Architects Poem by gershon hepner

Architects



Architectural power is in vogue.
Architects are never vague,
which is why they are so close
to power centers. They have class,
like God, who of the universe
is called the Architect, of course,
and work with great strategic savvy,
leaving lifting that is heavy,
beams of steel and concrete boulders,
to the engineers and builders
and men within the dark dominion
controlling all their work, trade union,
ending up with superstatus
plus high fees with which they hit us
when, like Norman Foster and Frank Gehry,
they have pleased the Pritzker jury.
Till then, they must starve like doctors
for Medicare and struggling actors
or, without tenure, Bible scholars
for whom no office offers billers,
unlike investment bankers and
attorneys of whom I’m not fond.


Christopher Hawthorne writes about architects in the LA Times, August 29,2007 (“Architects want to move closer to centers of power”) :

Karl Rove, the canny and controversial presidential advisor who will be leaving the White House at the end of the week, may have more enemies than anybody in Washington. He also may have more nicknames. George Bush calls him 'boy genius.' Critics of the administration have often described him as 'Bush's brain.' But the name that has really stuck with Rove over the years is 'the architect.' In January 2000, before Bush had competed in a presidential primary, he was asked about Rove's role in shaping his campaign strategy. 'Karl gets credit for being the architect of it, ' he said, 'and he should.' He famously repeated the term at a news conference after his 2004 victory over John Kerry. Wayne Slater and James Moore titled their second book on Rove, published last year, 'The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.' What is it about architecture that makes it so attractive as a metaphorical job description? There's Bill Walsh, the NFL coach who after he died last month was widely remembered as 'the architect of the West Coast offense.' And Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Osama bin Laden's Rove, often is called the architect of 9/11. Don't forget James Madison, architect of the Constitution, or Alfred Hitchcock, labeled by one of his biographers 'the architect of anxiety.' The computer industry is full of information and software 'architects' who do their building with zeros and ones.
And, of course, there's God: architect of the universe.The architect label suggests precision, strategic savvy and the ability to consider a project from a certain analytical remove - to see the whole chessboard at a glance. It describes the person who sketches out a complex plan but never the one who executes it. As a metaphor, it's a step up from 'engineer, ' which used to be as common a rhetorical title as architect is now. Somebody in Rove's position a few decades ago would have been said to have 'engineered' an electoral victory; those architects at Intel and Microsoft were once called software engineers. But engineering, a profession that tends to be more esteemed in quickly growing industrial societies than in postindustrial ones like ours, has none of the Machiavellian undertones required to capture the scope of Rove's role. It implies pure expertise - all science and no art. In his canonical 'Ten Books on Architecture, ' written in the 1st century BC, Roman architect Vitruvius argued that successful buildings had three qualities in common: firmness, commodity and delight. In other words, to qualify as a piece of architecture, a structure had to be not only stable and useful but beautiful.

8/29/07

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