Building the Architect's Character ― Explorations in Traits

An understanding of architects’ character traits can offer important insights into how they design buildings. These traits include leadership skills necessary to coordinate a team, honest and ethical behavior, being well educated and possessing a life-long love of learning, flexibility, resourcefulness, and visionary and strategic thinking. Characteristics such as these describe a successful person. Architects also possess these traits, but they have additional skills specifically valuable for the profession. These will include the ability to question the use of digital media, new materials, processes, and methods to convey meaning in architectural form. Although not exhaustive, a discussion of such subjects as defining, imaging, persuading, and fabricating will reveal representational meaning useful for the development of an understanding of architects’ character. Through the analogies and metaphors found in Greek myth, the book describes the elusive, hard-to-define characteristics of architects to engage the dilemmas of a changing architectural landscape. Building the Architect’s Character: Explorations in Traits examines traditional and archetypal characteristics of the successful architect to ask if they remain relevant today.

Kendra Schank Smith is a Professor of Architectural Science at Ryerson University, Canada. With a Ph.D. in architecture from Georgia Tech, she has written on representation, urbanism, and education, and has published two books on architectural sketches. She is the co-author of Developing Your Design Process: Six Key Concepts for Studio.

Albert C. Smith is an Associate Professor of Architectural Science at Ryerson University, Canada. He holds a Ph.D., from Georgia Tech, in architecture with an interest in representation. Smith is the author of Architectural Model as Machine and co-author of Developing Your Design Process: Six Key Concepts for Studio.