No one wants to be a safe architect. Safety assumes the conventional and the predictable. Who wants that? Yet what client would choose the risk of the unknown over the safety of the known?
All great achievements in architecture have been the result of calculated risks. We think of architecture as a creative profession that innovates all the time. Every click or sketch is aimed at creating something new. However, not all design is innovative.
Fear of negative public perception of their projects can stop architects from taking risks, from innovating, from making buildings that deviate from the norm. However a person doesn’t choose to be an architect to be bottom-line oriented. Yes, rapid growth will bring you lots of money, but that is not what it’s about. It’s a question of if we’re doing good work for the city.
The city should bring together the micro-architectural and macro-urban scales, the everyday realm and the spectacular, the safe and the risky . . . it must be situated between what we do, what we theorise, and what we imagine. In this kind of city, surprise is as important as certainty, and architecture becomes strange yet familiar, comforting yet challenging, known yet unknown,
a catalyst to thought and experience
