Architects are among the very few providing custom design services in a product-infatuated society. This presents a profound problem, especially since few clients possess an understanding of the efforts necessary to create custom products, and even fewer are willing to adequately finance them.
The capabilities now provided by furniture system designers, sustainability consultants, construction managers, and engineers of all stripes have become so advanced that architects may eventually become unnecessary – except, perhaps, as EXTERIOR STYLISTS.
BUILDING INFORMATION MODELLING, MASS CUSTOMIZATION, PARAMETRIC DESIGN, PREFABRICATION, RAPID PROTOTYPING, DIGITAL FABRICATION and even ONLINE WEB ORDERING that permits product customization - are ways to pull architects out of their deepening ditch.
To avoid obsolescence, architects need to increase demand for their skills by embracing emerging technologies that both stimulate and satiate consumer desires.

PS: Tailoring Trade, which as a consequence of mass production, has shrunk to 1/16 its size from 1920 to 1990. Architectural Trade could go in the same way now.