by Marshall E. Purnell, FAIA

Summary: The future path of our profession is laid out in the AIA’s Strategic Plan. If you haven’t looked at it lately—or at all!—go to the AIA’s homepage. It’s short, so it won’t take too much time to read.

But don’t confuse short for easy.

The priorities—especially diversity, integrated project delivery, and sustainability—are challenging. They’re tough. They require new ways of thinking. So much so that you might want to throw up your hands and say, “Why bother? What difference can I make?”

The power of example
Don’t underestimate the power of your example in shaping the actions of your partners, your neighbors, and your children. Leading by example is in fact the best resource we’ve got to take on the challenges facing our profession and our planet.

People who watch you—and they do—will have their consciousness raised. They in turn will raise the consciousness of others, until we reach that tipping point where collaboration and respect within the building team is automatic . . . where the vision of a profession that truly mirrors our society begins to become a reality . . . and where the tide turns from exploiting the earth to an attitude of reverence, stewardship, and healing.

The same communications tools that challenge those of us who are digital immigrants can be the megaphone through which the impact of our actions can be magnified around the world.

The challenge
What I’m challenging each of us to do is this: We should conduct ourselves in ways that say we take responsibility for the health of our industry, our society, and our planet. Identify something we can do in our communities and in our firms, however small, to gain moral standing.

Be the leader architects are meant to be: Buy a hybrid car; better yet, bike to work. Take a member of the building team out to lunch; get acquainted. Go into your local school and share with the children the wonder that is architecture and the miracle that is the planet Earth.

If each of us does something, others will follow our example. That’s what leaders do.

Bigger than a lifetime
In our homes and in our offices we can demonstrate that our relationship to other members of the building team . . . the under-represented in our society…and the very land itself need not be zero-sum; that as long as there’s life, there’s hope. In doing so, we’ll start to bring about the very things that seem impossible to achieve today.

We are like the builders of the great medieval Cathedrals, struggling to express a thought too great to achieve in our lifetime, a thought that must be left for future generations to spell out. But spell it out they will if we dare to take the first steps.

What a privilege to belong to a profession that has the vision and courage to take those first steps. Leading by example, what can’t we achieve?