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Second, as I said, I am an engineer and will speak from this perspective, and so this is a quote that I probably use about 10 times a week. It's tremendously overdone, but I think it captures the true spirit. And that is Theodore von Kármán. I don't know if you know who he was, rocket scientist who started the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech. He said, “Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.” Engineers create, and so, in effect, we create the world that never was. I would think, naively at least, that architecture would fit more into that second category—the creation of things that never were. They didn't exist before. An “academic engineer” is almost an oxymoron because we have two pieces, which are the classic academic paradigm. That is, we're both scientists and discoverers. We're educators. We teach the next generation, both the concepts as well as the process. The third perspective—which we do share with a number of cousins across campus, all the professions—is that we are professionals. We do design. We create technologies. This is very, very different from the traditional academic model of simply looking at—at least on the scientific side and the physical and life sciences—looking for new knowledge. There's a tension that comes about, then, as a professional in an academic or research environment. The tension, first of all, is that you're fundamentally driven by discovery, that is, the search for new knowledge. At the same time, you are trying to teach the next generation how to do things. At the same time, you're changing dynamically and daily what you're going to teach them as part of the discovery. And, then the third piece is that we create. We create our portfolios. We create our technologies that are in there, which, again, has this tension between the basic discovery, the search for, the quest for new knowledge, and educating the next generation. |
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