Quantify Architecture

At the end of 2014, Aaron Betsky wrote in the New York Times “The truth is that architecture is not made by or for a wide spectrum of the population. It is made for those who have the means to commission it, and reflects their values and priorities.” His point was a riposte to those who would claim that architecture should speak to and for ‘ordinary people’.

I won’t dwell on questions of taste or arguments about elitism. My concern is the oft-expressed opinion that one of architecture’s indelible functions is to serve a social purpose; an art in service of some greater good. The substance of Betsky’s claim is something many of us experience at work. Architectural services are an indulgence afforded only by institutions, corporations, and a few individuals of significant private wealth. Should we expect their priorities to match our own?

Perhaps our education is to blame. As students, we develop strong personal convictions about architecture’s interior life, assigning it needs and aims, an ethical structure, a moral charter. As service providers, we often have to suspend much of this in order to satisfy clients. Logic would suggest that other markets for our expertise must exist, but the traditional way we sell our services seems not to connect. What to do?

First, an assumption. I am increasingly of the opinion that good architecture can only be produced in the service of good clients. To stretch the point, it’s probably not even possible to run a good architectural practice if you can’t find clients that share your priorities.

One of the quirks of building procurement is the manner in which the end occupants are so often estranged from the process of designing and constructing the building. Often the person we call client relates to the building only as a financial vehicle, and not at all as a environment.

Building procurement has 5 typical roles; architect, contractor, developer, financier and occupier. 5 actors. Having so many distinct entities necessitates a number of discreet relationships, driving costs up. More contracts, more communication, more time, more division. Any system which cuts out one of the middlemen is almost cheaper by default. An example; in Germany, baugruppen are intentional communities who form for the express purpose of creating their own homes. There are different models. Some groups take on the role of developer, eliminating at a stroke their 20% profit margin from the cost. Some commission no architects, others build themselves. The result is usually larger and cheaper homes for the founders than ‘off-the-shelf’ properties.

Developments in open-source design, crowdfunding, pre-fabrication, 3D printing and CNC manufacturing suggest that, in the future, any one of the other actors may be replaced. At a time when property development is increasingly driven by financial speculation, marginalising the city’s populace, that latent multitude of potential occupiers, it is fascinating to note this burgeoning capability to up-end the status quo in favour of the end-user.

I had a waking dream this morning. I was drawing on a flat tablet, like the type used by digital artists. On one side was a dial for cycling through menus, a short array of buttons for a flat hand. Between the fingers of the other I held a fat chisel-tipped stylus, the soft tip cut at an angle giving a thin edge for etching fine detail, a flat edge for broad strokes. Before me, on one screen, a clean and simple canvas. One accordion-style menu folded up, a display bar whose readout unravelled a tickertape of suggestions as I drew; changes to the proportioning system, servant grids, a warning when the limiting length of an element was reached. As I scrolled back through the messages, blue lines appeared overlaid on the model, hints of possible changes from the algorithm. The drawing was like one you see now only in exhibitions, a charcoal sketch of the fluted scrolls atop a column; rough, but in steady, controlled curves.

A second monitor held a mosaic of images; historic photos, sketches and line drawings which detailed the making of various precedent buildings. They faded or grew in size and brightness as the drawing progressed, as possibilities receded with each drawn line.

Within the dream itself I saw a further vision, of the old A1 standing drawing boards of the kind seen in photos of every atelier and studio before desktop computing won the day, with high-legged assistant’s stools before them. The board was canvas and screen itself, above its surface sat a 3D projection. As the assistant drew on the board, so it was with the model. An endless surface of scaled drawings and details showed upon the drawing board face, any one could be brought to the fore; its revisions glowed in the soft-sculpted projected form.

A city contains many buildings of interest. Of one type are the works of individual brilliance; Sydney Opera House, La Sagrada Familia and so on. Of another are the historical remains, the temples, palaces and assembly halls from which is woven the story of a place. These works tell of a city’s past; its people, their glories, their sophistication.

