Shoot for the Middle

What do the Parthenon, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Great Pyramids, and the Pantheon have in common?  Yeah...they're all awesome and pretty much universally adored.  As designers, we’re all striving for that perfect design; the one that will be loved by the masses and respected by the architectural community.  It’s a lofty goal, and one many designers spend a lifetime chasing, only to fall short by circumstance or talent.  But, that’s part of what makes this profession so compelling.  It is a game without an end.  The joy is in the playing, not in the outcome.  I’m sure the designers of the buildings above saw the finished product and thought they could have been better.  You know Enoch stood back from those pyramids at a site visit and said “What’s up slaves? That’s not how I drew it. Man!” 

I’ve got a pretty simple way of thinking about this goal.  It amounts to thinking about the world population as a big pyramid of architectural knowledge.  At the bottom of pyramid, the fattest layer, are the uneducated masses. They don’t know or care much about design, and it really doesn’t take much to please them.  In contrast, at the top of the pyramid are the architectural elite, the scholars, the geniuses of design. The middle is striated with varying levels of architectural care and concern, from folks with a passing knowledge of design to people with a formal architectural education.  

The goal, as I see it, is to design a project that cuts straight through this pyramid from tip to base. A perfect project has something for everyone.  It appeals to the masses on a base subconscious level and to the elite at deeper metaphysical or technical level.  Most of us are designing projects to the left or right of center, hitting the base, but missing the tip.   Sometimes we’re a little closer to the middle sometimes a little further to the edges. There are lots of reasons for this.  It could be design talent.  It could be client.  It could be budget, or craftsmanship.  The stars must align perfectly to get close to the middle.

There are also times when projects will slice through the pyramid horizontally; satisfying only a narrow band of the population.  I see this happen at the top quite often.  Usually it happens with an avant-garde design that the elite can’t stop talking about, but very few others actually understand.  The top group chalks it up to a dense proletariat.  I say, those projects fail, too.  Yes we need them to move the discourse of architecture forward, but they’re never going to be loved by the masses. They’ll be in all of the architecture books and magazines, but most will shrug their shoulders.

I’ll keep playing the game; shooting for the middle.  Who knows, maybe someday everything will line up perfectly.  --ds