On Abstraction

Cranes, cranes everywhere and all the construction sites abound

Cranes, cranes everywhere nor any new work to be found

One may point out to all the cranes that dot British cities currently as evidence of a surge in construction. One may even be lulled into a false confidence in the property market; however, people forget that in the cycle of building design, construction is but the last stage of what has already been largely designed years earlier. The boom in construction sites in 2019 is most probably the delayed manifestation of the boom in the property market in previous years. The process of producing property is long, precarious trade that leaves architects adrift in a sea of economic uncertainty.

Furthermore, over the last 4 decades, the economy in western countries has been mostly abstracted where wealth is generated through services more than it is through manufactured products*; yet, the architectural profession has not adapted to design for abstract spaces as it does for actual buildings. Bricks and mortars is the only recourse; however, the profession misses out greatly on so many other opportunities not dependent on the whims of the economic cycles: construction is such a delicate field that is always afflicted at the hint of a recession, yet architecture is such a vast discipline for which construction is but one manifestation. Architecture is both a service and a product and yet the persistent obsession with production whilst ignoring services is what puts the architectural profession in peril. Many in the profession may scoff at ‘paper architecture’ yet in times on turmoil, it is these projects that may keep the profession afloat. If construction is sensitive to the economic tremors, entertainment is somewhat shielded from the fluctuations of the market.

What have architects done to ingratiate themselves with gaming designers? Gaming is a very large, lucrative and emerging industry with so much spatial design involved. Space and architecture are integral to gaming. They are the foundation of the worlds of fantasy these games purvey. Why don’t architects pursue these projects with commensurate rigour as they do with developers? I understand that these projects will not command the same revenue but they are quick projects with minimised overheads that can be delivered relatively quickly. They can even be handled by younger staff, keeping them motivated and energised. These commissions can even act as testing grounds for certain designs to be extrapolated and interpreted in actual buildings at one point in the future.

What have architects done to get stuck in in the film industry? London is the global epicentre for post-production, brimming with cutting-edge studios working on myriad films.  A great deal of spaces are CGIs. Do architects get approached for such projects? Do architects lobby to get involved? How about architects vying to liaise with filmmakers to advise on actual spaces, locations and interiors? This design knowledge should be the preserve of architects and it is in fields like this where architects can dispense their services as well.

The list goes on. There are myriad fields to explore and frontiers to conquer. The architectural profession has remained mostly unaltered by the cataclysmic changes in the world around it. Have people at the helm, especially those who survived one or two recessions, with the harrowing redundancies and reduction in wages, ever paused to think about what to do differently lest they face the same misfortune repeatedly?

*One can refer to Sharon Zukin’s 1987 book Landscapes of Power for a detailed analysis of the effect of the changing economy in Western countries on the role of the architect

Design vs. 'Design'

What is architectural design? What does design mean in a profession where the authorship of buildings has been, to a great degree, expropriated by developers and estate agents? As hitherto argued, when manufacturing in property was outsourced to contractors over the last few decades, architects stubbornly hung on to production and turned their backs on services. Over the years, the profession has become largely comprised of a class of bureaucrats aspiring to be contractors and almost ashamed of belonging to an erstwhile creative profession. They have, of their own accord, delegated design authorship to others. So many decisions are taken by developers, agents and increasingly over the last decade, planners. In other words, almost everyone else has a say in what spaces and buildings look like more than the architect does. The architect has been rendered as a vessel to implement a template rather than interpret a brief.

This argument pertains to most large-scale, speculative schemes. I reiterate that many exceptions still hold out and even prosper. I exclude, for example but not exclusively, boutique practices working on one-off projects and bespoke commissions as they still lead and inspire.

