The Next Normal by Architect Magazine January 2011

IT ’S NOTHING NEW TO SAY THAT CHANGE IS A CONSTANT. The Greek philosopher

Heraclitus fi rst made the point back in 500 B.C. Twenty-four centuries later,

Karl Marx tagged change as the prevailing characteristic of the Industrial Age

in a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto: “All fi xed,

fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable

prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones

become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts

into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to

face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and

his relations with his kind.”

If change is constant, the rate of change is variable. Sometimes it creeps, nearly

unnoticeable, as during the monolithic 3,000-year reign of the Egyptian pharaohs.

Sometimes it moves with devastating speed, as when the Black Death cut the

population of Europe by a third in just four years: 1347 –1351. Lately, change has

hit a surreal pace, as though some giant Monty Python cartoon hand is dropping

our ancient and venerable prejudices—about architecture, the economy, weather,

the government—into a blender, and the

machine is set to “liquify.” Who knows

what bizarre concoction will eventually

come pouring out?

The uncertainty can be crippling. In

2009, in just four months, demand for

mental health services in the U.S. doubled,

as measured in a survey commissioned by

Spectrum, a healthcare consultancy. And

according to a December 2010 Rasmussen

Reports poll, only 23 percent of Americans

believe the country is headed in the

right direction. Our national stress level

is orange.

It’s not so easy to track the demand for

mental health services among architects.

But the profession’s exceptionally high

unemployment rate would suggest that architects are feeling the eff ects of change more than most. The economy is just

one concern among many: emerging technologies, the imploding star system, a widening generation gap, a shifting

regulatory climate, decaying suburbs, shrinking cities, intensifying global competition.

Consider this issue of ARCHITECT as an antidote to our stress-inducing zeitgeist, a necessary investment in

professional therapy. The topic, content, and structure are an industry-wide group eff ort; they emerged from in-

person and online conversations with architects, evolved in discussion with the magazine’s new editorial advisory

committee, and took fi nal form in collaboration with our creative partners at Bruce Mau Design.

To get the conversation started, we organized the feature section around fi ve deliberately provocative statements,

such as “Your clients are really old” and “Your architecture is a commodity.” Articles respond to each provocation

from a variety of perspectives, some favorable and others oppositional. In trying to understand the transformation of

architecture and spark dialogue around the deceptively simple question, “What’s next?,” it’s critical to recognize that

there are no right or wrong answers, merely intelligent guesswork. JOIN THE CONVERSATION AT ARCHITEC TMAGA ZINE.COM.

A COLLABORATION WITH BRUCE MAU DESIGN

TEXT BY NED CRAMER

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ARCHITECTURE FIRMS ARE GENERALLY INEFFICIENT, saddled by a 19th-century

business model and tethered to the boom-bust economics of the real estate

industry. As an antidote, AIA chief economist Kermit Baker suggests the

stabilizing benefi ts of paraprofessionals. Business consultant Paul Nakazawa

encourages architects to go with the fl ow of the fi nancial crisis. And students

from across the globe share their plans for architecture in the 21st century.

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THE NEXT NORMAL124

ARCHITECTURE, WHEN MEASURED IN ECONOMIC TERMS, is not a terribly effi cient

profession. This is not in any way meant to imply that architects aren’t

hard workers or that they waste their time on unimportant details.

Rather, it has to do with their productivity—their output per hour of

labor—or, more specifi cally, the historically low levels of productivity in

the construction industry.

Over the past two decades, employment at architecture fi rms has

been increasing at a rate of about 4 percent per year. However, over

this same period, the volume of nonresidential construction being built

has increased by a little more than

1 percent per year. There are good

reasons why it takes more hours to

design a square foot of space today

compared with two decades ago:

Buildings are more sophisticated;

clients are more demanding; building codes are more complicated;

there are a lot more products to choose from. But architecture fi rms by

and large are not being compensated for these added responsibilities.

According to the AIA’s The Business of Architecture, 2009, annual net

billings per architecture fi rm employee averaged just $130,000, and

for most small fi rms they didn’t

exceed $100,000.

Obviously, a fi rm’s revenue per

employee establishes the upper

limit for the compensation it can

off er, so fi rms with higher revenue per employee will likely pay higher

salaries. More broadly, professions that bring in higher revenue per

employee will likely have higher compensation levels. Lawyers, who on

average bring in almost twice as much revenue as architects, also have

compensation levels about 60 percent higher.

Hiring paraprofessionals is one important way to manage costs

and increase staff effi ciency. Paraprofessionals are typically trained

to be profi cient in a more limited set of functions than a full-fl edged

professional.

Other professions have made extensive use of paraprofessionals.

In law offi ces nationwide, for example, paralegal and legal assistant

positions total more than a third of the number of lawyers, according

to the U.S. Department of Labor. In dentistry, there are twice as many

dental assistants as there are practicing dentists. But medicine is the

profession that has made the greatest use of paraprofessionals: from

licensed practical nurses to registered nurses to physician assistants,

there are many more paraprofessionals than physicians. The healthcare

fi eld is structured to effi ciently leverage a physician’s time.

The Department of Labor projects that growth in paraprofessional

positions will outpace growth in professional positions over the

coming decade. In some professions, such as medicine, the supply of

physicians can’t keep up with demand, so the growth is met through

paraprofessionals. Using paraprofessionals is deemed to be a more cost-

eff ective use of resources because these workers need less training and

are paid only a fraction of a physician’s salary.

Some larger architecture fi rms have positions for CAD and BIM

specialists that are not fi lled by licensed architects. However, the use

of paraprofessionals for technical design tasks is not widespread in

the architecture profession. In fact, at many small and midsize fi rms,

nonarchitectural functions such as information technology, graphic

design, and marketing are commonly performed by professionally

trained architectural staff , usually interns or recently licensed architects.

Design paraprofessionals are so uncommon that the Department

of Labor hasn’t even published estimates or projections. We shouldn’t

be surprised that revenue per employee and compensation is so low in

architecture when we have professionals performing functions that

could be done by paraprofessionals.

In addition to increasing compensation in the profession and

allowing architects to concentrate on those things they were educated

and licensed to do, there is another benefi t of expanding the use of

design paraprofessionals. Architects work in a unique industry. Both

residential and nonresidential construction are among the most cyclical

sectors of our economy, meaning that there is an inherent boom-or-bust

nature to them. It is not uncommon—in fact, it is almost expected—that

years of strong growth will be followed by years of steep declines.

Architecture fi rms are constantly struggling to match staff resources

with fl uctuating workloads. Given the cyclicality in the construction

industry, a period of being understaff ed, when a fi rm is struggling to

meet project deadlines, is likely to be quickly followed by a period when

a fi rm is overstaff ed and needs to go through the destructive exercise

of salary freezes, furloughs, or downsizing. Think of 2007 and 2009, and

how quickly we went from boom to bust.

How have we coped with this downturn? The way we always have,

by eliminating a lot of our “paraprofessional” positions: interns and

recently licensed architects who perform these more standardized

design functions.

If there were true design paraprofessionals, they could move more

fl uidly into and out of a broader range of positions in the design and

construction industry as needs changed—working with engineering

fi rms, construction companies, developers, facility managers, and

building owners, in addition to architecture fi rms. This would allow

architects to pursue the creative design careers that they envisioned

when they made the decision to invest so much time and money into

becoming an architect.

But when we use emerging professionals to manage the ebb and

fl ow of the construction cycle, we also risk eliminating the future leaders

of fi rms, as well as the future leaders of the profession, in hard times.

To this day, the profession has not fully recovered from the early 1990s

construction downturn, which forced a lot of younger architectural staff

out of the profession, never to return. �

ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 125

DESIGNPARAPROFESSIONALS

PRINCIPALS/PARTNERS

DEPARTMENT HEADS,PROJECT MANAGERS

ARCHITECTS/DESIGNERS

I.T., MARKETING, OTHER NONARCHITECTURAL STAFF

INTERNS

EMBRACETHE CHANGE

THIS YEAR WILL BRING LITTLE comfort to

architecture fi rms that are just hanging on,

hoping to ride out this recession without

making fundamental changes in mindset,

behavior, and practice. Ironically, the potential

of architects and allied professionals to make

substantive contributions for the betterment

of society has never been greater, yet we are

trapped in an emotional quagmire of wanting

to “recover.”

So, let’s be clear—the foreseeable future

only requires about half of the pre-recession

workforce in architecture. Those who remain

in the profession need to augment their

knowledge, create and deliver a much higher

level of value, and be open and willing to work

productively in a highly complex and often

disrupted business and societal environment.

Market downturns and recessions would

be far less damaging if individuals and their

respective organizations were more skeptical

about success in good times and less panicked

in diffi cult ones. The rule-of-rules in the world

is that change is a condition of life. So leading

fi rms never assume that the underpinning of

their success is permanent.

When things seem most successful and

secure, top managers in such practices insist

the most strongly that their

organizations stay tuned into

changes in the business world.

In the most challenging times,

they act tactically to limit

losses while continuing to

make strategic investments.

In this recession, these

actions have included very

diffi cult decisions, such as laying off signifi cant

numbers of staff with years of dedicated

service; remaking practices from the ground up

by reconceptualizing business models, service

off erings, and the number of staff required

to address the future needs of clients and

markets; and moving into new markets and

territories of practice.

Unfortunately, the story for the majority

of practices is a litany of casualties due to lack

of foresight and procrastination in the face

of major change. The common casualties are

vision, communication, focus, development,

and investment. They are commonly displaced

by short-term survival tactics, suspension

MOOVE YOUUR BUSSINESSS BEYOONDD TAAACTTICAAL RRESSPOONSSES TO THE

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STEEPSS FOOR RREBBOOTINNG AA BEELEEAGGUUEREDD ARCHHITTECTTURRE FIRM.

THE NEXT NORMAL126

of communications and developmental

initiatives, and complete loss of discrimination

regarding what work the fi rm pursues.

Firms that have fallen into the latter group

of behaviors need to reestablish a discipline

of returning to fi rst principles as the basis for

moving forward. Here’s how.

Step 1. Constantly articulate and reevaluate

your fi rm’s vision.

The basis for every sustainable enterprise is

the investment of people in eff orts that are

meaningful. The fi rst principles that generate

practices and the core values that inform them

endure over time. The larger an organization

becomes, the more critical it is for the

principles and values of the fi rm to be made

explicit, and to be constantly revisited as a

way to promote an eff ective fi rm culture.

The failure of markets is not a failure

of a fi rm’s values, but it signals the need to

reevaluate the fi rm’s goals and strategy in light

of disruptive changes. A fi rm’s vision fails when

the collective is unable to chart a new course.

In many ways, the industry’s continued

emphasis on marketing professional services

serves to contain the profession within fairly

narrow boundaries. Without new visions

for practice—sited in a broader context of

issues, ranging from cultural change to the

growth of cities—how can we imagine that

the profession can produce a whole new

constellation of value?

Step 2. Make sure your fi rm has a well-

understood theory of business and practice—

one that fi ts its size.

Having a clear vision for your fi rm is necessary,

but that alone is not suffi cient to have a

sustainable enterprise. The key propositions

about what your company really does and

what accounts for success need to be well

understood if you want to fully capture

opportunities for organizational learning

and growth. These propositions are not

immutable, but the lack of them reduces fi rms

to completely reactive behaviors.

The increasing scale of horizontally and

vertically integrated practices—i.e., AECOM,

URS Corp., Jacobs, and Stantec—signals

profound changes in critical parameters of

practice, including capabilities to service

clients globally; scalar issues of business risk

and fi nancial capacity tied to larger projects;

and single-source responsibility tied to more

integrated forms of project delivery.

Since most of the super-large fi rms are

publicly owned entities, their drive for market

dominance over the coming years will shift

the paradigm in ways that are parallel to

other professions, such as medicine, in which

an increasing percentage of doctors work for

healthcare systems instead of private practices.

Assuming that the current trend in industry

consolidation can be sustained through the

treacherous straits of the global fi nancial crisis,

the prognosis for midsize practices grounded

in a business model of commodity service and

delivery is increasingly uncertain.

Small practices can survive if they are

principally focused on a specifi c locale or

network and serve as a community resource.

