Have you ever wanted a chance to ask an architect about your home? Maybe you’ve got some new idea and want to know what’s involved in making it happen, or maybe there’s just one thing you’d like to change but you don’t know how. Well, if you live near San Francisco and you’re planning on doing the San Francisco Living: Home Tours, then you can also bring your photos, idea books, sketches, and questions to the “Talk to an Architect” booth at the Home Tours headquarters.

The Home Tours headquarters is the Stable Building located at 2128 Folsom Street in San Francisco. Tours are Saturday and Sunday, September 11-12, from 10-4pm.

Last year, eight local designers volunteered: Mark English, Tim Mangan, Andre Rothblatt, Phil Rossington, John Klopf, Jonathan Feldman, Jim Cline, and Kathleen Bost. The Home Tours is only one program in the month-long Architecture and the City festival sponsored by the AIA San Francisco.

“Some people brought drawings or ideas, and we’d have a good exchange of information,” said Andre Rothblatt. “Architects could bring things to show as well, such as their portfolios or a sample drawing set. It’s about architects responding to the people,” he added.

Drawing details can be helpful for clients who want to better understand construction methods.

It’s OK for visitors to admit that they’re beginners, too, if they don’t know anything about the design process. John Klopf, another participant from last year, viewed it as a public service. “It’s helpful to have a knowledgeable practitioner with nothing on the line. Some people came with photos and specific questions, or different potential floor plan layouts that they’d come up with, and they could get honest answers to their questions. It’s also fine for someone to declare themselves a beginner.”

Other popular topics included how to work with a contractor, or exploring the possible costs for a potential renovation. “I didn’t do it in order to get new work. It’s more of a public service,” notes Klopf. “It raises the profile of architects in general when we make ourselves accessible. We know things that can help people. And this year, at the the Talk to an Architect program, we’ll have contractors sitting at the table with us for the first time, so visitors can talk to the whole team.”

An architect can advise on how to make a home more livable. Shown above: before & after photos of a San Francisco renovation by Andre Rothblatt Architecture.

The Talk to an Architect program is free and does not require pre-registration. Just drop by the Home Tours headquarters at 2128 Folsom Street on September 11 or 12, anytime from 10 to 4.

Jill Pilaroscia and I met in her airy and light-filled studio in downtown San Francsico to explore the science of color. Some of the questions below are based on previously published interviews and Pilaroscia’s own writings, which you can find on her Colour Studio web site.

Why Color?

On your site, you’ve got a quote from Denis Baylor, Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University, saying that colors are inventions of the nervous system.

In the experience of vision, there are three components: the visual stimulus itself, the receptors in our eyes, and then the interpretation which occurs in our brains. You see an image. The light from this image enters your eye through the pupil, focused by the lens – not unlike a pinhole camera – and falls on your retina, which acts like a big screen on the back of your eye, carpeted with special receptor cells called rods and cones. The rods and cones transmit information to your brain via the optic nerve. In the brain, this information is processed first through your thalamus gland, which is connected to all of your hormonal systems. First-response reactions like flinching from a perceived flying object, happen here, as do panic reactions for people who’ve been conditioned by experience to react to certain visual triggers. Only then is the information channeled to your visual cortex, the most massive system in the brain, which interprets the image to categorize the visual stimulus.

Color isn’t just about surface decoration. There’s a cellular and biological response to color that we have as human beings, and it’s that response which we are addressing when we work with color.

Background and Biographical

How did your family background help to lead or inspire you towards your current field?

I grew up in Rochester, NY. My mom was an artist. She sketched and always had a portfolio. She was a registered nurse by profession, and always wished that she could have pursued a career as a full-time artist. My dad worked in insurance sales and real estate, but he was also a gardener and a stonemason. We had an acre by the side of hour house which he planted with row upon row of dahlias and gladiolas, for both the neighbors and for us. I remember being small and wandering through the gladiolas that were taller than I was.

On family excursions we went to places like Highland Park in Monroe County, near Rochester, NY during their annual lilac festival. This is the only 10-day free festival of its kind in North America, inspired by a magnificent lilac collection at the Park that plays host to over 500 varieties of lilacs on more than 1,200 bushes. What was first planted in 1892 by horticulturist John Dunbar has now become the world’s largest lilac collection. Other places I remember include stone quarries in Vermont, and historic venues like Williamsburg, Virginia – I will always remember the colors there.

Jill Pilaroscia's childhood experiences with gardens and flowers inspired her color work later on.

Tell me about your early music and fine-art interests. What happened in that radical shift from music to fine art?

I started singing in the first grade and continued all through high school, training as a coloratura soprano. I was steeped in music! But I was always interested in looking at colors and color combinations.

I want to know more about how color is like music.

Some colors look pleasant together, as if harmonically tuned. Others look harsh and dissonant.
Here is a formal definition of color harmony as per Wilheim Ostwald: “Colors harmonize if they have equal hue content – one does not overtake another.”

Yes, but how far can we take that musical analogy? Are there equivalents in the color world of a major fifth or an octave in music?

Color is a phenomenon of light, which is about vibration (oscillation), and musical sound is also vibratory in nature. We perceive both light and sound based on its frequency, which is a characteristic of wavelength. Maybe the octaves would be different shades or tints of the same color. Sharps and flats, which are subtler variations in pitch, might correspond to different colors that are very close together on the color wheel. One of our clients, IDEO, once asked me for an “atonal cacophonous solution” – what they meant was a color solution that was unusual, edgy.

What about the visual equivalent of tonal quality or timbre? A pure tone actually sounds less interesting than one that’s a mixture of tonics and overtones. (draws simple and complex sine waves)

A single frequency appears as a simple waveform.

[RF: If you've ever heard someone play a musical saw, it sounds sweet but synthetic because the tone it produces is almost too pure. It doesn't have the tonal depth that an oboe would have. That's because oboes have more overtones. I was looking for the equivalent of overtones in light as opposed to sound.]

A combination of two or more frequencies produces a composite waveform.

[RF: The lighting designers talk about continuous spectrums, color temperature, and color rendering, but they're talking of course about light sources, and it's always some variant of white light, rarely colored. I wonder if different pigments or materials might yield colors that LOOK approximately the same, they're both cornflower-blue for example, but one is much richer than the other because the surface itself reflects ordinary white light in a greater spectral diversity.]

Not all light sources render the same color. There are “warm” fluorescents and “cool” fluorescents, halogens – all of these light sources have different color rendering capabilities. Some are brighter and whiter, some render cool colors more clearly, while others enhance warm colors. You need to understand the lighting that will be in each space, but you also need to understand the color relationships among the room elements as well as the light sources in order to get things to work well together.

Smooth surfaces bounce light differently than rough surfaces. The light reflectance of a surface is the amount of light bounced back at the viewer. The light that bounces back is what the viewer sees. Light that is absorbed by the object is not seen by the viewer. So an object that absorbs all light except for visible red wavelengths will appear red to the viewer. The amount of light reflected or absorbed by a surface will influence the viewer’s perception of the color of that surface. A hard, shiny surface reflects more light than a soft, textured surface, which in turn changes its perceived color. Thus, a matte surface creates a softer impression.

Farbkreis by Johannes Itten shows primary, secondary, and tertiary colors.

Tell me about singing rooms and harmonic edges.

A room that’s good to be in is well-tuned. You can go in and subliminally feel that it’s well put together, that it’s balanced. You go in and you just feel good. Sometimes in order to tune a room I have to consider how it feels to be in there – is it too harsh, too bright, too dark in spots? Color can mitigate a lot of these issues.

Can you cure a “sick” or “poorly tuned” room with color alone, even if the design flaws aren’t color-related?

You can do a lot with color, because you can trick the brain into perceiving a space as less noisy or even less odoriferous, just by changing the colors that are in there.  [See under Human Response, below]

Opinions on Use of Color

Who are some of your favorite artists & designers?

Henri Matisse had a masterful sense of tertiary color. He could make the viewer see all of the image at once, or direct the viewer’s eye to just where he wanted it by using color and contrast.

Gerhard Richter, Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, James Turrell, Steven Holl. And if that’s not enough, try Verner Panton, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, Billy Baldwin, and David Hicks.

Jill Pilaroscia experiments with color in her own home. Photo: David Wakely

Dorothy Draper and Diana Vreeland. They all had self confidence with color and how it’s applied.

[Editor note: We reference images by other artists in grayscale to distinguish them from the color images of the primary interview subject's own work. However, much of these artists' work, having to do with color, can't be fully communicated in grayscale. We encourage our readers to do a Google Image search on these names, because their color sense is quite dramatic!]

Can you cite examples of color throughout history?

The Pompeiians had an organic yet rich palette of earth tones and mineral-based reds. Medieval churches used blues on vaulted ceilings, because saturated blues tend to move away from the viewer’s focal point, making the ceilings appear higher and grander. Blue is the most atmospheric color. It blurs all edges. It’s one of the nicest colors in architecture for creating a diaphanous sense of space – but terrible for graphics, because our eyes can’t distinguish the edges unless the blue is dark and contrasted against a light background.

Up until a certain point in history, color was used symbolically, as a communication tool. Blue was used to indicate sky, while purple, which was an expensive pigment, was used for rich clothing and vestments to denote status. If you look at Egyptian art, or cave paintings, or Medieval art, color is used to indicate rank, function, or morals. The Madonna always wears a blue outer robe, for example – sometimes with white beneath, sometimes red, or sometimes both. People didn’t think of color as being decorative in an individualistic or fashion sense. Later on, color had to move from being symbolic to being more personal, more ornamental, more subjective.

When exactly did this shift occur? Here’s a quote from Janice Lindsay’s book “All About Colour“: “By 1856, chemists and not nature had become the color makers.” At a certain point, the available range of pigments became much wider and more affordable. Two other interesting books are Rene Huyghe’s “Color Symbolism” and Faber Birren’s “Symbolism of Color.”

I’m always asking people for examples of bad design, because cautionary tales are just as revealing as success stories.

Instead of just declaring that something works or it doesn’t, there can be different levels of “working”. For example the famous Golden Arches [McDonald's] decor is intentionally chosen so that fast-food customers will want to leave quickly. That’s not pleasing to me personally, but it serves its purpose.

Jill Pilaroscia chose the blue of the front office for this existing rental property to support a water-inspired theme, and also to help create a sense of calm and security.

I don’t like color just for color’s sake. By that I mean color used purely to shock, or to call attention to a thing. It has no integrity. However, there are some Dutch architects and colorists, like Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, who DO use color for color’s sake, but it’s part of their culture. They EXPECT more color.

Europeans are more open, culturally, to color – especially in the more extreme climates where they they really need more color. In Italy, which is much farther south than the Netherlands, they want architecture that is chromatically tuned to the soil and vegetation, rather than seeking color as an attention-grabber.

What are some common mistakes of architects with regard to color?

These are not mistakes so much as a misunderstanding between color and architects, and it’s due to the way architects are educated. They’re not taught about bio-responses to color, they’re not taught how they can move volumes around in space through the application of color, or how they can use color to shape experience and behavior.

Architects value materials and the honest colors found in those materials – for example woods, stones, even concrete has a natural beauty that I do not deny. Architects value light, and the way the light brings materials to life.  However, now we have environmental concerns about endangered resources. With more people sourcing materials from locations within a restricted mile radius, and of course budget constraints, color offers a wonderful opportunity to play a role in architectural design.

Architects are not always taught to see color as a tool that has its own integrity. Sometimes architects look at color as a last resort, and may wait until the last moment to throw color at a problem, instead of integrating the color into the design to enhance spatial relationships or the experience of a space.

Le Corbusier was really into color for a period of his career, but then he became anti-color, and that’s what the Modernists picked up. But I don’t fault them for not respecting color, because color has been misrepresented. David Batchelor’s book “Chromophobia” is a cultural history of color that talks about this fear of color. Since Aristotle’s time, color has faced discrimination – some technical, some moral, some social, some sexual, some racial. Immanuel Kant said that color could never participate in the beautiful or the sublime.

I would like to add one thing here, to say that developers are more open to color because they look at architecture as an investment. Anything that can be done to the investment to enhance its appeal, its presence, and its sale potential is viewed as a positive.

Do you have any pet peeves related to color issues within the building, design, or real estate industries?

One of the worst things to do is apply fashion colors to fixed objects. Here in town, I probably shouldn’t dish too much on the projects! But imagine a huge high-rise painted sugar-pink. I can also think of one new condo complex South of Market, which used gold and red, only it came out as mustard and ketchup. Not very sophisticated.

[RF: I think it's because most of us are more used to choosing colors for smaller items, like clothing or jewelry, rather than entire walls or buildings.]

Large expanses should be classic. Use color to enhance and support the architecture.

Jill Pilaroscia used twenty colors of graduated intensity to color the historic dome at the San Mateo County Courthouse. Photo: Dennis Anderson

How can you tell when are neutrals a courageous choice rather than the coward’s way out?

Every neutral color has its chief feature. Beige is not just beige. You can have a beige with pink or yellow overtones, or greys with different characteristics. If you don’t know this and start combining neutrals, you can have unintended effects like a couch that suddenly looks purplish when placed in a beige room.

Our eyes produce an afterimage if we stare at something long enough. Simultaneous afterimage was something that Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten discussed at length. What this means is that the underlying color in a neutral tone can be brought to life by adding its complementary or opposite color to the visual field. That is how a beige couch sitting in a beige room can suddenly become a purplish-beige couch against a yellow-beige wall.

White is difficult, too. Every object inside a white space is starkly outlined, giving things a sculptural quality. The bright glaring white creates a tonic edge. You need to be very careful when choosing whites, because if the pigment is at all dull, it can collect shadows in corners and look dirty. Other whites can be so gleaming that they create excessive glare in some spaces.

Human Responses to Color

In terms of human response to color, is color a drug, a spice, a tool, or a nutrient?

It’s a core material. Every signal and every message that we send to one another is communicated somehow through color, or using color contrast. Every color we visually observe about our environment signifies something – time of day, season, the location of objects in space. Objects cast shadows and we need those contrasts of dark and light, also. Monochromatic space is dangerous, and boring. It’s tiring.

Monochromatic, all-white space can look so cool, so glamorous. But is it comfortable? We have a social responsibility when designing public spaces not just to create intellectual spaces that look good in photographs. In one such space, the users were observed implementing creative devices to mitigate the glare on their desks, like moving the tack board to screen the reflectance.

What could be the evolutionary or biological reason behind color and the human response? Why do we even see colors when animals don’t?

Actually many animals do see color, including bees, fish, and birds. They need to be able to find food, mates, and avoid predators. Even plants have been shown to grow differently in colored mulch!

At Red Envelope, Jill Pilaroscia made strategic use of red as both a brand differentiator and to provide visual stimulation. Photo: David Wakely

What happens to people who are deprived of color?

If given a choice, people typically will gravitate toward color. A lack of stimulus is unappealing to a typical individual. Monochromatic environments in nature are typically extreme, as in the Arctic or the Sahara. The monochromatic palettes combined with the climactic conditions and qualities of light are very demanding. If you ask someone to visualize a healing, serene, restorative place in their mind, most people will reference a place in nature such as a forest or a beach, a place that offers a variety of colors and textures.

I had a slide in one of my talks that showed a women’s prison. Identical cells, monochrome: white ceilings, gray floors, stainless steel. Someone gave these women yarn and crochet needles. They created all kinds of items for their cells, toilet cozies, spreads. They transformed their cells with color. People WANT color. It’s instinctive, this drive to bring color into our spaces.

