The Design Vacuum (excerpt from Architectural Record)

The following is an excerpt from this past July's lead editorial from Architectural Record.  It happens to include an excerpt from a writer named David Dillon, who recently passed away, but was a well known architectural critic for the Dallas Morning News.  This brief narrative exemplifies the struggles in our profession today and what I view as the design imperative that is necessary to reconnect with the public and make architecture relevant once again.

"...[There is] a huge vacuum in serious design commentary, in which architecture, the most public of the arts, is losing touch with its public -- its customer base, if you like -- and has less and less influence on how our communities are planned and designed.
...[in a recent poll of] six national critics about what was most important to residents in their part of the country...almost without exception the key issues were public and civic -- affordable housing, regional planning, access to transit, neighborhood preservation, congestion, sprawl, open space.  Architecture with a capital A, as in what are Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry up to now, barely made the list.  Which is to say that there is a big disconnect these days between what architects are doing and what the magazines are publishing, and what the public is doing and interested in.
Correctly or not, the public perceives the profession to be largely indifferent to its concerns.  They think architects are interested mainly in architecture as art, in architecture as business, or in defending the autonomy of the profession, which has been largely squandered, whereas they see themselves as custodians of the public realm and the social and communal elements of architecture and design.
...The great critic Ada Louise Huxtable once said that the public knows its right when it comes to the law, or Social Security, or Medicare; it's up on all the entitlement programs.  But it does not know what  it is entitled to in terms of architecture, urban design, or environmental policy.  One job of a good design magazine [OR BLOG!] it to help educate the public about its rights in these matters, because in the end its biggest ally is a concerned public, and its most powerful weapon the ability to arouse public opinion in the service of good design."