 Buildings are inherently about the most expensive and laborious and time-consuming object made by man. Architects themselves in the 1920th century conflated the potential of mass production that we saw in automobile assembly line production as somehow being the same. But architecture doesn't have lots of problems. It's harder to move the thing once you've built it. There's the relationship with the ground which needs to be considered. And then the most expensive cost in any building process is financing. And that hasn't changed. It's really expensive to put up a building and you have to go out to a bank and get the money to build that structure. And you have to pay off the loan that you're getting. And there's no way of changing that that I can see. So those are fixed costs in architecture. And that's never going to change. So architecture is very unique that way. I mean, a lot of people who talk about architecture as an art don't want to think about the fact that it's the one art that actually people live in. And that gives it its own conditions. And I think all of those make it a very unique process. So in some ways, I mean, and this is what Manfredo Tifori, the great Italian critic, argued that architects can't really transform the way they want. That they have to follow the dictates of the society and the culture behind it. Let's say we go back to Alberti's definition of the architect as someone who's on the same social level as the client. Someone, in his case, who spoke Latin and who read the classics, who understood what there was to understand about Roman architecture. And he was trying to really distinguish it from the broad base of builders of the uneducated, I suppose, architects and to raise the status of the architect. And I think we still, in a lot of respects, are sort of caught in that mystique of who it is the architect is. Although, you know, during, I think, one of the great changes that took place during the modern period, let's say the early 20th century through to the late 20th century, you might say, was the kind of imperative that architects somehow needed to work in a closer relationship with a broader spectrum of the population than they would be if they were just designing for the church or the politically powerful or the politically elite. And that they take this skill, this obvious skill that they have and apply it to a larger community. Lewis Mumford always argued that architects needed not to know the correct order of correct orders, but that they should understand how to build a community. I don't necessarily believe all of that's true, but I think that he had, you know, a point to make about what the role of the architect was. And, of course, he was arguing that the architect should engage with things like low-cost affordable housing, creating the kind of communities that he supported, like Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn and so on, that kind of thing. The bulk of the profession has a stake, you know, going back again to this Albertian notion, I suppose, in kind of, in remaining on the same level as these clients, rather than thinking about who the real client is, which is the end user, they're thinking about who's paying for it. And this is what this, you know, kind of contemporary political, social political condition where everything gets outsourced has produced. You know, there's so little engagement really with architects and from architects to the community, there's always this intermediary of the private client that becomes the client for the community so that if a museum wants to build a new building, they go to a developer and the developer builds a 50-story building on the top and then adds a gallery to the bottom and the private developer becomes the client for the architect rather than the museum itself, if you see what I mean. And you're right, the architects, do you ask the question, why don't? You would think that architects would want to have more clients and yes they do, but I think also the way architecture works in our society, it's a kind of extra fee that's applied to a project. You don't need an architect to build a building, nobody does. You can get a structural engineer, you can get, you know, the fastest growing segment of the housing market are prefabricated, you know, McMansions, not built by architects but built by housing developers or housing corporations where you buy a plan and sell it. That's the fastest growing because it's affordable for most of the population. In some ways, architects who are doing, entering these prefab competitions in a way are arguing against everything that architects always say they can do or what they should be able to do, which is to give spatial form and physical form to a specific site, location, condition, program. That's what architects should be able to do, but unless they're really thinking about and engaging with the site, the location, the conditions, the end user, all of those conditions around it, then they're not really, excuse me, doing that. They somehow have the idea already pre-thought or maybe they're thinking about who the client who's paying for the project rather than... So part of this has to do with, I think the general social conditions of the time and architects in a way are stuck in that. The only way to fight it is to go against the predominant social political model. I think this is also very true in America and maybe more true in other countries as well. What I worry about in undergraduate architecture schools is too much process and not enough thinking in the educational system itself. And I think the... I could think of a couple different architects who really cannot draw at all and who are Pritzker Prize winners. I don't want to name any names, but they think of different ways to communicate. They're able to communicate in a non-drawing sense. I think also a lot of architects are dyslexic or have ADD. It's a very common trait that I see in this profession, which means that many of them have to think of different ways to communicate and many people who have those kind of ways of learning and thinking have to really focus their concentration, I think, which may actually help them become a successful architect and communicate in a different kind of way. So I think a lot of what the public perceives as the skill of the architect being almost a 19th century draftsman is not really what the profession is like. It's a very different profession from that. Well, I think the difference in my mind is that design is somehow always collaborative with the economy and I'm not necessarily saying that's bad, but architecture, in a good sense, can hold itself apart from the economy because it's a part of this larger tradition going, I've said I've gone back to Alberti, but you might even go back even further, that's developed its own language and is independent, there's a part of architecture which is independent from economic equation. And design, this idea that you see in the Museum of Modern Art with all this fancy furniture somehow solving the world's problems, I think is just absolutely ludicrous. And there's a lot of this that comes out of things like the Aspen Conference and all kinds of things where these so-called industrial designers want to change the world, but they really only change the world when they're working for private corporations. And there's something about architecture at its best which would even reject that notion, because architecture sees itself as being independent and I think it's important to hang on to that and that's why groups like Super Studio and Ant Farm are so important because they take this broad open vision of architecture, they're working within the long tradition of independence and remaining independent and sort of, you know, they both engaged with the real world, that's why I love them, but at the same time they were very, they brought this vision and remained independent. They didn't need to be linked up with industry the way, let's say, industrial design does. And some of that's actually I think infected some of the architecture schools because I think they see that as a potential client base. You were asking the question, why don't architects want to expand their client base? And some of them do want to do that and they see this engagement with the economy with corporate interest, shall we say, as a way of doing that. But in doing that you give up the sort of tradition and independence of architecture. So in that sense I think there's probably something good about... and I make a big distinction in the architects' newspaper between design and architecture. I think it's really important to know and architecture at its best reaches out like design but can somehow remain independent from this alliance with a kind of corporatized way of thinking about the world.