What are the “visual ergonomic factors of color”? What does that phrase mean?

Visual ergonomics has to do with bringing relief to the eye, and stimulus to the eye and brain so that our visual mechanics can stay refreshed. Our eyes need variety in both color value and intensity. Our eye instinctively seeks out places where edges meet in a contrasting way. Staring at a neutral fabric in an office cubicle, with a neutral wall beyond, will cause your eye to grow fatigued. However, looking off into the distance at a carefully selected accent color will allow your pupil to open and close, thus exercising your eye muscles. This in turn allows your entire brain-eye mechanics to be stimulated, and thus to relax.

One project at Hewlett Packard is a good example. They had an all-beige office, with beige furniture systems up to 6 feet. The people working in there were staring at their monitors all day, in an unrelieved beige environment. There was no way for the pupils of their eyes to exercise, to dilate and then contract. All-white museums can be fatiguing in this way, too. The white sets off the artwork but it can be too much intense work for the eye.

The viewer's gaze can switch between the neutral areas and the red accents to avoid fatigue and eyestrain. Color accents also aid in orientation within the building. Photo: David Wakely

Are color-blind people still affected emotionally by different colors, even though they can’t distinguish them? How did people who were blindfolded still demonstrate their response to color? Would a blind person in a red room experience the same increase of heart rate and blood pressure as someone who could actually see the red color?

There are experiments where subjects could sense the colors with the palms of their hands. Even Helen Keller noted how colors affected her. I’ve done color palettes for color-blind people, mostly red-green color blindness which is the most common. Even color-blind people can sometimes distinguish colors, they just see them differently. They see the world in their own palette.

Have you ever reviewed esoteric spiritual systems such as yoga or the Kabbalah on the uses of color to deliberately and consciously induce certain mental states?

The chakra system goes from red at the bottom to violet at the top. Tony Torrice, an interior designer who worked extensively with children, made a series of color cards for kids that were used in childrens’ hospitals. He’d give them the cards and ask them what color they preferred. Often, children would choose the color that was associated with the same chakra where their medical problem was located. For example, the throat chakra is blue, so a child that chose a blue card might very well have trouble in the throat or tonsil area.

[RF: I didn't find much on Tony Torrice directly, but there's a book on Amazon by Ro Ligrippo titled "In My World: Designing Living & Learning Environments for the Young" that was apparently co-authored with Torrice.]

Chakras refer to energy centers associated with colors and locations within the human body. They are referenced within traditional Indian medicine, yoga, and Buddhist systems.

Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf education, says that hyperactive children should actually have a hyper-colored room, to in essence overload them so that their energy would spend itself out, leaving them calmer.

How does color influence our sense of time, temperature, taste, etc? How can color alter time and space?

First we have the effects that color has on things like heart rate. Subjects in a red versus a blue room will respond differently. Red tends to cause elevated heart rate and blood pressure, which in turn affects the person’s internal sense of time, because our internal clock is calibrated to our heart rate. So if you’re in a doctor’s waiting room, which wait is going to seem longer? A blue room is more calming, and thus time appears to pass faster.

In manufacturing situations we use color to alter all the senses. A forklift, for example, might be colored blue because the perceived load will actually seem lighter to the operators. In a carpet factory where the heat might build up in the summer months, walls can be colored blue to make it feel a little cooler inside. In noisy environments, I might use blue-green or blue to make the sound a little less noticeable.

You can even alter the sense of smell. Hewlett-Packard had one factory where they used plastics that had a very sour and pungent smell. Placing a sweet color, like a pale soft apricot, near those stations actually can mitigate the sensory impact of those odors.

For sensory purposes, these primal associations are pretty consistent even cross-culturally. Symbolically they’re different but physiologically they’re not. A red bridal dress, for example, might say “harlot” to us but “fortunate” to a Chinese person. But everyone’s heart rate will speed up the same on seeing the red color, regardless of the meaning they put on it.

Another room in Jill Pilaroscia's own home. Photo: David Wakely

How do you discover an individual’s personal color biases? Do you use tools like Rorshcach, fabrics, take them places, structured interviews? What if the person isn’t good at accessing their own feelings?

You have to ask questions in such a way that they can respond to them. It’s a little like being a psychologist and an expert communicator. Someone who couldn’t access their feelings at all probably wouldn’t be hiring a colorist! Usually we start with basic preferences such as “I don’t like earth tones” and I just ask them to tell me more about that.

For public and corporate projects, where there are a lot of people who will be affected by the colors in their environment, I use environmental analysis questionnaires to assess people’s responses to a space. For example, they might be asked to rank the space according to various pairs of attributes that may be important to that project: could be bright/dark, high/low, open/enclosed, friendly/hostile, fragrant/odoriferous, calming/arousing, powerful/weak, etc. The attributes themselves aren’t entirely fixed, and can vary from one project to the next.

Color and Climate

Your other articles talk a lot about using color palettes appropriate to the locale and weather.

Even the building orientation has to be taken into account. For an exterior project that’s mainly getting northern light, you have to pump up the color. If the building has four sides, yes, you pump it up on the north side. The same thing happens indoors. Sometimes you have to nudge the colors.

Color can not only strengthen architecture, but also enhance the pedestrian experience. If this facade were all-white, or all one color, it would lose its sense of variety and rhythm. Shown here is the Fillmore Center, color consultation by Jill Pilaroscia. Photo: Greg Lindley

Financial Influence of Color

Let’s talk about color and financial performance. When we talk about a “successful” project or a “successful” color design, what meaningful metrics can we come up with besides occupancy and rent rate increases?

As we said earlier, there are different levels of success. Most of my clients for public projects or housing developments, their #1 driver is financial performance. Other intentions can include creating as sense of place within a community or mixed-use area. It should be attractive, handsome, pleasing, friendly, and it should look like it fits with where it is.

One cautionary tale comes to mind. When people started developing here in the Bay Area, a lot of it was done by a few developers who came north from Southern California and they just re-used the same formulas that had worked down there: Mission-style homes with pale pink, white, and pale peach. It was misplaced. These homes did not sell well, and we were hired on many occasions to correct the palette so the buildings would look more appropriate for our geographic area.

The same thing happened when trying to bring SoCal to the Pacific Northwest. Those homes that had looked so good in SoCal suddenly looked like they were from outer space.

Can color alone suggest “upscale” or “economy”? I can tell you that color is only one of many signifiers that suggest luxury or economy to me personally. To me, fake bars on windows and shallow window indentations spell “cheap construction” and no amount of colorizing can change that, although better color might make the place a little more palatable.

I know exactly what you mean! Those fake bars are terrible. But as a colorist I can’t do anything about the choice of window or the depth of the moulding.

In this multifamily rental project, color was used to make the multiple buildings stand out from one another, and to create visual interest. Photo: Paul Peck

Color can communicate status by making a statement. Black = expensive, and sometimes beige = economy. There’s a reason why so many high-end gadgets are black – it’s so sleek, so shiny, so high-tech. Here’s a crasser example. When a well-known major American retailer first opened, they marketed towards a lower-income clientele. That’s not necessarily true anymore, but it was at first. Their color choices included pale pink and mint green, both colors that were statistically associated with lower socioeconomic groups!

Related Professions

How do you feel about minimalist architecture that treats color as a frivolous distraction from form?

I like Minimalist architecture. Color could be used to orchestrate and illustrate the simplicity of their designs. Color can enhance and accentuate form without being overbearing. You don’t have to paint it red to make it stand out.

[RF: We discussed the all-white apartments that still appear with some regularity as feature articles in places like the NY Times Magazine]

I call the all-white apartment a whitescape. An all-white apartment might be calming initially, but all that white, with its high reflectivity, can become fatiguing to live with over a longer period of time. In Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” everything is black or white: white teeth, white bones, white fog, white hair. There is a sense of coldness and inertia.

But some people find solace in white. There is nothing wrong with preferring white in one’s personal environment. Every man’s or woman’s home is their castle. If white resonates with them, then that is the appropriate color for them to live with. I am more concerned about public space. Don’t force a single color scheme on every environment because it seems intellectually superior.

For public spaces, I would suggest that a variety of color and color value is important, so that users can find something with which they can visually or emotionally resonate. Add flowers or plantings, art, or furniture to break up the monotony of a single unrelieved color. There’s a great book called “White Walls, Designer Dresses” by Mark Wrigley on the history of white in architecture.

In Jill Pilaroscia's own home, each room is a new world of color. The bedroom has a golden theme, but doesn't rely on super-saturated color. Photo: David Wakely

I did see one white apartment that really worked. It was in a San Francisco high-rise with northeast exposure and a 180 degree view. The owner had a wonderful art collection which displayed well against the white walls. The art itself was powerful enough to counterbalance and complement the spectacular views.

White spaces are also associated with schizophrenia!

Have you ever worked together with a lighting designer on a project?

Yes. I have worked with lighting designers on numerous occasions. Many times, my color is already selected or installed prior to the coordination with the lighting designer. As with other design collaborations, it is always best to coordinate these two disciplines early on, but it’s not a blocking issue, because a color scheme should really work in a variety of lighting conditions, independently of the artificial light sources chosen.

I don’t use special viewing rooms or light-boxes to test my colors. I just use regular daylight. About 70% of the time I can already tell if a scheme is killer or not, and if it’s killer I can take it most anyplace. If the edges and palette are well-balanced, then MOST of the time it will work, even under a variety of light sources.

Lighting designers don’t seem to work much with colored light, other than to sometimes use reflected light from a colored surface.

Philippe Starck comes to mind. He did a “light” hotel.

Jill Pilaroscia chose a muted, cool green for her own dining room. Photo: David Wakely

Have you worked with very fine-art driven architects on a joint project like a building lobby?

I have worked with high-end residential architects, and it’s been a treat. Sometimes the art itself is part of a high-end project – making sure the colors and finishes resonate with the art. I have also worked with art consultants, some of whom I absolutely adore. Tessa Wilcox of Art Source Consulting is amazingly insightful and talented. If your client is a major collector, you have to make the color work with the art so they don’t fight one another.

Let’s talk about Feng Shui. Do you believe in Feng Shui? Can we draw some parallels with your own experience?

Feng Shui has a logic behind it, like not putting 4 doors in a row, or not having the toilet be the first thing you see upon entering the home. I don’t care so much for the Feng Shui approach to color, too formulaic – something like “We need more Metal, so let’s add brown”. A color scheme should NEVER be a formula. It should always be site-specific.

Do you have any advice for architects?

Just this. Consider the role of color in the built environment. In today’s economic climate, there’s less money to go around. You might not be able to achieve the same level of architectural materials and finishes. But applied color (paints and stains) are now more eco-friendly, so entertain the idea of color. “Give color a chance”!

The color palette for this development in Fremont seems to riff off the green mountains and sky in the background. Photo: Patrik Argast

Color and Health

Have you ever worked with color therapists or mental health professionals? Is color scientifically accepted as a method to heal physical or mental illness to the point where insurance companies will reimburse for treatments?

As if! Well, maybe someday. We’re not quite there yet, but some of color’s effects on human health have definitely been demonstrated. There are practical concerns in hospitals, too. Making a huge wall lime-green will reflect light on the patients and make them look green, too. The doctors and nurses of course assess patient condition partly based on complexion, but they can’t do that with too much interference.

Frank Mahnke has stuff in his book about the human color response that speaks to this.

The developers of this condominium wanted it to look rooted in history, so JIll Pilaroscia chose a palette that referenced a more "historical" feel, in this case the earthy palette of Tuscany. Photo: Patrik Argast

Famous Last Words

Do you have any famous last words of advice for architects in particular?

If there is an opportunity to mention the International Association of Color Consultants that would be great. I am a fully accredited member of their North American Chapter and have completed my Thesis on Color In the Manufacturing Environment – A Case Study. The thesis in catalogued in the library of the IACC in Salzburg and San Diego. The program is a multi disciplined course in the art and science of color application for environment.

Few architectural institutions offer a formal program addressing color in the built environment. Any exposure they have to color theory is frequently through studio courses that focus solely on two-dimensional color applications.

Don’t be afraid of color. Some public projects are at the mercy of facilities management, which may be afraid of having to think. They care only about the bottom line: how fast can we touch it up, we can only use 4 hours of your time, and every floor is the same, even in a hospital where one floor may be for children and another for seniors.

Multifamily housing, color design by Jill Pilaroscia. Photo: Naomi Kuhmann

It’s hard to understand the value of color through measurements as a bottom-line return on investment, because ROI doesn’t factor everything that’s truly important. The concept of ROI itself has less meaning because we only value the bottom line. We don’t value people, and we don’t value nurturing people. The people don’t matter. It’s all about corporate profits, making it easy, and not working too hard. Sometimes colorizing a space costs more to do and to maintain. But our environment shapes behavior. It’s WORTH spending time on.

Architects and interior designers are natural enemies sometimes. Which side are you on? Are YOU afraid of drapery? What about color?

Absolutely not! I love drapery. I have a beautiful metallicized linen drapery from France in my own bedroom at home. Drapery can be very useful – it can add sophistication and intelligence to a design.

Anne Fougeron isn't afraid of drapery, although she doesn't overdo it, either. Shown here is Fougeron's own home. Photo: J.J. Casas

What I don’t like is consumption for consumption’s sake. Sometimes interior design is about chachkes and owning too many things, just for the sake of having an attractive assortment. It’s OK to have a lot of stuff as long as it’s personal. It can be reassuring, bringing joy. But not if someone else who doesn’t even know you has picked it all out for you.

What’s the most extreme design challenge you ever faced?

Convincing people that design matters, and explaining to them WHY it matters – without lying to them or condescending. This applies both to private clients and to public agencies and officials. A lot of people just don’t get it with modern design. It’s like trying to explain why a great novel is worthwhile to someone who only reads the sports page or the gossip columns in the newspaper.

How do you convince someone that design matters?

A good design should last over time, be well-sited, and include amenities that matter. Quality costs more, but they’ll end up with something that’s far more suited to their needs. It helps for people to have some visual training so they can understand the importance of design in the world. Unfortunately, the slash-and-burn budget cuts in public schools have gutted most of the arts programs.

People without design education tend to romanticize the past at the expense of the present.

What people don’t realize is that bad architecture has been around forever – not everything that’s old is good!

San Francisco is famous for Victorians, but much of their ornament went to disguising the fact that their footprints weren't actually that spacious - vertical space was an attempt to compensate for the lack of usable, horizontal floor space.

San Francisco has a lot of Victorians, but many of these buildings are not good design. They’re dark and cramped inside, with too many walls and inconvenient kitchens. It’s no wonder that owners today want to knock out walls, open them up, and bring more daylight in.

This Victorian bedroom may have gorgeous detailing and beautiful furniture, but it's still so small that a guest can literally lie on the twin bed and touch both walls.

[Developer "loft-style" condos use the same trick to disguise their units' cramped footprint with disproportionately high ceilings, which creates vertical, but useless space.]

Tell me more about how buildings can emotionally affect people.

Buildings like the Notre Dame in Paris or Hagia Sophia in Istanbul convey commitment to a grand idea. They inspire awe and amazement that the building could be done at all. They take people by the throat.

The Church of Notre Dame in Paris is one of architect Anne Fougeron's favorite buildings.

"Good architecture takes people by the throat," says Anne Fougeron of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Small buildings can do it, too. Even a private home – a person can unlock their door, go inside, and get that “wow” feeling because it’s a special space and they think, “I’m so glad to be home.” I have an email from a client in Palo Alto who wrote to me, “I finally got to spend some time in my house over Christmas and it’s ten times better than I anticipated.”

