Architect magazine knocks it out of the park in a couple of recent arcticles and interviews. Are we as architects a service profession, or are we sculptors, artists, auteurs? In an opinion piece taking on New Urbanism's critics, Jeff Speck, former director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts and co-author of Suburban Nation and The Smart Growth Manual throws in a couple of gems:

"...I live in a Modernist house, but I don’t let my personal style preference doom my clients...."

"...while most of us were trained in architecture school to serve clients and patrons with sophisticated designs, nobody prepared us for the vast collection of customers that we would take on..."

In an interview with Grace Kim, co-founder of Seattle-based Architectural firm Schemata Workshop, writer Edward Keegan notes: "Most of them probably wouldn't trumpet it, but architects are in the service industry." Kim notes that she has purposefully ingrained client satisfaction into the culture of the firm:

"Client satisfaction is the first of five objectives we listed when we started the firm,".... Design is "the reason we do what we do," she adds, "but we don't practice architecture as a service to ourselves."

See more at Schemata Workshop's blog: schemataworkshop.wordpress.com , or read her book: The Survival Guide to Architectural Internship and Career Development . Architectural writer Mark Lamster notes in an article on design thinking that

"Too many architects don't just want a seat at the table, but the seat at the very head of the table."

Without a client, an architect can only draw. Bringing form into existence is a team effort, and unless an architect is independently wealthy, the practice of architecture requires collaboration with a client.