Negative Chain

Not only has the construction industry not regained the social trust it lost due to the earthquake resistance falsification issue, but the problem of falsifying Structural Engineering is still ongoing. Following this extremely low-bid bid scandal, the construction industry has been under fire since the end of last year for the bribery scandal involving a civil engineering design firm that involved the former governor of Miyazaki Prefecture, and the bid-rigging scandal involving general contractors for the Nagoya subway construction project. There is no way that trust can be restored under these circumstances.

The main stakeholders surrounding architecture are the building owner, designer, contractor, government, users, and local community members. If architecture creates the human environment and culture, we must consider that its influence extends directly and indirectly to all of these people. If a client uses its economic advantage as a weapon to accept a bid price that it knows is clearly an unreasonably low price, it should be condemned as an antisocial act. It is selfish to ask the creator to create something with all their heart while engaging in selfish acts. If such acts are acceptable, a healthy society cannot be built. In a situation where designers are dumping, contractors are colluding, and clients are artificially selecting contractors, there is no way that mutual trust can be created. The actions of these three parties will have a chain reaction that will affect others, and if the actions are socially negative, it will inevitably make people's positions difficult as a negative chain. We must break this negative chain.

According to the 2003 Basic Survey on Wage Structure compiled by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare after a survey of more than 42,000 business establishments, first-class architects are ranked 9th overall. First place goes to pilots, whose average annual income is 14.85 million yen (average age 39.2 years old), and while this is only half of that, first-class architects are still in the top ten with an average annual income of 7.23 million yen (average age 38.8 years old). According to the first Basic Survey on Children's Lives conducted by the Benesse Educational Research and Development Center, architects are ranked 12th out of the top 20 careers that elementary school students want to pursue. For junior high school students, they are ranked 20th, and for high school students, they are ranked 14th. These results show that architects are recognized as a socially important profession, and that they are a profession that children in particular aspire to. Prime Minister Abe is now calling on the people to create a "beautiful country, Japan." Architects are one of the professions that are expected to contribute to nation-building. Nation-building is also said to be about developing people. We must reconstruct a positive chain in which people involved in architecture work together to create things with a sense of fulfillment.

To achieve this, consideration for others and a fair sense of ethics are required even in the midst of free competition. Architecture that is built on a fair relationship of trust between the client, designer, and contractor is architecture that truly contributes to society.