The clients for Anne Fougeron's 440 House project loved their home enough to write her an email after spending their first Christmas holiday in it. Photo: Tim Street-Porter

Buildings can evoke all kinds of responses: exhilarated, cozy, or even uncomfortable. Sometimes we will intentionally elicit a response of discomfort as part of the design.

[Even a small amount of edginess can add dynamic tension.]

Anne Fougeron's Ingleside Library. Sunlight is drawn into the interior, while along the walls windowed niches built from honey-toned natural wood create a warm and inviting environment. Photo: Joe Fletcher

Kitchen of Anne Fougeron's 21 House project. A semi-transparent bathroom wall behind creates interest, but also a sense of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Photo: Matthew Millman

Tell me about how you work with builders and craftspeople. Are they fabricators for your designs or do they contribute to the designs as well? How do you integrate the crafters with the builders?

There’s one craftsman, Dennis Luedeman [based in Emeryville], a steel fabricator that we’ve worked with for 20 years. I learned about welding after the first dining room table I commissioned from him, and I didn’t realize that welds could either be exposed or hidden until I saw them on the table. He also did the stairs for the Tehama Grasshopper project.

The steel fabricator who built these stairs for Anne Fougeron's Tehama project had created a physical mockup that ended up influencing the design - the shape of the stair treads, for example. Photo: Richard Barnes

We let him take a lot of design initiatives. It looks like our work, but has his personal imprint. He has an implicit understanding of the materials that even our structural engineers cannot match. We have stair fights all the time! He has to prove himself, but he does, and he keeps pushing the envelope of what can be done with the material. We have other people like that for glass and other materials. People who have a thorough understanding of how to put buildings together. I care about how it looks, but I’m always open to new ideas suggested by the craftsmen we work with.

With glass fabrication, much of the cost comes from finishing the edges. In the Hosfelt Gallery project, Anne Fougeron found a glass fabricator who already offered pre-finished panels in specific sizes for a very good price. She accommodated her design to make use of this fact. … Photo: Ethan Kaplan

There’s a big difference among builders, too. Good builders don’t try to pretend that they could do it better themselves, without the architect. A lot of builders are just in it for the money, and they don’t care about the design.

This can be a problem with designing public buildings. We don’t have any control over who the builder is for those projects. The cheapest bid gets it, and the process can take so long that material specifications have changed, or prices have shifted. And the contractor who has won the bid has often cut corners to get the job done. It is a dangerous combination. All these factors take a toll on the quality of the design and affect the overall result. Public buildings really should be built to the highest standard, as they are not often replaced, and they are so important to the life of a city and a community.

If public buildings are such a pain, why bother?

It’s a big chance to influence the urban fabric… and I really believe in good public buildings. Even with all the extra paperwork, the applications, the timeframes, the lack of control over the builders – it’s worth it in the end. I can’t just do private homes.

Anne Fougeron's Ingleside Branch Library in San Francisco as seen from a pedestrian street viewpoint. Photo: Joe Fletcher

Who were the teachers and mentors that influenced you the most?

One was Dan Solomon at UC-Berkeley, whom I studied with and later worked in his studio for 4 years. He was good at site planning and housing in an urban design context. Now there’s more interest in that sort of thing. I think it’s OK to include modern buildings in an old context, to respect the urban fabric but twist it a little bit. Here’s one project we did – 1532 House – that manages to differentiate from the surrounding homes without overwhelming them.

Anne Fougeron's contemporary 1532 house in San Francisco (second from right) preserves the rhythm of the street without slavishly imitating the older facades of the surrounding homes on either side.

The front profile is the same height, so the rhythm and the massing match. But it’s in a California modern vernacular – a permeable screen and a line of sight straight through – unlike the older Mission style homes on either side with their solid opaque walls and smaller windows. I call it the “Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde” house.

[That variety actually makes for a more interesting pedestrian experience.]

A pedestrian might appreciate the variety which punctuates without overwhelming in Anne Fougeron's 1532 House. Photo: Richard Barnes

Back to mentors. Another one was Dolf Schnebli, who would come out for quick 3-4 week studios between his other teaching gig in Zurich. He emphasized the integration of buildings over time and history.

Dolf Schnebli was one of Anne Fougeron's professors who influenced an entire generation of contemporary architects.

Dolf was a diehard Modernist in a post-modern era. The people he taught or who worked for him include Botta, and also Hertzog de Meuron. He was always super-available to us, and one of my biggest “AHA!” moments was in his class. One project assignment was a day-care center in Berkeley, and I designed a bunch of cute little buildings, which I had drawn by hand with wiggly lines to show how vernacular it all was. He said to me, “It’s fine to want to make it vernacular, but it does not need to look like it was designed by a peasant. Vernacular doesn’t mean ‘peasant’!”

He didn’t mean that I had no talent; what he meant was that it’s OK for a trained architect to draw upon the skills and history of other architects as well as the vernacular. Don’t try to pretend that other architects didn’t do anything. You don’t have to dumb it down. It’s OK for a designer to be sophisticated.

Some works on vernacular architecture imply that anything vernacular is good!

Bad architecture can be timeless, too. There’s been bad architecture throughout history! Sometimes it’s an emotional attachment, as in Ethiopia where they have these thatched huts called Tukul. Traditionally, people live in them together with all their animals and a wood-burning fireplace. It’s emotional but unsanitary – traditional shelters can have intelligent systems but they still could be better.

Traditional shelters such as this Ethiopian hut can have great sentimental value, but modern interpretations can improve upon living conditions while still preserving their character. On the right is Hosanna Clinic, a design by Anne Fougeron, which preserves the familiar local vernacular forms while allowing for modern sanitation and health care needs.

I teach this, too, to be constantly aware of what other people are trying to do. There’s another style of design that’s more intuitive, going with the flow, and that’s OK too. It’s a different kind of art, though.

A closeup of another structure at the Hosanna Clinic shows how modern materials can provide the same shelter from the sun, but with more durable surfaces and better air circulation.

What do you think of the training that young architects are getting today?

Architecture is not about sitting at the computer, making crazy dissolving morphing skins. It’s about buildings. Buildings are made of stuff. They’re built by somebody – a lot of somebodies. It’s very labor-intensive. I always tell people, “If you want to be an architect, you’ve got to go out there and look at real buildings.”

Getting out there and looking at real buildings can be an education in itself. Artist David Macaulay's whimsical drawing "Secrets of the Great Pyramid Revealed" implies that, unless we look for ourselves, the Great Pyramid really could have a giant razor hidden inside it - for all WE know.

You need to train your eye. It’ll ground you. This is rather Bauhaus-y, actually – the Bauhaus school had an emphasis on integrating directly with craftspeople.

How do you teach your students how to approach a design problem? What are some of the problems that work the best as teaching tools?

How I teach depends on what I’m teaching. The course itself needs a goal, and then you can teach to that goal. Personal attention to each student is important. An autocratic teaching style is not as good, because people think and learn differently. I’m rigorous, though. For example, if I teach a course in site planning, I might have the students design the same project on two different sites. They’ll learn from that how the project has to change in response to each site.

For beginning students, the problems are fairly circumscribed, because they’ll be overwhelmed. In a graduate-level studio course, though, they should already know what they’re doing and can handle more complex problems.

Critiquing is a really important teaching skill. It’s a negative art, in a way. It’s not a cheery process. You can’t just tell your students that everything they do is fabulous. But you don’t have to crush them and tell them they’re idiots, either. Even if there are 20 things wrong with their design, you don’t have to overwhelm the student. First, tell them what works, and then start in with the main issue that doesn’t work. Dolf Schnebli taught me this lesson too.

Getting critiqued is always the hardest part about being an art student. But I had one painting professor who was able to do it well. He never crushed anyone. He’d just say something like, “I don’t think the black sun quite works” but he’d say it in a way that made you feel clever for even having tried it, made you WANT to go and do it over.

Learning’s tough. If you want to be coddled, you can stay home in bed. In the real world, people aren’t super-nice. Don’t be brutal. But if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

"If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen," says architect Anne Fougeron about getting critiqued.

Do you ever get students who seem on Day 1 to be useless lumps, but somehow they just work and work and they get really good?

Some of the best students are the ones who struggled more in the beginning, but they applied themselves. It’s like they know that they’re starting at the bottom of the barrel and they work harder. What I really dislike is students who don’t work, and who don’t even show up to their studio classes.

Two famous so-called low-achievers. Albert Einstein flunked math in high school, and is now thought to have been dyslexic. Fred Astaire's Wikipedia entry says: "a screen test report on Astaire for RKO Pictures, now lost along with the test, is reported to have read: "Can't sing. Can't act. Balding. Can dance… a little."

As a student myself, I wasn’t as facile as some. But having too much talent can be a handicap, because they don’t know how to sequence their steps. They can’t find their anchor. They rely on their initial talent and they don’t work as hard. Being the grinder can be a better path than having it all come too easily.

Do you emphasize theory or practice when teaching?

I’m less completely theoretical than some. Architecture doesn’t do well as all-theory, it tends to get bogged down in incoherent discussion. I’m interested in the theory about making. For students, I also want to make them think about issues that they’ll have to confront in the real world as professionals.

Sometimes that means problems that go beyond mere design, for example assigning problems that have social relevance. I think the more junior students are sometimes more comfortable with the fluff – they’re not ready to confront larger issues just yet. But I try to have rigorous standards regardless of the class level.

Final physical model of Anne Fougeron's design for Maison d'Acier, which is French for "house made of steel". This house was designed for a steel fabricator to celebrate steel's structural capabilities, including a dramatic cantilevered room overlooking the Ohio lake where the home is sited.

Do you teach people to design in specific styles?

I try NOT to enforce a stylistic direction. You don’t want everyone’s work to look the same. Even with something like math, where there’s supposedly one right answer to a problem, there can be many ways to solve it. The students in this one course, not my course, were creating these deconstructed, Zaha Hadid-meets-Frank-Gehry-meets-Coop Himmelblau designs. It made no sense. Sometimes enforcing these deconstructionist styles like “no orthogonal grids” can be more constraining than not!

[Perhaps because it creates needless design complication?]

Can you set your own teaching goals or do you have to teach to a pre-set curriculum?

The last time I taught was a graduate studio course at UC-Berkeley, and I taught whatever I wanted. Some schools like ETH Zurich have structured programs. Having a set curriculum is not necessarily a bad idea, though. It ensures that the graduates will all have exposure to the same core set of ideas that have been received, understood, and processed. If the curriculum is too loosey-goosey, too unstructured – the graduates can’t always THINK very well.

Architecture is really about common sense, using issues to solve as a way to generate ideas. They may not always be resolved cleanly, but you can’t ignore them.

What sort of curriculum would you have in say an elementary school, or high school, if our public schools were to introduce design or architecture into their programs? A lot of it might depend on the ability of the teacher, too.

I have a European background so I tend to train the eye, more than the hand. You can train people to make things, or you can train them to be sophisticated about visual things.

Architectural training in the U.S. is all about materials and methods, and not about architectural history. Architecture is treated as a technical profession where contract law is more important than history. I think some training in both is good, though. It’s like music – you can teach people to be very sophisticated listeners, but then you teach them to play a simpler instrument to start out. It doesn’t have to be intimidating. Music is something that everyone can do at least at a basic level. Everyone can learn to hold a beat well enough to play in an ensemble.

It’s a life skill, really. You don’t have to be an expert at everything, just do it well enough to get it done.

[We got off on a tangent and the resumed our discussion about college-level coursework.]

There are too many courses in things like ADA compliance now, not enough time for design. ADA compliance is easier to teach, because it’s very quantitative. And, there’s a big lobbying effort for it. It’s not that accessibility isn’t important, because it is. It’s just that so much time is devoted now to keeping up with the latest standards, and how many people is that really serving?

The same thing is true of green building. It’s easy to say, but the truth is, it’s complicated and we have to think carefully about where those resources are being spent. Is the linoleum on the floor REALLY the biggest problem we have?

For schools, I think the faculty should have enough practical experience. They should have built works, not be all theory. Of course, having an active practice can eventually eat away at the time you have for teaching.

What do you get out of teaching?

Having to teach makes you have to deal with abstract ideas of design, which you first formulate and then have to teach. It should be about more than just technical aspects like heating systems and fire codes.

What do YOU think constitutes good design?

It’s understanding of the various conflicting forces that make a building. There’s budget – and there’s lack of budget. There’s context – and unwillingess to change. There’s the client – and then there are the neighbors. All these different needs and constraints pull the project in different directions. Good design is the synthesis of all these forces in a way that still makes it work.

Artist Constantin Brancusi asserted that "Simplicity is complexity resolved.

Good design wows people. It’s an almost ethereal quality that is present in really good buildings. Louis Kahn is one example, particularly the Kimbell Art Museum. It’s not huge, it’s intimate. Kahn designed it with barrel vaults – but then he included diagonal movement across these barrels with the circulation. It is so simple and yet so sophisticated.

In his design for the Kimbell Art Museum, Louis Kahn managed to create diagonal lines of sight that cut across the straight lines of the barrel vaulting, similar to the multiple vanishing points seen when traversing a regularly planted orchard.

Design can be painfully slow, and most people don’t understand how something can be so flawless and yet take so long!

Even Picasso, who was very prolific, was always working his ideas through.

Three schemes from Anne Fougeron for the same project, a proposed home in South Carolina, showing how physical models can be both a tool for the creator and as a way to communicate ideas to clients.

What are some of your favorite buildings?

I am an architecture junkie and so I look at and love many buildings. Just to name a few, both old and new:

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, for its light, scale, and virtue. The Parthenon in Rome. The Cathedral of Saint-Chappelle, all glass with spines of stone. Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum. Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel [Chapel Notre Dame du Haut]. Pierre Charreau’s Maison de Verre, where everything was made custom, and Charreau had to fit the new residence underneath an existing apartment.

Pierre Charreau's Maison de Verre was a Modernist masterpiece of its time.

The Phoenix Library [read a good building case study here]. It sings! There are so many advanced features, from the screens and window systems designed to mitigate the extreme heat and sunlight, to the columns with skylights as column capitals. You don’t need 16 signs to find things, because it’s clear where you are at all times, and you can find the bathroom!

The Phoenix Library has advanced daylighting, energy-management, and structural systems.

In the SF library, you can’t find anything and don’t know where you are.

How are the acoustics in your interiors like the 440 House? All that hard surface.

We thought about that a lot, and we wanted a “live” sound. In that home, the living room has an intentionally formal feel, and the acoustics are part of that feeling too. Think about the sound of stacked heels on a hard stair, that click, click, click – it adds to the sense of formality.

Anne Fougeron designed the living room at the 440 House as an intentionally formal space. The surfaces make the acoustics very bright - you can imagine the heels clicking. Photo: Tim Street-Porter

The kitchen by contrast has a wood floor, a lower ceiling, acoustical treatments, cushier furniture. It’s a cozy place to hang out, watch TV – its informality is an intentional contrast to the living room. All rooms in a home are not equal! There can be differences between them.

By contrast, the kitchen in Anne Fougeron's 440 house creates a feeling of warmth, coziness, and relaxed intimacy. Photo: Tim Street-Porter

That staircase, if you’ll notice, is rather shallow. We were actually worried that it was going to be too shallow, and we built a prototype for the client out of plywood first. We said, “Go have a couple of glasses of wine and try it out for a week or so.” It turned out the clients liked it just fine, and had no problem navigating up and down.

