Residential Knowledge Community

As a librarian, I've been called a lot of things (never over-paid, though)--information specialist, database architect, knowledge manager, associate professor, department head, etc. So I'm used to odd titles. Architects? Not so much. So "residential knowledge community" was new to me. Apparently means those careers and professions that design and build homes suitable for living and lasting longer than a generation.

Here's the assessment of David Andreozzi of Rhode Island, and interestingly enough, this was exactly how I've felt about architecture the last 40 years--especially Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 20th century and the 80s guy who designed the Wexner Center on the OSU campus, Peter Eisenman:

"A century long love affair with modernity combined with a desire to create star architects have morphed our profession into celebrating architecture, that at times goes so for to the extreme that it begins to ignore building codes, fails to adequately satisfy program requirements, and encourages state of the art experimentation over proven technology, in order to proclaim invention over creating architecture. We live in a time of starchitects that design sculpture with secondary program placed upon it, and we all celebrate this as good. It can be argued that our current paradigm actually discriminates against history, environmental scale, and individual culture in architecture in whole."

To say nothing of on-going costs! Eisenman's design won out in a competition and has locked Ohio into a perpetual repair program due to the design which has cost us millions more. The building is dysfunctional and disorienting to the senses. Entire foundations exist to do nothing but restore Wright's buildings which ignored everything then known about environmental damage and we're paying for it now as buildings fall apart and anyone over 5'5" feels squashed walking through one of his homes.