Part 6: You are going to read four extracts from articles in which architects discuss their profession. For questions 37 – 40, choose from the architects (A – D). The architects may be chosen more than once. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet. The nature of architecture Four architects talk about their profession A. What continues to fascinate me about architecture is that, among the applied arts, it is uniquely capable of recalibrating our perception of the world we inhabit. Yet, deeply attached though I am to buildings, I would never argue that every structure merits preservation. Buildings are, by their very nature, vulnerable: weather, neglect, changing patterns of use and the sheer passage of time all conspire to erode them. Nor, frankly, are all buildings worth rescuing from obsolescence. Architectural failure is seldom the result of deliberate negligence; rather, it stems from the near impossibility of anticipating every spatial, social and practical consequence before a building is actually occupied. A design that appears coherent on paper may prove disappointingly inhospitable in practice. Looking ahead, architecture will have to become far less indulgent about its environmental impact. Our assumptions about comfort, energy consumption and material permanence are being revised at speed, and the question of how buildings perform ecologically will no longer be peripheral. Energy efficiency, once treated as a technical afterthought, is set to become one of the discipline’s defining concerns. B. The demands modern life places on buildings differ radically from those of earlier periods, and this means that the preservation of heritage architecture cannot be treated as an unquestionable virtue. Communities must make discriminating judgements about which buildings continue to serve a genuine civic, cultural or practical purpose. The same principle applies to new architecture. However striking a building may be externally, its first obligation is to enhance the lives of those who occupy it. A façade may be visually arresting, but that achievement becomes hollow if the people inside are made uncomfortable by poor ventilation, excessive heat or a misconceived arrangement of space. I am also wary of romanticising architectural creativity. Unlike the painter or sculptor, the architect is constrained by the client’s brief, regulatory frameworks, budgets and the mundane but crucial realities of use. Personal expression, so central to other art forms, is therefore necessarily circumscribed. Public judgement, meanwhile, has become instantaneous. Digital platforms allow reactions to be circulated before a building is even complete, and this accelerated scrutiny will inevitably influence architectural decision-making in the decades to come. C. Architecture may have originated in the elementary human need for shelter, but it has long since become one of the most visible expressions of collective identity. A building does not merely occupy a site; it interprets, contests or reinforces the culture around it. For that reason, design should be rooted in a sensitive understanding of place, memory and social meaning. At its best, architecture is unquestionably a form of art: it gives aesthetic coherence to its surroundings while also deepening our understanding of the past. To allow significant buildings to decay is to sever ourselves from an accumulated store of architectural intelligence. Even structures often dismissed as unsuccessful deserve attention, since they reveal the limits of ambition as much as its achievements. Their shortcomings remind us that architectural perfection is an illusion. Unlike designers of mass-produced objects, architects rarely have the luxury of testing a full-scale prototype before committing their ideas to reality. Consequently, errors of judgement, proportion or use are not merely possible; they are, at times, unavoidable. D. When I consider buildings that are widely condemned, or that plainly fail the people who use them, I often detect the imprint of an architect who has mistaken self-expression for professional entitlement. Such buildings tend to privilege formal bravura over local context, daily experience and human need. I do not deny that architecture belongs, at least partly, to the realm of art; but to treat it chiefly as a vehicle for individual artistic display is to misunderstand its ethical purpose. The user must remain the central consideration. Architects are entrusted with the rare opportunity to shape environments in which people live, work, move, gather and remember. That responsibility requires humility as much as imagination. This will not change. What will change, however, is the pressure exerted by global conditions. As populations increase and land, materials and energy become more contested, architecture will have to respond more explicitly to planetary limits. Rising temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions and the need to use resources more sparingly will increasingly determine not only how buildings look, but how they are conceived from the outset.
Which architect: • has a similar opinion to D regarding future influences on architecture? 37 [ ] • shares an opinion with A on whether architecture should be preserved? 38 [ ] • expresses a different view from the other three on whether architecture is art? 39 [ ] • has a different opinion to B on the most important factor to consider when designing a building? 40 [ ]