But small-to-midsize fi rms that have a strong

propositional basis in practice, are able to

work across diff erent

fi elds of knowledge,

are technology-savvy,

and are woven into

multiple networks of

societal stakeholders may have the brightest

future. They include a category of fi rm whose

output is represented as “cultural production,”

working across the full spectrum of scale and

type of objects, territory, and infrastructure.

Such practices exist mostly in networks that

include established knowledge communities

in educational institutions, governmental

bodies, and major corporations.

The fork in the road that is coming into

clearer focus reveals an increasing scale of

organizations providing commodity service

and delivery on one hand, and on the other

a class of practices driven by the production

of knowledge and content. The two classes of

fi rms potentially have an even greater universe

of collaborative possibilities and value creation

when they come together to address the most

challenging problems of our time.

Step 3. Take a hard look at your fi rm’s

developmental assets and make sure you’re

investing in the right things.

How many fi rms fi nd that they are pitted

against competitors they have never seen

before, for work that they could have

easily won before the recession? How

many principals fi nd that their marketing

departments are putting out proposals that

completely miss the boat on what their clients

are looking for now? How many fi rms fi nd

that their ownership transition plan has failed

because the presumed successors cannot

provide the needed leadership and vision?

The developmental assets of architecture

fi rms are largely intangible and reside in

people and complex webs of connectivity that

bind them together. There are four classes

of assets: ideas (intellectual capital); image

(symbolic capital—the power to represent

ideas, convey meaning, and communicate

identity); networks (social capital); and

capabilities (implementation capital—the

abilities to conceive, program, plan, develop,

and deliver work). These four asset classes,

when properly connected and orchestrated,

catapult fi rms from being above average to

being exceptional.

When the underlying paradigm of society

shifts, the edifi ce of these assets—which

represent years of dedicated eff ort and

fi nancial investment—is badly shaken, if not

toppled. The canonical modes of practice,

whether general practice, market-sector

leadership, or “starchitecture,” are repudiated,

and the investment strategies that correspond

to a fi rm’s developmental assets are all open

to question.

The leadership and other key members

of fi rms, who have built successful careers in

various modes of practice, understandably

have a very diffi cult time letting go and

embracing an uncertain future. But in a

time when investment capital is scarce,

the alignment of vision and strategy is

imperative. We can say with a high degree

of confi dence that investing in yesterday’s

success is, at best, misguided.

Step 4. Face and embrace the future.

The profession of architecture in the United

States was codifi ed during the 19th century.

While many aspects of the profession have

changed substantially since then, traces of past

modes of thought and behavior are far from

expunged. Collectively, we remain captive to

19th-century notions of organization. It is clear

that further changes in architectural business

models and organizational structures will track

the global trend of outdated social, political,

and economic structures being shed.

For the moment, architectural practice

appears to embrace two distinct, but

complementary, trajectories. The fi rst aims

to capture the service and delivery needs of a

world that will be increasingly urban, and the

vast utilitarian and infrastructural needs of

a rapidly expanding population. The second

is sited in the multiple layers of issues and

meanings of complex societies and is directed at

the development of communities and cultures.

The opportunities for our profession,

equipped with our unique capacities for spatial

thinking and design, reside in embracing these

challenges. �

I AM AN ARCHITECT. I THINK YYOU NEED FRIES WIITH THATT. I DESIGN BUILDINNGS, NOTT COMPUTTER SYSTTEEMS! I CRY MYSSELF TO SSLEEP. 95%% OF THEE CLOTHES I WEARR ARE BLAACK. I CAANNNOT SPELL TO SSAVE MY LIFE.

A fork in the road is coming into focus, between super-large

fi rms providing commodity service on the one hand, and small-to-midsize fi rms devoted to cultural

production on the other.

ARCHITECTURAL MAD-LIBS: VIA TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND LINKEDIN, WE ASKED READERS TO FILL IN THE BLANKS. THE RESPONSES APPEAR THROUGHOUT THE ISSUE.

TONY GARZA DANIEL HEATON, AIA @GRAPHITETREECHRISTOPHER WEBSTER THOMAS HACKETT

LISTEN TO THEM

U.S. ARCHITECTURE SCHOOLS ARE DOING A GREAT JOB OFIINSPIRING ANDD EMPOOWERINNG THEIIR STUDDENTS COUURSE.

ASSKING TTHHEIR AALUMNI FOR COONTRIBUUTIONSS. CRANKIING OUTT CAD/PRRESENTTATION MONKEEYS.

FOURR STUUDENTS, FFIVE QUESSTIONNS: MMEMBBERSS OF TTTHE CLAASS OF 220111 SHAARE TTHEIR

PRIORITIEES FOOR THHEIR OWNN CARREERRS, ANND FOOR THHHE FFUTURE OF ARCHITTECTURE..

1. Has architecture school been the way you imagined it would be when

you enrolled?

Kale: My undergraduate education was more about gaining skills and

learning crafts. Graduate school made me think beyond the architectural

scale and introduced cross-disciplinary learning possibilities. It became

my personal enlightenment.

Risch: Not at all. I didn’t really expect

something precise, but I liked (and still

do) very much what I discovered.

2. Do you want to become a licensed

architect, and do you see that as essential

to your future career?

Nencheck: With three years of internship

experience, I will take the licensing exams

shortly after graduation. Licensure is a

step toward a position of leadership and

increased responsibility within a fi rm, and

for me would be an important culmination of my years of study.

Risch: Due to legal regulations in Switzerland, you don’t really have a

choice [other] than to become a licensed architect; otherwise you can’t

get building licenses. But as a graduate of a Swiss federal institute of

technology, one quasi-automatically becomes a licensed architect, so this

isn’t an issue of concern to me.

Kale: Yes, but [I] don’t know how. Today we study and practice

architecture globally but still get licensed by local authorities. Licensure

is even more challenging for architects with foreign degrees. There is a

need for an international accreditation system.

3. What do you want to be doing, and where, in fi ve years’ time?

Fay-Paget: In fi ve years’ time, I would like to be somewhere in the

Midwest, where I will open my own business that off ers architectural

design, construction management, and structural engineering.

Nencheck: In fi ve years, I plan to both practice architecture and continue

the independent research projects I pursued in graduate school.

Risch: I want to be doing architecture, but where and how is open for now.

Wherever I go, I probably won’t stay long, in order to benefi t from the

knowledge and culture of diff erent architects.

4. What does an architect need most: design talent, social commitment,

or business savvy?

Fay-Paget: The architecture student in me says “design talent,” the

entrepreneur in me says “business savvy,” and the woman in me says

“social commitment.” But I feel that an architect needs design talent

above all else, because without it, nothing would be designed worth

building.

Risch: Design talent and social commitment are essential for

meaningful architecture, but business savvy is even more essential for

successful architecture. As the values that generate great architecture

are mostly not … [economic ones], every architect has to fi nd ways of

combining these.

5. What’s the biggest problem that architects of your generation will

have to help solve?

Nencheck: The greatest issue facing architects today is climate change.

Architects have a responsibility to design and build environmentally

sensitive and sustainable buildings in order to preserve existing

resources.

Fay-Paget: I believe that the biggest problem with architecture today is

that most of it is “dead.” By this, I mean that most fi rms simply cut and

paste buildings or entire complexes from one project to another. The

intricate design process of a project has been mutilated by budgets and

timelines that no longer allow for design to actually occur.

Kale: We should make ourselves believe that having a green building is

as ordinary as having a fi re-safe building. So that sustainability can be

perceived as a social necessity, not an overused marketing term. �

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Thee Neew Scchool fforr Deesiggn • M..Arcch.

Linndssayy NNennchhecck • 277 • Morrristtowwn, N.J.

• WWasshinngttonn Unniverssityy inn Stt. LLouis • M.AArcch.

Maartiin RRisschh •• 225 • TTscchapppinaa, SSwitzeerlaandd

• ÉÉcole PPollyteechhniqquee Féédééralle de Lausaannne •

M.SS. inn archhiteecturee

Draakee FFayy-PPaggett • 233 •• RRRossevillee, CCaliif. •

Woodbburry UUniverrsitty • BB.AArchhh.

ROGER NILSENJAMES MOSER, AIA

@JOHN_WARBURTONKEVIN PARENT, AIA


WHERE ’S ROBERT MOSES WHEN YOU NEED HIM? These days, it’s tempting to wish for an all-powerful champion of design. But be careful. As the master planner for Hanoi, Vietnam, architect Brad Perkins learns that working for an authoritarian, single-party government doesn’t eliminate every roadblock. New Urbanist Andrés Duany decries the “orgy of public process” that inhibits urban planning. And three students, by contrast, tap into community organizing in their competition-winning scheme for suburban Long Island, N.Y.

AVERAGE NUMBER OF DAYS TO OBTAIN A CONSTRUCTION

PERMIT IN THE U.S.

AVERAGE NUMBER OF DAYS TO OBTAIN A CONSTRUCTION

PERMIT IN CHINA

the cities of Jinan and Nanjing, under Sun Yat-sen. (Previously, he had

worked as a top deputy at Burnham and Root.) His father, Lawrence B.

Perkins, FAIA, was founding principal of Perkins + Will, which is now a

frequent competitor with Perkins Eastman on international projects.

His brother, the political economist Dwight Perkins, was until recently

the director of Harvard University’s Asia Center and has in the past

served as a development consultant to the Vietnamese government.

“I vetted everything with my brother,” Perkins says. His expertise

was useful, and his contacts and credibility within the Vietnamese

government, Perkins believes, helped Perkins Eastman (in collaboration

with the Korean fi rms Posco E&C and Jina Architects, the Vietnamese

Institute of Architecture, Urban and Rural Planning, and the Hanoi

Urban Planning Institute) win the job over RTKL Associates and a joint

bid from Arata Isozaki and the Offi ce for Metropolitan Architecture.

Certainly, though, Perkins knows the Asian ropes in his own

right—he has made 105 trips there (more than 20 of them to Vietnam),

and quite literally wrote the

book on foreign architectural

practice: His primer,

International Practice for

Architects, was published in

2007. In it he writes, “Vietnam

has the potential to be a real

market for North American

design services.”

The extent to which that

potential has been realized has

surprised even Perkins, given

the troubled history between

Vietnam and the United States.

“It’s amazing how warmly

we’re treated,” he says. The relative youth of the Vietnamese population

of 89.6 million accounts for this to some degree; a signifi cant majority

is under the age of 35 and therefore has no memory of the war. Hanoi

itself came through the war largely intact. The country’s historic

tensions with its Asian neighbors, in particular Japan and South Korea,

play to the favor of American fi rms.

It is Vietnam’s youthful and rapidly expanding population that

is placing such enormous pressure on its urban centers. Hanoi, the

national capital, is at present a city of 6.5 million, but demographers

project that number to rise by some 40 percent in the coming decades.

To account for the city’s growth, the new master plan will push

development out to fi ve satellite cities separated from the historic core

by a greenbelt of parks, lakes, and land reserved for agriculture. “Our

plan was built around sustainability,” Perkins says. “We’re trying to get

Hanoi to recognize they have this wonderful one-time opportunity to

do something the Chinese have not done, which is to protect one of the

great architectural zones, which runs through the center of the city.”

This new vision is dependent on a radical overhaul of the city’s

infrastructure. “The existing system cannot keep up with the pace of

the population growth of the city, especially in the ancient quarter,”

says Do Dinh Duc, director of Hanoi Architectural University. Essential

services such as power and sewage treatment are woefully inadequate

even for Hanoi’s current population, never mind what it will be in 10 or

20 years. Residents, for instance, depend on some 10,000 illegal wells

for potable water. The new plan would answer that demand with a pair

of water-treatment plants. Also among the items the plan calls for: a

new light-rail system, a new regional road network, a new international

airport, and a vastly improved fl ood-management system.

If it all sounds enormously ambitious, that’s because it is. “Daniel

Burnham’s ‘Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s

blood’? That’s really only possible in a place like Vietnam,” Perkins says.

“As a planner, that makes it quite enjoyable. The government has the

ability to make big plans. And they really believe that planning matters,

and they take it very seriously.”

