What Has Gone Wrong With Architecture

In 1953, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin took a fragment of ancient Greek poetry and used it to divide the world into two kinds of thinkers: “The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing.” 

He described a chasm between people who see the world through a “single central vision” and those who “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” 

This distinction helps explain how architecture lost its influence.

Architecture is a Fox’s discipline. It sits between capital, politics, infrastructure, climate, design, engineering, art, psychology, and economics. Its task is to hold these domains together, manage complexity, and, at its best, make spaces and places in which we can live better together.

The role has been one of great influence, used by those in power to manifest their vision and values. The Fox-like architect can cross over domains, lead public debate on the most pressing issues of the day, and work with the greatest power in the land to shape the future of our cities. 

Between 1984 and 2003, psychologist Philip Tetlock, led an extensive study comparing the predictions of 284 experts, who he categorized as either Foxes or Hedgehogs. He found that a Hedgehog is “more likely to be overconfident … and slow to change their minds when they are wrong,” whereas a Fox “uses a variety of analytical tools, is more likely to be self-critical, and more likely to update their beliefs in response to new information.” 

After 20 years and 28,000 predictions, Tetlock was forced to conclude that Hedgehogs’ predictions were “no better than a dart-throwing chimpanzee,” and in some cases, they actually performed worse than random chance because they would systematically ignore events that didn’t fit their narrative.

Responding to wider trends in professional services, architecture embraced specialization. In doing so, it has lost influence by steadily narrowing its scope. The discipline has allowed, and at times encouraged, scope to be subsumed by adjacent professions: transport planners, urban designers, cost consultants, interior designers, fire safety consultants, project managers, and a multitude of engineering disciplines. Today, the architect is one consultant among many. Foxes squeezed uncomfortably into Hedgehog costumes.

In the U.S., the built environment generates $3.5 trillion dollars annually and supports 20.4 million jobs. Despite this, not a single architect holds a seat in the House or the Senate. Lawyers, in contrast, make up 31% of the House and 47% of the Senate.

The benefits of specialization in any profession can be immense. Noticing this, and in response to wider trends across professional services, it seemed like the rational thing for architects to do. Medicine gives us a sense of how specialization can be beneficial, and at the same time, risk missing the bigger picture. Few people would choose a generalist to perform critical heart surgery. But narrow specialism also comes at a cost, as it can leave no one answerable for the whole. 

We probably all know someone with a complex condition who passed through a maze of excellent specialists and still received poor care as there was no one there to join the dots. The body is an interconnected system, not just a collection of mechanical or biochemical parts. Complex cases sometimes need a Fox able to see the bigger picture, and cross between specialties.

Like human bodies, cities are complex. Making them better places to live requires a knowledge of the past, careful observation of the present, and flexible hunches for what the future looks like. 

Architects are making decisions today about something that will not be built for many years and will shape part of your city for decades, even centuries. So being able to make a good judgment for the future is an important, albeit unspoken, part of the profession. 

Over-specialization, especially in professions such as architecture, means the value of the Fox is overlooked and undervalued. We continue to break down our cities into component parts and give each of those parts to Hedgehogs to optimize: housing driven by yields, streets by flow of traffic, buildings by fire safety codes, public space by maintenance costs. 

Parking requirements provide an example of Hedgehog thinking at its worst. Codifying minimum parking provision for housing, offices, shops, and restaurants seems reasonable in isolation. In aggregate, however, they use vast amounts of space in our cities, inflate the cost of housing, and encourage driving. 

In the U.S., there are up to two billion parking spaces, creating the surreal situation in many places where more land is devoted to parking cars than to housing people. This is what can happen when Hedgehogs optimize parts and forget the whole. 

Architect Kongjian Yu was an example of the Fox-like thinking at its best. Typically, water management is the narrow domain of drainage engineers and flood risk consultants: Hedgehogs aiming to flush water away as fast as possible through pipes and sewers. Yu brought together ideas from landscape architecture, Daoist philosophy, urban planning, drought and storm water management, traditional Chinese terraced farming practices, and from nature itself to develop the “Sponge City” concept. 

Instead of seeing rain as a nuisance to be expelled, a Sponge City follows the flow of water and where it ends up creates wetlands, swales, and swamps. By using the land to soak up and store water, the city creates a landscape that slows water down during wet periods and releases it during dry periods, like a sponge. 

What appears as an obvious insight has upended previous ways of thinking and launched a new discipline. 

Yu’s skill as a Fox was not just to make this technical and philosophical leap, but to then have the architectural skill and political influence to turn it into hundreds of new sponge-like public spaces, breathing new life into cities around the world from Chongqing to Copenhagen, Bangkok to Karachi.

Cities are too large, too complex, and too important to be left to Hedgehogs alone. Architects matter not because they have mastered a specific instrument, but because they can bring the orchestra together, and in doing so make our cities better places to live.