When we first landed in Baja, California, the question the M.Arch Core 3 studio had set out to answer–how can you design a winery for one of the driest regions in the world–already seemed wrong. We spent one week traveling from one winery to another, treated to drinks and food and admiration that was so clearly juxtaposed by the communities existing just outside of each winery’s wealthy purview. I will admit a certain excitement with all the spoils of our travel, from both the wineries and from MIT, but all of this came with a creeping sense of guilt. Who were we hurting with our presence?

The studio instructors, to their credit, encouraged us to address the political nature of the project. They would bring up questions of community, of public space, of water-saving techniques for producing wine that might help the winery minimize its impact on the existing infrastructures. But, of course, we were never allowed to ask the looming question: does Baja California really need another winery? Can architecture help with the issues that exist in the region, or will it, through both the economic and social costs of building, actually exacerbate the problem?

These are questions, I have noticed, that architects don’t like to ask. Nader Tehrani’s famous-within-the-department advice on how to begin your own architecture firm is to “never say no to a project.” Rem Koolhaas’s Junkspace makes a claim for the influence architects can have over the small moments of beauty and community within a building, even if the purpose and outlook of the architecture is the junk of its developers. All of these arguments begin from a dangerous claim: the proposed architecture will be built anyway; if you can do it better than it might otherwise be, then why not take the project?

One of the greatest oversights of this question relates to the community for which a project is proposed. Most US states–most countries–include a community review of building plans before construction permits are approved. This gives neighbors a chance to claim their right to views, to fresh air, to not facing another building’s back-end. It also often stops projects that seem detrimental to the surrounding community (too big, too corporate, too impersonal). This process (along with other permitting and financing challenges) stops a huge percentage of building proposals before construction ever begins. Hiring a well-known, well-respected architect often makes this process easier. An architect can make a not-so-great program more palatable to the public with promises of public space, minimal environmental footprint, and beautiful renderings. At what point does this become disingenuous work?

This question brings me back to the Baja California winery prompt we began our second year with. It is true, of course, that architecture above a certain size requires someone certified (architect, engineer, or otherwise experienced) to verify the health and safety requirements of a building. In that sense, architects are always needed. This does not mean, though, that architects are always best suited to address the problems of a particular region. Architecture is often a media that promotes itself–promotes development–in places that will not always benefit from it.

The answers to the specific questions given in class have been vague so far, so I’ll clarify a bit. A prompt like the Baja winery does not address the full scope of the problems in Baja, Mexico because it assumes as a premise that architecture must be a solution, and works backwards to discover problems architecture might address. The community surrounding is often only understood as a community to make some concessions for, although they are the people most affected and most aware of how architecture could help or harm. Architects, however, are working to convince communities of new projects, and these persuasions do not trust the community to know what will be good for them. The predictable consequences of something like a winery studio for Baja have to do with the related media. We know in school that our designs will never be built, but by supporting an exercise of creating a winery in Baja, and sharing these ideas and renderings and writings with the existing wineries and the MIT community, we are through just an academic project promoting the development of the region. Even if the projects are conscious of the environment and the neighbors, by the very fact that we must use architectural projects to address issues of the region, we are supporting development. I wish, at some point in school, we would be taught to just say “no.”