Architecture as a legal profession started around 1857 and has evolved in various ways as we know it today. Architects, until the existence of social media, established their name because of their live projects and mouth-to-mouth publicity because in that era there was no social media or any internet facilities, but today’s world and future mostly depend and tend to expand only due to social media.
The power of social media is such that it can make a person from 0 levels go to a 100 level in just a few hours and not even days. Now every profession has some social media accounts or blogs that showcase their thoughts to the world in less amount of time.
Today every common man is on any other social media let it be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the list goes on and wants you to watch the content that is unique and not repetitive. So as an architect social media plays an important role in displaying your different works on a platform where every kind of person can see them, understand them and get inspired by the works. The vastness of social media has now generated employment opportunities, as now the firms or companies employ a social media manager to manage their social handles and to have consistency to appear in the feed of the local public.
When we now open social media, the trending architectural works is by the young and millennial architects, as they have grown in a social media era and knows how to use it efficiently with all kinds of animation and graphical representation that enhance the aesthetic of the overall project and gives variety content to the local public to appreciate it. Architecture is all about experience and so is the medium to reach a large crowd all over the world.
After observing the young architects on social media, the older firms also have started to showcase their upcoming and previous works so that they can stand in this competitive market.
For young architects, social media gives them a great opportunity to create a market for themselves as according to bylaws architects cannot publicize their firms or their names but through the help of social media, architects can tell the world what kind of work they do and all the information any client needs to know. Social media can let young architects learn about what is the trend going on and can learn new technologies through it. A person sitting in India can know that an architect in the US or anywhere in the world is using sustainable build forms or materials through social media and can contact him/her for learning those technologies.
In the Covid pandemic situation, there is a boom of the social media in all sectors, the young architect’s hosted webinars, created surveys for post-pandemic architecture and introduced competitions among the architectural students, and have interactive sessions with other architects all around the world and learning new software skills, this is only the result of the social media reach around the world where all the architects and designers came on a platform and explored there field to the fullest.
The future of architects lies in UGC (user-generated content), which lets the public talk about architects, their works, technologies they use, and the brands. Everything on the social media is connected like if, in any project, it has a description which explains the whole concept and the materials, then using hashtags or tagging those brand in the post gives the post a reach in the construction field as well, so basically social media can expand the reach with just tags also.
Social media also provides different kinds of feedback to the young architects and appreciation from the senior architect’s which can boost morale and encourage the young architects to create more interesting designs and research.
For architects, social media is a third-person perspective which could also be considered as a criticism as architects provide what clients demand but the third person (social media) would give an unbiased opinion on the content. Good content could be related to the general public and can reach a global audience and not get restricted to just one area or country.
Social media has provided the architect with all kinds of formal and informal interactions to expand their thoughts and to utilize the social platform to transform cities from virtual thinking to taking steps to create it.
But social media needs to be used wisely as it can bring many benefits to the young architects but sometimes it can also degrade the name and the work of the same. There needs to be truth and reality and not exaggerated versions of works to be depicted on social media as it would lead to misleading which would eventually bring down the name of the architect.
