The past century of architectural history can be understood as a continual diminishing of the architect’s domain of expertise, which has been fragmented away and delegated to a vast body of adjacent specialists — structural consultants, glazing consultants, energy consultants, lighting consultants, acoustics consultants, security consultants, waterproofing consultants, to name a few — whose necessity is demanded from often already bloated budgets, and whose number grows exponentially with the increasing scale of any given project.
Under these conditions, architects themselves seem to have little left from which to derive their own disciplinary legitimacy. Our only domain of authority that so far remains relatively unscathed by this fragmentation seems to be our supposed ability to subordinate the chaos of material, labor, and business to a delicious and delicate mirage of meaning. One way we construct this mirage is through detail.