Independently this week, we have written elsewhere on the idea of the architect as urban explorer.

Edwin’s piece ‘Intellectual Disaster Tourism‘ is featured over on Archined, where he casts the architect as contemporary urban archaeologist, continually seeking the ‘perverse pleasure’ of studying the next city in decline. With Detroit as his example, hollowed out by mass unemployment leading to urban decay, Edwin cites a ‘reversal of roles’, whereby

‘the affluent west receives intellectual development aid; the second and third worlds supply the apparently over-developed, trouble-free Europe with challenging cases for education and research. Young academics are scarcely aroused or stirred by problems within the borders of their own country any more. They’ve got to be more spectacular, more exotic, more extreme.’

Similarly, Rory and Todd Reisz have written of ‘The Architect as a City Critic’ over on the Huffington Post, as part of a new weekly blog looking at all things Al Manakh. Here, the recent emphasis on ‘research’ as a precondition to building is exposed as a competition of one-upmanship, with architects travelling further and further into ‘unexplored’ territory to stake their claim and expose the strange spatial experiments to the world. Focusing specifically on the Gulf region of the Middle East, it nevertheless emphasises the importance of understanding the rapid urbanisation of Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, too often dismissed as unsustainable folly.

What both posts agree upon is that, whatever the motive, architects must immerse themselves in and interpret the wider world in order to design for it.