I believe we live in the age of self-promotion. After we saw the industrial revolution in the18C, the social revolution in the 19C and the technical revolution in the 20C, today we are witnessing a Narcissistic revolution.

Good or bad, today it is all about ME (or moi, ich, ik, watashi). Time magazine dedicated their person of the year in 2006 to you.

Why? I call it “individualizers”, elements in our lives that make us more individuals. Here is my list of six individualizers:

1. Shareware: technology makes it all happen, from the internet to our mobile phones, from the banal to the exquisite, we are all witnesses and are driven with a need to share,
2. Marketing: product marketing is focusing on individualism as a form of self-expression. “You shop therefore you are” is the mantra of our times. We buy products to express not only who we are but also who we want to be. Which iPod are you?,
3. Therapy: is the new religion, over 1 million patients are treated every day in the US alone. The search for our unique selves leaves a void,
4. Real: in our confusion “the real thing’ is driving us for a search for real food, real jobs, a real home, a real family, a real me, real self-promotion,
5. Space is individualizing us: from hotels to airports and theme parks, each visitor is carefully checked and tracked. We need to prove who we are before we can enter these transitional spaces,
6. Finally, there is no place to hide. What yesterday might look like fun with the boys (and or girls), will tomorrow end up tagged as “Priceless!” on Youtube.  

The question for 2008, and here is my (easy) answer:

1. Japan has the highest pro-capita rate of architects, of the 1.2million registered architects world-wide Japan has over 300,000,

2. There are very few aesthetic regulations: anything goes,

3. In the chaos architects work hard to make their buildings stand-out,

4. Tokyo has some of the world’s most daring and cash-rich clients,

5. Japanese construction companies (not only the major ones) are the world’s most advanced,

6. Buildings have an average life-span of around 30 years,

7. The city has been destroyed many times over (and most likely will be again soon).

When one thinks about architecture and methodology "architectural programming" or brief formulating" come to mind. These are the techniques for formulating a creative process. As Robert Kumlin has written an excellent book on the subject of architectural programming, so I will not touch on it here.

The creative process is only one issue of the spectrum I have in mind when using the word methodology. At Waseda I thought for six years methodology to first year students, and we looked at the various methodological ideas and systems, such as Aristotle’s method of induction, phase space or Kepler’s backflips to make mathematical relations fit natural phenomena.

What I am interested in as I write about methodology and architecture, is to see the shifts that have been taking place within the process of architecture as a system. (I have written about this in the book: eBussines and Workplace Redesign) When we talk about architecture as a system then we need to look at what is happening both within as well as at the forces outside of architecture. I believe that there have always been two, opposing forces in place: internal and external. With internal and external I don’t mean the interior and the exterior of the space, but an entangled kind of yin-yang duality that pushes the process of architecture along. And with process I mean a persistent structure or a quality that follows a Darwinian path. This stucture is an evolutionary process that modifies the hierarchical elements of architecture slowly but at certain points the structure takes on catastrophic proportions. Our main interest thus should be towards these "modifiers". The internal and external forces are what create the shifts within the system.
Even though the system will remain open ended, in itself as a methodology it is closed. It is however important to take into consideration that these internal as well as external modifiers have always been dormant within the system, there is nothing new, and as such the system is complete. The changes are taking place only in the hierarchical interrelationships within the system.

The question of architecture and methodology really is: What is driving the formulation of our spaces?

Let us for example look at Buckminster Fuller’s methodology. Here we can see how internal and external factors shape Bucky’s design, and through his 4D thinking we can see that internally his focus has been on ways to reduce materiality while creating higher structural strength, what he calls “tensegrity”. External factors are, for example, his ideas for the Wichita house where a factory assembly line that during WW2 was building bomber planes, Bucky envisioned to be changed to a house-building plant.
I will add some more examples later on, as I think this is unchartered territory. It will tell us from a historical perspective the contribution certain architects have had on the progress of architecture. I wonder whether we would be able to able to pinpoint the catastrophic shifts within the system when we map enough of these modifiers?