Anne Fougeron was concerned about the shallow stair at the 440 House and actually insisted that the clients try out a prototype for a week to make sure they could use it comfortably. Photo: Tim Street-Porter

Let’s look at your JFR House in Big Sur. How can a glass box set the tone for energy efficiency? And how do you keep them comfortable in the summer and winter?

This home was set out in the redwoods, among surrounding hills that are high enough to block direct sunlight from reaching the sunroom even with an entire wall and ceiling out of glass. However, California’s energy code doesn’t allow shading from foliage or land features to be counted, so we had to work closely with the building department in order to get the permit. The home is designed for daylighting and passive solar, so that it’s actually pleasant to be there at any time of day.

Anne Fougeron's JFR House sits in a bowl in the landscape and is completely surrounded by hills on all sides. Seen here is the front entry. Photo: Richard Barnes

Rear view of Anne Fougeron's JFR House. Photo: Richard Barnes

In the living room of Anne Fougeron's JFR House, the hillside gives a protected feel, and prevents too much direct sunlight from causing excessive heat gain. There is still plenty of light, but not too much. Photo: Richard Barnes

On that note, which new building technologies are most exciting to you? Including materials and finishes.

Caulking! Really good caulking allows more flush details, because it can expand and contract. Details on how you can DO building, like gasketing, thermal breaks, and flashing are always getting better. Solar-embedded panels in glass and other glass technologies, which integrate green features much more easily into buildings.

Detail of Anne Fougeron's 21 House. Photo: Matthew Millman

One innovation that’s becoming more popular especially in Europe are double and triple building skins. Technology is constantly evolving, and even if we don’t use something right away, it works through the webs of our brain. HAVING to do it helps.

Renzo Piano's NY Times Building has a double skin with anoperable outer layer, plus a window-by-window daylighting system that has the sun's position vis a vis surrounding buildings from EVERY window… for all 15,000 windows.

So how do you keep up with it all?

We use consultants! Especially for our firm, because we do take risks with new designs. Waterproofing especially. Pretty much every project we use a waterproofing consultant.

Tell me about designing for health care. What are some of the constraints and how are they different from, say, a private residence or another type of public building such as a library? How can you make a hospital fun rather than drab, without spending a prohibitive amount of money?

Health care can be very prescriptive. Hospitals have a lot of regulations and not much budget. But there’s no reason that clinics couldn’t be nicer, more nurturing environments. Our work for Planned Parenthood attempts to do exactly that.

Did you have to design any extra security features into the Planned Parenthood facilities? They don’t look like a troublemaker would have much trouble just walking in.

Planned Parenthood had to do a lot of security upgrades after several high-profile incidents, including one in Boston where a man walked in and shot a doctor and at staff. I’d already done a few clinics for them so they came to me and asked if I knew anything about security. I said that I didn’t know but I would try. They hired me.

I didn’t want clinics that look like a prison. There’s already so much victimization of women… why punish them further by making them come to a jail for basic care? Ninety percent of their business is basic gyn care – exams, pap smears – for women who can’t afford it any other way. These women already going through enough in their lives. Some of them already have other traumas to work through. The clinics should make them feel wanted and safe.

Anne Fougeron designed the interior of this Planned Parenthood clinic to help the clients feel wanted and safe, using daylight and fresh springlike colors to create a serene feel. Photo: Grey Crawford

Here you see the entry lobby. The lobby is the first line of defense. Bulletproof glass and materials all around. Doors that lock on closing. An air gap by the window so they can speak with the receptionist behind. Panic buttons everywhere. If the receptionist determines that the client or situation just doesn’t feel right, the police can be there in 2 minutes. So the staff also knows that they’re safe.

The Planned Parenthood lobby from the visitors side manages to employe state-of-the-art security without calling attention to the fact. Photo: Grey Crawford

Interiors are lively, with color and as much daylight as possible. Daylight changes throughout the day – makes it more interesting for clients who might have to stay there all day. Benches to encourage interactions. They’re built from resistant materials, because they get a lot of wear and tear and there are very minimal maintenance budgets. Surfaces have to be durable and easy to clean – resin or wood rather than fabric, for example.

Planned Parenthood lobby designed by Anne Fougeron, as seen from the staff side. Photo: Grey Crawford

Planned Parenthood is a good client. A lot of other health care work is prescriptive and normative, done to meet regulations. Now that we’re winning design awards, there’s more interest in going beyond the prescriptive to create spaces that help morale. Improved morale is very important for health and healing.

What’s your position on sustainability in design?

Build it right, build it once, don’t build it again.

Tell me more about the city of the future. There’s such a disconnect between utopian visions of past ages and their eventual reality that I wonder whether our Cities of the Future will really be full of pristine vertical farms, or whether it’ll be more like Blade Runner. Design is one thing, but humans are another. If there are too many rats in the cage, it doesn’t matter how pretty the cage is.

That was a competition to envision SF as the city of the future. Rather than set it in far in the future, we felt that a realistic timeframe would be something like 100 years. There was a planner on the jury and I said, “In 100 years, you won’t even have approved anything!” That got a laugh.

In ancient times, farming was basically poking holes into the ground. Modern farming, even with large-scale equipment like the combine harvester on the right, is still basically doing the same thing.

Instead of envisioning a vast sweep, we saw small things happening incrementally. Our take was urban agriculture. In 100 years there will be even less arable land to support a growing population. But we’re still growing like we were thousands of years ago. Poking holes into the ground.

Architect Anne Fougeron's conception for San Francisco's recent Cities of the Future competition features vertical farming towers that are also energy self-sufficient housing units.

Another image from Anne Fougeron's concept for Cities of the Future. These farming towers could be integrated into the existing urban fabric, while existing buildings could additionally be re-purposed or modified to further increase the amount of arable surface area.

Real soil isn’t always even arable. In Ethiopia, they can’t grow anything on their land other than those strange banana leaf plants. Minimum nutrients for maximum work. But all you really need out of the soil are the minerals. Instead of doing that, there’s hydroponics, and vertical farming makes more out of limited land area. One agricultural town could feel all of the Bay Area.

Anne Fougeron's strategic plan for Cities of the Future includes a network of designated vertical farming sites scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Here, the sites extend up and down the bay on both the Peninsula and the East Bay shorelines.

In Japan, they’re using basements of buildings that otherwise go unused. In San Francisco eventually they’ll ban cars from downtown, and we could use those parking garages.

Anne Fougeron's idea was to re-use multi-level parking garages for urban agriculture, with different crops grown on each level.

Your Tehama project reminds me of a spaceship. Not the retro, Space Agey Jetsons kind, either. It’s so light it feels like it’s in the stratosphere.

Anne Fougeron's award-winning Tehama warehouse renovation includes a residence on the top two floors, while Fougeron's offices are on the ground floor. The penthouse floor is visible as a "glass bubble" on the roof. Photo: Matthew Millman

This project was a renovation of an old warehouse space with a new penthouse portion at the top. The intention of the penthouse was to participate in urban life. At the time it was built, there were no immediate lines of sight from close-by buildings directly into the space, so it was feasible to envision the penthouse as a glass bubble that floated above the city but was also still part of it.

Interior and exterior shots of the penthouse level for Anne Fougeron's Tehama warehouse renovation. Photos: Richard Barnes

We designed it to maximize the transparency between up and down. Operable windows allow for natural ventilation. Most lofts have dark airless spaces in the back – the interior rooms have to borrow light because they have none of their own. We made this more like a house, by adding light and air. An interior courtyard on the lower level brings light deep into the interior, as well as creating a stack ventilation effect – ventilation without mechanical means.

Main living area for the residential area of the Tehama loft. Above is the penthouse, and to the left is seen the interior courtyard that brings light and air deep into the heart of the building. Photo: Richard Barnes

We didn’t do detailed modeling of the sun patterns daily and seasonally, but the building was already built, and we didn’t have the option of orienting it. I knew approximately what would happen. That wall by the stairs was left that way because we knew it would catch the light and cast dynamic shadows on the wall behind.

The wall behind the stairs from main living area to penthouse of the Tehama loft catch dramatic light changes throughout the day. Photo: Richard Barnes

The acoustics in there are bright. But that’s the way the client wanted it. They didn’t want a lot of stuff. They didn’t have the budget for it either.

What’s it like to be FAIA?

You mean, what did I get out of it? Well, I got to hang out with all these fantastic white males! On my own! In my gown!

[A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects is recognized as having made outstanding contributions to the profession. Fewer than 2% of registered US architects are elected. To be considered, an architect must be nominated by petition, either by other Fellows, by a greater number of AIA members, or by the local AIA chapter as was done in Anne Fougeron's case. Of the 134 Fellows elevated nationwide in 2010, only 22 were women. Anne Fougeron is listed under the 2010 FAIA Fellows at this link.]

Seriously… I did it because I have a feminist agenda. There aren’t enough women architect/designers in the profession. We have to push the envelope. So, I applied – if I hadn’t gotten it, I would have been super ticked off. Out of the 34 California architects to become FAIA, only 4 women became FAIA for their design work, and only 6 women total were elevated to FAIA. Not a great track record. If you look at the national list, you will see how few women became FAIA for design.

So, 16% of the Fellows are women, but half the undergraduate architecture students are women! Where are they?

First of all, it’s a tough profession, and it’s not kind to women. It’s not kind to anyone, really. And it’s sexist: the developer world, the city-planning world, the engineering world are all male-oriented. Not everyone is an entrepeneur, either. It’s hard to be the sole proprietor of your own firm – hard for everyone, not just women.

In 1993-95 I closed my office and moved to France. When I came back, I restarted my office and soon after got divorced. I didn’t have deep pockets and I had a young daughter to feed and take care of; she was 6. Necessity is the mother of invention. I was able to restart my business and raise a great daughter… she’s confident, smart, accomplished.

Anne Fougeron, left, in a recent photo with her daughter, Sophie, whom she raised as a single parent at the same time that she was building her own design practice.

A lot of the women don’t get their license, but they do go into related professions.

You’ve got to claw yourself out of that hole. You have to fight the fight. You can’t stay in the back, because nobody’s going to fight that fight for you. NUMBERS MATTER.

"Numbers matter." Anne Fougeron was speaking of women in architecture, but here's another place where numbers really did matter: women in the early suffrage movement worked all their lives for a right that American women today now take for granted.

[This is the first of a two-part series featuring Greg Warner and Brooks Walker, founding principals of Walker Warner Architects in San Francisco. Greg Warner's interview came first.]

Pretend you’re teaching a new group of students about site response. What’s important?

Many architects say that they’re sensitive to site conditions, the environment, and sustainability. But it’s easy to fall into what I call “bling” – for example, getting seduced by the idea of “green building technologies” without considering what’s actually fundamentally appropriate to the site in question. As an architect, you can let your guard down too easily, and get taken off the path by trends. The importance of place means thoroughly understanding what is actually there.

How do you respect a place?

You have to understand the nature of the place, including its history. Using your given senses too – listening, seeing, and understanding in order to harmonize.

How did your early life affect your design sense?

Most of our work is not urban. It’s rural. I grew up outdoors on a ranch, in Hawai’i, so I’m most comfortable in that familiar context. Most of my interests involve the outdoors. I love fly fishing, hiking, cycling, and triathlons. My experience growing up in a rural area has led me to design in a very specific way that has in turn influenced my occasional urban work as well. Even in urban settings, I seek ways to relate buildings to the outdoors, and I really appreciate the importance of using natural influences to enhance quality of life.

On the East Coast where I grew up, the outdoors can be your enemy, especially in the wintertime.

The question becomes, how do WE adapt to this context to respect that climate? If you’re hiking in a rainy area, you prepare for it. Similarly, when designing a home, climate should inform the architectural solution in order to be compatible.

So your approach [to discomfort] is not to deny it. You still face it – but properly equipped.

When we design a home, we  have to provide a solution that takes the client’s desires into account, because that’s one of the parameters which, along with the site, informs the design. Some clients come to us with preconceived ideas, which we feel are not a good fit for the site. For example, a client may have his vision set on having an East Coast style home, but in California. That’s not an appropriate match for the climate and history here. If we can’t talk them into accepting an alternate approach, we often won’t take the project.

How do you talk someone out of building in a wrong style?

We ask the client what they like about the buildings that they have selected, and try to elicit the underlying qualities that attracted them to each one in the first place. Then we can embody those qualities in a design that’s actually a better fit for the place. Ideally we remove “style” from the dialogue.

Often, we push back BEFORE we’re hired, by educating the client on our philosophy and our approach. We’ve been around long enough to know the importance of being selective. Filtering our clients is tough in this economy, but you’ve got to love what you do; that’s the primary step to success in a project.

It comes back to respect. We respect our clients enough to be open and candid with them, because good design is a collaboration between architect and client. Respect is one of our core values as a business.

Can you give me an example of how you talked someone out of building something that would have been site-inappropriate?

Our Kamuela Residence project in Hawai’i is a good example. The clients were a young family who wanted to build a home that was understated and respectful of the surrounding community. The clients were sophisticated and understood the social issues that can arise when building a luxury home in the midst of an agrarian community. Originally, they had  notions of what I’d describe as traditional bungalow buildings: pitched roofs, lots of predictable detailing, similar to many of the existing homes on the island.

The client for Walker Warner Architects' Kamuela Residence originally expected the architects to design a home that referenced the older plantation homes in the region.

But this was also an area rich with a lot of practical, agrarian structures already optimized for the unique climate in that area: low slanted roofs to align with the prevailing winds, long narrow buildings oriented for optimum ventilation. Very fitting.

Walker Warner Architects, Kamuela Residence. After the clients saw how well-suited the local agrarian buildings were to the Hawai'ian climate, they were open to emulating the best of those features for a home that was tailored to both unique site conditions and their own needs. Photo: Matthew Millman

Initially, we drove around looking at various local buildings while I described what worked about each one. The conversation happened quickly, as did their understanding, and then there was trust; the clients understood the reasoning and logic behind how the local buildings were sited, and saw the implications for weather, views, and rain. Once it became obvious to them, they got excited.

Once the mind is opened and confident, that’s when trust begins. That’s when collaboration begins. The early stages are a sort of courtship between architect and client. We’re really interviewing each other to see if there’s a mutual alignment. Just as we listen to their desires, we also educate them on what our values are, and they ideally buy into that early on.

So that means every project you do could be in a different style, depending on what fits the site.

We don’t work in a specific style the way some architects do. It’s an approach, a point of view. To me, a style is sort of like working with a kit of parts, though. So this means we may be less practiced in using a specific kit, but I feel that we’re more versatile overall.

Walker Warner Architects, Kamuela Residence. The extensive porch, called a lanai in Hawai'i, is a common feature of Hawai'ian architecture. Photo: Matthew Millman

A vision our clients had initially considered was of plantation homes from the 20s or 30s, common in the region. These were built as sugar plantation housing throughout Hawai’i – a semi-Victorian look. In early Hawai’i, however, the local structures featured “single-wall” framing made with simple planks instead of studs. The buildings didn’t need insulation. The gaps between the boards allowed air to flow freely through the walls. The buildings were oriented based on the direction of the prevailing wind to further encourage good ventilation. Sheet rock is a poor choice in Hawai’i because of the humidity – it deteriorates rapidly and is too susceptible to mold and mildew.

