Leveraging the unknown.

01 Feb, 2025

At the conspiracy of the unknown, opportunity and the imagination are found our most particular feats, our most meaningful and valuable, our most unremarkable and banal. Here are the greatest works of artist and intellect, as are here too each and all of our many mundane daily discoveries, at the once dark edges now illuminated by imaginative leaps. Acts of discovery, invention and creation, the surprise, delight and joy that attend them and their results, are not and are never without their obscure twin and shadow. In creation unknown is inevitable.

Professionals do not of course deal in the unknown, the fact of professionalism and professionalisation being knowledge, the special well-known by a few. Without special, shared and protected knowledge there is no profession, at least none for which one should be willing to pay.

Professionals do not deal in the unknown, but the professional knows that at the centre of their practice is the unknown; rather than its embrace though is instead its obviation, the elaboration of modes of practice designed towards its elimination.

Professionals deal in the known, so to the professional the unknown is anathema - practice, process and contractual arrangement evolve to forfend it.

The above being said then and if it were that we knew, as professions and communities, the very right way to shelter and house our collective selves, and were all on board and together acting on such special knowledge as a collective, and were we all to accept the necessary design and instruction that would go with it, and follow it, and were we all willing to give of our resources towards those ends according to our means, even then should we still wish to forfend the unknown, and thus forego the opportunity for the surprise offered by expression of the collective genius that's available through the activated and empowered individual imaginations of us all?

If it were that we knew that we certainly don’t know such a very right way, and acknowledge that any such general agreement as to that way is in understatement improbable, and were we then, rather than implement unsatisfactory solution in fear of the unknown, instead to embrace the imaginative opportunity offered by it, could not our built places be so enlivened by the sum of these imaginative acts, some kin to Kroll's 'collective texture', that the embrace of the unknown would be well worth the risk?

Is it not indeed in the embrace of the gaps in and limits to professional knowledge and scope that such imaginative opportunities present themselves, as unknowns become known? Is it not in fact just so in the best-established current modes of practice, whereby such gaps and limits are revealed in time, through the simple process of drawing present reality to uncover future possibility, and so directing present action to achieve some ideal future?

To imagine such a process as the means to a satisfactory end of practical completion (and of course no real end at all but beginning) in the context of, for instance, a domestic project for engaged clients is not necessarily a great feat of imagination. Soliciting information directly from an ultimate authority in the form of a client or sponsor brings with it obvious advantages when addressing gaps in knowledge, and while we can never presume upon the wisdom of any such knowledge as authority brings, we can though contractually capture belief.

The feat of imagining that process wherein all unknowns become known through standard procurement processes as the means to some satisfactory end of practical completion is rather greater in the context of 'development', of the construction of environment for unknown future occupants, be the developer public or private and their interests directed accordingly.

Regulatory and market standards and the presumptions and prejudices of sponsors and designers brought to bear on such a process have little chance of such satisfactory outcome without the understanding and embrace of its limitations by all agents to it, sponsors and designers, regulators, contractors, owners and occupants.

Central to those limitations is the unknown, the collective and collected, unknown owing to the many and various motives and morals of myriad unknowable individuals, the counterpart knowns to these unknowns not remotely amenable to easy solicitation or survey, not so if real knowledge is sincerely sought.

We can and we do though, more often than not, as profession and industry, presume to know another's unknown, or at best to proceed in ignorance of some unknown's existence.

As profession such presumption, given the anathema unknown, though not forgivable is at least understandable. On the professional side is on one hand an attested claim to knowledge, on the other a similar claim to special and privileged access to knowledge.

The means of access to knowledge, particular to the professional according to the profession, will inevitably be in some combination of precedent and prejudice, neither problematic if well-informed. The result of it though, the knowledge gained, is often at best some average of averages, some dull middle that may bridge the troughs but will flatten the peaks, at worst the rubbish out that eventuates from rubbish in, in probability merely the confirmation of existing bias.

In respect of the above satisfactory outcome of development, the metric by which satisfaction or success is judged is here and unapologetically quality on a social scale. Return-on-investment or a good net-to-gross or so on and so forth, such measures as those that have no true social dimension, relevant only to the interests of a narrow few and then only briefly, are of no use to any in the longer term and global view. We contend indeed that all useful measures can be contained under the social, environmental performance included.

To state briefly, we should succeed and be satisfied with an urban environment where we all people, and with us the rest of our entire animal family, feel we belong, feel represented, are happy, healthy, engaged, and comfortable.

What would particularly do this for each individual, what would bring such health and happiness, comfort and engagement, beyond objective standards already captured and necessarily fulfilled by regulatory requirement, is that which is necessarily unknowable to us as professionals, unknown often even to those particular individuals themselves and only to be revealed in their own time and through their own action.

The known unknowns are necessarily and happily so to us as the professionals in our ideal here, wherein we leave unknowns so, but knowable in time.

In our ideal then is embrace of a professional anathema. And from our ideal comes invention, born of course and as always of mother necessity, but born of father opportunity too, and from our ideal's invention comes the surprise, delight and joy that should always accompany the ordinary. And broad is our mother necessity's definition, as broad, deep and high as Maslow's pyramid, and indeed above and beyond it, for what vision of an ideal is worth a damn that's not everything that everyone could ever want.

We now leave the creation of 'development', of a great mass of our constructed environments, to a different conspiracy than our above, not to that of the unknown, opportunity and the imagination, but instead to that of bureaucracy, technocracy and capital, and with it their respective rules, processes and resources.

While acknowledging that such creation as that which will occur under our preferred conspiracy will be none without co-conspirator reality's collaboration, we recognise too that such creation as will occur under this other conspiracy, this one of bureaucrats, technocrats and capitalists, will fall far short of any sort of an ideal without other co-conspirators too.

The bureaucrat's rules are all proscription, presumption and forfence, the technocrat's processes too presumptuous and indifferent along with it, the capitalist's resources truly the common wealth but captured and misdirected.

'Development' is merely development, the active formation of constructed environment. To truly become appropriate home for humanity and all life it must itself live and breathe, and flex and refine, as all life does through living. Development too is subject to that contractual concept of practical completion, but to consider the event of practical completion as the end point of development, the point at which some particular constructed environment stops developing, is socially, environmentally and practically untenable.

For our foe dread conspiracy though, the untenable must be maintained, particularly in the case of residential development. This is where it always will aim, and so by design.

Need it be said, nothing worthwhile is ever achieved thus. The reality in our ideal, and really its centre, essence and worth, is that none can provide it but all.

Architectural design is ultimately concerned with the direction of construction, and while mere part of a process yet the professional must act. The foregoing does not propose that the formation of built environment be left to chance, nor that it should be the outcome of chaotic free-for-all. No less architectural rigour should attend when leveraging the unknown, and probably more should.

Tasked with finding questions and answers to questions of such infinite particularity as the unknown futures of unknown others though, it might be the prudent professional who'd decline to provide to these others, beyond regulatory requirement, any but one thing, and that the opportunity to make known all their own.