ABSTRACT
Since 1960, architecture in North America has participated in if not actually been at the forefront of a welter of global transformations concerning the built environment. Primary among these are the challenge of housing ever increasing populations and the dilemma of how to develop ever more square kilometers of the earth’s surface for this particular purpose as well as others. Simultaneously, architectural designs have forcefully shaped our understanding of both the socio-cultural upheavals accompanying these changes and the technical innovations and economic realities enabling them. While the profession was the strongest force shaping a sizeable role for architects within the production, maintenance and management of the built environment, concern with the status of architecture as a discipline contributed to an increased importance for the eld as a symbolically robust and dynamic cultural force. From the rise in authority of the architect-planner during the 1960s, to the bolstering of architecture as a corporate service profession and identity-fashioner during the heyday of postmodernism in the 1980s, on to the emergence of more maverick, conceptual and interdisciplinary models of practice since then (enabled largely through exploitation of advanced digital technologies), the profession has gradually encompassed wide new areas of expertise while retaining many if not most of its earlier concerns. Yet while the eld has evolved to become far more carefully attuned to matters of publicity, branding and entrepreneurship than it was during the rst decades of the twentieth century, its ability to reect, enhance or even aect social progress has ebbed and owed over the last half century.
