Peripheral Vision: Architects Look Beyond the Artificial Boundaries of Disciplinary Divides (Practice‪)‬

Successful residential architecture often involves meticulous, almost obsessive attention to every aspect of a house. The ideal commission comes with a substantial budget that allows architects to package the total concept, from a house's layout and proportions to the pattern on the curtains and the shape of a chair leg. For many architects, even that is not enough. In the last decade, big-name architects have broadened their artistic reach--and their revenue stream--by mixing markets; middle-class consumers now happily buy bathtubs designed by Philippe Starck and dustpans by Michael Graves. But architecture can also influence seemingly unrelated areas of design, and vice versa. An increasing number of architects, it seems, are getting paid to design Web sites and product packaging and to invent brand identities. Some are making narrative films about their ideas; others are putting their architecture to music. For a growing subset of architects, the office has become quite a versatile place, an atelier of modern technology and creative culture. On the one hand, this freewheeling design sensibility is most prevalent among graduates of progressive art and architecture schools such as the Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Los Angeles architect Liz Martin, a 1992 SCI-Arc grad and the founder of Alloy Design and Technology, notes that in preparation for large-scale design competitions, Rem Koolhaas sometimes hires an extra 50 people from disparate design backgrounds for a brainstorming session, and that Thom Mayne, a SCI-Arc founder, also works that way. Recently, however, cultural theorists such as Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) and Daniel Pink (Free Agent Nation) have weighed in on the grassroots nature of this phenomenon. In his newest book, A Whole New Mind (Riverhead Books, 2005), Pink says cross-disciplinary design is part of a growing cultural shift in the way we think and work, and he predicts that the ability to master that kind of creative synergy will mean the difference between who gets ahead and who falls behind.