In the realm of design and construction of buildings architecture as a discipline is meant to be practiced only by registered and licensed individuals. Architecture cannot be claimed by any technical profession as an adjunct to any technical engineering course as it is illegal and criminal as provided for in The Architecture Act of 2004, also known as Republic Act 9266.
Around the world, architecture is practiced and accepted due to the role played by the architect as the prime professional in the design and construction of buildings whom clients talk to directly when in need of architectural design services instead of talking to technical engineers. Engineering consultants are hired directly by the architect to perform the engineering part of the proposed project.
An architect's creative, artistic and intuitive mind is antipodal to the rectilinear mind of a technical engineer. The creative mind of the architect is comparable to the mind of a poet-philosopher, while a technical engineer is similar to the mind of an accountant which is all linear and mathematical in nature. While the architect's mind encompasses both the general aspects of spatial and formal style of building design, the technical engineer's mind is only limited to that particular detailed quantitative and qualitative portion of building design called structural designs or even MEPFS (mechanical electrical plumbing fire and safety) designs.
In this case, an architect cannot be a technical engineer and neither can a technical engineer be an architect. As far as the east is from the west, the mind of an architect functions differently to the mathematical mind of a technical engineer in the process of creative and artistic building design.
An architect creates, a technical engineer calculates. Though there are architects who are structural engineers at the same time but often started as civil engineer first before becoming an architect. Most of their minds are yet technical in nature and most of them teach math if not theory of structures rather than architectural design in the colleges of architecture.
There are exceptionally gifted architectural geniuses who are innovative structural engineers at the same time. Such artists-technologists like the famous Spanish architect-civil engineer Santiago Calatrava, the German architect-civil engineer Frei Otto, or the Uruguayan architect-civil engineer Eladio Dieste, or the Mexican architect Felix Candela were PhD degree holders in structural engineering aside from being masters of architecture. Great architecture of the past was created not through quantitative mathematical theory, but first by that powerful tool of the architect, which is the creative and intuitive imagination of design and second is the structural design of the engineer.Just as the Theory of Relativity of Einstein was first a product of his intuitive and creative imagination, truth in architecture is the aesthetic awe it brings and its satisfaction to the end user.
If we shall go back in time some five hundred years ago to the birthplace of the Italian High Renaissance in the 16th century Italy, this was the manifestation of the flowering of the architect's creative genius-even a hundred year hence before the appearance of the professional civil engineer in the 18th century.
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