Recently I had the pleasure of setting up the academic programme for a new university course that implies the creation of a new profession, the building engineer. Technically, this is not a new profession since there is no law bestowing new responsibilities on the post we formery knew as foreman, then as quantity surveyor and later technical architect. However, there will be so many changes (and some of them fundamental) that the profession will be able to develop in a totally different way. It is also curious to note that the person chosen to develop this study programme,  in a design school such as ELISAVA, is neither a designer, an engineer or a technical architect. Architects are open to new technologies and take a particular interest in the subject of sustainability and its conceptualisation, making it more widespread and improving efficiency. Perhaps then the choice of an architect is more in line with the requirements that the Bologna Protocol (1999)¹ has set out for nations within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA): to place the student in the centre of the new academic process. Teachers, facilities and even academic content are no longer the most important factors. Why we need Europe to tell us so is a mystery, but today what matters most is what students learn, what is known as the capacity acquired during the university process to deal with a real situation in any nation within the European area. Anything beyond this is a bonus.

So what should we teach? If we are to prepare students to give suitable responses when faced with real situations, then surely we should teach them to manage ideas and solutions in real contexts. Few schools here confront this dilemma, while English-speaking and Northern European countries unanimously advocate placing the student before an existing scenario. It has been proven that a response given to a tangible and comparable space is more likely to be an intelligent one. If someone sees a bicycle in action, they will forget it. If they are told how a bicycle is ridden, they will remember. But if that person is taught how to ride a real bicycle, then they will learn to do so. I see something similar in IBM’s new slogans for the US Tennis Open: Stop talking, Start doing, among other leitmotifs.

This is about preparing someone to carry out a specific action or to apply a particular method and not just to study. But beyond these ‘actions’ this new professional is part of a whole chain of actions and will therefore also have to provide advice and help. Humanities professor Josep Olives, when defending this programme, assures us that the only problems in a company are people or problems connected with people. This is why clichéd terms such as people skills, leadership or synergy, which are so necessary in achieving a vocational degree, become fundamental.

A design school whose communication is based on the slogan ‘I’m not an artist’ sees a future unlike anything we could imagine. If this slogan were applied to their other lines of study, it would read something like ‘I’m not an architect’ or ‘I’m not an engineer’, which reveals a totally different way of understanding how the society of the future will develop. There are even many now who claim that due to market and social pressures, professions such as architecture are soon to disappear. If professional corporations are weakened, which in today’s economic climate may soon become a reality, then these professions will also be weakened. Individuality, imposition and brilliance is no longer a safe guarantee for success.

But what is design in reference to architecture? When we speak of form, design is its rational analysis. When we speak of construction it means technique. Until not very long ago, architectural design was inseparable from its construction².

Perhaps architects will play a more integrating role, while building engineers from  design schools with solid technical backgrounds will help to resolve architectural problems of a purely physical nature. A building must be the most intelligent response to a problem in terms of its structural demands. It must be projected as an energy exchanger, organiser of functions and an assembled and ‘manufactured’ whole.

There is just one problem: form and technique. If architecture’s superficial and conformist spirit, along with its absurdity and banality, has lead to its decadence, then it would seem logical that adopting a more scientific spirit could allow the profession to absorb what the technical world is offering, i.e. new materials and production methods imported from other sectors, alternative structural types, etc. Our students must not only be capable of conceiving a structure but also of seeing how this structure might open the way to new concepts in architecture. We need to generalise architecture’s industrial production, base it on new technologies and learn from artisan techniques that transmit and afford value to a constructed building.

The platforms that surround these new engineers of architectural design will determine how they are taught. To start with, we live in a world where there are no longer any blank slates, no large spaces to work in and the few uninhabited areas of the planet, which in the past were protected from the dangers of climate change, are now where activity is at its most intense. The United Arab Emirates could be a good example.

