Architectural References

What is Valuable?

A reading list is meaningless if it includes every book ever written. A museum is not a museum if it includes every object in the world. The value of institutions is that they curate information. There's only so much time in the day and space on the planet, so we need to prioritize what's valuable. Systems of self-referencing exist for this purpose. Our responsibility as a society, within our respective fields, is to identify what is valuable for future generations. We shouldn't expect students to find it for themselves.

Why Does it Matter for Architecture?

When students are deprived of what exists in architecture, they don't know what to study. They aren't taught the profession, so they assume that the profession doesn't exist. They think architecture is whatever they want it to be. It causes them to distrust institutions in general. Is there even such a thing as learning? If nothing matters beyond ourselves because everything is opinion, why should I listen to others? The downstream implications are not good for a profession that relies on knowledge, consensus, communication, and collaboration.

Is Architecture Accessible?

We should strengthen the consensus in architecture by improving our self-referencing system. Architecture has many authoritative sources, but they aren't readily available to students. We shouldn't have to wade through muck before we find something valuable. Scholarship provides only what we need to know from statistically-proven sources.

How is Self-Referencing Statistically Proven?

Fortunately, competence recognizes competence. When architects achieve value, they know what it is and what it looks like. They have proven it themselves, so they can identify it in others. That is why professional organizations and competitions are headed by leaders in the field. We know this intuitively when we ask a principal architect for a reference and not an intern. The weight behind the principal's reference is backed by the number and weight of their own references. Every field relies on some form of citation analysis to decide responsibility. We shouldn't give the profession over to people who aren't interested in architecture. Uninterested people can only guess at what's valuable because they don’t know the profession. If they claim that the top three architects in the world are X, Y, and Z, but X says that Y and Z are bad, the lack of reciprocity signifies error. How can they value X, but ignore X's evaluation of Y and Z? If, on the other hand, the top-voted architects self-reference each other, it signifies consensus because it would be statistically impossible otherwise. The person with the most weight behind them correctly identified the consensus, which means that everyone was correct to give that person weight. Not every consensus is easy to discern, but weighted references give us the best way to find value. The more context we feed into the system, the more accurate it becomes over time. It helps to include related fields and other metrics to check against the results.