We actually borrowed this single-wall look and have used it in other projects elsewhere. We used single-wall framing to create a permeable screen in a residence located in Woodside, CA. The living room is a glass box, but it’s screened from the western sun by this planked wall that visually intersects with the rafters.

Walker Warner Architects, Woodside Residence. The textures and materials in this screen wall in this home in Woodside, CA are reminiscent of the single-wall framing typical of both Hawai'i and of barns in Northern California. This type of framing screens the sun but admits the breeze. Photo: Matthew Millman

Was it appropriate to use a Hawai’i feature in a California home?

There’s enough commonality between the climates of Hawai’i and California that in this case, it was. One common feature of buildings in both places is a generous porch, or lanai in Hawai’ian terminology. A mild and livable climate means that traditional buildings don’t always need excessive heat or air conditioning to be livable. People can live comfortably in the “in-between” zone between the indoors and the outdoors.

Walker Warner Architects, Kamuela Residence. It's hard to believe that this luxury contemporary home was originally based on local shacks! Photo: Matthew Millman

Our palette is often “weathered”, warmer, and not harsh or clinical. We prefer using enduring materials like wood or stone because we want our buildings to last.

Going back to the Kamuela project in Hawai’i, why were agrarian buildings a better example than plantation homes, since these plantation homes are also part of the “local context” – does this mean that the plantation homes are somehow LESS adapted to Hawai’i than the single-wall framed barns?

These homes (in the up-country ranch region) were somewhat unique as compared to true sugar plantation houses. Single-wall framing was common in Hawaii, primarily because of the simple means for construction (no studs needed).  The exterior walls were simply made with vertical boards with a tongue and groove connection between each.  For homes, there weren’t actually gaps (too many bugs!) between boards but the walls were literally 3/4″ thick. Barns and other structures of utility hade similar type of wall system; however, boards were not tongue and grooved together.  This is similar to what you see in California hay barns (as referenced in the Woodside home).

How else was this project driven by site? Isn’t it on a border between two microclimate zones?

Yes. It’s on a hillside with great views toward a drier climate below, and a rainy climate directly behind. Trade winds tend to come over the hills and drop  moisture on the way down toward the ocean. As a result, behind the house is a rainforest and watershed. The roof of this house is pitched to shed its rainwater back into the gulch located at the base of the watershed, while the front lifts toward commanding long-distance views.

A view of the rain forest behind the Kamuela residence by Walker Warner Architects. The moisture and feeling of shelteredness on this side is balanced by sweeping views of the ocean and mountains on the other. Right photo shows Greg Warner by the natural Ohia log windscreen. Photos: Matthew Millman

Both California and Hawai’i seem to have microclimates. San Francisco is famous for them. Can you talk more about how you design for microclimates?

Another project designed in direct response to climate and to site was Sonoma Ranch. This was also a new home located on a legacy cattle ranch property in today’s California wine country. One of the area’s challenges is the wind: in the summers, it’s often difficult to simply sit outdoors and read a newspaper with the wind gusting at 30 mph or more. Our solution was to use the building as a windbreak forming a courtyard, oriented for protection from the prevailing winds.

Walker Warner Architects, Sonoma Ranch. This home was designed in response to a vernacular style matching the surrounding Sonoma County agrarian buildings, and oriented to shelter the outdoor courtyard from the forceful prevailing winds. Photo: Mark Defeo

It’s designed in response to the Sonoma poultry barns that are so frequent in that area. These buildings are often whitewashed, with tin roofs. Taken in that context, our design was very fitting and respectful of the area’s history. Initially, though, the Sonoma Design Commission didn’t see it that way.

Typical barns in Sonoma are often whitewashed without offending the design board, but it can take some persuading to get a white-colored house approved. Credit: JG Bracco, Barns of Sonoma County (barnsosfsonoma.com)

Sonoma design guidelines call for buildings to disappear into the landscape: requiring earth tones that blend. We had to present to the county planners to explain how our design referenced the already existing vernacular.

The farmhouse references for Walker Warner Architect's Sonoma Ranch are clear in this photo by Matthew Millman. Even the tower is similar to the silo in the barn photo shown previously. Photo: Matthew Millman

On the one hand there are Modernists who seek to create very clean, pure designs that are honestly about the present, stripped of ornament and unencumbered by the baggage of ages past. On the other hand, we have some high-end resort communities that REQUIRE a replicated Tuscan or Mediterranean style – that same literal historical interpretation that you resisted in the Hawai’i home. And then there’s Sonoma Ranch, which very consciously and intentionally echoes the forms of local buildings – but these are also from the past. Why’s it OK to reference history in Sonoma but not in Hawai’i?

Forced style of any sort can be problematic for obvious reasons. Those restrictions you mention are often typical of resort community design guidelines. If they’re poorly conceived, the results can be unfortunate. However, their intended purpose is to create a cohesive-looking community, which, in a way, is the same thing we strive for by making our designs appropriate for their surroundings.

Despite the building's low profile, the interiors of Walker Warner Architect's Sonoma Ranch convey a sense of expansiveness and air. Photo: Steven Brooke

It may turn out that what a client specifically likes about a Tuscan home are the thick walls, the stone, the tile roofs. We try to dissect and re-interpret these qualities for the region and place that we’re actually designing for. You can edit the materials and the detailing and still satisfy both client and community.

Sonoma Ranch by Walker Warner Architects. Generous porches add another layer of transition towards the outdoors. Photo: Steven Brooke

Guidelines can raise the quality of design in a resort so it doesn’t turn into a free-for-all. A building can have a Tuscan palette, and still be very contemporary. For example, in the Woodside project, we wanted a contemporary feeling that was evocative of a California barn. It’s a very modern building, but it’s rustic and warm, too.

Walker Warner Architects, Woodside Residence. Once you get past the weathered-barn exterior, the living area is virtually walled in glass, but still shaded from the sun and screened for privacy. Photo: Matthew Millman

Some Modernists can have a difficult time with self-imposed palette restrictions – if they work primarily in exposed concrete and steel, they might find it difficult to satisfy community design guidelines that refer back to more traditional styles and materials. It’s risky for a Modern architect to push back against these design regulations, but it can be rewarding as well.

What’s the difference between a palette and a vocabulary?

Palette is just material. Vocabulary is inclusive of material, but also of methods and forms… more of a language.

Are you a Modernist?

I’m not a Modernist with a capital M, but I think I am forward-looking. I’m impressed with certain things about modernism, but it often seems lacking in what I like the most – warmth. There are restraints on how far I can go with a “Modern” vocabulary. On the other hand, Scarpa was a modernist, and yet his work is warm, textured, stunning and inviting – all the same adjectives you could use to describe the traditional buildings found in his Italian region.

A true Tuscan building has smaller, more modest openings. Tuscan-style in California incorporates modern glass walls and expansive arches, which creates a feeling of greater openness and grandeur.

How do you draw out your clients to elicit the architectural qualities that they truly seek in their home, perhaps without knowing?

By referencing: both our work and that of other architects. Our library is extremely important as a communication tool. There is an ongoing dialogue throughout the project. We show projects to our clients that seem to us to have some of the qualities they seek – they give us feedback – and then we respond to that with informed suggestions.

What sorts of questions do you ask your clients?

We actually have a structured questionnaire for new clients. We ask questions to help them identify what the essence of their home should be. How do they plan to use it?  What does a “home” really mean to them?  We get them to talk about places or architecture that they have found inspiring. We ask them why they chose a property in the Bay Area as opposed to someplace else, and of course we ask them what they like. We also ask them, “What DON’T you like, and why?” We have to extract the essence of what they want and what they don’t want.

Some clients come to us with their own books, clippings, and references, but they haven’t articulated what they’re responding to in each selection. So, we ask them to write down what they like about each image or project. It’s engaging, on both a practical and an aspirational level.

Questions become more and more pointed as the project progresses. Early on, it’s more general, more gestural, and more about the senses than about daily practices. As the designs become more developed, that’s when we start asking them more detailed questions, such as how they prefer to arrange their toiletries.

You teach your clients how to respect the site and region where they want to build. What about livability?

Livability is one of our guiding principles, and yes, it can restrict innovation. We choose not to sacrifice livability -  some architects do. Philip Johnson’s Glass House is a good example of a very modern home, but it does impose a certain lifestyle where you expose yourself to the outside. It’s very bold, and the Glass House is an extraordinary design. But it’s not for everyone.

Our Woodside project mixes both traditional and modern materials and elements by combining a caretaker’s unit that is actually the guest suite above a fully functioning barn. The barn has a stone facade that references rural buildings you might actually find in California, while the guest room above is a glass box that presides over the structure.

Walker Warner Architects, Woodside Residence. The guest suite glass box is an intervention that breaks up an otherwise monolithic, almost medieval-looking structure. Photo: Matthew Millman

Do you ever have to teach your clients how to live in their home, if a site-appropriate design requires changes to THEIR daily living habits? For example, in a home that relies on natural ventilation rather than air conditioning systems, you might have to get the client in the habit of opening a window instead of automatically switching on the A/C.

Do we have to teach our clients new ways of living? No. But sometimes, especially with young clients who are just starting families, we can draw on our own experience to remind them of needs they’ll soon discover for themselves.

Tell me about your materials. Are there materials you’ll never use?

As an example, we don’t use sheetrock in Hawai’i because of the humidity there, but it makes total sense to use it in some other climates. It’s more about appropriateness than an absolute list of choices. You learn about what works and what doesn’t in a particular place by studying the buildings in that area that have endured for a longer period of time.

We are more cautious than some in our exploration of new materials. If it’s too risky, or too trendy, we are more careful. It has to endure both physically and aesthetically.

We’ve looked at how you design for Hawai’i. Have you ever designed homes for colder climates? What do you do differently?

The same approach applies, namely, reviewing local buildings first and taking cues from them. One home we designed in Idaho is an example of a site-specific design for a high desert, mountain climate with hot, dry, sunny summers and cold winters.

As with the Kamuela Residence, Walker Warner Architects began designing this residence in Idaho with clear attention to climate and local agrarian responses. Photo: Cesar Rubio

This home also references local agrarian structures.

So what constitutes good design?

To us, a good design should be livable, adaptable, appealing, and well-crafted with well-chosen materials.

Walker Warner Architects, Idaho Residence. The interior of the living room is simple, with the same natural materials as the exterior, and welcomes in the outdoors. Photo: Cesar Rubio

Who’s your favorite architect? How did you decide to become an architect?

Vladimir Ossipoff. He practiced in Hawai’i where I was raised. I went to school as a day student at the Hawai’i Preparatory Academy, designed by Ossipoff. We all had to attend weekly Sunday services at the Davies Memorial Chapel, which he designed. I sat in that building each Sunday, twiddling my thumbs pretty much, staring at the same four walls. Without my even realizing it, that building imprinted on me. As I look back, that building is likely why I became interested in architecture.

Vladimir Ossipoff designed the Davies Memorial chapel and most of the buildings on the boarding-school campus where Greg Warner spent much of his boyhood.

This revelation was actually a watershed for me, and we can follow the trail from there. An interest in fine art drew me to the University of Oregon, which has an architectural program that is steeped in the influences of context. By emphasizing sensitivity to site, I came to realize how naturally my own childhood buildings had come to shape my own point of view, and my appreciation of rural settings.

Davies Memorial Chapel, designed by Vladimir Ossipoff, located on the campus of the Hawai'i Preparatory Academy. Note the screen of natural Ohia logs, an element that Greg Warner has honored in subsequent designs from Walker Warner Architects.

Once you realize what your preferred design context is, you tend to seek out those contexts in future projects. This shapes your practice. If I had been born and raised in a city, I’d likely be an urban designer. But that’s not who I am.

What about Bay Area architects, past and present?

Many Bay Area Regionalists were also sensitive to site. Bernard Maybeck, William Wurster, Bill Turnbull. They were all forward-looking, yet they really understood the fabric in which they were working. My influences were primarily regionalists of the Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest.

Each of these rural wildnerness sites would require a different sort of architectural solution - or perhaps no solution, if it's on national parkland. Clockwise from top left: Sonoma, California desert, rural Italy, and Iceland

What do you think about the new generation of architects coming out of school today?

I’m an artist. I draw. [Drawing is a right-brain activity, whereas execution using computer-based tools is a left-brain activity.] Students today communicate more via computer than by hand. To me, the focus on the use of the computer has disabled creativity in that sense. Computers can be great tools, both for design and efficiency, but they don’t teach you how to think about a problem.

The process of design takes time. In today’s world, expectations are often focused on speed. Sometimes that means sacrificing the qualities that come from a fuller exploration.

Some designers work with a kit of parts that they’re familiar with. The advantages of this are it’s consistent, and it’s fast. You might compare this to cooking and recipes. There’s cooking from scratch, or there’s Betty Crocker.

Or, you can create your own custom mixes just to save time, but it’s still from scratch. Maybe that’s more a methodology than a recipe, though.

As a student especially, you owe it to yourself to explore as much as you can rather than go straight into formulaic approaches. You have to spend a certain amount of time in a discipline before it really becomes second nature. How can we expose students to the broadest possible range of possibilities in architecture?

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers talks about something he calls the 10,000 hour threshold. It’s about how passion and a commitment to execution can become a differentiator by attracting better mentorship, which in turn raises your game even higher. I think there’s something to this.

[Note: My guess is that after 10,000 hours of practice, you will have honed your instincts and intuition to the point of a reflex that allows you to act both correctly and quickly, even under great pressure.]

Having said that, I do have some favorite details that I tend to use over and over again. One example is the steel beam resting on a wood column: simple, expressive, both durable materials used honestly.

Walker Warner Architects Woodside Residence. Modern structural systems together with natural stone and wood finishes create a California hybrid architecture that responds to climate and contemporary needs. Photo: Matthew Millman

How do you convey to the clients a sense of longevity in your designs?

We’re designing homes with the client’s full life cycle in mind, and beyond. Their young children will eventually grow up into older children, and then go off to college. In the meantime, the home might accommodate in-laws or even their grown children’s return. The home has to be versatile enough to accommodate these life changes without requiring a renovation every 10 years. Sometimes this freaks out the clients a little bit! They’re not used to thinking this far ahead. But we’re  creating their home as an heirloom and a legacy to future generations.

[ This article was written in conjunction with Michael Bernard, our "Ask Michael" columnist, and addresses billing from the standpoint of smaller firms with a focus on custom single-family residential work for private owners. ]

Invoicing and collecting payment are a key element in the designer-client relationship, one which is often overlooked particularly with small firms serving private residential clients. A designer may feel embarrassed to be demanding specific sums of money from his clients. Or she may feel that the relationship that she has with her clients is so personal, so delicate, that even a single invoice would drive them all away. Some designers may try to hold off on invoicing until the client is too emotionally invested in the project to back out. Then they send a huge invoice, and the fight happens anyway, only it’s worse than ever.

Needless to say, these self-deluding habits don’t serve anyone – not you, and not your clients, either. If you don’t know how to ask for money for your services in a way that gets you paid, the consequences are obvious.

Billing should be treated as one of the fundamental business practices of small and large firms alike, rather than an afterthought. Yes, the design work is important because after all, that’s why your clients are coming to you. In terms of cash flow, collecting is one of the biggest challenges especially for small firms – and yet, the AIA Handbook has very little advice to offer on things like what information an invoice should contain, how it should be presented, or what to do if payments are not received in a timely fashion.

Is Billing The Real Problem?