With the bureaucratisation of the architectural profession over the last few years, the term design has been gutted of its essence, simplified and misused. We talk of ‘design’ rather than design: ‘Design’ is a marauder. ‘Design’ is an impostor. ‘Design’ is the murderer of innovation and creativity, the aspects the architectural profession once possessed, and in which lies its redemption. ‘Design’ is vulgar. It is loud. It confuses ubiquity with creativity. It is passive aggressive, desperately trying to make a statement as means of gaining a seat at the table it once willingly walked away from. ‘Design’ is the vapid acrobatic geometry. ‘Design’ is the convoluted shape. ‘Design’ is the Rhino model du jour. ‘Design’ is the railway accident where ‘technical’ picks up the pieces. ‘Design’ is the arrogance of not being curious yet thinking a funky colour cuts the mustard. ‘Design’ is the statement-making funky colour. ‘Design’ is the quirky form for the sake of it. ‘Design’ is the perpetual first-year architecture student that fears an orthogonal plan looking boring and slaps a curve on it to convey originality. ‘Design’ is the passive aggressive riposte at agents, developers and planners to tell them that the architect is still here. ‘Design’ is a puerile teenager asserting its individuality. ‘Design’ is the coloured post-its, bookmarking pages from the catalogue meted out by planners and agents for architects to implement a template from. ‘Design’ is controversy as means of soliciting attention.

Design, on the other hand, is predicated on curiosity. Design is a craft that forever questions and refines. Design doesn’t implement the brief but rewrites it. Design is detail-obsessed and multidisciplinary. Design is structure as much as it is finishes. Design is an experience. Design is a lifestyle. Design does not fear simplicity yet can be bold. Design can flirt with kitsch and come out unscathed. Design doesn’t get old after a week of the wow factor. Design is ‘technical’. Design is fervour. Design is passion. Design is controversy as a by-product of genuine conviction.

A designer is not only one who conjures shapes and colours but someone who creates. A designer is not someone who has no technical grounding. Far from it. A designer is the engineer as much as it is the architect. Both design together. They bring each other out of their comfort zones. They challenge each other and excel at working through constraints. A designer is one who understands how market forces shape architecture and how engineering sculpts spaces. A designer is obsessive yet pragmatic. A designer is one who can see the big picture. A designer under-promises and over-delivers. A designer has imagination. A designer shows clients what clients themselves did not know they even wanted. A designer relishes challenges and is enamoured of constraints. A designer recognises talent in others and promotes it. Others are not competition but powerful allies with complementary skills.

Design is taking back control of the profession. ‘Design’ is succumbing to the profession’s demise.

Manufacturing Taste

In the property sector, who had the training and the panache to advise clients on design trends? Who would have been a natural contender to engage in visual merchandising? Who had the analytical tools to research design benchmarks? Who would have been well-versed in analysing target consumers and translating the data into inspirational built form? Who would have excelled in shaping public taste and tapping to people’s needs and aspirations? Who had the ability to introduce to clients innovative materials and stylish finishes? Who should have been an authority on architectural design?

Letting agents and project managers. Obvs!

I would have argued architects, but they have been terribly busy with waterproofing packages and aspiring to talk only to other architects (to wail about being unappreciated by society).

Since the 1980s, architects have left a cavernous void behind them that had to be filled somehow. They were too busy becoming bureaucrats that they lost sight of who there really were meant to be. Whereas almost all other white-collar professionals embraced outsourcing and specialised, architects abdicated and opted to play second fiddle to contractors, nay, sub-contractors even. Architects had pressing matters to tend to like blockwork elevations and lintel schedules.

Letting agents had to step up. The traditional role of letting agents is to find tenants for developments yet over the last 40 years, they have blossomed to an incredibly influential class of advisors with so much clout on the design of buildings. Agents dictate to clients what needs to be designed, what finishes to opt for and what furniture and fittings to select. Many agents are truly brilliant, but many others have no design background at all. They end up emulating what has already been done. This leads to developments becoming derivative. All new spaces are facsimiles of each other. The market is inundated with clones. This is particularly true of speculative commercial developments: It usually takes a visionary and stylish developer like Derwent London to unveil a completed project for agents to take a cue from it and perpetuate copies of it for the next 5-7 years.

As for architects, on the other hand, their finger is resolutely not on the pulse. Many in their ranks are alienated from mainstream trends, let alone emerging ones. What never ceases to amaze me is how incurious most people in the profession are: There is an egregious dearth of curiosity about what projects are being designed and constructed around them or who’s designing what. There is a lack of curiosity about clients and developers and what these developers are up to. There is a lack of curiosity about market trends in property: what sectors are dead and what sectors are buoyant. What typologies are plateauing and what typologies are nascent. Which clients are out there buying and renting spaces. There is a lack of curiosity about materials, finishes and FF&E. There is a lack of curiosity about what’s in style. There is even a lack of curiosity about innovations in structure and building services.