Indeed, the plan has the strong backing of Prime Minister Nguyen

Tan Dung, the head of government in a one-party state without a free

press. This does not mean, however, that it has been or will remain free

of opposition. “When you get there, you realize how hard it is to control

anything,” says Paul Buckhurst, a principal at Perkins Eastman who

spent 34 weeks in Hanoi during the planning process.

“It’s fairly common for low-income people to protest in front of

local authority offi ces,” Spencer, of the University of Hawaii, says. In

the past year alone, some 200 building projects in Hanoi have been

halted due to public opposition. “It’s not a system where the state can

just do anything.”

Thus far, the new master plan has been fairly well received,

according to Perkins, pointing to an 87 percent positive response to an

anonymously conducted survey. “In the presentations, people could

stand up, and did,” he says. “There was a good deal of pushback.”

The success or failure of the plan will in large measure reside in

the team’s continuing ability to satisfy local community groups, many

of which are faced with relocation or other signifi cant changes to their

traditions and habits. “It’s one thing to defi ne a vision, and another

to realize it,” Spencer says. “The vision and the plan can be great

technically, but unless you have widespread buy-in and a lot of goodies

for people who are existing stakeholders, it’s going to be very diffi cult.”

Preservation is a particularly challenging issue, and one

that has left the team, on occasion, at odds with members of the

Vietnamese government. In a rapidly modernizing city with such

a mixed architectural heritage—historic Vietnamese, French, and

Soviet structures in varying states of distress—there are persistent

questions as to what is worth saving. “Every act of preservation is a

reinterpretation of what Vietnamese history is,” Spencer says.

If all follows according to plan, by 2050, Hanoi will have emerged

as a city on par with London, New York, Moscow, and Tokyo. The path

for that growth is now set, but it is only a path. “One of the wonderful

things about Hanoi, and one of the reasons it has a chance to be a great

world capital, is that it’s just beginning its development,” Perkins says.

That, of course, is both its burden and its opportunity. �

IT’S A RICH MAN’SS HOBBYY. THATT ANYBOODY CANN DO IT.. TTHAT WE ARE WWEALTHHY AS DOOCTORRS AND LAAWYERRS.

THAT AARCHITTECTS LIVE IN RREALLY COOL HOOUSES. THE BIGGEST MYTH ABOUT ARCHITECTURE IS

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DOUGLAS SPOHN DOUG RICHARDSMICHAEL POYNTON JOHN CRUET JR.,AIA


ANDDRRÉÉSS DDUAANNYY IISS SSOURING ON WHAT HE SEES AS EXCESSIVE,

OBSSTTRRUUCCTTIONNISSTT CCOOMMMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT IN URBAN PLANNING.

ATT AANN EVENNTT LLAASSTT YYEEAAR, THE CO-FOUNDER OF NEW URBANISM

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INN TTHHEE UU..SS.:: ““BBAASSIICCAALLLLY, WE CAN’T GET ANYTHING DONE.” IS THERE

A PPLLAACCEE ANNYYMMOORREE FFOORR BOTTOM-UP PLANNING?

CONTROLTHEMASSES

Public engagement in the community planning

process is a relatively new phenomenon. Is it

good evidence of American democracy in action

or of public skepticism about the planning

profession?

Urban planning with public participation has

not always existed, nor has it been deemed

necessary. Even 50 years ago, planners were

still considered demigods. They had reformed

cities to be beautiful, healthier, cleaner, and

more stable. Planners had done more for public

health than doctors. By making lives much

better, they had come to be trusted by the

people.

For example, take John Nolen, whose small

offi ce delivered hundreds of city plans in the

1920s. How did he do so much? San Diego is

an example. He visited the city for a couple of

weeks, spoke to whomever he needed to, then

got back to Boston, prepared the documents,

and mailed them back to San Diego, and … it

was implemented over the years.

In the 1950s, planners were still considered

so trustworthy that when they had that towers-

in-the-park idea, they could fl ick their hand

and get an entire neighborhood demolished.

But those inner-city plans became socially

toxic almost immediately, and as the suburban

promise was betrayed, confi dence in top-down

planning evaporated.

Participatory planning rose out of that

disappointment. It wasn’t just the result of Jane

Jacobs versus Robert Moses—it was categorical,

a nationwide insurgency by people who had

never heard of those two.

The Congress for the New Urbanism has

popularized the charrette as a process. Where

does it fi t into the range of civic engagement?

Bottom-up avoids the big mistakes of top-

down planning, but it is quite ineffi cient. New

Urbanism merges the virtues of top-down and

bottom-up planning, combining the principles

of its charter and the participation through the

charrette. This is something new. The planner

adjusting principles to local circumstances is a

system that has now worked very well indeed

hundreds of times.

But we seem to be reaching a tipping point now

where municipalities will give up on engaging

the public because it’s gotten too time-

consuming and too expensive.

We were involved in Miami 21, a citywide

charrette. That process was bottom-up and

required convincing everyone concerned. It cost

millions of dollars and took four years. It was a

magnifi cent result and the most comprehensive

such eff ort by any big city, but it will probably not

be repeated. The economy has changed all that.

While the New Urbanist system may work

well, it is also expensive. To mount a charrette

requires those rare, highly skilled professionals

that can speak to regular folk, think clearly, and

draw quickly. Charrettes can cost $300,000. We

need to get the cost down to $50,000.

The other complaint you’ve voiced is that

NIMBYism has become too obstructionist. Is

there a better way to get public participation

in the design process without a project falling

prey to local interests?

Conventional public participation makes

the mistake of privileging the neighbors, the

people who live within a half-mile of the given

proposal. So it becomes extremely diffi cult to,

say, locate a school or an infi ll project. While

democracy doesn’t need a great number of

voters to function well, it does require a full

cross-section to participate. That is the source

of its collective intelligence. You can’t confuse

neighbors with the community as a whole.

We propose using the jury pool or the

phone book to invite a random group, which

is then understood to be apart from the self-

interested neighbors, just as the developer or

the school board are acknowledged as vested

interests. The neighbors must be seen as vested

interests as well.

But how are municipalities going to be able to

make big decisions?

If you can’t build a bike path or lay a power

line that connects to the new solar energy

farm, then you can’t engage in the 21st century.

We have also been developing the concept of

subsidiarity, the design of decisions: what issue,

by which people, and when.

The region makes decisions about heavy

infrastructure, the neighborhood decides

about traffi c, the block makes decisions about

parking, the household makes decisions about

its building, and the individual makes decisions

about the bedroom. The smallest group at the

latest point in time that can competently make

a decision—that is subsidiarity. Thus we’re

evolving participatory planning towards a more

intelligent democracy.

A lot of architects are working in China, which

doesn’t have much of a public process to speak

of. Should we copy their model?

It’s much easier to get things done there. But

they’re also making terrible mistakes. The

outcome of their planning is generally awful

and provides evidence that you need some sort

of public participation.

But if you want to be cynical about it, the

West will benefi t from sending over all those

irresponsible designers who are screwing

up their quality of life. China will become an

undesirable place to live. In the future, their

best talent will choose to live in San Francisco

or Seattle. It is poison-pill planning. The CIA

couldn’t do better. �

INTERVIEW BY DIANA LIND

PHOTO BY NOAH KALINA

“Conventional public participation

makes the mistake of privileging

the neighbors. … You can’t confuse neighbors with the community as a whole.”


“THE TIME FOR THINKING CAUTIOUSLY IS OVER,”

exclaimed the call for entries in the recent

Build a Better Burb competition. Ryan H.B.

Lovett, John B. Simons, and Patrick Cobb’s

student entry, Upcycling 2.0, responds with

multidimensional intelligence to the brief,

which requests that participants be “bold” in

developing ideas to retrofi t the downtowns of

New York’s Long Island.

Organized by the Long Island Index, part

of the Rauch Foundation, the competition

clearly resonated with the design community,

attracting 212 submissions. The jury chose 23

fi nalists and fi ve primary winners, one people’s

choice winner, and the student winner,

Upcycling 2.0.

Long Island Index director Ann Golob

succinctly explains the impetus behind the

competition: Long Island is having a hard time

getting its young people to stay. Low-paying jobs

for younger adults and the lure of edgier New

York City are resulting in an aging population.

“We need to reinvent ourselves,” Golob says.

In developing Upcycling 2.0, arguably

the most innovative of the competition-

winning designs, Lovett, Simons, and

Cobb—all enrolled at Columbia University’s

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning,

and Preservation—tapped into their training

as architects and urban planners. They also

applied innovative practices from economics,

community organizing, and other disciplines.

And as members of the competition’s target

demographic, they know their audience.

Competition juror Daniel D’Oca, a partner

at Brooklyn, N.Y.–based Interboro Partners,

called the plan (portions of which are shown

above) “a creative, optimistic reading of

the suburb and its building blocks, which it

proposes to combine in interesting ways.”

At the largest scale, the scheme accepts

as a given the existing regional confi guration

of towns and mass transit that connect Long

Island to New York. But it is at the local level—

namely, Hicksville, N.Y., a bedroom community

of more than 41,000—that the students turn

traditional suburbia on its head.

Upcycling 2.0 posits that in order

to encourage community participation,

individuals and organizations should combine

revenue streams—such as a portion of rental

and lease income and membership dues—and

then use the funds for public development ( 1 ).

This overarching idea intrigued jurors: “It’s not

just about design—it’s about how these people

can pool their money,” Golob says.

Lovett, Simons, and Cobb would

administer the funds and the projects through

a nonprofi t community-improvement group.

“The project title is misleading. This is less

upcycling than a homeowners association

with a conscience,” says juror Allison Arieff .

The group would encompass local residents,

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THE NEXT NORMAL136

OUR ANCESTORS MANAGED FOR MILLENNIA WITHOUT AIR CONDITIONING, electric light, and the other

appurtenances of modern life. So should the profession’s eff orts to go green necessarily involve

more technology? The recipient of a $129 million government research grant explains his

ideas for making buildings more energy-effi cient. (Hint: Technology is only part of the solution.)

A consortium proposes a counterintuitive strategy for New Orleans’ fl ooding problems. And a

professor suggests that architects need to design, and build, more simply.

AVERAGE WINTER TEMPERATURE NORTH OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

AVERAGE INTERIOR TEMPERATURE OF AN INHABITED IGLOO

THE NEXT NORMAL140

FIND YOUR INNER SCIENTISTPPENNN STTATE’’S EENERRGYY INNNOVVATTIONN HUUB HASS RECEIVVED A $1129 MILLION

FFEDEERALL GRANTT TO PURRSUEE NEEW GGREEEN BBUILLDING TEECHNNOLLOGYY. JAMES

FFREIHAUUT, THE HHUB’’S TEECHNICAL DDIRECTOR, JJUSTTIFIEES TTHE EXPPENSE.

DATING FROM THE ERA of the Revolutionary

War, Philadelphia’s Navy Yard was a bustling

shipyard for more than two centuries. During

its World War II heyday, it employed 44,000

people, and by 1995, when the U.S. Navy closed

the site, there were over 200 buildings from a

pastiche of eras on the 1,200-acre spread. The

Navy Yard became a business park, providing

offi ce space for about 80 companies, including

Tasty Baking Co., the Philadelphia-based maker

of Tastykakes, and Urban Outfi tters.

Now it has become a laboratory for the

buildings of the future. Led by Pennsylvania

State University, a consortium of 112

organizations from academia and industry has

just received a federal grant of $129 million to

study what it takes to build new structures

that use minimal energy and to retrofi t, for

effi ciency, everything from modern offi ce

buildings to drafty old gymnasiums.

In an interview with ARCHITECT, James

Freihaut, the consortium’s director of

operations and technology, who is a professor

of architectural engineering at Penn State,

describes how, in addition to revolutionary

components and systems, we need a revolution

in collaboration—and in policy.

The Navy Yard consortium is the nation’s

third Energy Innovation Hub: the fi rst two,

at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at

CalTech, focus on nuclear energy and solar

energy, respectively. Why is this hub focused on

energy-effi cient building?

We use 40 percent of all our primary energy

in operating building systems. Yet unlike the

automobile, aerospace, and manufacturing

industries, which have seen dramatic decreases

in their fuel consumption over the last 30 to

40 years, there has been no really appreciable

change in buildings’ energy use. We really need

to address this.