The forms which comprise the modern city share a common trait of largeness; open span floorplates, fabricated & panelised cladding elements, limited decorative effect or finesse. They often meet abruptly with the ground and sky, and suffer from a kind of scalelessness, some lack of agreement in their measurement. The whole speaks to a moment in time where the patrons of architecture are spread wide and thin, scant in their benevolence; a time in thrall to the gods of efficiency.

Construction technology has advanced in great leaps this past century, throwing open a vast universe of possibilities. With it, architecture has suffered a terrible liberation. To judge the evidence of the built environment, little of Modernism’s dogma prevails, yet its rupture with the past, the cutting of ties with generations of prior architectural knowledge, seems far more absolute.  Of Corb’s Five Points, two have been absorbed entirely, whilst two more have been discarded like the peel of the fruit. Free plan and free elevation abound, though not necessarily in the service of one specific ideology.

Once there were schools which taught specific principles of design (the rigid application of these was itself a target of criticism for the Modern movement). Before then, apprentices copied from masters in a chain that refined and improvised on standardised forms and styles stretching back over lifetimes, like some monumental, glacially-paced jazz. When we open a blank workspace today, how many of us can draw on the rich past of architecture? How many of us look at the keyboard and palette interface, and see an instrument shaped for pleasure?

I admit these are leading questions, suppositions based on personal experience; I wonder how many architectural graduates are trained in systems of proportion & hierarchy, in the sublimation of art within the object and the harmonious relation of parts to the whole. I struggle to think of comprehensive design systems that are commonly shared or understood among my contemporaries.

All of this is to say that, in thinking about the tools we use, consideration ought to be given to the way in which our tools are shaped to create art. Unconsciously or otherwise, the tools guide the hand. Perhaps the tools themselves ought to be pieces of art. We should ensure that whatever tools we do employ make use of the knowledge already garnered by previous generations, be it via templates, proportion systems or rules of thumb, or any other aid you might imagine.

“The path to a more rewarding architecture lies in embracing technology to minimise the time spent on repetitive work, and maximise the opportunities for critical reflection.“

This post seeks to address common complaints about the nature of architecture; disparity in the priorities of parties involved, confusion about whose purposes it is intended to serve, and weaknesses of the current mode of practice.

A case of misshappen identity

What is architecture? If a problem of our profession is the inability to come to an agreed definition of our role, then confusion on the part of our clients is an obvious result.

The manner in which many of us practice seeks to navigate some fine line between business and art. The extent to which individuals gravitate towards one or the other is a personal preference. Given the apparent dissatisfaction amongst many architects with their livelihood, we must ask whether these are complementary disciplines.

The teaching of architecture at schools tends to promote it as a creative discipline, often emphasising a philosophical dimension to the personal act of creativity. The creative process is suffused with a form of morality; if we are to play God, then what is the right way to build? Designers adopt belief systems, develop philosophies of self-expression.

Economic realities often expose another face to the practice of architecture. A business must generate sufficient profit to remain viable. Here efficiency enters the core of the creative process. Architects must find ways to maximise income to allow time for the creative process (an indulgence by the client), or use shortcuts to remain profitable when fees are low (a devaluation of design).

In addition, regulatory requirements put further external constraints on the generative process, increase the burden of knowledge on practitioners and make the creative act increasingly one of interpretation.

When the tension between art and business becomes manifest during a project, the result is disenchanted architects, frustrated clients, disenfranchised public. Business is concerned with the generation of profit; efficiency is at its heart. Art is expressive, above the quotidien. In its creation it may be wasteful or exuberant, it may go against the grain. The two diverge increasingly as we move from conception to realisation. The gap we try to straddle grows wider. Architectural conversation resorts to old cliches, either selling our souls or starving for our art.

Two proposals and a definition

To begin a proposal for more rewarding architecture, I’ll attempt a simple, catch-all definition here. Architecture is building well. The particular, precise meaning of building well is for each designer and client to negotiate between themselves, but in contrast to grander, more eloquent statements about architecture, it requires that shared values be negotiated in order for the goal to be understood. Agreement is fundamental. Design then becomes the manifestation of both parties’ interests.

