Photo courtesy of AIA Florida Gulf Coast

Last weekend's AIA Florida Gulf Coast Design Conference encompassed a straight-forward yet multi-faceted message of 'Designing With Vision' this year. As such, the elite group of architectural members recruited industry namesake Jonathan Glancey, Hon. FRIBA — acclaimed British architectural critic, journalist, author, curator, radio and television broadcaster — as this year's speaker to expound on the topic at hand. While the annual awards for the ceremony was held at The Art Ovation Hotel, Thursday, October 29, Glancey presented and spoke via Zoom from his homebase in the UK. "I would have liked to have brought myself, but because travel is difficult at the moment I pre-recorded my conference talk from a studio in a former USAF fighter base at Rendlesham not far from home in Suffolk, some eighty miles north of London," he shares. "This is where a UFO supposedly landed in 1980. It was reported by senior American and British air force officers and, unexplained, the incident is known as 'Britain’s Roswell.' So, this is as good a place as any to think about Vision, how we see our world and our place in it through architectural eyes, the theme of this year’s Sarasota Design Conference." 

SRQ: What is architecture to you, and what do you think is important for architects to recognize about their profession and trade? 

Glancey: Architecture is a marriage of art and science, technology and craft, economics and what’s possible with available resources. It’s also about landscape, place, politics and ecology. To create worthwhile and special architecture isn’t easy, so it’s important for architects to stretch themselves to think of ways we can get the very best from the profession and to convince clients and politicians to support that.  

Can you touch on how you discussed the Conference's themed thread this year 'Designing With Vision' in your virtual presentation? 

At a time when we aren’t free to travel, we can look closer to home for architectural inspiration. Although my talk toured imaginative architecture from around the world, and through the centuries, it’s really about place, how we respond to the places around us with imagination, intelligence and sensitivity. I want to think about the role grand architectural visions play in shaping architects’ work and in the great sweep of buildings around us. But, I’m very wary of architectural vision on a grand scale. If we stop to look carefully at what’s around us – the turn of a stair, the play of light and shadows in our homes, the extraordinarily rich life, structures and patterns in our gardens, on our balconies, we might learn even more that’s worthwhile for architecture than from grand plans, abstruse theories, the latest design techniques and see architecture not as something imposed from above but as complementary to the natural world and our place within it. 

What do you hope attendees took away and gained from the Conference? 

To look afresh and to question, even for a moment, their architecture, their world.

Photo courtesy of AIA Florida Gulf Coast

Read Jonathan Glancey's full bio here.