How does the project’s focus on retrofi tting

deal with that problem?

There are 5.2 million or so commercial

buildings in the U.S. with lifetimes of 20 to 40

years or more. If you just concentrated on new

construction, it would take 20 to 30 years to

realize any signifi cant energy improvements.

We need to really concentrate on existing

buildings and making them much more

energy-effi cient.

It’s also a much more diffi cult job to do,

technically and economically. If we can tackle

the retrofi t market, then we will be able to deal

with new construction fairly easily.

What does a full retrofi t entail?

First, you characterize how much electricity,

natural gas, or oil the building uses and break

that down to the various subsystems, like

lighting and HVAC, to see which aspects of the

building are contributing most to that usage.

Then you do a systematic “what if” redesign,

coming up with technology for each of the

components that would radically reduce the

energy used.

What new technologies are Hub researchers

developing for such retrofi ts?

One example is active façades, which respond


dynamically to the building’s environment.

These might have embedded phase-change

materials, a wax or gel that can absorb heat as

the façade gets hot from the sun. As the heat

starts to transmit through the building’s façade

into the interior, the phase-change material

slows down the temperature increase inside, so

that the air-conditioning system doesn’t have

to use as much energy to keep up.

We’re also studying building coatings

that respond to the intensity of sunlight and

become more or less refl ective or diff usive, so

that the heat doesn’t get into the structure to

begin with. People are looking at protective

coatings that are also energy generating, as

well as photovoltaic shingles and sidings that

generate electricity. Crucially, we’re also looking

at extensive use of sensors in buildings, to

develop a control system that will distribute

heating, cooling, and ventilation to where the

people are, rather than the building as a whole.

Some of these materials already exist. Some

of this technology already exists. But it’s not

being used correctly.

One example is on-site power systems,

which generate electricity using photovoltaics,

wind turbines, gas turbines, or internal

combustion engine–based systems, which have

the added benefi t that all the heat energy from

the exhaust is recovered to provide hot water,

heating, and even cooling. You can buy systems

like these that generate power and store it

for the building’s use, like a hybrid car, right

now. The reason they’re not used more often

is that buildings aren’t designed to use them

effi ciently, so the payback period may be fi ve

to 15 years.

As it stands, a lot of this technology isn’t

economically feasible to use in a building.

How much would it cost, per square foot, to

have all this technology?

Thousands of dollars. If you wanted a totally

instrumented, dynamically responsive building

with pseudoactive materials, it would be very

expensive.

How can we deal with the cost barrier?

A major problem is that we don’t have good

modeling tools that can simulate all the

diff erent systems in a building, which would

let the design and construction team see

the advantages and disadvantages of each

of the proposed technologies. The whole

package might be overkill for some buildings.

Furthermore, many systems are most cost-

eff ective when they are designed in concert

with the rest of the building.

They do modeling like this all the time in

the automobile and aerospace industries. The

reason we don’t do it in the building industry

is that the design process is really fragmented.

A developer hires an architect. An architect

suggests an architectural engineering fi rm. The

architectural engineering fi rm suggests certain

contractors, construction companies. You hire a

commissioning agent downstream.

Everybody has their own little design tools

and is trying to optimize their profi tability

from their part of the design. You don’t get a

product that

gets the best

performance

for the lowest

cost and

lowest energy use. We need all these people

working together—a vertically integrated

industry. For that, we need new design tools.

The hub is working on that.

Complicating all this, however, are certain

policies. If you are using public funding, you

have to have fair competitive bidding on each

aspect. If I want to do an integrated design

with architectural engineers, contractors,

construction, and commissioning agents all

in the same room, how can I bid out diff erent

parts of the job?

How is the Hub dealing with that issue?

We’re trying to fi gure how this would work

by doing some real projects. At the Navy

Yard, we’re renovating a gymnasium that

was built in 1942. It may have lead paint

problems—a typical retrofi t issue—and is

historically signifi cant, so it’s going to be a

challenge. Furthermore, using state funds for

it is going to make it very diffi cult to do an

integrated retrofi t.

But, obviously, we want to practice what

we preach. We’ll have Penn State physical plant

people, who deal all the time with state funds,

in on this process, telling us good ideas and

explaining the problems they have run into

with specifi c state policies. Then we have to

document that and fi nd a way around it that

the rest of the industry can follow.

We’re also doing a retrofi t with private

funds. Urban Outfi tters, whose international

headquarters is here, has asked us to help

renovate a 70,000-square-foot older building.

There will be a diff erent set of issues in

each of these projects—and that’s good. We

want to see the diff erent issues that come

up and fi gure out a way to either change

those polices or to fi nd a creative way to

address them.

How much energy would a retrofi tted offi ce

building save per year? And how soon would

such a package be available?

Just by using integrated design and existing

technology, we think we can get a 30 percent

reduction. With a more intense design process

and advances in dynamic controls, smart-grid

technology, and materials, we can get to 50

percent. If we really put some long-term eff ort

into new materials and smart-grid technology,

we think we can get 80 percent. Though we

are still grappling with the business model, the

hub hopes to have a package of suggestions for

the 30 percent reduction retrofi t available to

developers within one to 1.5 years.

You’ve received $22 million in federal funds this

year and are expecting similar amounts over

the next fi ve. But that depends on congressional

appropriations. If funding is canceled, how will

you spin off what you’ve accomplished into

something useful?

We’re not going to accomplish enough in one

year, that’s for sure—maybe in three years.

Certainly in fi ve years, our plan is to be self-

suffi cient. It’s actually very complicated, as I

think you can see now. It’s not just a technology

issue, it’s a policy issue, it’s a business model

issue, it’s a cultural issue.

The World Business Council for Sustainable

Development had an energy-effi cient building

task force for fi ve years, and their conclusion

was pretty much the same thing. If we don’t

do integrated design and delivery of buildings,

we’re not going to get anywhere in building

energy effi ciency. But it’s such a complicated

problem that no one company, even United

Technologies or IBM or GE, can take the

fi nancial risk to do what it’s going to take. We

need the government to share the risk with us.

The Achilles’ heel of all this could be the

policy issues that encourage the current form

of behavior. I can guarantee you countries

like China and India—who are growing

exponentially and want to develop energy-

effi cient systems—have learned from our

mistakes. They’re learning that they need to

do integrated designs and building systems

development, and I bet you that they do it. �

INTERVIEW BY VERONIQUE GREENWOOD


“Everybody has their own little design tools and is trying to optimize

their profi tability from their part of the design. You don’t get a product that gets the best performance for the

lowest cost and lowest energy use.”

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AARCHITECTTUREE FIRRM WAAGGOONNEER & BALL HAS TEAMEED WITH TTHE DDUTCCH GOOVERNMENT AND THE AMERICAN PLANNING

AASSOCCIATIION TTO PRROVEE THAAT SAAVINNG NNEW ORLLEANNS CCOULLD BEE AS SIMPPLE AS LETTING THE WATER IN.

TEXT BY KATIE GERFEN

IMAGES COURTESY WAGGONNER & BALL ARCHITECTS

NEW ORLEANS ARCHITECT DAVID WAGGONNER, FAIA, has been on a four-year crusade in defense

of water. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, everyone from the federal government on

down has been focused on keeping the water out of New Orleans—building bigger,

better, higher levees and fi nding new ways to contain any water within city bounds.

But Waggonner is leading a veritable Enlightenment salon of thinkers to question every

aspect of moving water in and out of New Orleans, and to reestablish the connection

between residents and this most basic of resources.


Waggonner hasn’t embarked on this journey alone: He is working

with people such as U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who as early as 2006

organized a series of trips to exchange ideas with the people who know

fl ooding best: the Dutch. Out of those talks emerged a series of three

formal workshops at Tulane University, known as the Dutch Dialogues.

The fi rst took place in March 2008 and centered on Louisiana’s landscape

and its properties; the second, in October 2008 during the American

Planning Association (APA) convention, focused on planning at the

regional, city, and neighborhood scales; and the third was in April 2010,

when participants developed a water strategy that would “nourish the

whole system,” Waggonner says. Landrieu continued to lead concurrent

delegations to the Netherlands to learn as much as possible and to

establish relationships between Dutch leaders and key U.S. decision-

makers, including Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator

Lisa P. Jackson.

The water-management concepts that emerged from the Dutch

Dialogues suggest that throwing more infrastructure at the problem

is not the best solution: “As we’re thinking about the infrastructure

we would need, we’re shifting more toward the Dutch model,”

Waggonner says, “which is really starting with the ground and water

and biodiversity layer, and then [moving] to the infrastructure layer,

then up to the habitation layer.” The idea is to analyze the groundscape

of the city and environs or “reshape the bowl,” as Waggonner puts it,

to create a series of drainage pools and canals that would run through

the city, managing stormwater runoff by gravity rather than pumps.

Bringing water back into the urban fabric creates new opportunities for

redevelopment of communities as well. “Water is an attractive thing, a

thing to reconceive this place,” the architect says. But, he adds, “It’s not

so easy when you’ve been traumatized by it.”

The existing, “primarily technologically based system,” as

Waggonner refers to it, collects water in three main outfall canals—

enclosed by stem walls, or mini-levees—and uses pumps to eject the

water into Lake Pontchartrain ( 1 ). This system is not just in place for

catastrophic hurricanes, but also to accommodate runoff from the

near-tropical rainfall that regularly blows through the area. Part of the

Dutch Dialogues scheme involves setting the average surface level at

5 feet below sea level, which would allow for the removal of concrete

fl oodwalls and the creation of a series of canals and waterways. Gravity

keeps water circulating through the system. “You don’t want dry water

courses,” Waggonner says. “A dry ditch is not an attractive thing.” The

new system creates visual, physical, and social connections between

the water and the neighborhoods and provides storage to accommodate

storm surges or runoff from massive rains.

Removing the stem walls and creating a connection, both visual

and infrastructural, with the canals creates a waterfront destination in

place of decaying urban barriers (3). Widening the canals where possible

allows a more natural waterline and additional capacity for both storage

and pumping. Another motivation for taking down the walls isn’t

urbanistic, it’s psychological: “You do a better job of maintaining what

you can see,” Waggonner says.

After Dutch Dialogues II, a local community group, Friends of Lafi tte

Corridor, approached Waggonner and his fi rm to work on a sustainable

water strategy. Currently, stormwater is collected in an open box culvert.

A proposed solution involves expanding the culvert and covering it

over; water would still run through it, just underground (2). This new

structure would allow for a second layer of water from the Bayou to run

over the top—essentially creating a double-layered canal—as part of the

circulating water system that draws water through the city and back out

to the lake. The scheme also looks at the nearby Carondelet Canal, which

ran from Bayou St. John to the French Quarter but has long been fi lled in.

The canal is somewhat reestablished, this time as a bioswale, creating a

stormwater storage and bioremediation zone separate from the larger

water system. It’s about “modifying the engineered structure and getting

back toward the natural condition,” Waggonner says. “It’s not just about

New Orleans, it’s about applying these systems across the boundaries.”

But despite the involvement of planning luminaries such as Paul

Farmer, executive director and CEO of the APA, who helped Waggonner

lead the Dutch Dialogues along with economist Dale Morris of the

Royal Netherlands Embassy, the scheme to rethink New Orleans’ water

infrastructure is having trouble gaining traction. The U.S. Army Corps

of Engineers has two options on the table for New Orleans: repair the

existing stem walls and keep them in place, or remove the walls and

the current pumping system, and dig trenches (as deep as 30 feet) to

serve as water storage. The fi rst option costs roughly $800 million—the

amount earmarked by Congress—the second $3.4 billion, according to

the Army Corps. The City of New Orleans would be left to foot the bill

for maintenance. The plan that emerged from Dutch Dialogues II and

III would come in between the two in terms of cost but would arguably

create a much better urban experience and require less maintenance.