When most of us think of collections, we think of third-party agents calling up deadbeats and threatening them with increasingly scary penalties. That attitude doesn’t go over well with a private design client, even if that client owes tens of thousands of dollars in fees. Some architects end up in a downward spiral of gamesmanship with their clients, each of them trying to hold the other over a barrel – with the bill as the focus of contention. But is that the real problem?

Typically, both client and architect argue about fees when other problems arise. Could it be that we’re fixing the wrong problem here? They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. How can we line up all our ducks in a row so that misunderstandings never even have a chance to develop?

For many professionals, client disputes stem from a lack of trust - which in turn arises when the parties have failed to establish shared understandings and common goals from the onset. And, sadly, some people derive more satisfaction from "winning" than from actually accomplishing anything. Art: "The Conjuror" by Hieronymous Bosch shows a crowd fascinated by a street magician. The magician's accomplice steals their purses while they're distracted

That’s essentially the strategy outlined by Michael Bernard, AIA who is not only an architect himself, but also a seasoned management professional specializing in business consulting for design firms. Through his own firm, Virtual Practice, Mr. Bernard works with over 50 clients consisting of firms both small and large, ranging from sole proprietorships to firms of over 30  people with offices in Northern and Southern California cities. I figured if anyone would know the answer to this question, it’d be be him.

Culture of Billing

“You have to create a culture of billing,” says Bernard. “You need to create a structure which will allow you to collect fees. You don’t have to be shy about it. It’s what keeps your business moving forward.”

“Be rigorous in billing every month.” Bernard was emphatic. “Some firms delay up to three months, but they’re losing money by doing that.” It really takes commitment from the principals, not just hiring a bookkeeper and putting the problem in someone else’s hands.

This culture should extend to all of your employees as well. “A typical office might issue something like 20-50 invoices a month. Your staff needs to understand how the work they do supports the well-being of the firm. Part of this is to understand that completing their timesheets accurately and on time is what helps the office to get paid on time.”

The Contract is King

As it turns out, fee disputes are often the first symptom of weaknesses in the architect-client relationship that had gone undetected, and one of the biggest weaknesses is not clarifying relationships and expectations at the very beginning. The early stages of engagement are a delicate time and many architects tread lightly to avoid frightening off a potential client. After all, if the clients are that leery of spelling out commitments on paper, do you REALLY want to work with them?

“Use the contract to convey established billing practice,” advises Bernard. “The contract is the memory of the project, with all parties signatory.” The contract spells out who the parties are, their roles and responsibilities vis a vis one another, the scope of the work to be performed, a proposed timetable, a fee structure, and billing practice as well.

With a good contract, all the other "courtiers" must submit equally to the royal sceptre. These are the who, the what (scope and cost), the when, the where, and the why (program).

“California law stipulates that architects may not perform design or construction services without a signed agreement with the client,” Bernard reminded me. Sometimes a firm will commence work to meet a demanding schedule and simultaneously try to work out the contracting details. This is almost always a risky practice, not only because it’s illegal but because it just postpones little issues until they become big ones. Even in cases where there’s not a moment to lose, get an agreement in place and then work out the contract as quickly as possible. An initial agreement can be as simple as a letter of understanding.

Although Bernard didn’t provide a timetable for finalizing a contract, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that letters of agreement should only hold for the first billing cycle, and if the client can’t agree to a contract after that time, the architect is inviting trouble by letting it slide.

Consider Client Response Times

One issue that I have seen as problematic on other projects are clients who are simultaneously demanding but who are also unavailable half the time for important decisions, or who are so preoccupied with their other affairs that they don’t have the bandwidth to think about things like finalizing and signing their contract agreements. If your clients are overseas for long periods of time, for example, you should get another designated responsible party who is empowered to act on the owners’ behalf, and clearly convey to the client the costs and consequences of project delays. “A simple solution is to include in the agreement the name of the designated project representative. This can be the owner or another party,”advises Bernard.

Even so, there are some decisions that can really only be made by the owner, and if the owners can’t understand the implications of delays, then the architect may have to expend considerable effort to keep the project on track.

Use Examples in the Contract to Illustrate and Convey Expectations

The contract can be used to set expectations by example as well as by description. “If you have third-party sub-consultants who bill to the architect, and the architect then bills that out to the client, you can include an attachment to the contract that sets some rules, including expectations for billing frequency and information – what to expect, and when to expect it.”

One aspect of this is to actually ask your clients what information they would like to have on their invoices. “Sometimes the owner gives us an invoice template,” says Bernard. “I attach this invoice to the sub-consultant agreement so that the sub-consultants can see how the information they provide to me is in turn provided to the client.” You can use this same method to establish the invoicing details that you would like to see on the sub-consultant invoices for your own information. Make sure that the information desired by the client is something that your office can reasonably deliver.

What does your invoice say about how you run your business? Your invoice should be carefully thought out to present relevant information clearly, including any desired actions - such as what to pay and when to pay it.

Define a Billing Timetable

Along with format, the architect must set forth clear invoicing timetables with both the owner and the sub-consultants in a way that allows them to mesh together smoothly. These timetables should be written into the contract which is agreed upon and signed by all parties.

You’ll have to establish clearly with the owner questions such as:

• By what date should the invoice be received?
• Who should receive a copy and do they need it electronically or in paper form?

“If we’re about service, then this attention to detail is part of that service,” says Bernard.

On the other end, you’ll have to set a timetable for the sub-consultants as well, ideally arranging to receive their invoices a few days before you have to invoice the owner. If they miss their deadline, they’ll have to wait another month to get paid, but that’s their problem.

For example, suppose that the owner establishes that he needs to have the invoice by the 7th day of the month in order to send remittance within 30 days. You might determine that your bills need to be done, approved, and sent out by the 5th calendar day. Your sub-consultants, in turn, will need to get their invoices to you by the 2nd or 3rd calendar day of the month. If it’s too much of a hardship for them, then you, the client, and the sub-consultant will need to propose some mutual arrangement that works for everyone.

The chain of dependency spans from contract terms, through hours worked, and finally to payment received. If any one of these links is weak, the remaining transactions may be delayed or absent.

A simpler practice might be to make a point of getting your invoices out within the first 5 calendar days of the month. “By establishing clear timetables for all parties, you won’t be late because of lagging sub-consultants,” notes Bernard. “You don’t want to be held up in your billing and end up holding the bag for everyone else. Every day that you delay will cost you money because you’re essentially giving the client a loan. Don’t do that.”

If you delay billing on your end, but the sub-consultants bill YOU on time, you’ll be on the hook twice.

When people are asking YOU for money, and you don't have the cash, that's known as a negative cash-to-cash cycle. Make sure you can collect from your clients before you have to pay your own vendors and consultants.

What to Tell Your Bookkeeper

“Don’t forget to give your bookkeeper all the information about timetables, roles, and billing formats for each account. You could have different billing arrangements with each client, and it’s very important for the bookkeeper to have that information prior to issuing invoices, especially if your bookkeeper works offsite and only comes in a few days every month.”

You don’t need to give your bookkeeper the full legalese in every contract, but that person does need to know the basic fee structure and billing agreements that are in place. “Make sure your bookkeeper has a project information sheet for every project: name, address, billing address, other contact information, and terms of payment.”

Which Fee Structure is Best?

Before we go into this, one note to make is that the American Institute of Architects does not allow its members to discuss and compare specific fee rates. Even hypothetical examples can be an issue, so we’ll have to be vague on actual numbers here. Having said that, there are several common fee structures for private residential work, and no one method is best in all cases.

Fee as percentage of construction cost. Some architects like this, some don’t. Basically the architect’s total design fee is specified as a percentage (which can vary) of the construction cost. In early design phases, the cost of construction is of course an estimate. Upon project completion, this estimated cost is reconciled with actual construction costs. It’s up to the architect to figure out how to allocate and track this fee across the project so that the design budget doesn’t get consumed too early.

Hourly fee only. For some projects an hourly Time & Materials agreement with a fee schedule for different types of staff is acceptable.

Hourly fee with not-to-exceed limit. The architect is responsible for monitoring fee usage in order not to exceed the budget. Part of this is keeping the project within scope, and informing the client immediately when some requested design change would impact the design fee, or other project costs.

Additional Services

For fixed-fee projects, how do you communicate clearly when a specified service or task is not part of the base fee – PRIOR to its appearance on the bill? It seems to me that this information should be conveyed directly to the clients at the time that they make the request of the architect.

“Get a letter of acknowledgment from the client,” says Bernard. “Either send them an email formally advising them that the task will involve an additional fee of an estimated amount, and request from the client for authorization to proceed. Don’t start until you receive this authorization. Then, on the next invoice, itemize each of these tasks.” For example, an additional shade study or extensive meetings with the neighborhood association above and beyond what might be specified in the base contract could be considered as an additional service.

Use the Invoice as a Communication Tool

I asked Michael Bernard how to keep clients from being unpleasantly surprised by their invoices. How do you prepare them for the fact that different design phases may involve different levels of effort and possibly different fee amounts? Is that something that gets plotted out in monthly billing projections so that private clients can do their own personal budgeting, which may include freeing up needed funds from other sources?

Bernard didn’t recommend using assumed calendar durations to calculate exact fee projections, because the duration of a design phase can be somewhat uncertain, especially if agency approvals are involved. However, projected or non-binding estimates of a monthly range of fee that clients can expect, by phase, is helpful, as long as it’s not tied to the calendar.

Communicating with your clients helps shape their expectations and their understanding of value. Your invoice is one part of an ongoing communication whereby you demonstrate the value of your services.

“Walk the client closer to paying on time by giving good information. We need to increase our value with our clients as service providers, and part of providing good service is to show a clear-headed understanding of money. Sometimes clients can’t understand every design issue, but they CAN understand money, so make that area your common ground.” This includes treating our clients’ money as if it were our own.

Don't view your clients as cash cows to be milked. They'll spot that sooner than you think.

What Should Be Shown On the Invoice?

Getting the right level of detail on an invoice is important. Too much line-item detail just invites a nickel-and-dime approach on the part of the client, who may dispute hours worked without understanding the design need for those hours. Part of this is conveying the principle of design as a service rather than a product. Another part is telling a clear story, so that it’s easy to follow how each subtotal figures into the invoice. And, finally, the invoice should present clear instructions for remittance – how much and when.

“Avoid tying the release of deliverables to your fee,” advises Bernard. “Don’t lose control of the link between services and fees.”

OK, so what should be on the bill, then? “If the fee is set as a lump sum fee billed as a percentage of construction, then it’s just the fee with no detail. If the fee is hourly with a cap, we may want to provide detail, especially regarding project changes that cause us to exceed the fee,” says Bernard. As stated earlier, these additional services should not come as a surprise to the client – get an authorization to proceed by task before billing for additional services. If you need to show fees allocated across design phases, then you might need to include the design phase (or phases) on the invoice for work performed, even for fixed-fee arrangements.

If your fee agreement is straight hourly, your invoice will be a diary of work performed and, as such, can be a useful tool for both you and your client. For the architect, it allows them to communicate the value of their services to the client. In fact, good invoicing is a diary of the project, regardless. The issuing of invoices is a project activity just as are submittals or deliverables to the client. Having clear and consistent invoices is an important part of the project record – what was billed, when, what was paid, etc.

Other details on what information should be presented should have been worked out earlier, in the initial contract. Some architects will show things like fees spent vs. fees remaining, or provide separate summaries on each invoice showing just the total fees billed to date – not including reimbursable expenses.

Details Matter

“Always review every invoice before it goes out,” cautions Bernard. “Your clients will expect you to know what’s on those bills whether you really do or not.” Invoices with too many typos create an unprofessional impression, and if there are any errors in arithmetic, charges, or line items, you’ll have some explaining to do. Even if it was someone else who made the error, like your bookkeeper, the buck still stops with YOU.

Not All Hours Are Billable

If you’ve agreed to a fixed fee but you bill monthly by T&M, you could get a lot of questions from your clients, especially if you don’t do a good job of allocating resources internally, and you are bent on billing out every hour of staff time to “reduce overhead”. The client isn’t responsible for your failure to budget for your own operations.

Visibility Into Your Own Operations

“All firms should have a billing system that is NOT Excel!” Bernard and I discussed the various merits of QuickBooks and ArchiOffice. (I’d used ArchiOffice at my last position and loved it – even for a small firm it paid for itself the first day we ran our bills on it, and it simplified reporting and timekeeping by a magnitude of 100.)

"All firms should have a billing system that is NOT Excel," advises Michael Bernard. Shown here is ArchiOffice, a system that I used at my last firm. Yes, I'm shamelessly promoting a piece of software - for free.

I think my question was about how much information a small firm really needed about its own operations, if they’re not doing Federal work. Is it worth it to do complex profitability analysis or corporate-level financial reporting? “You need to know what your expenses are. Where do you spend money, and what is the profitability at staff level for each project?”

A real billing system simplifies timekeeping and timesheet entry, and it also does something even more important: real-time information on project budget and hours used. “If your project is over budget, you can trim your effort in a timely manner, instead of continuing to put forth the same level of effort only to find out you should have cut back a month ago.”

“In terms of overall billings and expenses, you should know: what your target is per month, what you earn, and what you spend,” says Bernard. Not all billing systems will include full operational features for internal expenses and payroll, so you’ll need a general accounting system to provide and manage this information.

The Cost of Delays

What does it actually cost you when you are late getting your bills out, or when clients are late in paying? “When payment is delayed, you’re essentially lending the client money. How much does it cost you to tap into your line of credit?” Of course if bills don’t go out at all, payments will never come in. Unbilled but billable staff time is not money in the bank, as some people might fondly believe. It’s money OUT of your pocket.

Questioning an Invoice

Sometimes a client will question an invoice. Here again, a clearly written contract that’s signed by everyone is your best ally. You should be able to refer back to the contract to identify how a billing number was arrived at, and where it fits in with the total agreement. New clients may need to understand that a retainer is not part of the fee until the end of the project.

“Use contract language to establish how much detail to provide on the invoice,” reminds Bernard. “If we establish in the contract that we don’t provide detail, then they shouldn’t be demanding this detail as a condition of payment. If we do, then any hours we spend on gathering the reports they need should be billed as T&M as an additional service.”

Can you bill your bookkeeper’s time for additional reporting? Yes, if it’s already in the contract. But do people actually exercise this option? “Probably not. But it gives you leverage. Think of this as a mini-exercise, a strategy to facilitate an ongoing design dialogue… how we manage fee transparency should be the same process as for design discussions.”

It is very hard not to feel put on the defensive, especially with a demanding but uninformed client. It may signal a lack of trust, and that may not necessarily be your fault. But if you really have nothing to hide, then you will be able to respond to even the most irate questions with calmness and courtesy.

"What's this on my bill?" We believe that a calm and courteous demeanor is the best defense, along with scrupulous honesty.

In our next installment, we’ll go into strategies for collecting late payments.

A few weeks ago, we visited the offices of Matarozzi Pelsinger and spoke with Lawrence Motta, Dan Pelsinger, and Dan Matarozzi to get a builder’s perspective on what it means to create good architecture. The meeting opened with some Monty Pythonesque banter – but for all their lighthearted humor, they’re a pretty hard-core bunch when it comes to the quality of their own work. (Speaking of Monty Python, check out the Python Architect Sketch, which you can see right here on YouTube. It’s a riot!)

Speakers are credited by their initials: LM (Lawrence Motta) DP (Dan Pelsinger) and DM (Dan Matarozzi).

What makes Matarozzi Pelsinger such a good company? What makes you so much better than, say, the Joe Average Construction Company?

