Understanding architectural consequences.

Why do buildings look the way they do? What informs their size, materials and impact? What causes architecture to change from one era to another? There are conventional answers to these questions: the architect took account of site, programme and budget; the materials were chosen as a result of climate, availability and (again) budget; architecture changes because of new materials (for example ETFE), new technologies (digital), new demands (airport, computer suite, call centre). Yet we know that these explanations, while undeniable as influences on the story of architecture, cannot tell the whole story. They describe the occasion for change, or the moment, but not the underlying reasons. That is because architecture is fundamentally an intellectual and cultural activity, not the straightforward application of craft skill, though without that skill and the designer's eye, the intellectual and cultural context will be impoverished.

To understand fully the world of architecture, we need to appreciate the deep tides governing the sea in which architects swim--politics, economics, demographics, art, climate change, industrialisation. We are just beginning to take seriously the likely effects of climate change as regulations drag the construction sector into a world where the glut or dearth of water will be even more pronounced than it is now, and where heat and how to deal with it architecturally (the theme of this issue) will assume ever greater importance. But climate change is only one of the big issues which the world, through its architecture, is going to have to address in the coming decades. The exponential growth of cities, ageing populations and universal educational and healthcare provision, to higher standards than currently apply in many countries, will generate huge change.

In order to make a coherent architectural response to these drivers, we need to understand the tides rather than the waves in that metaphorical sea. Thus we can observe, for example, in the unrolling tragedy of the Middle East, that a response to terrorism may be described as a fence before becoming a wall, an insult, a war. Architecture becomes the focus onto which love, hate and the emotions in between are projected, the conscious or unconscious representation of conditions that have little to do with the drawing office and the building product. Since we are aware of this, it is not possible for architects to pretend that they are neutral agents in a rule-free universe. One price of professionalism is the burden of behaving not merely professionally, but as moral beings.