Support for changing the paradigm is easy to fi nd among intellectuals

and foreign governments, but harder to wrangle at home. “New Orleans

is a test case,” Waggonner says. “We’re the canary in the coal mine with

regards to American infrastructure.” But with a new mayor prioritizing

water management, and the interest of a U.S. senator, the EPA, and

the APA, the plan could move forward—and help to heal New Orleans

residents’ relationship with the water that so defi nes their region. �

PROPOSED LAFITTE CORRIDOR


DO MORE WITH LESS

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AAN ERRAA OOF RRAAPIIDLLY DIIMINISSHINGG RRESOURCES, IS

AARCHHITTECCTURRE SOO TTECHHNOLLOGICCAALLLY COMPLEX?

TEXT BY KIEL MOE, AIA

GRAPHIC BY JAMESON SIMPSON

ARCHITECTURE DOESERRECTIONSS

PAAST, PRESENT AND FUTURRE MUULTI-TASSKING

PUUSH THE ENVELOPPE

DEESIGNMOORE WITHH LESS

WOORK FORR FREEELITISM

SYYNTHESISS NAAIVETY? MISGUIDDED OPTIIMISM?

5

7

1

3

4

6

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DOUBLE-GLAZED CURTAINWALL

MASONRY CONSTRUCTION

CHARLES STARCK, AIA @JIMSYME@ARCHISPEAK

LUANE FAUCHER@AVSCAPEGOAT

MIKE WEBBER

KEVIN PARENT, AIAMARK BERON ROB ANGLIN

DAVID PERONNET

THE NEXT NORMAL146

ARCHITECTS OFTEN HAVE A NOSTALGIC VIEW OF PROGRESS: Our feebly linear

understanding assumes that humanity always benefi ts when a new

technology arises. Architects frequently deploy systems, software, and

products to replace older versions and diff erentiate themselves in a

crowded and competitive marketplace. Many architects thus embrace

linear progress with excitement and incorporate technology with

misplaced enthusiasm, unaware that they are caught in a vicious cycle,

based on recurrent, and self-undercutting, obsolescence. Technology

is anything but new, and the traditional view of progress—a curiously

mixed cocktail of acquiescence and hubris—refl ects little about its

real dynamics.

In reality, progress is nonlinear and unstable. As such, it is

very much open to design. Today, progress itself must be designed.

Contrary to the traditional model, one design for progress today would

selectively de-escalate the most egregious forms of technology in favor

of a lower-technology but higher-performance paradigm. Neither

stubbornly reactionary nor blindly optimistic, this lower-technology,

higher-performance approach is an intelligent mongrel of both the

archaic and the contemporary, and it can improve the performance of

our design practices and buildings.

Instead of adding ever-increasing layers of intricacy, specifi city, and

coordination, architects should question the complexity that dominates

our buildings and lives. Using a low-technology, high-performance

approach, architects can exceed the performance expectations of a

higher-technology building, and in the process they can engender

durability, adaptability, tolerance, and, most importantly, resilience—

qualities that are increasingly fundamental to architecture. One cannot

underestimate the role of designed resilience in the 21st century.

Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Construction

The linear model of progress in architecture is invariably additive:

When architects encounter new problems and obligations, they often

respond by layering materials, technologies, consultants, software.

The double-glazed envelope is a classic example—a cascade of

compensations for the conceit of an overilluminated, underinsulated

glass box. The extra glass and steel, automated shading devices, fi re

controls, and operable vents consume prodigious amounts of embodied

energy and coordination time. These costs are diffi cult to justify when

envelopes with a vastly more sensible 20 to 40 percent ratio of window

to opaque, insulated wall can

yield much higher performance

for thermal conditions, lighting,

operational energy, embodied

energy, serviceability, and

resilience.

Monolithic wall assemblies

such as site-cast, air-entrained,

lightweight insulating concrete

are, by contrast, an optimal

approach to the de-escalation of

technology. The lower strength

of lightweight concrete requires greater wall thickness to perform

structurally. The concrete incorporates millions of air pockets that

provide insulation equal to layered insulated wall assemblies and

that manage vapor and water migration with its capacity to “breathe.”

Indeed, what are often seen today as problems inherent to building

envelopes, such as vapor or water migration, only became problematic

as assemblies became layered with thinner, task-specifi c systems and

air conditioning.

Whether lightweight air-entrained concrete, solid cross-laminated

wood panels, solid masonry, or solid stone, monolithic assemblies

become even more benefi cial when coupled with a thermally active

surface for heating and cooling, created by moving water through

pipes that are embedded directly into walls and ceilings. Structure

becomes the primary mechanical system. In Portland, Ore., Opsis

Architecture renovated a masonry horse stable into its new offi ce by

retrofi tting the building with a thermally active surface, which at

once served as the seismic retrofi t, the thermal-conditioning system, a

perdurable fi nish material, and a foundation for a future expansion.

Bureaucracy of Technique

Architects have inherited a mentality of overly programmed, layered,

engineered, additive, complex, and obsolescent design from the 20th

century. We routinely strain against the bureaucracy of techniques

we have passively grown to accept. We lose more ground than we

gain in our successive attempts at “progress,” and yet, somehow, we

routinely acquire more liability. Architecture stands to benefi t from

a rigorous reevaluation of its more pernicious theories, techniques,

and technologies.

As the complexity of buildings and practices continues to

increase, so does our inability to know the diffi cult whole. This is an

intellectually and professionally dubious position. In a radically less-

additive mentality, there are systemic gains for buildings and practices

when we do more with less by orders of magnitude: 40 drawings in

a construction set, not 400, for instance. Practices that do this know

more about what they do and do more of what they know well. Doing

less but better, and in turn achieving more, is consequential progress.

A primary aim of de-escalating technology is an escalation of actual

knowledge about technique, practice, and performance.

Twin Obsolescence

Architecture’s chronically divergent preoccupations with a building’s

image and the inevitable obsolescence of ever-escalating technologies

and systems is not a cogent pathway forward in this century, and

it never was. Rather, consequential progress will emerge only

when architects productively merge architecture’s objecthood and

objectivity; when they grasp that a single-speed bicycle off ers a model

of far-higher-performance design than a Toyota Prius, much less a

Formula One race car.

In all aspects of practice, an increasingly interesting question has

arisen: What is the least architects can do and still exuberantly achieve

or exceed the expectations of our discipline? This is not to suggest

laziness, or some trivial minimalism, but rather to invoke a more

mindful engagement with technique—a wholly untaught, unthought

but inordinately consequential concept in architecture in this century.

What the profession needs is more intellectual and disciplinary

agility to fi nally set our techniques and practices on a course for

meaningful progress. This will emerge from strategic shifts in our

pedagogies and practices. It will not emerge from capitulating to the

demands of software packages, certifi cation checklists, or greenwashed

products. As Lewis Mumford wrote, “The machine itself makes

no demands and holds out no promises.” Progress will not arrive

automatically, but through thoughtful tactics and strategies. Progress

will only be achieved when it is designed. �

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AMERICANS AGE 65 AND OVER IN 2010

AS AMERICA’S 76 MILLION BABY BOOMERS reach retirement age, what they

need—and want—in their living arrangements will change dramatically.

Some boomers will seek out suburban gated communities such as Leisure

World in Seal Beach, Calif., which explicity excludes primary residents

under the age of 55. Architect Matthias Hollwich is banking on a diff erent

trend—the desire of older Americans to live in diverse, higher-density

communities, with a host of services and activities. And no matter

where the baby boomers choose to retire, Michael Graves wants their

surroundings to be perfectly, universally accessible.

AMERICANS AGE 65 AND OVER IN 2050

ASSUME THEY WANT TO HAVE FUN

THE NEXT NORMAL150

A BELOVEDD GRANDMOTHERR’S DEATHH TRANNSFORMMED 339-YEEAR-OLD ARCCHITTECTT MMATTTHIASS HHOLLLWWICH

INTO AN UNLIKELY, PASSIOONATE ADDVOCATTE OF AARCHITTECTUREE ANDD PLANNNINGG FOOR TTHE AGGING.

BY HIS OWN DEFINITION, German architect

Matthias Hollwich is old. He certainly doesn’t

look it. Tall, and muscularly fi lling out a black

T-shirt, he’s got the kind of youthful energy

you see in athletes and workaholics. There’s no

gray in his goatee, and while his hair is cropped

short, he’s still got most of it. So I’m taken

aback when he answers a query about his age.

“I’m 50 percent of my life,” Hollwich states

with a glint in his eye. “The average German

reaches 78, and I’m 39. I have passed 50 percent

of my life expectancy, so I’m offi cially old.”

Standing on the threshold of middle age,

Hollwich is on a mission to change how society

as a whole—and, specifi cally, the architecture

profession—thinks about aging. It begins

with a counterintuitive position. In a culture

obsessed with preserving the luster of youth

for as long as possible, with a whole host of

methods from the surface to the structure

(Botox, little blue pills, artifi cial organs),

Hollwich believes we ought to call ourselves

old earlier. Doing so will change the way we

look at older people and, eventually, how

people will look at us.

By acknowledging the aging process and

integrating it into daily life, he argues, we’re

better able to prepare for the inevitable end-

of-life changes that, at present, we keep grimly

hidden away in assisted-living facilities and

nursing homes.

Hollwich has dubbed this critical

perspective “New Aging,” and for the past three

years, he’s conducted workshops, seminars, and

research studios on the subject—fi rst at the

Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Germany and

then at the University of Pennsylvania, where

he teaches. (He routinely takes his students

into nursing homes to see existing conditions

fi rsthand.)

This past fall, he organized “New Aging:

An International Conference on Aging and

Architecture” at Penn’s School of Design. The

conference brought together a diverse group

of designers, academics, and scientists, from

architect and gerontologist Victor Regnier to

the controversial British antiaging researcher

Aubrey de Grey.

But Hollwich is far from a cloistered

academic. As a principal of the New York–

based practice Hollwich Kushner (or HWKN)

and co-founder of the architectural social

networking site Architizer, he’s in a position

to pursue and promote design projects that

rethink what it means to be old. However, his

qualifi cations don’t explain why a decidedly

hip architect (with an Offi ce for Metropolitan

Architecture pedigree, no less) would choose

to align himself with the Golden Girls set.

“My grandmother died next to me in a

room. We were living for years in the same

house, and my mother was her caretaker,”

Hollwich recalls. “I was the last one to talk to

her. I felt it when she died. It was not scary.

It was very beautiful that I was so close to

her.” He was living with his family in Munich

at the time.

“For her,” he continues, “she was looking

forward to it [her death], because she didn’t

feel so well anymore. And she felt she

could hand over her life now to the next

generation. But there was, I think, a moment of

confrontation with death. Denial is the worst

thing we can do. Most people deny that they’re

going to die or they’re going to get frail or that

they’re going to need to move into a nursing

home … or even that they have to give up the

car, the driving license.”

Multigenerational living and a clear-eyed

reckoning with the limits of independence are

at the root of Hollwich’s New Aging. Together,

they suggest increasingly popular architectural

and urban planning solutions such as walkable

communities in urban areas, with close-

at-hand amenities such as grocery stores,

pharmacies, and public transit, or housing

developments that entice active sexagenarians

with rock walls and shopping malls, but also

incorporate what Hollwich calls “stealth

care”—home nursing services that operate as

invisibly as infrastructure—to serve the elderly.

“By bringing aging closer to home, you make it

less scary,” he says.

Currently, HWKN is at work on just this

kind of development in Palm Springs, Calif.

It’s geared to the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual,

and transgender) community, a group usually

invisible in discussions of aging, even though it

represents an increasing elderly population.

Called Boom, the project is banking on the

combination of high design and a wide range

of facilities—spa, boutique hotel, medical care,

active but wheelchair-accessible landscapes—

as a signature draw. HWKN has enlisted 10

fi rms on the project, including such notables

as J. Mayer H., Diller Scofi dio + Renfro, and

Lot-Ek. Bruce Mau Design is creating Boom’s

visual identity.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a vibrant

65-year-old, fi t enough to go shopping and

play tennis daily, who would want to move to

a community full of old people. And I say as

much to Hollwich.

