An Old Argument

Hilyard Robinson, architect and engineer, working on plans and specifications for war-housing projects at Ypsilanti, Michigan (courtesy of the NYPL):

And frankly, it’s a tired argument. Not only are architects and engineers not inherently enemies, we do our best work in collaboration with one another. Cody Tharpe’s piece at ArchDaily is not wrong, but is, unfortunately, a rehash of discussion I’ve been hearing for more than twenty-five years and is much older than that. (Full disclosure: during my four years at TTE, I worked a bit with Charlie Thornton.)

Structural engineering will always take a “back seat” to architecture in building design because of the nature of the projects. Architects are responding to much more complicated design constraints – with the clients’ desires being by far the most complicated pieces – than engineers, so the design process only works if architects go first. It’s not laziness that make me wait on my design until I have a preliminary set of architectural drawings, it’s the knowledge that I can solve my design problems (in short, transferring gravity and lateral loads to the ground) in many different ways, and I need to see how the architect has solved theirs to know which path I should take.

I have not encountered a general attitude among architects that I perceive as a lack of respect. I have encountered frustration among architects that stems from two causes, both easily solved: architects not understanding enough engineering to know why engineers make the decisions we make, and engineers not understanding enough about architecture to know why architects make the decisions they make. We play different roles and always will, but it is easier to collaborate when we know what the other is thinking. Again, none of this is new.

It may well be that this discussion seems tired to me because I work in the niche of historic preservation. When we leave general building practice and look at this niche, a lot of the freedom in design is taken from both architects and engineers. Assuming that we all know something about preservation, we have a much larger inherent common ground than in general practice, so we tend to communicate better.