Bouncers

Bouncers are usually associated with 'pub culture' - any rowdy behaviour by a customer may elicit a very unpleasant response from the bouncer that the customer is not supposed to forget! A look at a bouncer is quite enough to send a chill down anybody's spine, who is yet in his senses. So arguing with him, is literally a farfetched idea - as easy as walking on the moon.

Times have somewhat come to a stage, wherein the bouncer's business (or demand so to say) may expand in a variety of fields, wherein decorum, decency, law is increasingly being jeopardized - which means almost everywhere! I wonder with what values, morality, ethics am I approaching a consultancy field such as architecture - a far reaching code of understanding and creating conducive environment for human habitation. In an age of information explosion, technological innovation the nature of thought that seems to be created in humans is the idea of narcissism (antithesis of empathy).

Empathy for architects is required to understand 'context' - a situation of climate, technology, culture and society. This grounds architecture onto a given 'soil'. In the mode of action, empathy is required to understand the role of other players who contribute into the making of architecture for the architects (client, consultants, contractors, labours and other people). In academic life, the responsibility of teachers is to generate empathy in the students to understand their environment and to ground their ideas in differing situations.

However, in real life, things seem to be getting messier. It is getting increasingly difficult to manage inflated and distorted egos of stakeholders who make your team in a given project. Traditionally, the onus of defining and conceiving a response for a given context was a prerogative of the architect, now it doesn't seem to matter whose prerogative it is! We don't know what we are beginning with, where we are heading, and what we have accomplished and how to review what we have created!! We end up just doing 'something' for the sake of doing it!

In this hindsight, it is better to keep a bouncer at our offices. One nasty argument from a client or any consultant challenging your notion of context, and you know whom to resort to help! Let the bouncer take care of everything else and let him kick others in their butts if they don't seem to have an inkling of code of ethics/morality or what needs to be done. Of course, keeping a bouncer by me - would that be a narcissism?