There is a criminally missed opportunity for collaboration between architects and agents to manufacture taste. Collective taste is manufactured and propagated until it is internalised by society. The trend setters and the influencers, in cahoots with media and film, music and branding agencies define the style of the age and the taste spectrum for people to subscribe to. In the property sector, architecture and interiors fall within this remit, yet the authors of space design have taken leave of their vocation as creative professionals to pursue production. Whereas architects have been metamorphosed into bureaucrats by focusing on production as I have been arguing ad nauseum, they are also bureaucrats when they ‘design’ spaces. A brief is no longer the inception of architectural creativity but a stale template to implement and regurgitate. Every decision is taken by agents and clients without any meaningful input from architects who are there to receive instructions and effect. To most architects in practice, projects are cumbersome problems to mitigate, endless trackers to draft and myriad boxes to tick. Some architects, in the United Kingdom and abroad, still produce truly magnificent work and refuse to be exiled to the gulag of production but they remain in the minority.

Stripped of style, innovation and curiosity, what else is there in architecture but a utilitarian building trade that can be delivered efficiently by contractors and engineers?

On Novation

I have been arguing that the rise of the design-and-build contract (or procurement route) is the architectural equivalent of outsourcing manufacturing: This is an economic order that has been ascendant for the last 40 years, and most industries have embraced it by shifting their focus to services as they deferred production to countries all over the globe like China and Turkey.

Initially, this was a seemingly risky approach; however, many companies embraced it because they believed that they had the monopoly on design and knowledge. They deemed that other countries to which manufacturing has been outsourced will never pose any serious competition because the corporations had the knowledge and innovation accumulated over generations, ergo, that would not be easily replicated.

In architecture, the profession has not followed suit and most architects have dug their heels in, trying to hang on to production. This is unfortunate because there have been myriad opportunities for the architectural profession to specialise in. These unfulfilled opportunities left a void that has been eventually filled in by property agents and other consultants.

The design-and-build route has empowered contractors whilst it was detrimental to architects. The dynamic did not have to be a zero-sum-game where one actor gains power at the expense of the other. There has been an opportunity for a complementary responsibly matrix that may have satisfied everybody to some degree. The main fault with the design-and-build procurement route is not the contract type but rather the architects’ fixation with production.

Novation. This is the holy grail for many architects and failing to attain it is widely viewed as a failure on the architects’ behalf. I have been arguing the opposite. Being novated to the contractor is the crux of the profession’s woes. This is akin to HP or Nike becoming employed by the production factory to which they outsourced manufacturing.

Architects perhaps need to abandon the novation route and fully separate design and production. The manufacturing needs to be wholly outsourced to the contractor and their team whilst architects may strengthen the client monitoring role. This role can be more than a somewhat ceremonial, advisory “yay or nay” vocation. The ERs, laying out the design intent, need to ascertain that the design would be unassailable. As an extra service, the architects may wish to second or contract one or two team members to advise the contractor team but this would be on an hourly rate and when needed. The knowledge that the design architects have of the project is immensely valuable as it will shorten lead-in times and expedite the construction programme. In this case, knowledge means money and if the contractor wishes to avail oneself of this service, it should come at a premium paid to the architect.

A radical uphaul of the profession is needed. The first hurdle to overcome is for architects to accept the facts on the ground: Production has been outsourced and the design-and-build procurement route is here to stay. This is not to the peril of architects and it is full of benefits to clients, contractors and architects alike. What needs to be done is to renegotiate our role within this economy. We need to focus our attention elsewhere and we need to be conscious that our knowledge, accumulated over the years, cannot be replicated and should be purveyed at a premium, not a discount as we do with the novation slope. Like HP, our strength lies in innovation and design, and it’s high time we embraced that.

Sorry, waterproofing packages.

Planet of the Bureaucrats

I had argued previously that the production aspect of architecture has been outsourced to contractors with the rise of the Design-and-Build contracts. This has been congruent with a global economic trend where the economy has been abstracted, production has been outsourced and the focus has shifted from production to services.