In practice, this requires efficient allocation of resources (human and physical), and mutual recognition of the creative requirements of a given project.

There are some prerequisites to making this proposal work. Firstly, designers need to understand where their efforts are best spent, and where they are not well equipped for the task. This means honest appraisal of the limits of our ability, and development of tools or aids to support us in areas where we fail, so that our time is spent on rewarding tasks.

Next, an appropriate ratio of production work to creation and review should be formally recognised in the client-designer agreement. Calculating the time needed to develop a design of sufficient quality may not be an exact science, but it is vital that the needs and expectations of both client and designer are made explicit, and some agreed standard negotiated, in order for a fruitful design process to result.

How am building design?  or  The factors that impinge upon the design process

The solution proposed above is the sum of various responses to one question; how is building design aided, affected or inhibited? A number of factors are considered in greater depth below. I group them under four headings; prescription, limitation, intention and reward. I hope that statement of the problem, and listing the required improvements is the first step to creating tools and other aids that will help us move forward from this point.

1. Prescription

Statutory regulations delineate boundaries of the building envelope, formulation of openings amongst other formal characteristics. They also act to pass design responsibility along the supply chain to specialist providers of building elements. Thus building form is generated by individual interpretation of collective rules. Thoughtless submission to these constraints results in ugly work, whilst inadequate handling of them can result in errors and waste. Better design would be enabled by easy, universal access to these rules within our tools/ working environments, whilst standard elements, layouts and templates should be developed, promoted and shared amongst the design community on an ongoing basis.

2. Limitation

The creative act can be said to consist of cycles of two distinct acts; iteration and interpretation. The first involves the numeration of all possible solutions, the second sees this range being narrowed by critical review. While the latter is certainly a human strength, the former is not. We are instinctive by nature, quick to choose a preferred path of enquiry. Tools (eg. CAD programs) should be developed to accept and interpret given rulesets in order to provide the range of all solutions, the choice of which can be further refined by weighting of certain factors and additional design requirements. Where various statutory requirements coincide in the creation of a given element, there is great reliance on human ability to retain and recall all the relevant constraints. This can be alleviated by smarter tools, as noted in the paragraph above.

3. Intention

The dichotomy of architectural practice often manifests itself in client relationships that are not harmonious. The client’s desire for a particular building necessitates architectural services. Our wish to build in line with some personal philosophy necessitates a stream of income. We sell services to pursue fulfilment, but the role we play and the values we embody are not always explicitly discussed and agreed. Added to this is the burden of self-awareness. If designers do not engage in regular interrogation of their own intentions, they may not be conscious of imposing their own values on the client’s requirements. One solution to this is to explicitly acknowledge the importance of design quality within our appointment (more detail on this in the next section); this may create the space for more honest discussion of the designer’s own requirements from a given project, and make clear to both parties whether a good working relationship is possible.

4. Reward

There is a stable and moderately flexible relationship between the cost of procuring a building, the proportion spent on professional fees, and the quality of the final result. This may be something of a popular truism; you get what you pay for. However, the educational process hardly seeks to define this formula, and normal contracts for services do not recognise or seek to define the cost of achieving quality in design. Professional services are typically reimbursed in accordance with the quantity of work performed. If we set ourselves a required minimum income, then logic dictates that a simple multiple exists for each range of building values, according to their complexity, that guarantees said income.

The use of multiples recalls the old percentage fee structures, which were criticised for being anti-competitive. Part of the fault lay in their opacity. The solution should be to explicitly define the creative burden, and give it a value, rather than focus solely on deliverables. Appointment documents should include specific sections which indicate the ratio of production to reflection required for various stages of a project. In this way, quality of the design process is given specific regard, in much the same way that quality of finish is considered in the construction documents. Designers should measure the hours required to produce work commensurate with the quality they wish to achieve, and learn to calculate these in line with the overall project value, in order to gauge the suitability of prospective work.

