At a moment when the word “design” has come to refer to everything and thus nothing, Harvard Design Magazine 52 examines the state of architectural practice today. Once asserted to be the “mother art” (Frank Lloyd Wright) and “the ultimate goal of all creative activity” (Walter Gropius), architecture over the past century has lost its purchase on such grandiose claims to creative primacy and world-building. At the same time, however, architecture remains a ubiquitous point of reference for a wide range of disciplines and protagonists that influence the design of the things we use and the environments we inhabit. And so we start this issue with one simple prompt: what do architects actually make and how is this changing?

The answer to the first part of that question—and where this issue takes its theme—is that architects produce instruments of service, the things they are contractually bound to deliver. As defined in standard form contracts from the American Institute of Architects, “Instruments of Service are representations, in any medium of expression now known or later developed, of the tangible and intangible creative work performed by the Architect and the Architect’s consultants under their respective professional services agreements. Instruments of Service may include, without limitation, studies, surveys, models, sketches, drawings, specifications, and other similar materials.”

In other words, instruments of service are the instruction manuals, deliverables, and documents that direct the translation of a design idea into built form. Architects have invented and codified these instruments over time to convey and communicate design intent, to exert control over the translation of ideas to material construction, and to manage liability. These instruments define architects’ relationship with labor and construction, and reflect their responsibility to society more broadly.

However, the nature of what architects produce and how they go about producing it is undergoing significant change due to a variety of external pressures, including increasing project complexity, role specialization, technological advances, and the integration of fields including architecture, engineering, and construction within increasingly large, in many cases publicly traded, companies. In addition, architects and designers are, rightly so, expected to engage and contribute to an expanding and continuously changing set of cultural, social, and ethical values beyond their contractual obligations. And so the role of the architect is caught between competing priorities and value systems—market returns, environmental response, social equality, and cultural relevance—and it’s a bind that calls into question the raison d’être of architectural practice itself. What architects make is inextricably tied to whom or what they are making something for and why. And when the nature of what architects make changes—that is, when the nature of their instrumentation changes—the organizational structure and operating frameworks of design as both a practical and intellectual endeavor also become malleable.

But the situation is even more complicated, in that the different priorities and value systems that architecture finds itself caught between are cultivated, reflected, and amplified in a variety of ways and to varying degrees by the different spheres that make up the field of architecture writ large: the discipline, the profession, and the practice of architecture. The discipline of architecture as we know it in the United States (as well as many other parts of the world) has its origins in antiquity, and is a body of cultural and theoretical knowledge still largely shaped by the specific context of the European Renaissance and the succession of movements that followed. It constitutes the body of research, formal education, and inherited disciplinary values that define architecture as an intellectual pursuit and is tasked with preparing designers for practice in the world. In contrast, the profession of architecture is relatively new and inherently local. Ordinarily, it consists of the professional bodies that administer licensure, which are bound by the geographic and political limits of licensure and the regulatory laws and codified values of a specific state or nation. Meanwhile, the practice of architecture refers to the actual activity of designing buildings and cities, which is a global and continuously changing endeavor that is highly responsive to shifts in technology, politics, and economic dynamics.

These three spheres are by turns complementary and in tension with one another. While the practice of designing buildings remains agile and agnostic to change (it simply reshapes itself to absorb whatever may come), the profession is made increasingly brittle by its general suspicion of and resistance to such change, by threats to market share from outside competitors, and by industry norms that become entrenched by the bureaucratic and technological apparatuses created to support them. At the same time, the profession’s relentless drive toward specialization of technical skills, on one hand, and the discipline’s proliferation of narrower and narrower areas of academic expertise, on the other, has put significant distance between the two spheres and their communities, making it challenging for practitioners to participate in the intellectual project of architecture. And it’s a chasm that only grows with time.

The spheres of practice, profession, and discipline that constitute the field of architecture provide a rich framework to examine the question we started this issue with: what do architects actually make? In answering that question, we seek to understand the architect’s myriad roles in society today and their capacity to make change in a world in crisis. The field is diversifying and expanding in so many directions, both within and beyond the limits of professional practice, and it is unclear what will endure and what will succumb to disruption in the face of accelerating change. What we do know is that whatever may come, and however architects may hope to effect substantive, values-driven change in the world through design, architectural instrumentation will be at the center of it, and even as instrumentation itself is bound for transformation in yet unknown ways.

The issue that follows is organized into two sections—“Artifacts,” which begins to establish the history and present context necessary for answering our question, and “Instruments of Service,” which turns toward the question more directly and walks straight into it. As a whole, the issue brings together voices from across the practice, profession, and discipline of architecture as well as experts from other fields that are deeply integrated with architecture or that resemble architecture in its makeup as a professional body and therefore have important lessons to offer. Some contributors reconstruct the particular histories of what architects do. Some offer critical assessments of the present or advocate for future trajectories for the field. And some speculate where architects might be now if the past couple of centuries had unfolded differently. All of these contributions are expressed through a variety of formats, but an essential one that appears throughout the issue is dialogue. Across so many spheres of architecture and such a wide variety of different kinds of deep expertise, dialogue emerged as an especially effective means of teasing out how specific ideas, innovations, and challenges affect different stakeholders—in architecture and our built environment—differently. For us, it was a lesson in the immense value of conversation and one that we hope the field may take forward, in all of its disparate parts.