Bruce Mao on why Development is more important than Architecture

You probably don’t want to hear this, but it is time we stopped talking about architecture. We need to get out of the gilded box we built ourselves into. We should be thinking about educating, training and celebrating developers. The challenges of the future are so much more complex and systems-based than the object culture architecture currently embraces. We need a new culture of responsibility and comprehensive engagement with long-term implications that can only come from broadening the base of architecture to include the design of the business models that generate most of the qualities we live with in our cities. So long as architects self-marginalise by purposely excluding the business of development and its real burden of complexity and decision making from their education, from their business, architecture will remain a gentleman’s weekend culture, unwilling or unable to take on the heavy lifting and big problems, happy to polish fancy baubles for our urban entertainment.