why PHAD? what's it all about?

so much about presentation, in architecture, design or otherwise, is inherent in the word itself - presentation. recently, many things have been less about the quality of the material and more about the image, creating a brand, selling an idea. Our work as architects and designers should place more weight on content and less on image and sales. Serious work will not fade in the face of fashion and fad. Computer wizardry and technique is never a supplement for well thought-out content and well executed material that arises from it.

Fashion and fad are generated in a self-perpetuating cycle for a consumer culture by the media outlets of capitalist businesses, whose primary concern is profit and shareholder appeasement (read: benefit) over public welfare and social or environmental benefit. Architecture, as the pre-eminent plastic art that serves humankind as shelter and provides the environment in and around which we conduct our very existence, should not ever be subject to the seasonal fluctuations inherent in many other design disciplines. While it should be subject to questions of appropriateness and issues of aesthetics, some of these questions themselves are subject to being more or less objective, and thus sometimes somewhat subjective.

More importantly, this issue of fashion and fad in contemporary consumer society is itself a cultural epidemic, and the intent here is to counter that movement, if you will, with a one that is diametrically opposed - one that holds in highest regard and seeks to produce serious and well considered design and discourse that take as its fundamental premise the requirement that all design should benefit public welfare and contribute to social and environmental prosperity (providing a certain basic standard of living is available to its proponents in their successful and productive endeavours).

Should we not consider that all design take notice of these criteria? Should we not consider that all things that make up (read: clutter) our environment must be subject to these criteria? Should we not go so far as to enact legislation universally that ensures our right to environments free from the cluttering disease that accompanies contemporary consumer society - that of fashion and fad, advertising and sales, telemarketing and mail shots? Why suggest that architecture, whether it be well-considered, well-designed or well-executed, simply become the shell in which our over-advertised and over-consumed lives are relentlessly conducted? Should we not extend the notion of well designed environment to the entire environment and everything that we encounter? If we abstain from taking note of, then taking action on, these issues, we risk relegating architecture and the whole of design to become a backdrop for the projected desires of the corporate world and the capitalists, all of which come down to basically three things - profit, wealth and ultimately, greed.