PETER GLUCK´S SOCIAL WORK
An outspoken architect points the way to socially responsible practice by building his own designs.

Peter Gluck has a problem with the AIA.
(The American Institute of Architects - link)
He has a problem with architectural education too. Really he has a problem with the whole profession of architecture as it is currently practiced. Economic exploitation of youth. Big ideas in service of the highest bidder. Callow young CAD monkeys trained in archispeak. Designers who don’t know how to build. Engineers rescuing forms untethered from reality. He doesn’t seem like an angry person: he’s a sort of laid-back father figure with a gentle demeanor who appears to relish his work. But don’t get him started on the irresponsibility of architects and the way the profession is practiced. Or do get him started: you might learn something.
“I don’t belong to the AIA,” Gluck says during a BMW station-wagon tour of his recent New York projects, among them a campus for Bronx Prep, a charter school for 800 students in the South Bronx, and a center for the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, a nonprofit that works with poor families and immigrants in East Harlem. “I think they’re the problem, not the solution. It’s a group of people who get together to promote themselves; they’re not interested in really looking at the profession and...
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