Architects who develop
2024. 07. 21.
As someone who studied architecture but has been working as a developer for 7 years, I find it quite ironic that architects, despite being computer-friendly, rarely have proper opportunities to study development. In a way, architects are already exposed to environments where they can directly program through Grasshopper, Dynamo, Ruby, Lisp, etc., even while practicing architecture. It seems like they could just take a step further, so why don't they take that extra step? Recently, there has been an increase in architects claiming to have studied computational design, but among them, few have the basic skills to be immediately deployed in the field and develop alongside others.
Thinking about how this situation came about, the following reasons come to mind:
- Architecture courses usually only teach how to use Grasshopper, which alone isn't enough to do much in the development field. Architects using Grasshopper often focus on creating functional results without paying attention to maintenance and collaboration. But as anyone who has built a service would know, this work method can only produce prototypes at best. How do you combine different features created by multiple people within a single project? How should you set up a project to prevent problems when modifying features created by others? While studying architecture, it was rare to see these topics seriously addressed, but I found that developers constantly grapple with these concerns. The developers needed in the field are those who can work on top of the code I've written so far, not those who can create unusual shapes or perform ambiguous optimizations. Yet, most architects still focus solely on what they've handled and what they've created when making their portfolios.
- Architects deal with a lot of shapes. However, handling shapes is not particularly easy from a developer's perspective, and the fields where shape-related development is used are quite limited. If there were many developers dealing with similar topics as architects, the content and development culture they produce could naturally flow into the architectural world. But given the current situation, it's not easy for exchange to occur between architects trying to study development and developers. Looking at the communities formed by architects who develop, you can occasionally spot them progressing bit by bit by sharing things based on technologies that are not widely used in the current development industry. In that context, when looking at the overall landscape of the development industry, the architectural world sometimes feels like the Galapagos Islands.
I wish there were more architects who properly study development to a level where they could work in the field. With a little thought, architects have really good conditions for studying development. First, architects are sufficiently motivated to study development. Just looking at the use of AutoLISP, Rhino Grasshopper, or Revit Dynamo in practice, you can see that there are abundant problems to solve through development, and solving these problems greatly contributes to reducing work hours. Moreover, architects are not only familiar with computers but are already accustomed to entering commands in a command prompt to execute something. Considering that people from other professions might be intimidated by such command inputs when first studying development, architects can be seen as having already completed the preview. Now, if there were just good materials for architects to follow, study, and practice with, couldn't architects also acquire sufficient basic development skills?
I've been thinking for a while that it would be good to organize materials for architects wanting to study development, and I'm considering gradually putting this into action.