I am privileged to serve on the National Advisory Council at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Cranbrook is truly a place like no other—a stimulating, open environment where art, architecture, and design are taught and explored without boundaries. There’s a rich dialogue and a consciousness about design that doesn’t exist elsewhere.

Reed Kroloff, the school’s director, does an incredible job of bringing us together to discuss issues and what they might mean to Cranbrook. This month, our interdisciplinary group looked at social media.

Through a series of extraordinary speakers—Randy Ortiz from Chrysler Corporation, Ben Watson of Herman Miller, Inc., and Nike’s Tesa Arragones—we learned big business is using social media in very sophisticated and effective ways. For these companies, social media is a means of letting the world communicate their messages. But rather than controlling the content, they let the culture adopt and extend their ideas. Potent stuff!

Gathering public input about architecture

We have been experimenting a bit in our own practice, using social media to harvest public values and perceptions. We did a project recently with the help of Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop where we publicized an event on Facebook and then re-capped and talked about it afterward—again all on Facebook. I was moved by both the breadth and depth of input we got, and it was a lot more fun than stuffy public input sessions in fluorescent-lit community centers with the same old city hall groupies.

I am all over Facebook. I use it as a forum for dialogue in my classes, and people are always sending me cool videos, interesting links, and articles I would never find on my own.

At Cranbrook, someone asked me why I have 1500 Facebook “friends.” Of course I don’t have intimate personal dialogue with all of these people, but I have had some significant contact with them, and I really like the ability to easily reconnect. I believe social media ties into the psychology of creativity; creative people often have more loose ties than strong ones. They need input and stimulation from a lot of different people. Social media is a way of keeping that stimulus going.

Finding new ways to engage

I am looking for more ways to use social media to generate a professional dialogue about architecture and as a tool for helping us engage a broad slice of the public more readily in what we do. If businesses like Chrysler, Nike and Herman Miller have found creative ways to use it, why shouldn’t we?

Reflecting on the past two winners of the AIA Twenty-five Year Award, I am moved to ask what this award says about our values as architects. This is supposed to be the quintessential award that says a building is cool and has stood the test of time as an embodiment of architectural excellence. The winner must demonstrate excellence “in function, in execution of original program, and in creativity of statement by today’s standards.”

Frank Gehry Residence

If we look at the Frank Gehry Residence, the 2012 award winner, I’d say what we really value as architects is novelty, weirdness, and idiosyncrasy. Gehry’s house is amazing when it comes to these values. But is this the core heart and soul of what we’re about? It is also a single-family home for the architect himself? Is this what is really valuable about architecture—our own self-indulgence? This is not a house that even 1 percent of the populace would relate to or understand.

John Hancock Tower

The John Hancock Tower, the 2011 winner, is a beautiful building. But this is also the building where all the glass fell out. Excavation problems undermined the foundation of neighboring Trinity Church, requiring a huge restoration. The John Hancock Building, in its totality, does not demonstrate excellence. It had some real problems! Furthermore, the resolution was sealed by the courts; as a profession we are left with major questions and bad memories.

I’m a real architecture junkie; I travel a lot to see buildings. I am constantly dismayed by disappointing failures of buildings that the media has hyped. It crushes me–hurts me to the core of my being–to find that what has been called great architecture has feet of clay.

Other buildings I visit and find amazing! They’re supporting a beautiful life, are beloved in their communities, and are making a palpable contribution to the world. I recently talked with a woman who had visited the Kimbell Art Museum with a fellow she had just begun to date. The experience of being at the Kimbell bumped their romance to another level. It illuminated a connection of their souls! This building got the Twenty-five Year Award, and it deserved it.

I believe submissions to this program need to articulate the contribution the building has made over 25 years. How has it enhanced the community, or become a beloved icon? How has it provoked a redevelopment in its neighborhood? How is it sustainable? We profess these as values and say that the 25-year Award must live up to “today’s standards.” Are these really standards we believe in?

There is a difference between a building that makes a huge contribution and one that’s interesting to the architectural subculture. We, as architects, need to talk about this.

