I've been prompted to think about this again.
Six people died in a block of flats recently. It looks as if the reason for the deaths is a bodged services conversion job by Southwark Council. My guess is that they didn't employ an Architect.
Architects can't claim to be the most technically knowledgeable people in the world. What they do is to pull everything together. They ensure that things are designed, not in the sense that that somebody splashes a big felt-tip on large sheets of paper to come up with a fancy image, but in the sense that all the component parts are fit for the purpose, and they fit together to make a building that is considered at every scale from the smallest penetration in a sheet of plasterboard to the impact it has on its surroundings. That's quite a big job, but one that has to be done.
A few years ago I worked for a practice that was engaged by a housing association to mastermind two 'estate transfers'. My work comprised as much knocking on doors, and stumbling through language barriers as it did drawing. One estate, a crumbling thirties job, went very well. The other, an eleven story slab, sank without trace.
The reason for the sinking was that the full height glazing that covered one side of the slab block, running from balcony to balcony, hadn't been designed. The council had gone out to contractors who had assembled packages from sub-contractors, who had gone to window section manufacturers. The penny dropped when the caretaker told me that one of the sliding doors had fallen out of it's frame. I had a little play with the door, and it fell out on me - I'm quite strong, but even so it was a struggle to keep the thing from knocking me over. We went back through the procurement and supply chain and discovered that, although the glazing complied with the building regulations and the codes of practice, nobody had sat down and designed it for that particular use. Cue potential bill of one million pounds to replace. Exit housing association stage left.
So, perhaps the challenge of seeing something through, of bringing all the people and all the knowledge together might be something that your daughter would relish. It is a bit of a strain, and I usually cope by being unkind to people, but it is a task that has value. If I (or any number of others) had been engaged on that block in Southwark those six people wouldn't have died.