“If we don’t like how we’re … going to live

when we’re 80, then we need to re-engineer

what will happen,” he replies. He envisions

older people living in both stand-alone

developments and facilities mixed into the

existing urban fabric: In Geropolis, a study he

worked on in Dessau, the team developed a

series of community typologies for aging, some

modeled on college campuses and shopping

malls, and with spiritual retreats and wellness

hubs. “These spaces are not just for the elderly,”

he maintains. “I mean, when you look at what’s

good for our pioneers, it’s good for everyone:

mixed-use buildings, mixed generations,

reduced need for mobility and transportation.”

Pioneers? I ask, and he says of the boomers

and Gen-Xers who will redefi ne old age, “I call

them pioneers because they [will] go to a point

in life that nobody has ever been.” �

TEXT BY MIMI ZEIGER



THE NEXT NORMAL152

AN ABSURDLY FRRUSTRATING ATTEMPT AT SSHAVINNG IN HHIS HOOSPITAAL RROOMM MOTTIVAATEDD MMICHHAEEL GRRAVVESS TO BECOME A CHAMPION OF UNIVEERSALL DESIIGN——IN HHEALTHCARRE, AANDD EVVERRYWWHEEREE.

IT’S EARLY AFTERNOON when my taxi pulls up

in front of a boxy clapboard building in

Princeton, N.J. Michael Graves, FAIA, keeps a

number of studios on this tree-lined street.

I worry that I haven’t made it to the right

one, especially when I’m welcomed by three

wooden steps leading to a small porch. As

far as I can tell, there’s no accessible ramp or

lift, and I can’t ascertain how Graves—who’s

used a wheelchair since 2003, when a spinal

infection left him paralyzed from the chest

down—gets to work.

Only later, once I am seated in a room

fi lled by a huge Graves-designed conference

table, do I learn how the architect reaches the

front door: via a ramp concealed by a row of

carefully pruned hedges. Graves isn’t hiding

his disability; it’s the ramp that’s hiding in

plain sight. The design is a straightforward

example of integrated accessibility. For Graves,

accessibility is a daily experience composed of

dozens of challenges unimaginable for able-

bodied designers.

Case in point: While I am seated at the

conference table—a glass-topped aff air with a

sculptural white base that draws whimsically

on the architect’s love of classical forms—

Graves is parked sideways at the narrow end.

Designed before his disability, the table is too

low for his knees and motorized wheelchair to

slip under.

Graves is soft-spoken. He tells long stories

that are at once personal and political—one

is infused with just-barely-concealed rage

against the former Bush administration’s

policy on stem cell research (which might

yield treatments to help his condition). Graves

was in and out of eight hospitals during

the year and a half after his illness, and a

narrative about that time soon spins into an

architectural moral.

“My fi rst day in my wheelchair, I thought,

‘Oh, good, today fi nally I can shave,’ ” he begins.

“So, I took myself into the bathroom—I was

very proud of myself, by the way—and I

reached for the hot water [tap], and I couldn’t

reach it. And so I thought, ‘Well, that’s not such

a big deal. I can ask somebody to bring me my

electric razor.’ And then I looked around where

I would plug in the electric razor, and the outlet

was on the wall next to the fl oor.”

Unable to see his face in the mirror and

increasingly frustrated, he asked his doctor to

sit in a wheelchair and go through the same

tasks, with similarly obstructed results.

For several years, Graves has consulted

on hospital facilities and durable medical

goods—the kind of products used both at home

and institutionally. Healthcare has become

as important a part of his work (with both

Michael Graves Design Group, his product

and graphic design fi rm, and Michael Graves

& Associates, his architecture fi rm) as hotel

complexes and housewares for Target. In 2009,

Graves partnered with medical equipment

manufacturer Stryker to create a collection

of hospital-room furniture geared to address

the needs of both patient and caregiver. The

designs draw on his own experiences, as well

as behavioral research and interviews with

medical administrators, doctors, nurses, and

disabled and elderly users.

Graves is frustrated by the lack of good,

aff ordable, mass-produced healthcare products,

especially as baby boomers reach the precipice

of old age. “I used to say that we are in ‘the

new normal.’ And it got to be a phrase. There

are now—I’ve forgotten how many millions

of boomers there are. But if you sprained your

ankle today and you needed to get a pair of

crutches, where would you go?”

I have no idea, I tell him. “They aren’t

immediately available all around town,” he

agrees. “I say that because there’s not much

competition. And the people who buy those

things are generally elderly, on fi xed income,

and they’re not going to spend the most.”

Graves directs me to sit on a terra-cotta-red

armchair with a rounded back and bulbous

arms that recall the Mickey Mouse–ears

teakettle he produced for Disney. We’re in his

product design studio, surrounded by young

employees and prototypes for stereos, bathtub

safety bars, and kitchen utensils. He tells me

to pretend that I am elderly and to try to lift

myself out of the chair.

“One of the things we understood was that

people have to get to the front edge of the chair

before they can get up,” Graves explains. “And

when they get there, then it’s the big push.

My grandmother wouldn’t have made it. She

would do that two or three times before she

was able to get up.”

I grip the shepherd’s-crook-like arms, tilt

forward (“Nose over toes,” Graves instructs),

and easily lift myself into a vertical position.

The rounded arms that seemed originally like

a fl ight of design fancy actually provide me

2 extra inches of leverage.

Once standing, I walk and Graves rolls to

his workspace in the offi ce. Tubes of paint are

scattered on his desk, and several canvases are

in the works. Rome is Graves’ favorite place, but

he has not been there since his paralysis. It’s an

impossible terrain for wheelchairs, even high-

tech ones. In ochre, brick-red, and olive-green

paint, you can see his longing to return.

Each painting is an abstracted vision of

the Italian landscape; a few of them were

commissioned by a local hospital. But another

small canvas catches my eye. It depicts a

light-fi lled hospital room. The red Stryker

chair, two tables, and a bed are rendered in the

same Mediterranean hues as the landscapes—

Graves’ dream of a more humane healthcare

environment.

“Even though I was one of the originators

of Postmodernism, I don’t think in terms of

style at all. I never have,” he says. “I was simply

trying to humanize Modernism. I was simply

trying to fi nd a way to make an architecture

that didn’t leave me cold.” �

TEXT BY MIMI ZEIGER



ASSUME THEY WANT YOUR HELP

NOBODY BECOMES AN ARCHITECT because of a love for business. But recessions have

strange eff ects. Architects who typically appraise their work based on its artistic,

social, or environmental value are suddenly acting like MBAs. They’re looking for

quantitative ways to prove to clients that an investment in design is worthwhile.

They’re testing the efficiencies of building information modeling. And they’re

watching and worrying about fi rms in Asia emerging as potential competitors.

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT OF THE U.S. IN 2009

VALUE OF CONSTRUCTION PUT IN PLACE IN THE U.S. IN 2009

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THE NEXT NORMAL156

PROVE YOUR DESIGN HAS VALUE

1 California Academy of Sciences •

Alison Brown, Chief of Staff and

chief fi nancial offi cer

The California Academy of Sciences spent a

reported $488 million on its LEED-Platinum

building, designed by Renzo Piano, Hon. FAIA,

in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A big

return on this big investment is important

to the institution, and CFO Alison Brown

uses visitorship and membership as primary

measurement tools.

The museum projected that fi rst-year

attendance in the new building, which opened

in 2008, would be about 1.6 million. Instead,

it drew 2.3 million. And at the time that the

academy moved into the new building, Brown

says, “We were at about 15,000 member

households.” The opening year peak was closer

to 115,000. “We think our steady state is closer

to 60,000 member households,” she says, still

above the projected 40,000.

Brown also uses another, softer metric:

multiple engagements with people,

especially what she calls the “doughnut hole”

demographic of teenagers and young adults

without children. According to the Morey

Group, a consultancy, 60 percent of groups

visiting cultural institutions include children.

At the academy, the fi gure is 40 percent. “We’re

drawing a lot more adults,” Brown says. It’s

hard to quantify the reason why, but she

credits Piano’s design. The old building, Brown

says, “looked like a chemical factory.”

2 Chickasaw Nation Medical Center • Bill

Anoatubby, Governor of the Chickasaw Nation

The old medical center serving the Chickasaw

Nation in Ada, Okla., was designed to cover

20,500 annual patient visits, less than one-

tenth of the actual number of visits. The new

PageSoutherlandPage-designed center, which

opened in 2010, is three times the size and

cost $148 million. To determine the benefi t of

the Chickasaw Nation’s investment in design,

Gov. Bill Anoatubby looks at fi nancial return,

community response, and user satisfaction.

Anoatubby credits the design with helping

to secure a spot in the 2007 Indian Health

Service Joint Venture program, which provides

“up to $25 million per year [for the next 20

years] in additional funds for staffi ng and

operation costs,” he says. The Chickasaw was

one of two tribes selected out of a pool of 71.

To build community support, lead designer

Lawrence W. Speck, FAIA, met with tribal

elders “to ensure that the design incorporated

all the cultural elements important to our

community,” Anoatubby says. He adds that

patients and caregivers say the “design creates

an environment that is conducive to healing.”

Though some benefi ts of the design are

hard to quantify, the numbers of patient

beds, dental chairs, doctors, and services are

more concrete, and they have all increased.

“We think the facility will have a signifi cant

positive impact on the overall quality of care

and health outcomes,” he says.

3 Los Angeles Trade-Technical College •

Roland Chapdelaine, president

Los Angeles Trade-Technical College is located

in an inner-city neighborhood that president

Roland Chapdelaine characterizes as “probably

the most economically challenged community

not only in the city, but the country.” So when

planning the fi rst new campus buildings in 45

years, it was “critical that we demonstrate to

our community that we are willing to provide

them the best,” he says.

MDA Johnson Favaro came on board to

develop a master plan and then to design new

student services and technology buildings.

Funded as part of a $3.5 billion bond measure—

split among nine community colleges—the

new structures opened in January 2010.

The expected surge in admissions during

the fi nancial crisis, coupled with the recent

completion date, make it diffi cult to quantify a

return on investment. But softer metrics speak

plainly enough. “Since we are a downtown

inner city, graffi ti is a challenge for us. And I

can say that with these new buildings, it has

been absolutely minimal,” Chapdelaine says,

“which I think is a powerful statement about

how the community looks at these buildings.”

The fi rst facilities survey isn’t until spring, but

anecdotal evidence suggests the students, also,

are “really pleased,” he says. �

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How has BIM changed the way you work?

Joshua Prince-Ramus: I personally believe it is the future. But at our

practice, which is probably not radically diff erent from most practices,

BIM hasn’t yet lived up to its potential—not due to any failure on its

part, but because of the failure of the team as a whole: the triad of

owner, architect, and general contractor.

What do you mean by failure?

Prince-Ramus: BIM has the potential to facilitate incredible design team

collaboration from start to fi nish, to have everyone collaborate with a 3D

model. It’s just that we are still operating with a traditional contractual

apparatus, and BIM requires something new that doesn’t yet exist. So

to use BIM to its real potential with an old contract is [like playing]

roulette. We use BIM and our partner contractors use BIM, but as the

saying goes, it’s like driving a Ferrari to get groceries.

Jim, how has BIM changed the construction industry?

James P. Barrett: We’ve got 200 BIM projects now worth about $30

billion, and it’s growing. It’s pretty much a mandate. As it is now,

we’re in the same boat as Joshua—we’ve essentially looked at BIM as

a sustaining innovation that allows us to do what we’ve always done,

just better.

Better, faster, easier, and more cost-eff ective?

Barrett: Yes. The tools allow us to do trade coordination better than

we did before, and in some cases signifi cantly better. And there are by-

products that come of that where we’ve got better work quality in the

fi eld. But you could argue we’re still doing what we’ve always done. In

fact, the sequence of coordination is pretty much the same. And so the

conscious choice now is, we recognize that we have this tool. What else

can you do with it? What else does it enable you to do?

BIM WELL WITH OTHERS

INTERVIEW BY ERNEST BECK

PHOTOS BY NOAH KALINA

THHE BENNEFITTS OF BBUILDDING INNFORMMATIONN MODDELIINGG ARE

MMORE PROMMISE THAN REAALITYY. JAMMES P.. BARRRETT,

NAATIONAL DIRRECTOOR OF INTEGGRATEED BUILLDINGG SOOLUUTIONSS

ATT TURNNER CCONSTRRUCTION COO., AND JOSSHUA PPRINNCE-RAMMUS

OFF REX DELIBBERATE THEE PROSS AND CONS.