One of the best parts of the trip to China was the opportunity to see these things with my son, Sloan and his girlfriend, Kate.  Sloan’s background in history and law and Kate’s background in anthropology complemented my own background in architecture.  They are really smart, perceptive people who could absorb the places we visited with great depth.  They are also full of positive energy and lots of fun.

We all love to photograph what we are seeing.

And we all love to try new food.

We are not afraid of a lot of hiking.

I attended the Design Awards dinner for AIA Houston recently and was quite impressed with the standards of the awards program, the quality of the jurors and the thoughtful way the program was conducted.  I am a big believer in the peer review process as a means to identify and recognize good work that becomes exemplary in setting new directions for our field.  That is why one element of the program was disturbing to me.

Here in the fourth largest city in the country, there seemed to be an inordinate emphasis on “small” projects.  Nine awards were given for new buildings recently completed.  Five of those were given to single family homes, two were for interiors and one was for a very clever carport and parking lot.  Only one award was given for a building of over 50,000 square feet.  Although there were dozens of substantial sized schools, office buildings, medical facilities, government and university buildings etc. submitted, only one was selected for an award.  Whereas one in six of the houses submitted might have won an award, more like one in sixty of the larger buildings won an award.  Having kept up with dozens of such awards programs over the years, it strikes me that the AIA Houston program is not so unusual.  Why are so few larger buildings chosen as models for the best of architectural design in programs like this?  (I should note that this is certainly not sour grapes on my part since the one large building selected, the General Services Administration Field Office, is the only one submitted in which I had any involvement.)

Maybe one could argue that the really good designers are mostly doing smaller houses and interiors and the designers working on larger buildings are just less skilled and therefore less appropriate to be recipients of awards.  That argument seems seriously flawed given the fact that some of the same designers who win awards for “boutique” projects have much less luck when they submit their larger projects.  It also seems very unlikely that all the best talent in the field has somehow gravitated to these little projects and eschewed participation in projects that might have a broader cultural role.  I think this very common pattern of awards recognition is symptomatic of an obsession with the small in our field that is very problematic.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love doing single family houses and other small projects, and have almost always had one going on at pretty much any point in my career.  They are far less complicated than larger buildings, and there is much more opportunity for control on the part of the architect.  Clients and users are less complex and hydra-headed.  Both fees and construction budgets are generally more flexible and much higher per square foot.  Their smaller size inherently makes it simpler to get your arms around the problem and understand every detail.  Frankly, they are just easier.  I think that is why so many projects in architecture schools are small.  They are manageable, and satisfying results can be achieved by a single student working alone for the limited time-frame of a semester.  Maybe we are trained in school to think this is the premier vehicle for good design–a project that can be boiled down to a simple concept, conceived in a napkin sketch or two, worked through in one head over a few months and presented in a handful of snappy drawings.

Unfortunately, the kinds of buildings our culture needs from us as architects are not that simple.  Children in our cities need schools that will stimulate them and facilitate their education, and these will not be tiny little schoolhouses anymore.  The workforce of our society needs office buildings, production facilities and other work places that will be nurturing, efficient and beautiful places to spend 8+ hours a day–often more hours than we spend in our homes.  Our cities need multi-family housing environments that create sustainable patterns of living while also making well-scaled, neighborly places for everyday life.  We need healthcare environments where both medical staff and patients feel supported and where design contributes to medical advances and individual patient healing.  All of these needs require large, complex buildings with a diverse range of users, complicated processes of design and construction and a wide array of architectural skills.

Shouldn’t we be recognizing, awarding and learning from the best of the kinds of buildings our society desperately needs us to design well?  Shouldn’t well designed large buildings–like schools, office buildings, laboratories, retail centers, airports, convention centers, university buildings, public buildings etc.–be purposefully represented in our awards programs?  In the 25+ design awards juries I have served on I have made it a point to be an advocate for the practice of architecture that serves large numbers of everyday people in their daily lives.  I am certainly proud to recognize the exquisite small project that is full of control and finesse.  But these projects should stand, in design awards programs, alongside a good complement of projects that make a substantial contribution to solving the larger architectural problems of our society.