Young architects are among the important themes of our architecture today. The becoming-young of the population has turned the voice of the young into the loudest of voices in all social demands. Iran, with the largest and most densely packed age stratum in its population, has placed all the movements and developments of society — whatever economic or cultural meaning they carry — under its sway.
In every social activity, the effect of the heavy presence of the young is to be seen both positively and negatively: readiness and capacity to play a role on the positive side; the absence of a developmental space to receive it on the negative side — an imbalance that the demographic structure itself has imposed on the proportion of forces. The young, in order to enter professional activity and climb the first steps, stand in need of the help, support and guidance of their elders; but the volume of their demand is so great that it has no proportion to the means and equipment of the elders. The breakdown of balance between supply and demand, through the youthening of the population, has made already bad conditions worse: architectural firms with a record of practice, which under ordinary conditions would give part of their time and means to the training of the young and to keeping themselves up to date with the developments of the age, today are compelled to spend their whole capacity not even on professional work that answers the rising needs of development — would that it were so! — but on preserving their own existence in conditions where client relations have fallen into disorder.
The social effects of a youthful population reach far beyond the reciprocal duties of the generations. When our young, aware of the great and dense demographic dimensions of their cohort, see that the proportion of forces and the system of reciprocal relations between generations has collapsed, and that they are a great but solitary force, they feel that they must carry the whole burden of the age alone. Their protest here is not that the elders fail to do their duty in preparing employment conditions for the young; it is, more fundamentally, that they see the elders' engagement with the developments of the age as weak and insufficient, and their position to compete in the global arena of architecture as lacking in movement and dynamism.
The critique of the government's inattention to the issues of the young — in which the issue of employment stands at the centre, and one may say that all the others reduce to it — is a shallow, one-sided critique. The structural problem of human-resource management in Iran is the lack of any steward for professional training, and this in conditions where, in almost every field, professional competence has come to depend, with extraordinary intensity, on knowledge (the base of technology) and information (the base of presence in the market). And we, unmindful of this great and worrying gap, continue with the one-sided expansion of higher education and even of secondary education.
The ratio of architects to the total population of the country, or to the total urban population — even though the population has increased several-fold — has reached its highest level in the sixty years during which the architecture schools have taken on the training of architects. It is natural that the increase in the architect population has, like the increase of the total population, tended toward the young. The other side of the coin is that these architects, compared to the architects of generations before them, enjoy fewer job opportunities.
The matter is more complex than a two-sided relationship. On one side, thanks to the great growth of the population, the volume of construction, alongside the multiplication of the number of architects, has also grown extraordinarily; but both materials and building standards have declined. Alongside this, the rapid spread of the waves of globalisation has opened a new arena of struggle, beyond the customary needs of national development. The revolution — which is itself both a kind of welcome to globalisation and, at the same time, a refusal to surrender to it — has made the duties of entering this arena more complex. The basic problem of the young, in truth, is that in such difficult conditions there is no organisation or institution to lead this great force — the young engineers — in response to the even greater need of the development of the country's cities and villages, within a global horizon.
Setting the scene
The Memar Institute, on Tuesday 18 Ordibehesht this year, at the request of a group of young architects, devoted the time of the second session of its spring lectures to a discussion of "The problems of young architects entering the professional competition", in which six young architects and three long-established senior architects took part. From the very beginning of the discussion it was clear that the problems of young architects cannot be summed up in the simple division of "young and experienced", "pupil and master", or "apprentice and professional". The problems lie beyond their mutual relations, and the apparently mutual issues most often connect to the broader ground and conditions of the profession.
Hamidreza Ansari
Hamidreza Ansari, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran and the first of the young speakers, after listing a number of issues — that professional activity calls for dialogue and contact between the young and the senior, yet such a dialogue does not take place; that professional competition requires serious work, and serious work leads to serious relations with the client, in which situations arise where the rights of the engineer are put in danger, yet there is no mechanism to defend those rights; that professional success, for the young, is attended not by encouragement and support, but sometimes by the anxiety of the elders; that professional security is, in general, in crisis and the horizon of the future is not clear; that, as in the past, elders do not believe in the young and are indifferent to their zeal, and the young in turn have no trust in the elders; that the work of architecture has fallen to a purely economic business, and artistic creativity has no buyer; that the recent regulations on the grading of qualification have closed new avenues of professional activity against the young; that an architect whose graduation required the design of all kinds of large and small complexes is, in a city such as Tehran, restricted to a footprint of 600 square metres and two storeys in height — drew the conclusion that the problem is outside the profession, and has little to do with the reciprocal relations of the young and the elders.
Bijan Shafei
Bijan Shafei, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran and the second young speaker, declaring that the problems do not rest on the difference between generations, treats the weakness of three elements — "education", "law" and "relation to society" — as the ground of the present disorders of architecture: The teaching of architecture passed through three periods of change — before Seyhoun, Seyhoun, and after Seyhoun. But after the Revolution, the programme of the Staff of the Cultural Revolution, drawn up with complete inattention to the variety of tendencies and methods in architecture and to the pace of change within it, and imposed on every school of architecture in the country, closed the road of continued change and flourishing.
