The Career Counselors: Dennis Shelden and Scott Marble Recommend a Backup Plan

Digital Building Laboratory (DBL) director Dennis Shelden, AIA, and School of Architecture chair Scott Marble, AIA, exemplify the interdisciplinary skill set they proselytize at Georgia Tech. Trained in architecture, civil engineering, and design computation, Shelden was one of the masterminds behind Gehry Technologies (acquired by Trimble in 2014). Meanwhile, Marble tackled digital design, fabrication, and research as an associate adjunct professor at Columbia University, and as a founding partner of Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Marble Fairbanks, where he still works. At the DBL, an interdisciplinary program that brings together AECO practitioners and researchers, Shelden and Marble found kinship in crafting curricula intended for quintessentially 21st-century practitioners.

The post-professional M.S. architecture program, the duo’s crown jewel, includes specializations in building information and systems (think software development as well as supply chains and systems engineering), and in advanced production (drones, robotics, augmented and virtual reality, and the like). Couple this with Georgia Tech’s much-touted entrepreneurial resources, such as the business incubator Advanced Technology Development Center, and, Shelden says, architecture graduates can have career trajectories that were unfathomable just a decade ago.

If the application of technology to improve design and delivery inefficiencies has been disappointing to date, Shelden wants architects to hold the line. “All the weight of opportunity has been building and something’s changing now,” he says. First, the technology that has streamlined other industries, such as automobile manufacturing, has come down to a price point and an ease of use acceptable to the AEC industry. Second, he says, “other markets are getting interested in the built environment.” If architects don’t broaden their capabilities and revamp the design and construction process, “then the whole economy is going to come into this industry … and [innovate] for us.”

Data collection, analysis, and interpretation offers one opportunity for architects to lead the innovation charge. “Form, construction, and fabrication are central to our [work],” Marble says. “Now we’re into a phase of data, and we’re just starting to figure out what to do with that. The possibilities are much, much broader.”

Shelden and Marble tell their students to think entrepreneurially and broadly. Marble notes that the reliance of architecture education on other disciplines to make real progress is greater than what he once expected. Driving the industry forward “simply is not possible anymore without having meaningful collaborations and interdisciplinary work going on with other [sectors].”

“The more you can engage in thinking creatively about what you can do with an architecture degree, the more opportunities you’re going to have,” Shelden adds. Legacy firms, he says, would be wise to hire “young architects coming out of this new context to transform their business.”