We give awards to the worst architect

When I was in school I admired award-winning architects displayed with honor on the cover of magazines and dreamed of following their path and one-day receiving awards and recognition for my work. It took years for me to realize that this might be misguided.

Awards are rarely given for quality, for hard work, for dedication to the community, or for refinement of your craft.

Instead, we tend to award the outliers in the profession. The talented few who impress us with their individual creativity. The ones who wow us with their extreme designs, surprise us with the unexpected solutions, seduce us with the most creative use of forms, impress us with the most expensive materials, surprise us, startle us, bend the rules, break the rules, hell, ignore the rules.

We award the most talented architects who think outside the box.

But, here’s the problem: we live inside the box.

And the 1% of architects that we choose to reward are working outside of the reality that 99% percent of us work in.

A few years ago the award-winning architect Frank Gehry said that 99% of all architecture done today is shit. I imagine the 99% of us working in the trenches to solve our client’s problems would be offended. But no, Frank Gehry is one of the architects we’ve chosen to honor, and we admire him. Which is fine. I admire him too. But his shiny, eye-catching, beautiful work doesn’t have much to do with my work. His impressive work represents what could be done with architecture, not what should be done with architecture.

It’s taken years, but now I think my younger self was looking up to the wrong architects. Modeling my career after people who work in a rarified air of design that I’ve never experienced, and it turns out I never really wanted to anyway. I don’t need to be honored. I just want to be needed.

So, I’ll keep working on the 99% of the world that needs my help.

I’ll leave the other 1% to those guys in the magazines.