Secondly, production times have changed. In under fifteen years (and not 150 as is the case in America) cities have grown and developed in a way that few places in the world can compare with, rivalling the likes of Paris, St Petersburg or Florence (for want of not mentioning Rome). Production times are more in line with the manufacturing world than the building world and must also be aimed at restoring national heritage or adapting the huge amount of existing constructions.

Strangely enough, in countries such as Japan or Canada to live in a prefabricated house is a sign of quality and economic health, while in Mediterranean and Soviet countries it is a sign of precarious living and low incomes. More significantly, car manufacturers such as Toyota or Mitsubishi now have their own housing divisions, simply because houses are now being built like cars. Large companies like Ikea or Muji are also beginning to expand, based on particular manufacturing concepts, and already have their industrialised homes on the market.

The engineer becomes the driving force behind these fantasies, fruit of an accelerated urban climate. While cities, thirsty for entertainment and consumption, are being filled with constructions, engineers remain unaware of the changes in the landscape and at the very root of the social encounters that take place there.

This highly powerful field of building engineering must therefore be given a ring of protection and the knowledge and skills to prepare for what may occur in the profession and in society.

We can actually already build whatever we want. It is hard to imagine the exercise that Wolf D. Prix de Coop Himmelb(l)au used to begin his classes: “You have to project something that cannot be built”. In today’s world we can turn whatever we desire into reality, a capacity that destroys the concept of utopia (a term that has begun to lose meaning). Maybe this is a positive development … but maybe it isn’t.

Construction is carried out unabated and unlimited. Aspects such as the role of education, culture, sustainability, design and the market are taken into account and called into question. This is the environment that today’s building engineers will have to work in. Although restricted to the functions of the profession’s predecessors (foreman, quantity surveyor and technical architect) a highly extensive framework is opening up in which to develop. These new professionals must be able to think, discover, research and innovate, to consider any existing material as the raw material for a project, to combine and fuse architecture with engineering, condense form and function, and above all they must have the capacity to build.

We understand this capacity to construct by the actual etymological root of the concept. In any field of international cooperation for instance, the term “capacity building” is used to describe the development of a certain skill or competence in order to improve developing countries. The term, however, is not limited to the work of international aid. Recently governments have begun to use this concept to transform how communities and industry address social and environmental problems.

In 1991, the UNDP³ defined action and thought as necessary elements for “building capacity”. The capacity to create a suitable environment for development, with all the necessary regulations and tools. A continuous, long-term process (as stated by the UN in the Millennium Objectives) in which everyone takes part. This definition encompasses all aspects of sustainability: social participation, an economic framework and environmental considerations. The new building engineer will need to operate where these three areas intersect.

When I ask my students, “what is the essence of a doctor’s mission?” it takes minutes to reach the by no means trivial conclusion: to save human lives. Later on we arrive at the second part of the same conclusion regarding what it means to be a doctor: to cure those who are ill.

Determining what is the essence of an architect, however, takes hours. If we consider Stephen R. Covey’s⁴, words; “first things first”, the fundamental aim of the architect is to provide housing. And the second would be to create habitable towns and cities.

So the building engineer’s basic principles will be to create both housing and cities, with the best techniques available and with the best ethics in mind.

Examples do not abound, but work by architects such as Japan’s Shigeru, Italy’s Renzo Piano, engineers like India’s Cecil Balmond, Germany’s Frei Otto or Werner Sobek, Spain’s Javier Rui-Wamba, Catalonia’s Robert Brufau or English engineers such as Ove Arup & Partners or Buro Happold, perfectly present the idea that needs to be transmitted: the architect in the service of society, the consultant in the service of professionals, without losing any of their capacity for design, offering all the knowledge they have to improve solutions or even invent them, without neglecting the responsibility we owe our environment or our social and ethical responsibilities.

This new educational curriculum will enable students to become the driving force behind today’s non-standard architecture and will include all the necessary content to allow them to standardise its production.