Swimmin’ pools. [Architecture] stars.

Pitt at the con­struc­tion site for the Oscar Niemeyer Cul­tural Cen­tre. Photo by Cen­tro Niemeyer/Reuters/Landov

If you had told me at the out­set of my archi­tec­ture education/career that I would one day be writ­ing about Brad Pitt on an archi­tec­ture blog, I would have sworn you had lost your mind.  And even now, despite that I have already typed the man’s name out and com­mit­ted him irrev­o­ca­bly to this post, I insist this isn’t about Mr. Pitt. What really is the issue sur­round­ing grum­bling com­ments — there are pos­i­tive posi­tions as well — on web­sites about Pitt’s inter­est in archi­tec­ture and, per­haps more impor­tantly, his access to high pro­file peo­ple, places, and events within the archi­tec­ture scene is the atten­tion he has received from the media.  It’s fair to assume that prac­tic­ing archi­tects and archi­tec­ture stu­dents may feel slighted, but the cul­pa­bil­ity for this level of inse­cu­rity can hardly be levied at Pitt.

No, this isn’t about Pitt at all.  It’s about archi­tec­ture and the peo­ple that prac­tice it. In a pre­vi­ous post, I dis­cussed the lack of pub­lic out­reach, both from key fig­ures and the pro­fes­sion as a whole, through a satyri­cal sce­nario in which Peter Eisen­man appears as a guest on David Letterman’s show. Seri­ously, why shouldn’t a high pro­file archi­tect appear on late night tele­vi­sion next to actors, musi­cians, and yes, even politi­cians? Ask any layper­son who their favorite archi­tect is and you’re likely to get one of two responses; it is usu­ally Frank Lloyd Wright, or they don’t have one! Fur­ther­more, com­mon anec­do­tal knowl­edge sug­gests that very few houses are designed by an archi­tect in this coun­try and that most peo­ple are more likely to pick up one of those glossy house plan books in the check-out line before call­ing an archi­tect.  Is it any sur­prise that the con­ve­nience offered by these house plan books is sit­u­ated next to the lat­est Peo­ple mag­a­zine fea­tur­ing Pitt on the cover?  In other words, it isn’t the actor, silly, it’s the cul­ture!  And, it’s a cul­ture that we archi­tects have to accept some cul­pa­bil­ity for and stop com­plain­ing about one man’s suc­cess and the oppor­tu­ni­ties it has pro­vided him.

For­tu­nately, I do believe the pub­lic per­cep­tion of archi­tects is chang­ing, but not because Pitt is single-handedly ush­er­ing archi­tec­ture into the spot­light of the public’s con­scious­ness, though on some level he is. No, the more mean­ing­ful focus on archi­tec­ture and urban design is hap­pen­ing as a result of tech­no­log­i­cal advances, social media, sus­tain­abil­ity, and rise of design ori­ented char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tions (of which Pitt’s Make It Right Foun­da­tion is just one exam­ple). It’s really an excit­ing time to be involved in archi­tec­ture, despite the cur­rent effects of an eco­nomic sab­o­tage orches­trated some time back. Now more than ever, archi­tects have tools at their fin­ger­tips, lit­er­ally, that can rad­i­cally change the cul­tural per­cep­tion of archi­tec­ture as an old rich white man’s career to one that is more diverse, rel­e­vant, and acces­si­ble.  It is eas­ier to con­nect, share, and dis­cover archi­tec­ture and design more than it ever has been.

I don’t hold a grudge against Pitt’s archi­tec­tural inter­ests, good for him. As for me, I like to cook, and have rea­son to believe I’m pretty damn good at it, but I’m not a pro­fes­sional chef.  How­ever, if i were in a posi­tion — with the money, time, and recog­ni­tion — sim­i­lar to that of Pitt, there’s a high prob­a­bil­ity that I would develop a culi­nary pur­suit of some form or another. Why? Well, because I’m inter­ested in the sub­ject, dammit, and that’s good enough. Everyone’s life is big enough to include a mul­ti­tude of inter­ests and pas­sions, includ­ing Pitt’s.  And so with this post, I set aside any periph­eral inter­est in the mat­ter as framed by the media and set to work on my own inter­ests in architecture.