In the past, the vast majority of the facilities that we still have with us today were engineering-led. Architecture was considered to be a subset of engineering, particularly in the academic world. But in the 1950s, architecture branched out as a discipline of its own. The idea of the architectural engineer was lost. Only eight schools in the United States now offer architectural engineering degrees. The engineering schools and the landscape architects branched off in their own specialties. Part of this specialization, I learned, was driven by promotional opportunities, part of it was driven by the specializations that students were seeking.

In the process of dividing ourselves in the design communities, we created much more depth at the expense of breadth and understanding the intersections of ideas and initiatives. The governments, the engineering firms, and the design firms follow the primary academic model in terms of these specializations. The specialization produces a lot of good but it also creates some problems for problem solving downstream.

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