Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients

What, no architectural bootcamps? No shiny new frameworks? No this will disrupt everything? No hype cycle?

To be fair, the most well known examples of architecture tend to cost a lot of money to construct, and people spending lots of money want someone with experience. If you look at painters for example, a lot of them produce great work at relatively younger ages than architects, probably because the barriers to entry are lower.

Still, it seems that in the arts, you can continue to produce great work for a long time. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright was around 67 years old when Falling Water was built and Leonardo Da Vinci was over 50 when he painted the Mona Lisa.

Napster was written by a 19yrs old. Bram wrote bittorent when he was 26yrs old. Justin Frankel was 22yrs old when he wrote gnutella with Tom who was 25yrs old.

I mention these systems, because these were apps that needed to operate at scale.

This is also the case in software "engineering". Don't assume a code monkey who's 22 and can produce a piece of software with heaps worth of technical debt is a master of anything. The best software engineers in the world are generally mid-career (40-50) and have gone through lots of large projects in several different roles.

Just because our industry doesn't want to acknowledge that, doesn't make it less true.

I'm a software engineer that went through architecture school and I think you're glorifying architects a bit here.

The only reason why architects have a more gradual path as you describe is because there is a LOT of gatekeeping and feedback on your work is a LOT slower.

To become an architect you have to ideally go through schooling at a specific set of schools and then after that you have years of internships where you are at the mercy of the architect who supervises you. If you end up with a not-so-friendly boss you could end up working years of your youth in an unpaid internship and end up NOT getting any credit. That's years of delay to licensure. After getting enough credit and hours you still to take multiple exams, paying out of your own pocket, to get licensed. And unlike software, aspiring architects cannot spend a weekend or two to build projects on their own to put on a portfolio of work, and problems from anything you design can take months or years to crop up.

And even after all that only a tiny minority of architects end up in firms like SOM (like Google but for architects) and get to work in glamourous projects. The vast majority of architects just work on run-of-the-mill housing (not unlike CRUD apps) where the combination of building codes, the client's budget, zoning and other requirements often prevents you from doing anything too flashy.

The great thing about software really is the fact you have the independence and ability to build and publicize your own stuff whereas in all the other formal professions you can't without oversight.

I've read a bit of Christopher Alexander, and at least by his view the profession of architecture was in a fallen state conducive to soulless work. I don't know myself, except I've been to Barcelona which must've been doing something different.

That's likely because buildings are very expensive to build, and so who is going to risk tens of millions of dollars on a 22 year old architect with no track record?

My uncle is an architect (now a master architect) and knowing his career path makes your comment kinda amusing.

Uncle got a Bachelor's in Architecture, and was able to draft plans, but wasn't able to give them actual approval. You need a Master's degree and a certification through the state government, and often the Master's degree is done as part of your employment at a larger firm. And you need another Master-Architect to sponsor your master's, so the larger architecture firms sponsor apprentices-- but they do so with a pretty significant pay-cut to working apprentices.

My uncle is a bit of a scoundrel, looked at that system, and was like "screw that", and solely did drafting. Sure he couldn't finalize plans, but he specialized in doing drafts quickly. (He's admitted that his drafts were probably lower-quality and smudgier than other's, but they were done _far_ faster and cheaper.) He did this for a few years, and from all the drafts he's learn a fair amount.

So after 5 years of working as a freelance drafter, a young guy who has a newly minted Master-Architect cert reaches out to my uncle and asks if he's hiring. My uncle thinks about it and says--- yeah, actually, I am. With a master-architect on staff he can submit actual plans to cities. In addition my uncle asks the young master-architect to sponsor my uncle in a master's certification. The way that my uncle talks about it, it was almost a sham of a "sponsorship"-- especially since my uncle was both more experienced than and the employer of his sponsor.

PLOT cofounders Bjarke Ingels and Julien de Smedt were in their mid-twenties when they started out. Today, Bjarke Ingels Group is among the most influential firms in the world. Julien's own firm is also doing well, last I heard. Their old boss at OMA, Rem Koolhaas, started that firm when he was barely 30. Still a bit older than 22 years, but closer to that than 40. They're the LeBron James exceptions that prove the rule though. Though there are some amazingly talented architects in their 20's, it usually takes a lot of time to get the momentum necessary to be able to be the figurehead of an organization that depends on hefty commissions to keep running. Bjarke Ingels' openly flouts the architect-as-artist model of expecting clients to bend to their every whim and instead opts for an approach of mutually beneficial compromise. It's hard to argue with the results he's achieved. By trading some of his starchitect's share of cultural capital, he's gained the trust of influential clients on an accelerated timeline. It takes a special skillset to merry that to a coherent and compelling design aesthetic, which I think is also undeniable in BIG's case.

The employed architects I know are mostly miserable designing medical office buildings and similar crap, where design = shave a few hundred bucks off of the cost of every aspect of the project.

The problem with that for architecture is most structures are meant to be occupied, and being inside a heaped structure of softer rocks isn't very nice. I do wish that I got to see a structure meant to last millennia built in my lifetime. On that timescale, I _just_ missed Mount Rushmore.

Doesn't something lasting 4,000 years imply massive over-engineering?

On the other hand, some architects could stand to learn quite a bit from structural engineers...

Yep, but the issue is that in "modern times" the two professions were divided.

Up to roughly the end of the 19th century (and in some cases even in the early 1900's) an architect was also a structural engineer, and a structural engineer also an architect (and BTW in the classical times the architect was also the structural engineer and the site director, in some cases even the builder/contractor).

The gap between the two professions has become - in my experience - wider, and with the (needed) addition of other professional and "specialized" figures (geologists, plant engineers, etc.) each profession has become narrower in scope, to the point that sometimes it is difficult to have an architect and a structural engineer communicate properly, as they each lack a "global" vision on a project.

It is also confusing in the sense that it uses the term "sound engineering" with 'sound' being the 'good/sturdy' definition, whereas the whole phrase is interchangeable with a field of study within architecture(sound/acoustic engineering)

Who says we can't replicate them? It's just not economical to do so and really serves no purpose. The world has generally moved past projects with superstitious/dubious meaning attached to them and does an actual cost/benefit on most large scale endeavors. Except for some developing countries with growing economies who have something to prove.