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While the last thirty years have been some of the most peaceful in European history, they have been incredibly noisy. Much has been said, seen, heard and written about the stratospheric innovations in tech, retail and communication. The huge success of these sectors has skewed our perception of the world around us. Construction in particular has languished in the wake of this expansion.

Property price inflation has concealed stagnating productivity rates, consecutive recessions have introduced volatility to the industry, leading to shortfalls in adequate investment or technological improvement. The relative prosperity of the global economy has created the space for construction to stagnate.

To an extent, the lack of any significant social upheaval in the shape of a world war or significant financial collapse has contributed to the situation we find ourselves in. The defining work of our time is funded by the most commercially successful players, and is designed to distract rather than inspire or unite. Today's headline-dominating architecture reveals not only the priorities but also the shortfalls of our society.

The architects we are taught about at university created forceful and inspiring work. In the design-driven studio we students focus on the buildings that they produced, but in the time since architecture school I have wanted to understand the historical contexts that each of these architects faced more than the buildings they delivered. 

Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun and Walter Gropius were swept along with the desire for reinvention after the destruction seen during the Great War. The monolithic and forceful architecture of Hitler's Germany rose from the destitution that Germany suffered at the hands of its European cousins. Stalin used colossal civic interventions and totalitarian city planning to instil optimism in the communist project.

Here in the UK the Powell and Moya generation were at the forefront of the post Second World War rebuild, with projects such as the Museum of London and events such as the Festival of Britain breathing positivity into a country desperate to repair itself from the ravages of war. Powell Chamberlin and Bonn designed the Barbican centre from the ashes of a central London bombsite. Later, Erno Goldfinger would design Trellick Tower in West London as a powerful advocate of post-war Brutalism.

The commonality in all of these cases is that great social upheaval and change provided the fuel that the creative world needed to produce timeless but more importantly useful work. Our predecessors committed to supporting their respective causes which (if you approve of them or not) provided them with a clear vision of what their architecture stood for.

I'm not saying that in order to do interesting or historically significant work you have to live in turmultuous times, but it does seem to have helped many of those we now revere. What I do think we have to do is get a tighter grip on what we want the ideology for our era to be. What legacy do we want to leave?

To be honest, I don't understand or know what the vision for our time is, so I find it very hard to defend the work I am doing. I can confidently defend my work from town planning, financial and legislative perspectives, but the hard part is justifying the aesthetic 'architectural' decisions that are made in the design process, because these are more subjective. Often these are born out of trend and precedent rather than any deep seated vision or aspiration. One person's idea of what works well is never the same as their colleague, so we are locked in a world of subjectivity, where criticism is more prevalent than praise.

To compound this, the opinions of town planners, committees and critics are defined by their own reactionary attitudes to current affairs and political trends. Above all of this the desperate need for re-election is a constant devil on the shoulders of politicians and ministers.

Architects can make themselves useful by contributing to an ideology or vision for their time, but this is difficult in a world that moves faster than ever with more opinions and broadcasting channels than ever before. Government policy is fragile and prone to being re-written depending on popularity. Some would argue it has always been more about vote-hunting than it is an exercise in defining the best interests for the country and its people.

Times are good. People are richer, taller and live longer than ever before so why are we choosing to be unhappy with this? Cities, development and the property market are tied up in one of the longest running exchanges in history. We must redress the balance and drag construction into the 21st Century because right now it is the epitome of the phrase, 'great times are great softeners.