Waiting for conventional clients is a waste of time. Architects need to ditch the “detached gaze”, roll up their sleeves and fight back, says Melbourne-based architect and academic Melanie Dodd.
How architectural practice can get back down to earth will be the topic of the 2010 national architecture conference.
Creative director Dodd said this is responding to a pressing need for architects to change the ways they work.
“There is an increasing demand for architects to make a shift in how they go about their practice … Innovative, groundbreaking and profoundly useful solutions are resulting from enforcing or stimulating collaborations with others," said Dodd.
Dodd's provocative program will draw together local and international guests that are in the habit of turning convention on its head. Lateral approaches by practitioners adjusting to new ways of operating, says Dodd, are what characterise innovative overlaps and collaborations in architectural practice.
The program has been shaped partly in response to the staggering acceleration in the sophistication of information systems and manufacturing processes from which processes, products and services have emerged that threaten to marginalise the profession of architecture.
Taking its shape around four main themes — people, things, living, cities — the 2010 conference will showcase architects from Australia and abroad who are opening up fresh possibilities and definitions of practice.
"These practitioners are inventing their own projects and systems of operating: they don't wait for conventional clients, commissions or budget but instead see opportunity or necessity as their client," Dodd said.
Above all, Dodd wants to bring the conversations about how architects practice down to earth, and reveal the renewed enthusiasm for operating from the bottom up.
Organised by the Australian Institute of Architects, the ‘extra-ordinary - 2010 National Architecture Conference’ will be held in Sydney, 22 to 24 April 2010.
