Architects Just Never Get Recognised for their Work, do they?
Almost 30 years ago when I joined the architecture program at Makerere University, one of our magnificent lecturers came to class and decided to spend the entire three hours asking why we ‘wanted to become architects’. We gave reasons as diverse as students attending that lecture and while most of us tried to conceal it, the ultimate reason was that we wanted to make loads of money. This was before our lecturer crashed our dreams with this statement ‘If you want to make money, go and join law’ (and many people in that class could make the cut off points for law). While that was the most hard-hitting statement (at least to us), it was not the only one. He went on to list 9 other reasons why one should not consider becoming an architect. One of the reasons was ‘the lack of recognition’. Our lecturer noted then that ‘if you are doing architecture because it sounds cool to say to your friends a...