A post via anArchitecture… made me think a bit about our fair profession and it’s place in the grand scheme of the world. Via the site and post ‘The Architectural Practice, Part I’ – this graphic:
:: image via anArchitecture
And the text: “Architectural practices are a project based businesses: Changing teams create unique, tailor-made products or services (e.g. a building). A project is characterized by a network of different groups or companies (sometimes referred as ‘stakeholders’) like clients, designers, model makers, engineers, etc – temporary working together. Although people change from project to project their collaboration is based on trust. … Consequently, architectural practice’s success is based on past achievement: their project portfolio and their (business) network.”
Obviously you see where my rant is going… missing a stakeholder at this particular table? Yes, landscape architecture can still be marginalized… but an interesting discussion – and some parsing (i.e. splitting hairs between stakeholders and participants)…. check out round two of this on anArchitecture as well in ‘The Architectural Practice, Part II’… which has a laundry list of participants… oh, but landscape architect has been switched with landscape designer… ah, so close… rant continues…
A good parallel discussion on Land8Lounge revisits the perennial topic of ‘Who are we?’ and more aptly ‘Why can’t we be called something other than Landscape Architect(ure)?’… is worth checking out as well. Lively discussion all around 🙂
It is a funny little diagram. Not to comment on the author of the diagram, but the diagram itself definitely has a building centric outlook, kind of an outdated approach to looking at this system. As a land planner, the building is far down the process to me, and makes up one of the stakeholders and not the focus of the project. The purpose of development and construction is to create a place that serves a function and the building is only one part of that.
There’s definitely no lack of archi-centrism out there in the world… I get the idea of it takes a village and that no diagram could capture the entire process, but this just seems dated. I agree with you as well that the lens in which one views process will skew that as well – mine to the landscape/site/vegitectural – and as you mention, the greater context as well in land planning.