Professional skills in architectural design work

What is it about?

Recent works try to transpose the results of the anthropology of science and technics to architecture. This paper reviews every point of this transposition. Some works reach questionable results. Drift does not turn project into a wholly unexpected process; negociation can hide other important social relations (as constraint or communication); actors' skills are not arbitrarily interchangeable.

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Why is it important?

The failure of the transposition is then clarified by a comparison of architecture and industry design situations. Building being an only and setlled production, it is subjected to specific site constraints. Knowable ex ante, those constraints explain why design remains the hard core of architect's professional expertise, in spite of the increasing success of negociate activities.