THE NEXT NORMAL158

“The conscious choice now is, we recognize that we have this

tool. What else can you do with it? What else

does it enable you to do?” —James P. Barrett


“I keep thinking, why don’t we have the same relationship with

contractors as we do with our engineers? We have a core team of

consultants who we like to work with on almost

every job, so why aren’t we building up those kinds

of relationships between contractor and architect?”

—Joshua Prince-Ramus

THE NEXT NORMAL160

Could you be more specifi c?

Barrett: Pre-construction is far more diffi cult, but working in BIM

has been, I would argue, more fruitful for us, because it’s forcing us to

address fundamental issues of how we work with design teams and

what the product is that we need to make BIM useful for our purposes.

Prince-Ramus: The ideal scenario would be, you create a form and you

essentially say to the computer, “Give me a price.” And then you say,

“Now rationalize it, but using 20 pieces,” and then I get a new price.

And I say, “OK, well, that’s too much. Now give it to me in 14 pieces.”

Barrett: We’re all sort of saying, “We’ll show you what we’ve done in

3D,” but that’s still missing a huge next step, which is optimization. That

thought process isn’t really happening, not on any signifi cant level.

Prince-Ramus: And for us that is actually the most exciting potential of

BIM. That’s how we like to work. We want to know, how are they going

to build it, and what are the limiting factors in the design approach we

are trying? You are going to have to say, “OK, we’ve got budget X; we

want to make the most of whatever it is for the money and to know that

we’re spending the money wisely.”

With BIM, are construction companies making more design decisions?

Barrett: We’re trying to keep a strong line between that. We make it a

more information-rich environment to make better decisions that’ll

have long-term impact. We have enough problems without taking on

design liabilities.

Prince-Ramus: The problem is, there is often a void left by the architect

not controlling these processes, and often the contractor fi lls that void.

So the fi rst problem is the failure of the architect, and the second is the

contractor essentially assuming architectural duties that they don’t have

the legal liability to do.

Barrett: We have had the opposite, which is interesting, when the

architect takes the model too far.

Prince-Ramus: Everything that you have described, how to build a model

and things like that, there is always a learning curve. And so I keep

thinking, why don’t we have the same relationship with contractors

as we do with our engineers? We have a core team of consultants who

we like to work with on almost every job, so why aren’t we building up

those kinds of relationships between contractor and architect?

Does BIM help to achieve, or facilitate, that collaborative eff ort?

Prince-Ramus: It doesn’t necessarily demand BIM. But BIM is a powerful

tool, and if you get into that territory you’d be remiss not to use it.

Barrett: Mistakes in BIM are inevitable with the combination of

imperfect people working with an equally imperfect nascent technology.

A necessary precondition of BIM is a protective environment that allows

sharing and collaboration among the parties without fear of fi nger

pointing and blame. We take the Las Vegas approach to BIM, which is:

What happens in BIM stays in BIM.

Control of intellectual property rights is also an issue with BIM. How do

you deal with this?

Prince-Ramus: My observation is that when people start worrying

about IP, it’s because they don’t understand how to use BIM. We own the

drawings, the specifi cations, and the performance specifi cations. When

you do a performance specifi cation, what you’re saying is, “We insert

your proprietary information. You own that, you keep it. We own the

performance specifi cation.”

So is ownership of the BIM model really a question?

Prince-Ramus: The question of ownership is naïve. It’s exactly what

would happen in a 2D physical drawing situation. That is, we don’t own

the proprietary details, yet we will take our stuff and leave if the client

terminates us for convenience. We retain ownership of what we created.

How about in the construction industry?

Barrett: It’s not an issue for us whatsoever. We make no claims ourselves

for IP other than a proprietary system through our trade contractors. But

otherwise it has never come up as an issue.

Is BIM changing your hiring and recruitment strategies?

Barrett: We’re hiring more architects. Unlike with the design community,

there’s no history for us with BIM. Because our use of BIM is accelerating,

we are moving beyond a coordination tool to more for pre-construction.

That’s where we need people with diff erent perspectives that are not

bound by tradition. We’ve become more like problem-solvers.

Prince-Ramus: We’re starting to hire nonarchitects.

Barrett: We are apparently hiring Joshua’s castoff s.

Is this shift BIM- or technology-related?

Prince-Ramus: It’s an architectural education issue. It’s not that I’m not

hiring architects. But as someone who teaches and has a practice and

has real projects, I see the skill set of people with architectural education

as increasingly irrelevant, if not detrimental.

As the use of BIM becomes more widespread, what does the future hold?

How will you be designing and building?

Barrett: We’re seeing a strong movement toward engagement. We’re

encouraging it with the design team and owners and trade contractors

early in the process. We are going to see that totally accelerate. I also see

the development of a network of alliances. BIM can enable that because

you have a better tool to coordinate the players and their work product.

Prince-Ramus: Once engaged it takes a mental shift for architects to

start saying, “If I do my job really well I should be able to come up with

something remarkable by using the things at hand as opposed to doing

it in an abstraction and then hoping to God that somebody can fi gure it

out.” Is that where we’ll be in fi ve or 10 years? Unfortunately, no. I think

that’s where we should be now. �

*

*Apologies to Paul Rand

WHEN PEOPLE LEARN I’M AN ARCHITECT, THEY ALWAYS SAY TTHE INFORMAATION KIND OR THHE REEAL KIND? CAN YOUU DESIGN MY BASEMENT REMODEL FOR FREE?? LIKEE ART VANDELAY? I WANTEED TO BE AAN ARCHHITECCT, BUT I WAASN’T GOOD AT MATH

@LIVLAB@JOHNCLUVER

@GEISVIZ@ABIGREDAPE


WATCH YOUR BACKOUUR STUUFF MAYY BE MADE INN CHINA, BUTT WHENN IT COOMESS TTO IDEAAS, THEE UNITEED STAATES ISS STILL ON TOOP.

PRROFESSSIONALL SERVIICES, INCLUDDING ARCHITEECTURRE, CCONNSTITUTE ROUUGHLYY A THIRD OF AAMERICCA’S EXPORTTS.

BUUT BE WWARNEED: DESSIGN FIRMSS IN AASIA AARE CAATCHHING UP.

The United States imported more than four times as many goods from

China as we exported there in 2010, but our trade imbalance with China

has gone the other way when it comes to professional services. The

American architecture profession has been part of that export growth.

Many major American architecture fi rms now have offi ces in the largest

Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, as well as second-tier cities

like Tianjin. But trade, by its very nature, goes both ways, and some

Chinese fi rms have begun to open offi ces in the U.S.

The Ager Group, a China-based architecture, landscape architecture,

and planning fi rm of more than 110 people with offi ces in Shanghai and

Beijing, opened a Boston offi ce in 2007. If this is symbolic of both China’s

emergence as the world’s second-largest economy and America’s loss

of hegemony, it also isn’t all bad. The Chinese opening of branch offi ces

in the U.S. refl ects, in part, Chinese respect for the quality of American

professionals, evident in the career of Ager’s founder and president,

Xiaowei Ma.

An alumnus of the Beijing Forestry University, Ma came to the U.S. to

receive a graduate degree in landscape architecture from the University

of Minnesota, after which he worked for Sasaki Associates and other U.S.

fi rms before returning to China to set up his own offi ce in 2001.

His respect for American practice came through in a conversation I

had with Ma recently in his Shanghai offi ce. He notes that Ager sends its

Chinese employees to the Boston offi ce for periods of time, “to open up

their minds and renew their design thinking.” Ma doesn’t see Ager as a

Chinese fi rm with an American branch. Indeed, in a 2008 interview in

World Architecture Review, Ma responded to the opposite perception in

China. Ager “is not a purely foreign design fi rm that simply imposes the

western design process and design philosophy on Chinese culture,” he

said. As one of the fi rm’s principals in Boston, Jessica Leete, puts it, “That

Ager is China-based rather than U.S.-based really only has to do with

where the current majority of the work is.”

Ager’s 12 principals represent multiple nationalities—Chinese,

Philippine, and American among them—and almost all have

international education or work experiences, creating a diversity

that Ma sees as essential in today’s global practice. “The world is

fl at, without borders,” Ma says, “making nationality just a person’s

background.” That observation applies as much to clients as it does to

design professionals. “Ager is based in Shanghai,” Ma adds, “but the

client might come from the United States, [while] in the United States,

the client might come from China. … The market is cross-national.

AGER GROUP / SHANGHAI

THE NEXT NORMAL162

Our talents and thoughts are also cross-national.”

That cross-nationalism leads to some practices that may become

common in architectural fi rms with offi ces around the globe. Ager

employs full-time Chinese-English translators, for example. The fi rm’s

“strategic choice required that our company have a very international

atmosphere, with bilingual communication,” Ma says. Since its fi rst

year, Ager has also organized study trips for staff across offi ces to other

countries, so they can experience as many cultures as possible.

All of this suggests that the very notion of a headquarters and

branch offi ce may have become irrelevant. What matters, according to

Ma, is a fi rm’s “continuity of brand”—an idea that is, itself, an American

export to the rest of the world. THOMAS FISHER, ASSOC. AIA

URBANUS / SHENZHENIn the Nanshan District in the western part of Shenzhen, the heady

density of the city is far from view. Here, on the OCT Loft campus—a

series of renovated warehouse buildings clustered in a dense offi ce

parklike setting—the feeling isn’t of industry but commerce of a cultural

kind, like an edgy art school. The scene is downright serene compared

with the crowded city center of Shenzhen, which has sprung up as

an icon of China’s rapid rush to modernization and urbanization: In

30 years, the population has exploded from 30,000 to 9 million.

Designed by Urbanus, a Chinese architecture fi rm founded in 1999,

the OCT Loft campus was one of the fi rst major urban regeneration

projects undertaken by the fi rm, and for the past few years, it has

also been the offi ce of the architecture practice. “It’s a unique place,

programmed and designed by us,” explains Urbanus partner Wang Hui,

“a living case to test our ideas.”

Currently employing 85 staff between the offi ce in Shenzhen and an

outpost in Beijing, the fi rm has come a long way since it was founded by

Wang, Liu Xiaodu, and Meng Yan. (A fourth partner, Zhu Pei, split off in

2004 and currently runs a successful practice of his own.) Collectively,

the founding members of Urbanus were educated at China’s Tsinghua

University and did graduate study in the U.S., then spent their formative

years at fi rms such as Kohn Pedersen Fox and Gensler. In 2004, the

fi rm scored its biggest victory, winning a competition to design the

communications center for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Urbanus has completed projects across a wide spectrum of type and

scale. The Greater China Oriental New World, a 1.6-million-square-foot

mixed-use high-rise in Shenzhen, for example, minimizes the severity of

the building mass with towers of vertical folds. The Dafen Museum is a

critically acclaimed art institution built into the side of a hill. Urbanus’

most thought-provoking work may be its Tulou housing in Guangzhou.

Financed by China Vanke Co., one of China’s largest and richest

developers, it was one of the rare high-quality, low-income housing

projects in China and was included in an exhibition at the Cooper-

Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.

The partners are quick to note that their country has experienced

a total shift in architecture over the past 10 years. There were two

watersheds: the Olympics and Expo 2010 Shanghai, both magnets of

architectural experimentation and

urban transformation. Change has

largely been good, the partners believe. “This phenomenon has the

benefi t of making modern architectural styles the norm in China,” Liu

notes. The downside: “There are many projects being done by architects

who neither understand modernist principles, nor have the design

ability to create new ideas and images,” Liu says. “The result is … lousy

redesign of Western examples.”

Urbanus will do what it can to counter that problem. Just last year,

it won the competition to design Shenzhen Crystal Island, a 99-acre

transport hub and cultural center, in collaboration with the Offi ce for

Metropolitan Architecture. Also last year, at a much smaller scale, the

fi rm completed the Jade Bamboo Garden in Shenzhen, a patch of green

space over a parking lot which connects two residential areas.

