all.” This follows an attempt to extend his material-based morality into historical class-conflicts and gender based divisions, a bridge a bit too far for my understanding of material history (Adamson even directly addresses architecture’s privileged place on the social ladder, in contrast to the bricklayer, due to its lack of direct material labor, though he fails to understand that architecture is beginning to more closely resemble those fields he thinks are left behind, due to a myriad of reason, not limited to its place far downstream in flow of capital and its overabundance of new entrants to the field who are beginning their careers six-figures in debt). Even if it is possible to attain such material enlightenment, does it ultimately matter if the systems controlling said materials are so enmeshed in their production and implementation? As evident through my experience, I have more anxiety about the questions Adamson initially raises regarding the specialists who are making our things, a question with deeper, or maybe tangential implications that he never really addresses. What does cultivating material intelligence have to do with those of us who spend over nine hours a day sitting (maybe standing), staring at a computer?
Architecture, a field directly influential on and influenced by the material world, used to practice its own form of material intelligence through the drafting of physical drawings. There was a real craft, of which I was trained in my undergraduate degree. Though not art, a manually-drafted drawing is the closest thing to art an architect can produce. A perfectly drafted plan held hours of embodied labor, the literal mistakes, smudges, and sweat artfully clipped, masked, and disguised in order to make blue prints (old school technique for copies). These skills are completely irrelevant now, as all of our drawings are not only digitally produced (computer aided drafting, aka CAD), but now digitally drawn by the computer’s algorithms itself. Today, the predominant software in architecture is known as “building information modeling,” (BIM) a process which skews much more heavily towards information management than the building part.
When all of these trends, especially those of the last two decades or so, are viewed holistically, technology feels a bit too powerful a force to be confronted simply through the knowing of materials more, per Adamson’s suggestion (e.g. would writers solve the problem by working on typewriters?). Though he is afforded the time and space to deeply investigate such issues, at best his study itself feels a bit detached from material reality, or at least detached from the people who have to engage such a reality. Though he is positioned well to notice trends through the act of curation, affording him a view across various disciplines and techniques, it doesn’t seem that his profession has ever really been materially engaged in the ways he pines for. The truth is that for people like me, for those who are practicing, technology has become not just an additional thing we encounter, but a total mediator for the way in which we encounter everything else.
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Because I am relatively young in my career (at least according to the notoriously molassased paced profession of architecture, with its constituents often “emerging” well into their fourth decade), I’m not sure if I have any effective remedies for Adamson’s initial questions, other than to continue to inhabit the edges of the profession, even in the reward isn’t obvious. This, until recently, was much less a choice than it was something that sort of just happened as a consequence to the decisions I made early in my “career.”
A decade later, I’ve come to understand that in our modern time, from very early on, we’re molded to choose a profession and pursue it at all costs, trimming the fat that might get in the way of becoming an expert. Five centuries later, we have truly come full circle, albeit in a perverse way, promoting the anti-renaissance person, a focused technocrat, the specialist. As degrees in the humanities become rarer, and disciplines that have traditionally been influenced by the humanities (such as mine) continue to turn away from those roots, the hyper-specialized fields are becoming the hegemonic dictators of world-view and values. As such, it seems difficult to depend on traditional paths for answers to this dilemma. Maybe what we need instead is not only deeper material-intelligence, but also a cultivation of other-intelligence.
This is a last form of resistance I have clung to during my own, increasingly rare, free time: writing on lunch breaks and weekends, painting and drawing whenever possible, and spending my time reading anything that has absolutely nothing to do with architecture. These acts of anti-specialization, or generalization, are the only form of rebellion I can effectively partake in. It is an active pursuit of things antithetical to the specialized life. And while objects are a place to start, they remain isolated instances, held at a distance, if not understood through their broader connection to other things. The ingredients are important, but everyone wants the cake.