Shafei added: architecture is a stream in permanent change and transformation, with its roots in the far and the near past. The young architect needs a historical connection to these roots. Yet no institution and no system — neither during education nor during professional work — transmits the architectural heritage of the past and the experiences of the contemporary generations to the young, or nurtures a continuous historical knowledge in their minds. Perhaps no student of architecture at the University of Tehran, neither in the past nor today, has — except by exception — known or asked who designed the building of the school where he was studying architecture.
The condition of an architect's professional success is that he raise the level of the expectations of his client and prepare him to receive values higher than the values of personal taste. To reach such a success, one must learn the relation to society and count it as part of the competences and capabilities of an architect. Besides teaching the manner of relating to society, to meet the construction mafia we also need an organised guild. In Shafei's view, the relation to society is the most important thing that young architects must learn.
Bahram Shokouhian
The target of Bahram Shokouhian, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran and the third young speaker, was the system of assessment and qualification-ranking based on age and years of service — rather than on the work itself — which has been reflected, in an extremely unconsidered and arbitrary fashion, in the regulations for grading the competence and employment capacity of engineers. These regulations groundlessly deprive the young of undertaking mid-sized and large experiences in the most active years of their professional flowering, and in turn feed a distrust of the young, even among fellow professionals.
He noted that in principle one of today's worldwide developments in architecture is the professional leap of the young and the turning of the course of architecture toward the conditions and talents of the young. They have gained first place in many competitions. In support of this view he pointed to the publication of an international list of forty successful architects under forty, and added that in Iran, on the contrary, young architects have no possibility of taking part in competitions; he proposed that the regulations of assessment and grading of the competence and capacity of architects should, as soon as possible, be brought under a specialist council drawn from among the architects themselves and revised, and that modern mechanisms be put in place for the defence of the rights of young architects against clients.
Reza Daneshmir
Reza Daneshmir, the fourth young speaker, began from his own professional experience and said that what he has gained from about ten years of work alongside four or five good and well-known consultants is very little. He said that, although a number of the well-known consultants of the country are themselves in the position of a university, what a young architect acquires from them is much less than one would expect, because each of them is proficient in only one field, while a young architect has need of all of them. He added that the problem of young architects is on the agenda everywhere in the world: Philip Johnson used to give over the small works of his office to young architects; today Koolhaas plays that role, and by just this method new architectural offices have been born out of the heart of his own. Daneshmir counted the professional support of the great consultants for young architects among the most effective mechanisms.
The fifth young speaker
The fifth young speaker said that every architect who has reached something has worked with larger architects of his own time. There are many fields for the activity of young architects; but the most important training they need is the training in the process of group work. Being a designer is not enough; some knowledge of all those things needed for interdisciplinary contact with different colleagues and with the client is also necessary. Some clients, in fact, take pleasure in working with young architects because the young have no knowledge of the legal side of the work and their rights are easily violated. Besides learning a little of everything, every young architect must strive to reach mastery and expertise in one field.
Rezaali Abadi
Rezaali Abadi, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran and the sixth and last young speaker, showed the various problems in the mirror of institutions and systems in the following way: the institution of education, with its inability to turn every school of architecture into a school of architecture in the substantive sense; the Engineering and Building Control System, with its unjust assessment of the competence and capacity of architects; the client system (governmental and private), with its lack of trust in young architects and all kinds of financial and taste-based impositions upon them; the community of architects (young and old alike), with its neglect of the pace of change in technology and materials and fashions and methods, and of the spread of multi-purpose functions; and the institution of consultants, with the insufficiency of the capacity of the big consultants to accept graduates. He too stressed the need for support from the elders.
Mohsen Mirheydar
Among the long-established senior architects, Mohsen Mirheydar, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran, spoke first. He said: all of us, the old ones, entered professional work from our youth, even from our student days. But today, after forty years of professional work, in terms of financial means and corporate standing we are in the same place we were forty years ago. The reality is that every young architect, after a time, grows tired of small works and feels the need to try big ones. It was the same in our time; but in order to get a big work we needed a big person and a contact — just what every young architect must learn. To work with others does not mean to accept them; to work in a big firm means to learn at the expense of others. Having a private office does not contradict working in a consultancy.
Another matter is that the great masters each have their own characteristics, but the common feature of them all is prolific work. A further matter is the infatuation with the computer and the lack of training of the power of mental and experiential imagination. Mirheydar counted the essential benefit of working in the great consultancies as learning from the big work.
Mehdi Alizadeh
After Mirheydar, Mehdi Alizadeh, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran, spoke. He said architects have no professional network. We must learn network-working from doctors and from the clergy. The need for buildings exists in every corner of the country. An organisation and network must come into being that would send its members to the remotest corners of the country, guide them and support them. No architect succeeds alone. We must link together all the building works of the country through this network.
Faramarz Sharifi
Faramarz Sharifi, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran and the third speaker from among the senior architects, stressed in his brief remarks the need for greater work by the young — at least to the level of the young of the previous generation.
In sum
The discussions of this session may be summed up in the following way: the problem of young architects, beyond the relations within the profession, lies in the fabric of society. The most important duty of the young architect is the relation to society. The young stand in need of the support of the elders. The great consultants can support the capable young by handing over part of their own works to them. The system of assessing competence and capacity must not deprive the young of the possibility of taking part in big works. The greatest lesson from consultants is learning the process of group work; the greatest lesson from the great consultants is learning from the big work. The young must work much. And for the defence of architects — and for the defence of the people who need buildings — architects stand in need of a comprehensive, nationwide organisation and network.
