AIA conference gives an insight into changing priorities for US architects

This year’s American Institute of Architects (AIA) conference was held last month at the Rafael Viñoly-designed Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. I travelled to Massachusetts to see what the event might offer UK and European architects interested in working in the United States.

Experiencing it first-hand, it is clear that this event, now in its 16th iteration, is aimed squarely at the AIA’s 100,000-plus membership. There is a sense of its offering both moral and practical support to members, creating a club-like feel that says each AIA cardholder matters and is welcome to contribute through their local AIA chapter. In the corridors I heard enthusiasm for getting the AIA to be more proactive on an international stage but, for now, this conference is focused on the US, and many come here to collect needed CPD points through attending talks, workshops, open studios and other events on offer – among them a range of building tours including ones to the nearby Harvard and MIT campuses.

For the visiting UK architect, the event offers all this as well as an insight into the topics the American profession is deliberating, including AI, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and climate change. Not so different to what is being discussed here, you might say, but it was interesting to find that fellow architects from this tech-savvy nation are, like us, a patchy bunch when it comes to adopting AI. And despite efforts around DEI, only 27 per cent of American practitioners are currently women.

In recognition of this, perhaps, the audience was all the more pleased to have Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, receive this year’s AIA Gold Medal. She spoke of architecture as a vocation committed to the common good – something we might think is more of a European concern.

In fact, this notion of a commitment to creating a better world by investing in our communities was a recurring theme at the conference. The subtext was that in the current political climate, it is incumbent on architects rather than public policy to ensure that design helps to meet societal and environmental challenges. On this topic, keynote speaker Pete Buttigieg, former US secretary for transportation and one-time presidential candidate, said that salvation comes from ‘the local’. Solutions, he said, are now definitely bottom up. Offline is the way, too, he suggested, because buildings – unlike the virtual world – are places of trust for face-to-face encounters.

For Buttigieg, architects are part of the equation for creating social trust – a sentiment that, no doubt, played to his audience but also opens up a world of opportunity in terms of how architects might go about their work and how they might express what they do. This is certainly valuable from a UK perspective if one wants to better understand current US political and professional aspirations. In a nutshell, it feels as though small is the name of the game in a country so long associated with ‘big is better’. Though, of course, an architectural conference in Massachusetts – the bluest of states – might not give you the full picture.

The master of ceremonies for the conference was Weijia Jiang, CBS’s senior White House correspondent. She held the same role at last year’s AIA conference, held in Washington DC, where the UK-US mutual recognition was one of the event topics. For her, architecture and journalism are alike in their capacity for storytelling and embracing a vision about what comes next. In this way, architecture was repeatedly positioned not only as a vehicle for looking ahead but as an important one for righting wrongs or even promoting democratic values. 

Much of this can feel like high-powered rhetoric, likening architects to social justice warriors, yet it was clear the AIA is now focused on intention in the way it may once have focused on invention. Even during tech guru Allie K Miller’s keynote, AI was relegated to being a powerful tool that, although doubling its capability every seven months, is no substitute for genuine human relationships, outperforming us as people only in specific tasks.

Wendy Rogers from LPA Design Studios, whose practice received this year’s AIA Architecture Firm Award, spoke about maintaining relevance in a time of disruptive technology. She noted that ‘our clients aren’t asking us to solve climate change’. And yet this multidisciplinary office of over 500 has become a national leader in energy performance, not only bagging industry certificates for its projects but being the first firm in the US employing over 100 staff to hit the 70 per cent energy use reduction benchmark. Again, the achievement reflects the principle of being a self-starter in ‘doing the right thing’.

It was this new pioneering advocacy spirit of the profession that stood out most at the conference, and especially the way it was evident in larger firms, ones often described disparagingly as the ‘commercial architects’.

In this way, too, the AIA conference lends UK practitioners an insight into the modus operandi of a successful American office – one that is, perhaps, not so evident in international media coverage of the fashionable studios. Moreover, the event does not shy away from talking about money and marketing. Sessions included ‘What architecture firms’ billings and other indicators tell us’, ‘Is my practice making any profit?’ and, on the promotional front, ‘How do you know if your brand works?’. These, in addition to an expansive 12,000m² exhibition hall with some 600 stands, ranging from Autodesk to this year’s showstopper: real-life puppies promoting environmentally sound ‘artificial grass’.

Given all that the event had to offer to its nearly 13,000 attendees, might there have been room for an architecture exhibition too? Something, perhaps, about the very building in which the four-day conference took place, which might have got people talking about design, or about Boston’s architecture with its excellent IM Pei buildings and rich architectural history?

There was little in this way aside from the organised building tours. Yet from the convention centre, you happily had vistas over the city’s skyline with Hugh Stubbins’s Federal Reserve Bank standing out as a poignant reminder of the power of architecture at its best as conversations around the built environment ebbed and flowed.

Laura Iloniemi is an architectural publicist working internationally, and author of Is It All About Image