Better, faster, stronger

“ The cult of personal creativity elevates artistic genius and limits progress, because there is no communal goal of self-improvement.”

This post was inspired by Amanda Baillieu’s article on open-source architecture, published here, and the comments section attached to it, which suggested a disorderly conception of technology itself, the state of affairs in the tech economy, and its potential implications for the construction industry. What follows is a proposal for how the open-source movement might usefully be adopted by architects.

The creative act

Architects typically earn fees for two broad activities; the creation of building designs in line with professional knowledge, and the administration of building contracts through construction. For architects, the creative act is one of personal interpretation of external rule-sets. These external rules typically include building regulations, physical constraints of building materials, and client briefs. We do not control or, for the most part, seek to rewrite these information sources. There is no shared, codified language or tool-set that governs our creative activity beyond the use of scale drawings and specification clauses.

In the programming community, open source refers to rights granted to access, distribute and alter the source code of a given piece software. In practice, this gives rise to a collaborative attempt to optimise code, such that existing software / scripting languages are improved, or entirely new ones produced. 

Programmers may be employed in differing capacities; for their ability to develop and maintain code, or to create discrete products or services on the back of existing code. For comparison with the architect example above, we may think of programming languages as forming effective rule-sets. Thus, the programmer’s creative act may be one of personal interpretation of the rule-set, or communal rewriting of the rule-set.

Benefits of sharing

Open source development is a cultural phenomenon. Programmers are often some mixture of self-taught, peer-educated and formally-educated. Software development is incremental, distributed and often in a state of revision. New knowledge is created on a near-perpetual basis. As a result, the desire to ‘give back to the community’ is strongly reinforced among programmers. By contrast, architectural education has its roots in a medieval guild-type system; members pay their dues and serve apprenticeships to earn experience. This is a more personal and territorial form of knowledge acquisition. It’s likely that this foundation informs a disinclination to share. 

Through open source collaboration, programmers endlessly improve the tool-set at their disposal, continuously adding to and refining the knowledge base of their community. While this may be seen as ‘giving work away for free’, the result is that digital products and services improve year on year, imposing themselves on society in a remarkably short period. Demand for programming skills increases in line with this. The community does not just sustain itself, but increases its own relevance to the wider world. 

This bears unfavourable comparison with the architectural profession. A large part of the difficulty we have with evolution must lie in the value we place on the personal act of creativity. Within the community, this creativity is revered over acts of contract administration or information production, though we mostly charge clients for the latter. This schism in our psychology imposes many handicaps, causing uncertainty about a proper basis for fee proposals, and fueling internal competition to stand out from our peers. The cult of personal creativity elevates genius and limits progress, because there is no communal goal of self-improvement. Architectural brilliance shines and is extinguished within single lifespans, and is measured by individual buildings. If architects hope to make their profession relevant to the wider world, then the goal of architecture should be more architecture, not more beautiful architecture.

Automate, evaluate

We should note that programmers have a native advantage. Moore’s law implies that tasks reliant on processing power must become cheaper with time. There is an innate momentum within the field to always bring more complex tasks within reach. It is time for architecture to leverage this capacity.

Architects will always be employed by clients for our ability to deliver complex buildings. In tandem with this, we should also work like programmers do, to constantly to make architecture better, cheaper, more accessible, easier and faster to produce. Processor power makes it possible to produce and test scenarios at a speed humans cannot match. Design is a process of iteration and evaluation. It makes sense to delegate to machines those tasks they perform better, to allow us to design faster and smarter.

To give one example, there is no good reason why an architectural graduate should spend any length of time working out stair configurations within a given space, when a processor could test every compliant arrangement in seconds, and offer a menu of results. Protectiveness over this kind of work is more than myopic; it is an evolutionary dead-end. Collectively, the profession has solved these tasks many times over. We should not want to repeat such exercises ad infinitum.

