Architecture is a profession in crisis. 

It’s revered as this great influence on our built environment, a profession that designs how we live and work. We defer to these supposed geniuses, but the truth is, we don’t actually need them. One statistic makes that clear: According to Arch Daily, only 2% of homes in the United States are designed by architects. When it comes to it, people just don’t seem to find the extra cost worthwhile. 

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This statistic could be reflective of the fact that for centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, people built their own houses without much involvement from designers, whose talents were reserved for public works or wealthy clientele. The thing is, we no longer build our own houses. Architects could design them. 

Crucially, though, they don’t. And society moves on, because the profession is disconnected from the general public.

In the modern era, architects are highly concerned with the concept of honesty and enamored with the novel. Through honesty, they seek to express form and material composition clearly and without obstruction, while the novel pushes them to reinvent the medium with every design. 

The problem with this thinking is that it often leaves the most important element of architecture unconsidered: the person occupying it. Very often, modern buildings are so self-absorbed in the expression of their own uniqueness or commentary that they neglect the people who are supposed to be using the space they create. 

One of the first modern houses, Villa Savoye by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret — who used the pseudonym Le Corbusier — had unbearable flooding due to its novel flat roof. The entire post-modernist movement was a satirical take on modernism predicated on the nihilistic belief that design and rules are arbitrary. 

Los Angeles’ own Walt Disney Concert Hall has an interior that conforms so rigidly to the forms expressed externally that many spaces meant for human occupation, such as couches, are warped to unusability.

Houses are hardly developed with the aid of an architect because the extra money developers would have to pay is not worth the added superfluity of uncalled-for novelty.

But this self-absorption within architecture was not always the case. Before the advent of modernism, architects concerned themselves with the pursuit of an objective beauty. While scientifically unrigorous, this concern with beauty — a term largely ignored within the contemporary architectural sphere — led to centuries of buildings that simply made the spaces they occupied better.

Vitruvius wrote on the ideal proportions of columns in 27 B.C.E., Leon Battista Alberti sought to study and replicate the beauty of the great ancient monuments in 1452 and in the 17th century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini worked tirelessly to create works so gorgeous they inspired divinity within the audience.

It is my belief that the most important element of architecture is beauty — above structure, above efficiency. Of course, the primary purpose of a building is to provide shelter. But architecture is not the buildings themselves, but an act of design. While design should consider function, its primary goal is to please. 

People travel the globe to visit functionally useless architecture that has existed for centuries and take up space that could arguably be used for more functional spaces. We call these places ruins.

And many people feel the same way. As recently as a decade ago, a small group of Swedish architecture enthusiasts protested what they saw as buildings that did not match the needs or desires of the public by creating an online movement called the Architectural Uprising. 

Among their concerns was that modern architecture, with its vast, glassy facades, worsened the already dreary Nordic winters by reflecting an oppressively gray sky. The movement has grown internationally and has even garnered political backing in Sweden.

Presently, architecture is trying to be an art that communicates to the head rather than the heart. It espouses novelty and bare materiality in an effort to confront some kind of greater ideological truth. But people don’t need that. They want to feel cared about, like their space is meant for them. It’s likely the reason why such a high proportion of students do not prefer USC’s newest buildings — they reflect abstract values, but not people’s basic wants.

Beauty may be subjective, but it’s not that hard. Just considering it and citing what has already been successful has worked for centuries. It’s not as though that would suddenly change today.

If architecture is to matter again, then it should express that the people using it matter, too.

Daniel Pons is a sophomore majoring in geodesign writing about USC’s architecture and how it impacts the community. His column, “Walls of Troy,” runs every other Monday.