Although the architect’s【21】is primarily focused on design, in practice the

The future, the future is you. Although the architect’s education is primarily focused on design, in practice the architect is invariably a designer, businessperson, market analyst, psychologist, contractor, politician and arbitrator. You must keep that in mind as you enter the profession. It is not just about designing. It is about a lot of other things and the more exposure you can get in these other areas, the better prepared you will be for the future ahead. I think it is going to be a future with a lot of changes.
    You need exposure to the whole business side of architecture. You need to be able to talk about business to clients. Clients are wealthy people. Clients are people who, if they can afford to hire you, have been successful, if they are going to trust you with their projects, you need to be able to provide them with a comfort that you understand business. Get out and read business publications. I have often told people to read The Wall Street Journal. It is full of information. And at first you may not realize it. But in the Journal, in Forbes, in Fortune you will pick up on the trends of business. Business controls a lot more of our lives than any of us realize.
    We also need to have scientific literacy. I think that we need to continue to be a profession of knowledge. We need to understand more engineering than what we get from school just to get passed the exam. We need to hold our own in meetings with clients, with construction managers, with contractors, and with our engineers. You need to have the knowledge to direct them. Otherwise they will control you; you will not control them. In the whole area of environmental and scientific knowledge we need to know more. We are entering an age of great emphasis on our environment. We can’t continue to squander our environment the way we had in the past. Having greater knowledge is going to be very important to you in your roles as professionals.
    I think that, if you do all of these things, you will certainly be very marketable individuals. You will be flexible; you will be able to adjust to trends and changes. You will be able to work overseas and under different conditions. I am convinced that your generation is going to be subjected to more changes even than I have seen in my career. You need to prepare yourself in an almost Renaissance way to have flexibility. We think that we get a well-rounded liberal arts education in architecture but we really don’t. We get a rather superficial liberal arts education. So I encourage you to pay attention to those other courses and not view them as just being something that you have to trudge through. It is only through this that we will truly be leaders.
    What I push and what I encourage is that we want to be leaders. We don’t want to be followers. It is through professional development that we will be leaders. I think that if we do all of these things, we will see architecture return to a position of preeminence.  And we will be taking those projects back away from the program managers and all the other people that have been out trying to divide our role and take a lot away from us. I think it is a very bright future for you. And I will encourage you to read and look and realize that this is truly a very, very exciting profession that you are going into. It offers many, many paths, not just one path.