Architects have failed to take heed of these changes and instead of specialising and embracing the service aspect of their profession like almost all other white-collar professionals, they have consciously neglected it and frantically attempted to hang on to production as it disappeared right in front of their eyes.

I believe that this may explain the lamentable status of the architectural profession that we are blighted with today. Architects created this vicious circle where they forsake design to be contractors and end up being neither. They are powerless and with hardly any influence or clout in the property sector and the construction process. This dynamic that has turned a once profession of designers into a class of bureaucrats. So much time is wasted on non-productive endeavours and so much fee is squandered on pointless resource.

Architects need to accept division of labour. They key word here is “sub-contractor design”. There is absolutely no point in detailing drylining to the nth degree. There is no glory in obsessing over service penetrations through blockwork and there is no reward in getting consumed by waterproofing. Architects are experts at doubling up on work undertaken by trade specialists, and whilst an understanding is crucial for architects to be able to streamline and manage such processes, undertaking redundant work belies logic. Some architects, at early stages, assign resources to detail off-the-shelf products like fixings to drylining ceilings. Others try to submit Stage 4 packages at Stage 2. This is a futile and costly process.

Engineers have created a plausible model of assigning responsibility, yet architects scoff at them. I believe architects need to emulate the engineers’ modus operandi.

Architects need to be conscious that time and fees are finite and limited. This entails prioritising and letting go of some items. I emphatically believe that research into technology, trends, finishes and benchmarks is more useful than trying to outdo trade specialists. I also believe meticulous detailing of architectural elements and incorporating structure and services into the design, nay using engineering disciplines as design tools, is far more beneficial than delving into myriad options for the sake of it. A solid set of ERs where the design is unassailable is far more a propos than waterproofing details. Architects need to manage client expectations and lay out what deliverables they can commit to, whilst being vigilant about it. Again, engineers do a commendable job. If at first instance, increasing fees is not possible then architects need to maximise their profit margins whilst focusing their limited resources on the matters that only they can do.

Architects need rely more on technicians like engineers do. Yes, this may be blasphemous in certain professional circles, but architects need to outsource production even more. What is needed are fewer architects and more technicians and trade contractors. Fewer people in the profession follows the dictum of supply and demand. Hopefully with time, this leads to higher fees. 

Architects need to realise that their remit is design and creativity. They need to accept to relinquish some responsibilities to excel at the core of their profession: innovation. Instead, the profession obliterates talent and promotes bureaucracy. This is a suicidal approach for the profession because with the advent of AI, bureaucrats are the first people against the wall. AI, however, cannot supersede creativity. Architects need to let go of production per se and renegotiate the terms to manage production whilst streamlining the design and construction processes. They need to focus on making themselves indispensable. What is needed is for architects to engage in manufacturing collective taste. Taste as far as society as a whole is engaged is manufactured by designers, agents, clients and trend setters. Architects need to integrate themselves into this process. I will publish an article on manufacturing taste in the future.

Over the last 40 years, architects have rendered themselves less useful and lower in the pecking order by refusing to focus on services and failing to specialise. There is now a graver threat with the rise of AI that architects will become outright redundant if they choose to be bureaucrats.

But this is OK. Who needs more influence or even job satisfaction when one has blockwork packages?

For now.

Probably.

Architecture is a Service

Architecture is a dying profession. Annihilated by the financial crisis of 2008, it has been staggering for the last decade and does not seem to be convalescing. In fact, I argue that the profession has been indisposed for much longer, but the throes of death have been incredibly slow. The architectural profession has failed to keep up with the socio-economic changes of the past 40 years: The economic scape has changed immensely since the 1980s with the abstraction of the economy and the reign of the tertiary sector, with services at the helm.

Yet the architectural profession has been largely recalcitrant to respond to these cataclysmic shifts. The profession, as it stands today, is an anachronism. It seems obstinately anchored in the 1970s, when the architect was the master of all the engineering trades and where architecture itself was a linear process towards a finished product. The completion of the project was the end and terminus, a fact that resonated well with a traditional secondary-sector economy predicated on manufacturing. Not only this, but also the seemingly resilient format of the profession has been eroded and gutted from inside with contractors and agents chipping away, gradually but steadily, the powers and responsibilities that were once the preserve of the architect.