LM, DM, DP: It’s not just the amount of experience that we have. It’s what we’ve learned from that experience – how to tell smoke from fire. As a company, we emphasize a strict adherence to decision-making with consensus on all important issues. For example, just yesterday we discussed how we maintain our list of qualified subcontractors. It wasn’t about who was on the list. It was about HOW we maintain that list, the nuts and bolts of the process itself. How do we choose, recruit, train, retain, cultivate, evaluate, and how do we communicate those evaluations internally. We solicit feedback constantly from our own people: field operations, project management, and estimating.

Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders' new headquarters building was completely transformed during its renovation. A perforated zinc screen covers the front facade, and the original interior beams were carefully cleaned to match the pristine modern interior detailing. Architectural design: Aidlin Darling Designs. Photos: Richard Barnes

That sounds like the  Capability Maturity Model from Carnegie Mellon. That was a way to measure the quality of organizational processes in terms of repeatability and knowledge transfer. Turns out that most companies were still at Level 1 – chaotic, ad-hoc, individual heroics.

LM: Competition drives introspection. We are cutting edge in terms of our process, and we have an unwavering commitment to the quality of our own work. Quality isn’t just about having expensive materials and complicated products. It’s really about HOW you put them together. This is a company-wide culture.

Typically in construction projects, the lowest bidder gets the contract, but the resulting teamwork often falls short.

LM, DM, DP: We recognize that we are in a service industry. We have to coordinate with all these other players: architects, clients, subcontractors, inspectors, consultants. You need a team approach, and you need professionals who can go the extra mile.

Can you give specific examples of quality details in construction?

DM: Here’s one trick I learned from an old carpenter. On wood shingle facades, look for cut shingles. If they didn’t install the shingles correctly, the rows of shingles won’t align with the door and window openings and they’ll have to trim the shingles over those openings.

A good wood shingle facade should align with the window and door openings without the need for trimming a row in the middle. This example is from Pacific Shingle.

LM: Or, take a look at the switch plates right here in our building. The screws are aligned. If I go into a job and see things that are not aligned we will fix them. A client may not consciously see that all the screws are lined up, but subconsciously  they can feel that a home is well built.  That’s our culture: attention to every detail, a scrupulous sense of honesty, and an open book.

Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders won't leave anything misaligned on a job, and they won't leave a mess afterwards.

There’s medication you can take for that, you know…

So, do you remember flaws or mistakes on past projects? Do they keep you up at night?

Yes!! [says everyone]

LM: I’m a field guy with 25 years experience, and I still get bothered remembering stuff from years back.

Perfectionists are often haunted by memories of errors from long, long ago.

Do you have any advice for architects? Do’s and don’ts, or things you wish more architects would do, things you wish they knew more about?

LM, DM, DP on drawings:

• Don’t give us napkin sketches and then ask for accurate, detailed pricing. Especially don’t ask us to bid competitively based on napkin sketches. It happens all the time!
• For remodels, put the existing and new drawings on the same page of the drawing set so we don’t have to constantly be flipping back and forth to see what’s changing.
• Label both horizontal and vertical grid lines on your drawings.
• Make sure the structural and the architectural drawings match up.
• Make sure the specs match the plans.
• Bubble your changes.
• Get good software and render in 3D so we can see how the house goes together.

A builder needs good architectural drawings in order to properly bid on a project.

LM, DM, DP on detailing:

• Detailing is important, particularly in cutting edge designs. In modern design, there’s no such thing as “typical” details. Nowadays you might build to a 1/16″ tolerance – that’s not historical, except in special cases like traditional Japanese timber framing. The builder needs to have a very high level of competence and mastery in order to successfully execute modern designs. Of course, the scope of the project can dictate how much detailing you can do. If it’s a single bath remodel, you can treat it like a science project and show every detail. With a 6,000 SF house with 4 bathrooms, you can’t detail it all.

In this 7,000-SF Pacific Heights renovation and addition, Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders upgraded the foundation, framing, plumbing, mechanical, and electrical systems, as well as doing a full interior renovation. Architectural design: Charlie Barnett Associates. Photos: Mark Darley

LM on what an architect should know:

• Take the time to understand structural systems.
• Understanding building traditions is important. A lot of post-WWII architecture is about form over function.
• Architects should understand how things work, how things go together. Understand how, but don’t be constrained by it. The understanding engenders respect, and a willingness to understand the process of building as a collaboration, a team effort.

This condo renovation was built by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. Details include floor-to-ceiling pivot doors and a custom glass handrail. Design: Marnie Wright

LM on materials and flooring:

• When choosing materials, do your homework. The “wow-cool” factor is not enough. Examples: Don’t specify veneered plywood for stair treads, because it de-laminates within a few months of use.
• Don’t use solid flooring over radiant heat, because it will buckle. And don’t just rely on a 3 x 3 sample from the flooring subcontractor; it’s not going to look as perfect. Even small amounts of thermal expansion and contraction can really add up on a large surface area.

Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders did a complete interior build-out of this two-story San Francisco penthouse, including structural alterations, cantilevered steel and wood stairs, and telescoping doors in the master suite. Architectural design: Joel Sanders. Photos: Rien van Rijthoven

DP on listening to your clients:

• Listen to your clients. What do they REALLY want? How do they really want to live? You have to constantly be educating your client about what’s going on. Architects need to lead and educate their clients on the implications of delayed decision-making. Help them to understand the critical path concept.

The penthouse and kitchen from the San Francisco loft renovation built by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. Photos: Rien van Rijthoven

Does anyone draw too much detail these days? Is that ever a problem?

LM: Is anything overdrawn? Not these days. I remember in the old days before computers, we’d see STACKS of drawings and details. Not so much today. People do want beautiful intricate designs, but they don’t want to pay for drawing all those details. Now we have to work to extract that information.

DP: As builders, we need to know when to ask a question, when to solve it ourselves, and when to suggest a solution vs. just asking questions. That’s the difference between a master builder and an apprentice. A master builder knows how to lead and offer solutions.

This new contemporary ski house featuring custom sculptural steel trusses, radiant heat, and a variety of custom details was built by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders near Sugar Bowl Resort. Architectural design: Mark Horton Architecture. Photos: David Duncan Livingston

How do you conserve materials?

LM: My granddad would pick up old bent nails and hammer them straight. He’d say, “That’s good nail.” You can see in the old buildings how they re-purposed material sometimes.

But new building technologies are coming out all the time. How can anyone keep up?

DM: You have to understand where you come from. Today’s houses look the same on the outside, but inside the walls, they’re completely different. Take waterproofing. Rain still falls the same way it did in ancient times, but buildings are different. Today’s building envelopes are less air-permeable.

Wall assemblies, old and new. Shown is Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders working on a renovation.

DM: Older San Francisco houses were built using only sheathing boards. No building paper. Sometimes we do remodels and have to open them up, and they’re usually in fine shape. These old buildings were good at keeping the rain out, but not so good at keeping warm air in. The air movement, which might have reduced mold, meant they were drafty and cold, and they had no central heating. So they had more walls, and people just wore more clothing indoors. Now, we are confronting old conventions about how a building is put together.

The plumb line is one of the oldest building tools known - but it won't help with modern buildings that aren't straight to begin with.

DM: A lot of it is re-adapting old techniques to new buildings. The Courthouse Building has a new seismic system, neoprene bumpers sliding on rails. But there are ancient temples in Greece and Sicily that use the same general principles. Or take the old steam radiators that most East Coasters grew up with. I re-purposed some old steam radiators and used them for radiant heat instead. They carry a constant stream of 120 degree water now, instead of steam.

Basic building tools such as the square, the square level, and the plumb line haven't changed all that much since the days of the Egyptian pyramids. True, we have laser levels now… still it's easy to go back to the old methods using very simple techniques.

DM: Architects sometimes want to  stretch materials to their limits, sometimes making them do things that they were never intended to do. You can’t always predict how a new material or assembly will respond in real conditions, and there may not be 5 years to test a prototype.

This home, originally designed by Ernest Born, was later remodeled by Aidlin Darling Design. The use of Cor-Ten steel as a finish material is a relatively new phenomenon. Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders did the construction for the renovation.

What do you as builders consider to be “good design”, from both a practical and from an aesthetic standpoint?

DM: It’s about taste as much as experience. We like contemporary architecture. The buildings are refined designs that minimize fluff. Their lack of ornament actually increases their attraction for us as builders. There’s an organic feel to a well-thought-out modern building, because the structure is revealed as part of the design. Good design shows an understanding of materials, and how to meld those materials together. We believe in the adage that form follows function.

DP: Every architect wants to do a new thing. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is a great building. One wonders, “Wow – how did they think of that?” It takes your breath away. Well, that Guggenheim wasn’t cheap to build, with all that titanium. I guess the Parthenon wasn’t cheap either.

In the Lake Street Corridor renovation, Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders performed extensive foundation and structural work together with modern finishes including extensive use of steel and glass. Architectural design: Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Photos: Cesar Rubio

LM: I’ve eaten my words, too. I’ve looked at designs and said, “That’ll never work.” But then afterwards, I can see that it does work. A good architect can defend his or her ideas.

Additional views of the Lake Street Corridor renovation built by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. Photos: Cesar Rubio

DM: Architects want to look amazing on a limited budget. It’s a bit like a sport. People performing in circumscribed physical arenas, doing specialized tasks that are highly defined. Creative within tight parameters. It’s different from painting on a blank canvas, which has far fewer limitations from physical laws and program functionality.

Architecture is a bit like a spectator sport: amazing feats performed in a circumscribed physical arena under strict rules.

Tell me more how you feel modern architecture is organic. I used to feel that it wasn’t – didn’t use organic materials or shapes. Steel and concrete aren’t “organic”. And no one was using wood in East Coast modernism, at least not in the stuff I remember seeing featured in The New York Times Magazine.

LM: I’ll compare two projects. One by Aidlin Darling, the Cor-Ten cube on the Great Highway is organic because of its indoor/outdoor focus. It feels like you’re literally floating in the cypresses. There are no distractions within to take away from nature outside. It feels like a tree house. The other was for clients who were not interested in bringing the outside in. It’s an environment unto itself. Not an organic feel. But still a successful architectural piece.

Another view of the Great Highway renovation designed by Aidlin Darling and built by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. The outdoors is brought in so that the home feels as if it's floating among the cypresses.

DM: Here’s another one: a 2,500-SF apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco.

A disciplined and restrained palette gives this Nob Hill condo renovation an integrated, organic feel. Architectural design: Garcia Tamjidi, Michael Garcia, and Farid Tamjidi. Builder: Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. Photos: Joe Fletcher

DM: Restrained palette, doesn’t make a statement, but it works as an integrated piece. Everything on the interior is interrelated.

Additional views of the Nob Hill condo renovation built out by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. The restrained palette acts to highlight the art on display. Occasional touches of color elsewhere follow the same disciplined, minimalist approach. Photos: Joe Fletcher

What about bad design?

DP: Bad design has disjointed themes, arrhythmia, floor plans that don’t flow. It’s like a museum with each room from a different era. Contrived as in “let’s take this from Dwell… and that from Better Homes” or “Oh look! Crown molding!” Contrived as the opposite of organic. Even an ice cube is organic [self-assembled].

"Even an ice cube is organic," says Daniel Pelsinger of Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders, because water follows the same laws every time it freezes.

Why are competitive bids bad? Or when are they a bad idea?

LM & DP: When you don’t know what you’re building, if you don’t know the scope. In other words, if value engineering has not accompanied the design process. Value engineering means both a complete set of plans, and at least some realistic idea of what it’ll cost. You can get this as a gut check from an experienced building professional – ideally a contractor rather than an estimator. Specs are important – if you set an architect loose and THEN give it to three contractors, it’ll often be over budget.

LM: If you don’t quite know the scope yet, it’s better to bid on general conditions like billing rates, markup, and staffing levels. Otherwise you could be comparing apples to oranges. A contractor who bids low may not have enough onsite management to do a good job. Allowances help, too. If an architect puts together a list of general contractors for bid, I like to level the bidding process by giving the same allowances to everybody for things like doors and appliances.

Another example of a modern steel detail requiring precision in building. This remodel of a Green Street home in San Francisco was built by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. Architectural design: Holly Hulburd Design

What about estimating based on average cost/SF? Or asking questions like, “How much house can I get for my stated budget?”

DP: Still too variable. But as a client, you shouldn’t be afraid to give a budget. Some clients don’t want to, but look at it this way. If you’re buying a car, you have to know approximately what you want and how much you have to spend. Do you want a BMW or a Yugo? Do you have $5,000 or $50,000? Budgets always climb, mostly due to changes in scope or discoveries during remodels. We advise clients to hold a contingency for changing their mind, and for discoveries.

Along with their own headquarters office, The Flora Grubb Gardens project shows a deep commitment to green building from Matarozzi Pelsinger Builders. This commercial nursery features sustainable building design and materials, including a prefabricated metal frame, extensive toxic cleanup, 80% power needs from solar, and the use of recycled or reclaimed materials where possible. Design: Boor/Bridges Architecture.

What do you think of the design/build business model?

DP: We don’t do design/build, except for our Special Projects Division where we partner with a designer of our choosing. We give the client 3 names. We manage the design services. Even a kitchen remodel needs a design professional.

Who are some of your heroes?

DP: Turko Semmes of Semmes & Company. When I was at Cal Poly I worked half time with him, full time in the summers, as a carpenter. He was doing sustainable passive solar building in the late 70s, using new materials such as rammed earth, straw bale, and trombe walls. He had a great open attitude towards problem-solving. We were marginalized back then as “green builders”. It’s great to see that what Turko was preaching then is now mainstream.

He’s still around. www.semmesco.com

Turko Semmes was a leading-edge green builder long before it was popular.

DP: The industry is different now, but the people I remember are the unsung heroes who slogged it out every day. We glamorize field work but it’s often drudgery. There’s a book called The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesson about a guy who went trekking in the Himalayas. He made friends with one of the sherpas who carried 70 lbs and he asked the guy why he was so damn cheerful all the time.

The guy answered like a Buddhist: “I serve the task, not the taskmaster.” That’s what the best workers do. They bring a dedication to craft to every job. In our office we do it that way too. The relationship is not between you and your boss. It’s between you and the work itself.

This Clay/Arguello Street renovation built out by Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders features extensive detailing and a custom window wall. Architectural Design: Peter Pfau Architecture

I always thought work ethic came from upbringing? Is it nature or nurture?

LM: My grandfather was a concrete worker who came from Italy. He worked his butt off. My heroes all worked hard. I remember watching my grandfather using his lathe, then he’d show me his hands and how they had no splinters. I was fascinated watching him work with wood, he had such a passion for it.

Additional views of the Clay/Arguello renovation.

LM: My first boss Al, in 1979, was another person who taught me a lot. I was a laborer, and on my first day he told me to move a pile of lumber from the bottom of a muddy hill to the top. He measured the crook of my arm and told me that I could fit 15 2×4s and to carry it like this [demonstrates]. It was more efficient. Not more comfortable, but that’s what the job demanded.

Efficiency on a job site means never going up the stairs empty-handed, and carrying a full load each time.

DP: This attitude towards work, towards solving problems, is not something that can be taught, really. You can tell who has it by watching how someone works on the job site. Watch how he or she goes about problem solving. Can he solve the problem and keep working? Can he apply what he learned yesterday to solve a new problem today? Some guys come to a roadblock and they need to be shown every single time. I look for other things, too. Does he keep his tools organized? Does he know how to work in rhythm? Does she anticipate what’s coming next? It’s having an intuitive feel for the job. I’m always watching out of the corner of my eye, to be part of the rhythm and flow of the team.