The project, paid for by a private developer as a concession to the

local community, was a triumph for both the environment and local

urban policy. Says Wang: “Our design is based on reality, as well as a

dynamic knowledge pool, and this gives us endless inspiration and

nutrition.” ANDREW YANG

MORPHOGENESIS / NEW DELHIWhen Manit and Sonali Rastogi started Morphogenesis in New Delhi

in 1996, the couple—who met as undergraduates at New Delhi’s School

of Planning and Architecture and were fresh from graduate school

at London’s Architectural Association (AA)—confronted a sluggish

economy and architecture market. The liberalization of the nation’s

economy in 1991 had yet to impact development, but it turns out their

timing could not have been better. As many young architects do, they

entered a competition—to design a corporate headquarters for the

Apollo Tyres Group, in Gurgaon, Haryana—which they won. The project

was completed in 2000 and went on to win several awards.

“From there, we never looked back,” says Manit, who acknowledges

that the fi rm, now 93 strong and led by the Rastogis as well as Sanjay

Bhardwaj and Vijay Dahiya, is in the fortunate position of being able to

pick and choose its projects.

Ten of the top 30 fastest-growing urban areas in the world are in

India, and 700 million people are estimated to move to its cities by 2050.

Multinational corporations are fl ocking to the country to tap into its

vast, resource-rich, labor- and consumer-abundant market. The world’s

corporate architecture fi rms have been swift to move in too. (“Oh, they’re

all here,” Manit laughs.) Over its 15-year existence, Morphogenesis

has completed close to 30 projects, including corporate headquarters

for Ernst & Young, commercial offi ce buildings, factories, a shopping

mall, and several interiors and high-end residences, as well as an entire

residential subdivision.

But rather than settle into the niche of go-to fi rm for high-design

symbols of the new capitalism, Morphogenesis has grander ambitions.

“One important thing we are bringing back from the AA is how to

think about architecture as a process,” Manit says. The fi rm indulges

in lengthy research phases, giving its work the cultural depth and

technological sophistication that has been earning them accolades.

The award-winning Pearl Academy of Fashion in Jaipur (completed

in 2008) exemplifi es this approach: Utterly contemporary, the building

features several clever takes on traditional techniques. Lifted on piloti,

it has a central void or underbelly with a deep pool fed by recycled and

rainwater, which evaporates and cools the building. The idea is based on

the baoli, or stepwell, seen in ancient Indian architecture.

At this pivotal moment in India’s development, Morphogenesis’

principals realize the urgency to get involved. This might explain why

the fi rm is investing so much energy in a plan to transform the city’s

extensive network of nullahs (canals) from unhygienic sewage drains to

a green network of pedestrian and cycling paths and new social spaces.

Perhaps most ambitiously, in 2009, Manit took the helm of the Sushant

School of Art and Architecture and launched a School of Design. “Pure

frustration,” Manit explains as his motivation.

The number of architecture schools in India has jumped from 25 to

135 in the past 20 years, but this expansion, the Rastogis say, hasn’t done

much to improve the quality of young architects’ training. The nation

clearly has a great many needs at the moment, and Morphogenesis

seems determined to fi ll as many as they can. CATHY LANG HO

“The world is flat, without borders,” Xiaowei Ma says, “making

nationality just a person’s background.” That observation applies as much to clients as it does

to design professionals.

RECENTLY, I MADE AN IMPROMPTU VISIT TO HARVARD to visit my

old friend and long-term collaborator, Sanford Kwinter. He in-

vited me to present to his class at the GSD, and opened it up to

the broader Harvard community. We talked about the work that

I am focused on these days, launching a new educational project

committed to providing the tools of innovation and design think-

ing to the broadest, most inclusive audience possible. Our discus-

sion was animated and exciting—because it was troublesome

and even alarming to some of the students. One brave student

was willing to complain out loud: “I’m not comfortable with your

‘corporatist’ language and your obsession with getting to scale. Is

it really necessary?” My response was brutal: “I don’t care about

your problems, because they are not real problems. They are lux-

ury problems. You have the luxury of cynicism. The people in Ma-

lawi suff ering and dying from infections that could be prevented

have never heard the word ‘corporatist.’ They have real problems,

and they know one thing: They need solutions now. At scale.”

The cynicism and navel-gazing that infect the fi eld of architecture at

this moment—the whining malaise and never-ending complaints of pow-

erlessness and economic hardship and marginalization and irrelevance and

on, and on, and on—set me on fi re. Not because some of this is not true. Not

because I don’t share the diffi culties we are all grappling with to build and

maintain a business during the most challenging economic conditions in

living memory. Not because I don’t appreciate and support the dreams and

ambitions and authentically good citizenship that form the cultural founda-

tion of the architectural life. I am infuriated for two reasons: First, there is

simply no basis in historical fact that could possibly support a complaint

about being an architect—of any kind, in any form—at this moment in his-

tory. Second, to the degree that there are problems in architectural practice

in America, they are self-infl icted. Architecture is largely irrelevant to the

great mass of the world’s population because architects have chosen to be.

Is it really diffi cult being an architect in America? It’s diffi cult to be a

female intellectual in Kandahar. It’s difficult to raise a family living on

waste products in the garbage dumps of China. It’s diffi cult to fi nd your way

as a child in Malawi, where the infection rate of HIV/AIDS is 17 percent,

having already wiped out a generation of mothers and fathers. It’s diffi -

cult to overcome drug addiction from the quicksand of poverty and incar-

ceration in America’s overpopulated prisons. These conditions are diffi cult.

Being an architect is not diffi cult.

So, really, are we going to listen to another gripe about how diffi cult it

is to be an architect today? No, we are not. If you are a student at Harvard,

or a practicing architect, you are the privileged 1 percent. That’s right—

1 percent. I’m not talking about 1 percent of college graduates, but 1 percent

of humanity. Less than 1 percent of the world has experienced the power

of higher education. Look at what we have accomplished with less than

1 percent, the revolution of possibility that we have collectively created:

access to food and water and healthcare and energy and knowledge and

connection and mobility for billions of people. With less than 1 percent

we have created Massive Change. Imagine if we could reach just one more

percent. Imagine if 2 percent had access to the educational tools that we take

for granted. And that is my point: Architects take for granted the extraor-

dinary powers they have to shape the world, to create beauty, to produce

wealth, to reach people with new ideas.

If you are an architect and are thinking any thought other than, “Hey,

this is awesome! This is the craziest, coolest, most beau-

tiful time in human history to be alive and working;” if

you aren’t saying, “Wow! I get to constantly learn new

things, and everything is uncertain. I want everyone

on the planet to get in on the action and be part of this

new world of invention and beauty!”—I don’t want to

hear it. If you are thinking a complaint, just stop. If your

thought sounds whiny or rhymes with “woe is me” or

has a mildly racist undertone about people “over there”

taking “our” jobs—I don’t want to hear it. If you can’t

tell the difference between

critical and negative, and have

conflated the two and built a

practice around “challenging”

this or that, and are wondering

why people aren’t interested—

don’t come crying to me.

However, if you have wo-

ken up and realized that the

internal monologue and obses-

sion with policing the boundary

of “big A” licensed Architecture

means that architects could

lose the thread of the most im-

portant movement in history,

the movement to redesign the

world and everything we do to sustainably meet the needs of the 4.5 billion

children who will be born before midcentury, then do something about it.

If you realize your colleagues have been so busy policing the fence of exclu-

sivity that they forgot to open the door of possibility, then get in the game.

If you understand that the practice of architecture—the practice of syn-

thesis that generates coherent unity from massively complex and diverse

inputs—just might be the operating system that we need to solve the

challenges that we face in meeting the needs of the next generation,

then join the movement. If you get the fact that architecture, and the

design methodologies at its core, could be central to the future of cities,

governments, ecologies, and businesses, then please raise your voice in

the chorus of potential. Get into the discussion and leave your worries

about the fence that separates you from the rest of the world behind you.

Stop the complaining—and join the revolution of possibility.

TEXT BY BRUCE MAU

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BIGTHANKS

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN ARCHITECT AND BRUCE MAU DESIGN (BMD), The

Next Normal evolved through countless e-mails, conference calls,

and Skype discussions between staff at the magazine in Washington,

D.C.—especially art directors Aubrey Altmann and Marcy Ryan—and at

BMD’s offi ce in Toronto, where Blair Johnsrude took the creative lead on

the project, with support from associate creative director Laura Stein and

project coordinator Julie Netley.

Altmann and Ryan traveled to Toronto to brainstorm with BMD

designers (luckily, Altmann’s passport came through just in time). “The

project really caught fi re when Aubrey and Marcy came up for a classic

BMD creative workshop,” Johnsrude says. “We camped out in our studio

library for a day, and used every Post-it note in the studio to fi ll up the

project boards with all kinds of impossibly outrageous ideas.” Many of

those were eventually ruled out for practical considerations. “But it was

important to put all our psychedelic visions on the table, to discover the

essential spirit of what we were trying to do.”

Altmann and Johnsrude were in constant communication as they

laid out the pages. When Dutch design fi rm Catalogtree came on board

to create infographics, “it was only natural to hold our three-country

meetings on Skype—often at midnight, Dutch time,” Johnsrude

remembers. “It was a way to stretch the energy of our brainstorming

session through the entire project.”

The Next Normal was edited by Ned Cramer, Katie Gerfen, and

Amanda Kolson Hurley. Greig O’Brien calmly directed traff ic and made

sure the pages got to the printers on time. Lindsey M. Roberts finessed

the copy and helped us get our facts straight. Articles, photographs, and

illustrations were contributed by a crack team from the U.S. and beyond:

KERMIT BAKER, Hon. AIA, is the chief economist for the American Institute

of Architects. He is also the project director of the Remodeling Futures

Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

ERNEST BECK, an ARCHITECT contributing editor, is a New York–based

freelance writer. He focuses on architecture, design, innovation, and

business.

CATALOGTREE, an ARCHITECT contributing artist, is a multidisciplinary

design studio in the Netherlands founded by Daniel Gross and Joris

Maltha. Work includes typography, generative graphic design, and the

visualization of quantitative data.

THOMAS FISHER, Assoc. AIA, is the dean of the College of Design at the

University of Minnesota and an ARCHITECT contributing editor.

VERONIQUE GREENWOOD is a New York–based writer whose work has

appeared in Scientifi c American and Seed and on TheAtlantic.com.

CATHY LANG HO is an independent writer and editor in New York and an

ARCHITECT contributing editor. She was the founding editor of The

Architect’s Newspaper and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

NOAH KALINA is an ARCHITECT contributing artist and a photographer based

in Brooklyn, N.Y. His work has appeared in I.D., Nylon, Blender, The New

York Times Magazine, and other publications.

EDWARD KEEGAN, AIA, is a Chicago architect who complements his

independent practice by writing, broadcasting, and teaching on

architectural subjects. He is an ARCHITECT editor-at-large.

MARK LAMSTER is at work on a biography of the late architect Philip

Johnson, to be published by Little, Brown. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

DIANA LIND is the former editor-in-chief of Next American City. She is

currently program director of the Geneva-based New Cities Foundation.

KIEL MOE, AIA, is an assistant professor of design and building

technologies at Northeastern University. His most recent book is

Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture.

PAUL W. NAKAZAWA, AIA, is a business adviser to fi rms in the fi elds of

architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and engineering.

He is on the faculty of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

JAMESON SIMPSON is an illustrator in California. His illustrations have

appeared in such magazines as Popular Science and Wired.

ANDREW YANG is the managing director of Roll & Hill, a contemporary

lighting company. For the past decade, Yang has been a design journalist,

writing for design publications as well as The New York Times and

The Wall Street Journal.

MIMI ZEIGER, an ARCHITECT contributing editor, writes for publications

including The New York Times, Dwell, and Wallpaper. Her third book,

Micro Green, will be published by Rizzoli in April.

DATA SOURCES FOR PROVOCATIONS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR; U.S. CENSUS BUREAU; U.S. CENSUS BUREAU; WORLD BANK; WORLD BANK;

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PALEONTOLOGY; CORNELL UNIVERSITY STUDY BY RICH HOLIHAN, DAN KEELEY, DANIEL LEE, POWEN TU, AND ERIC YANG

Documents

The Next Normal by Architect Magazine January 2011