The architecture profession has suffered from the new economic order but the discipline itself hasn’t: Architecture has become a precious service and an expensive commodity to be traded in a consumerist market: Star-architects’ drawings sell like art paintings. Architectural projects are celebrated and promoted in lifestyle magazines under the guise of fashion shoots and product placements. Architectural design sells real estate. In fact, architectural design sells. It caters to myriad users from developers to wealthy magnates to financial institutions. Architectural design is an essential medium to incubate the tertiary economy, yet the profession is detached, with no sway or leverage over the money it so abundantly generates. Architectural design is created by architects, but it is pushed by agents. Agents set trends, harness networks, liaise with and even dictate to clients as well as to architects what needs to be done. These agents have no design background in many instances yet their word on design is gospel.

Architects, on the other hand, are like disgruntled former aristocrats whose estates have been expropriated. They believe the antidote to all their woes is the re-establishment of the ancien regime, but this is out of their control. We cannot go back to the 1970s, so why are scores of architectural academic institutions churning out generations of deluded professionals who cannot accept reality and hang on to wishful thinking?

I don’t disagree that architects are underpaid and overworked; however, I take issue with why this is happening. Architects compare themselves to doctors and lawyers which is a flawed analogy. Doctors and lawyers are adequately compensated because they are indispensable: Doctors are indispensable because they save lives. Architects don’t. Lawyers are indispensable because they administer the canons of the social contract that binds society together. Architects don’t.

Architects can, however, compare themselves to the plethora of professionals that have sprung up since the 1980s, like PR professionals for example. Architects can even relate to fashion designers and professionals in the film and TV industries. Architecture is a galaxy of design elements and the construction site is but one iteration. Architecture spans buildings, films, music videos, advertising, and magazine photo shoots. What have architects done to get involved, nay, be integral to all these processes? Why are architects not invested in manufacturing ‘taste’? We rightly complain about the devolution of our power, but we refuse to re-invent ourselves.

Architecture is both a service and a product, yet many architects obsess over production and dismiss the notion that their profession is also a service.  Whilst the modes of production have been, in line with the economy as a whole, somewhat abstracted and outsourced to contractors with the rise of the ‘Design and Build’ contracts for example, many architects further forsake design and desperately cling even harder to ‘production’ although it seems a lost cause and they are far removed from the decision making.

I am mainly talking here about the bulk of developments and speculative schemes. Of course, certain projects like one-off houses and high-profile cultural projects may still adhere to the old formula; however, as with retail commodities, when production is managed by the designer, it comes at a premium. Boutique firms specialising in the luxury end of the market fare well but they are a drop in the ocean.

This should by no means be misconstrued as a call to abandon rigour in design or to not view architecture as a craft of sculpting spaces. It is rather the opposite. Architects are sometimes told that scrupulousness in design is wasted and one should focus on the profitability of projects; however, architects renounce design rigour to try to attain business acumen and end up eventually with neither. ‘Don’t quit your day job’ is an adage that depicts this succinctly. Good design the linchpin of making money in property. Relentless and exacting design is what we should be feting.

The profession is dying, and reverting to glorified past, real or imagined, will not help the profession recuperate. We are a profession predicated on design and design permeates people’s lives. We bring value to property and substantially augment its value by adding our design to it. Society can survive without us, but does it want to? The profession has to reform and abandon its old ways. Other industries have resorted to specialisation and outsourcing. What has the architectural profession done? What is interesting is that the profession failed to take heed of the ascendant economic order of the last 40 years, but we are now arguably towards the tail end of it. The world is changing yet again, and a new order appears nascent. Will the architectural profession miss out this time like it did last time?

A Decade of Tumult: A Profession in Crisis.

I have been practising architecture in London for over a decade and since 2013, I have been working as an independent consultant in myriad companies of different sizes and profiles. This has given me a valuable insight into how disparate organisations approach similar challenges differently.

My career has also overlapped with almost unabated financial turmoil and uncertainty. I have come to the realisation that the architectural profession is in crisis and would even argue that the profession is dying. I intend to publish on this blog a series of articles to elucidate my point of view and to posit what I believe is a path forward to refresh the profession.