The United Nations estimates that between 2011 and 2050, the urban population of the world will increase from 3.6 billion to 6.3 billion (source). There is no shortfall of buildings to be worked on. In the face of this knowledge, to persist with more laborious existing practices seems like a form of professional irresponsibility.

Do you speak my language?

“The conflation of on-demand professional services with sharing economy start-ups ignores a crucial element of the subversive tactics that have proved so effective for Uber and its contemporaries; destabilising an existing marketplace by the overnight creation of a new and sizeable source of supply”

This post began as a response to Farhad Manjoo’s article published here. In it, Manjoo makes the statement “the Uberisation of work may soon be coming to your chosen profession”.

The explosive growth of Uber, Airbnb, and other sharing economy-based start-ups have given rise to a glut of similar commentaries. In the rush to speculate, some care needs to be taken in the inferences we draw from their success stories.

Disruption?

If you follow any kind of business news, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with terms like lean start-up, disruptive technology, and more recently, Uberisation. This new jargon is used by speculators and commentators alike to describe a wide variety of businesses built off the back of modern technologies. These companies fall into two distinct categories. The first type have genuinely new ideas at their core; the others apply a thin veneer of ‘new-ness’ to the presentation or delivery of goods and services that are already well-established.

Uber is an example of the first category. The genius at its core is the manner in which private assets are redistributed for commercial benefit. It’s the concept of defragging your hard drive applied to car seats. The effect is to dramatically increase the available supply. That act of invention aside, this wunderkind of the sharing economy is no different from traditional middlemen; trimming overheads by divesting its operating costs onto others (in Uber’s case the drivers), and charging buyers and sellers alike for use of their platform.

In the case of professional services, the models that this writer has seen discussed belong entirely to the second category. The conflation of on-demand professional services with sharing economy start-ups ignores a crucial element of the subversive tactics that have proved so effective for Uber and its contemporaries; destabilising an existing marketplace by the overnight creation of a new and sizeable source of supply.

Platforms which allow freelance operators to contract for services ‘on-demand’ leverage the reach and efficiency benefits of modern communications technology to revamp the manner in which professional services are delivered. In doing so, they change the ‘how’ and ‘where’ of the marketplace. In and of itself this model has the potential for far-reaching consequences, however it’s incorrect to describe this change as fundamental disruption. At a macro level, the supply of professional services remains constant. The real challenge is one we’re already familiar with; overseas competition. Platforms which increase the accessibility, authenticity and reliability of non-local service providers erase geographic competition barriers. For ‘Uberisation’ of architectural services, read outsourcing.

Displacement

In the short term, the possibility of ‘job displacement’ on a local level is quite significant, if you take local to mean the UK or any other first world economy, and displacement as a euphemism for being trumped by BRIC or Asian competitors on job bids. It’s not an outrageous stretch of imagination to suggest that the technological capacity to render architecture an unviable career in the Western world in a short number of years most likely already exists in a stable form. 

That speculation, however, takes no account of human appetites and habits.

How clients like their architectural services delivered is a matter of preference. For some people, business is strictly that. Others favour personal flourishes. Either way, there’s little benefit arguing the toss with your clients about what they should value. For architects based in the West, there is no winning a race to the bottom on cost. As technology removes competition barriers, the importance of thinking about values that aren’t solely cost-dependant increases.

Post-geography

Musing about the Internet’s ability to drive marginal costs down to zero and increase expectations of free content, Kevin Kelley came up with a list of 8 generatives that he considered “better than free” (linked here). The high costs of producing architecture, and the current impossibility of exponentially scaling the physical act of construction make it unlikely that we will see such a scenario play out in the near future for buildings. Nonetheless, it’s worth considering how value is demonstrated in the face of low-cost competition elsewhere. 

Seth Godin formulated the same thought in this way; when price and geography are no longer in your favour, the only clients left are ones that are accidentally yours, or ones that choose to be yours (link here). In marketing-speak, corralling the latter of those groups means defining your brand.