According to Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders, really good teamwork is what distinguishes the best from the rest.

Any stories about project from hell that you brought back from the brink of disaster?

DM: On one project, the client fired the project architect right before construction, and the rest of the design team wasn’t up to the task. We had 300 RFI’s and a very challenging design. It turned into one of our showcase pieces and a very supportive client. So what did the architect do wrong? Well, there were several design flaws that had to be corrected. One was a glass curtain wall with no ventilation, no way to clean it. This meant MOLD could grow. It’s a three-legged stool [architect, client, builder] and if any one of those legs is weak, the project is in trouble.

On this North Point condo renovation, the logistical considerations were almost as challenging as the execution itself. Architectural design: Craig Steely. Photo: Rien van Rijthoven

Do you have any red flags that, when you see them, you know NOT to take on the project at all?

DP: Generally, it’s a bad sign when the client is fishing for a number. It means they’re probably going to another contractor. And people who are unprepared. I remember one project we did that looked great on the surface. Great architect, great client. Then halfway through, the client brought in “her” contractor as construction manager. We knew he would steal the contract, and sure enough that’s what happened.

Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders performed a complete renovation on this 5,000 SF Los Altos home. Amenities include Lutron Homeworks home control system, a chef's kitchen, and solar system. Architectural design: Mark Horton Architecture. Photo: Rien van Rijthoven

LM: It’s a question of ethics. We have this problem too, where we are in charge of awarding work to one bidder or another. A subcontractor might call us and ask why they didn’t win the bid. They ask, “Well, how did I compare?” But we can’t tell them. We can’t give out that information, because that would not be playing on a level playing field.

A parting shot showing the Los Altos renovation at night. Photo: Rien van Rijthoven.

[ This article was written in conjunction with Michael Bernard, our "Ask Michael" columnist, and is the continuation of our previous article on billing for smaller architectural firms. ]

In our previous article, we described a few billing basics: what should be on the bill, and how to use the contract as a vehicle to establish all appropriate relationships and responsibilities. Having good understandings in place from the get-go is the best aid to keeping your accounts current.

Even so, Murphy’s Law is well-known, and you can’t depend on documentation to prevent every mishap. So, how do you handle it when your clients get behind? “They sure don’t teach this in architecture school” is what I found out – but the good news is, all is not lost, as long as you have the will to act on your own behalf.

Traditionally, collections has been viewed as a strong-arm profession, but a real professional can do better.

Collecting Late Payments

If you do a Google search for things like “collections letters” or “collections practices”, you’ll find a wealth of material, mostly advising people in debt how to fend off aggressive and unethical collections agencies. You won’t find too many call scripts or sample letters, at least I didn’t, and none that would be suitable for a professional services firm.

The "soft" portion of collections does not involve legal action.

However, you will need some consistent process to follow, and it should consist of a series of actions and escalations such as calls or letters, that are most likely to yield the results you want. It can be personalized to each client, but don’t let any of your clients off the hook, because the slack you cut others will come back to cut you.

Client is unusually late? “Call them up!” says Bernard. “Keep your voice neutral and unemotional. Rehearse beforehand if you need to. The message is that as a small business, cash flow is vital to your operations, and you’d appreciate them sending an immediate payment.” If you end up leaving a voice message, mention the hardship and then ask the client to call you or send payment immediately.

Should you have your bookkeeper make these calls instead of doing it yourself? “If your client is an institution or other large organization, the bookkeeper or project manager can make the call. If the client writes the checks, the principal should make the call.”

What about a timetable? Most collection action scripts include one or two phone calls and a series of letters from “soft” to “stern”. You might have to consider what works for you and your clients, but whatever you decide, be strict in sticking to timetables. If the client is on 30-day payment terms, you can make your first call on day 31. “Again, just keep it neutral. You’re calling because you haven’t received payment on the last invoice – for small firms, cash flow is vital, your business depends on it, and you would greatly appreciate prompt payment.”

If You’re Not Paid, You Can Cease Work

The next step if a phone call doesn’t work is to cease work and notify the client. Again, the contract is your ally, and it should contain language including fees to resume a project, and the conditions under which a stop-work order can be issued. If you make a second phone call, this can be the “serious” call where you inform them that you will be forced to cease work on their project, that this will affect the entire team and the project schedule, and that both payment in full plus an additional fee to resume work would apply. Sometimes clients don’t realize the true cost of delays in terms of permits that expire, or other factors.

[ This is not the same as a "stop work notification" in a legal sense. Here, ceasing work on a project means re-allocating your staff to other tasks, telling them not to bill any more hours to the project in question, and not spending any more of your own time on the project other than to archive the work as it exists to date. If the client requests the architect to cease work, there's usually a specified number of days that the architect can still legally bill for cleanup. By contrast, a stop work notification is a legal action that obligates the construction lender, if there is one, to withhold funds to cover the outstanding fee. ]

Keep a record of ALL your calls and conversations regarding collections.

Arbitration and Mediation

The design services agreement is a de facto notice of right to place a lien. With the right to lien as leverage, the contract confers the right to mediate and/or arbitrate later on down the road, if it is needed.

Carrots and Sticks

I asked Michael Bernard how well these “soft” calls actually worked. I used to think that collecting was an uphill battle unless there was some immediate leverage – if you don’t pay me, I won’t submit your project at the Building Department – but Bernard again advised on lining things up from the beginning was the best way to avoid adversarial situations.

“A former client felt so guilty about a tardy payment that he paid up even to his current charges that hadn’t been billed yet! But to obtain this outcome, you have to lay the groundwork early, and set up those terms long before.”

Having said that, there are two points in the project that are good times to true up the accounts, and that is right before submittal, and right before construction. You can also pull the permit out of Planning so that construction can’t go forward without you. Choosing to take such a strong measure can be a very nerve-wracking decision, but even if you do end up resorting to it, don’t think of it as a hostility so much as putting your foot down to set some limits on the treatment that you will accept.

Do you ever charge late fees? I asked. “A late fee can be added to the contract as leverage, but I’ve never had to charge one. Usually reminding the client that late payment penalties COULD apply is enough.”

If all your best efforts fail to get results, you can put a lien on the property. Optionally, a stop-work notification can be sent to the construction lender. If you end up going to court, many contracts provide for mediation as an alternative.

Legal Recourse

When we got to this portion, Michael Bernard took the time to share with me a handout that he had received from  Severson & Werson, a law firm that provides legal services for architects here in San Francisco. Much of the information in this section has been distilled from one of their “First Friday” workshops which Michael Bernard attended.

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," meaning that cash received today is better than promises of payment later.

So you’ve called, you’ve written, you’ve pleaded, you’ve not only threatened to cease work but you’ve actually notified everyone and re-assigned your staff. What’s next? A lot of architects go straight into writeoff mode, although some will just leave these debts open in their books for years. Either way, that’s money left on the table.

Some architects don’t want to play hardball because they’re afraid of making their client angry. But then you have to ask yourself: What are you realistically getting out of the situation as it stands today? Are you fantasizing that this one big commission is going to win an award someday? Are you hoping that the client will work with you again? But if you’re not getting paid now, why do you think the client will pay you the next time? Michael Bernard puts it this way: “If you’re not getting paid, what does that say about the value of your services?”

“Architects are professionals licensed by the state along with other professions such as engineers and contractors,” notes Bernard. “This means that they have some legal recourse that is not available to other design professionals such as interior designers.” This recourse consist of liens and stop work notices. A lien applies to the property, and a stop work notice obligates the construction lender, if there is one, to withhold funds to cover the outstanding fee. For design professionals, there are two types of lien, depending on whether construction has started or not.

However, none of this will do you any good without a signed contract. There’s a bunch of fine print here (in 18 point Powerpoint type) about contract fees vs. reasonable value of services, and some important schedule limitations. You have to prove that you’ve delivered the services, that you’ve invoiced for these services, that you haven’t egregiously overcharged for your services, and that you’ve formally demanded payment. Also note that liens only work if the client who owes you money is the actual owner of the property.

After reading the rest of this presentation from Severson & Werson, I’d only say that getting a lien requires a lot of attention to detail, paperwork, process, and timely scheduling. Sometimes you have only 10 days or 20 days to complete an action. So, if you do pursue this route, make sure you allocate appropriate staff resources as well as your own time to keep track of where you are in the process. But, the good news is, you HAVE this recourse, and it has been successfully used by professionals like yourself who have the fortitude to commit to it.

Finally, if none of this works, you can resort to arbitration or take your client to court. Obviously this is something that none of us ever wants to do. Some architects may be afraid that their professional image will suffer, but I’d opine that unless you make a habit of litigation, the only people it will deter are other problem clients. These situations can and do happen to everyone from time to time, and if you let people walk on your bones, all that will happen is you’ll sink deeper into the hole.

Conclusion

But relax, all is not lost. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Bernard sees the tasks of billing and collections as occurring within the larger context of running a design-centered business.

“We face so many risks in day-to-day architectural practice: liability, design excellence, quality of product and so on. These areas easily command our attention. Compared to these challenges, billing and collections should be a lead-pipe cinch. Yet we sometimes lose sight of the importance of cash flow in the name of pursuing more stimulating design-related activity. If we ignore the importance of a clear, lean and rigorous system of billing and collection, we will slowly but surely compromise the health of the very entity that allows us to pursue the career we love.”

Billing is only one of many tasks in running a design-centered business, but with care and attention, our tranquility won't be disturbed by needless hardship.

Severson & Werson Contact Information

Severson & Werson gives free workshops on the first Friday of every month to interested design professionals. To obtain more information, or to request a copy of the presentation referenced in this article, please contact Pete Molgaard at 415-677-5626.

Five years ago, Michelle Kaufmann was the darling of the architectural world for her ingenious, architect-designed pre-fabricated housing systems. The housing market couldn’t have been better, and demand for both affordability and design quality seemed like a match made in heaven. Awards and kudos came from all sides. They had a factory all geared up and ready. It couldn’t fail.

But of course it did, along with the global economy. Kaufmann and her business saw factory partners close their doors, home mortgage lenders melt down, and the housing market collapse. What does an award-winning architect do when it all collapses? If success is the indicator of good design, what does it mean when someone who was top of the heap yesterday is back at Square 1 today, along with all the rest of us? Well, for one thing, it means welcome to the club, since it’s almost fashionable to go bankrupt and lose your home, walk away from it even… or so the news media says.

Michelle Kaufmann is willing to take big chances, because any culture of innovation must accept risk. In some countries, innovation is either punished or actively discouraged, beginning with a child’s first day at school. But in this land of opportunity we can conceive and act; we have more freedom to experiment, and we have the freedom to fail as well. One indicator of “failure” might be going bankrupt – but every entrepeneur knows that not every venture succeeds, and it doesn’t reflect poorly on them to have tried something new. In more cautious cultures, a bankruptcy equals a total loss of reputation, but in today’s world, it’s the recovery that’s important.

Today, her company Michelle Kaufmann Studio is alive and well, with new projects and new work including two interesting projects of a distinctly spiritual bent: the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California and an 8-unit multifamily modular home project in Denver, CO for the Sisters of St Francis. Her design offerings also include four prefab single-family home models that, in photos at least, are indistinguishable from the best custom-designed architecture that one can find. (If they don’t become collector’s pieces within 20 years, I’ll eat my hats. All of them.)

In fact, buyers can have the best of both worlds, choosing either preconfigured or custom-designed homes that are one-of-a-kind, but still built using prefab techniques and technologies. Costs and timeframes are competitive with other designer homes built by the “old-school” methods of framing and assembly onsite.

An instance of Michelle Kaufmann's "mkBreeze" prefabricated home design was shown in Chicago last year.

In addition, Kaufmann is intimately involved with Architecture for Humanity, a San Francisco-based group that rebuilds after disasters around the world, from New Orleans to Sri Lanka. Her contributions apart from design include tireless efforts to promote practical ecological solutions in areas such as rainwater management, and a fascinating and altruistic blog, where she often spends more time promoting other people’s work than her own.

Kaufmann combines several forms of genius, actually, but first and foremost are her design sense and her willingness to delve deep into manufacturing processes in order to re-invent, re-engineer, and re-think. That, along with unquenchable optimism, endless fortitude, and an amazing generosity of spirit, make her an extraordinary force for change – a force of nature, one might say, akin to the earth-goddesses of old who were, in fact, guardians of the hearth and also of agriculture. After all, shelter is one of our most basic human needs for survival, and to honor the “sustaining” of life in all its dimensions is one of the oldest of human ideals.

In the interview, three voices are represented: Michelle Kaufmann, Mark English (ME) and Rebecca Firestone (RF). Content excerpted from other interviews appears within as italics, including a few portions of a longer interview with Treehugger.

ME: What’s your story? How did you get here?

Kaufmann: My first job out of grad school was working for Frank Gehry. I loved it. For 5 years I focused almost entirely on museums. It was interesting to see people walk into museums for the first time. At the Bilbao opening, I saw people weeping openly when they went in, because the space moved them so much.

And then, at the other end of the spectrum, my husband and I were looking for a place to live and all we could find was crap! Of all the homes out there, I think only 3% are truly designed, by actual designers. We couldn’t afford what we wanted, which was something well-designed, well-made,  and energy-efficient. I was also chemically sensitive and was very concerned with indoor air quality and mold. So after seeing the thoughtless crap that was filling the landscape, we painfully decided to do something about it.

Only a small percentage of homes are created by designers who care about creating really good designs. Shown is the MkSolaire design by Michelle Kaufmann, an urban row house that uses non-toxic, renewable materials and ingenious design to coax light and air deep within the interior.

I had not been familiar with the term  “green building” until my husband, Kevin, and I began looking for a home for ourselves.  Our key goals were to find a home that was well-designed, clean space without visual clutter, that would have low energy bills, healthy air quality, low-maintenance materials that aren’t killing the rainforests or increasing carbon dioxide, and could fit in our budget. Gulp. Our budget didn’t even make it on the low end of what was available unless you count “tear-downs” – which we could almost afford, but then we couldn’t afford to build anything after that. A home with these characteristics did not exist on the Bay Area market.

We spent a painful 6 months attending every open house we could find. Every Sunday, every Tuesday, I would make a plan for Kevin and I to follow to visit 5 or so homes in a 4-hour period. Each morning as I laid out the plan, I remained unrealisticially optimistic. Surely today would be the day we would find our home. At end of each day, Kevin and I would recap our findings. It usually included me finding excuses for why the home that required walking through a bathroom to get to the bedroom, and smelled like the curry aroma would never leave no matter how many cleanings, could actually work for us. I was getting wrapped up in the frenzy.  We have to move fast, or this opportunity won’t last!

One instance of Michelle Kaufmann's mkBreeze design, located in Dry Creek. Photo: John Swain Photography

Clearly, I was emotionally invested in us finding a home, and logical thinking had evaporated as quickly as the homes were leaving the market. Luckily, Kevin was able to remain logical and helped me see that even if we thought we could live with the curry smell – even then, a kitchen with pink tiles, and single-pane windows that somehow allowed the breezes to be felt in the room even when the windows were closed, even that was still above our price range. How could this be?

After a few months of these days of emotion and denial of reality, we entered into couples therapy.  What have we done so wrong in our lives that we cannot afford a clean, green home to live in?  Where did we go wrong? What decisions did we make that have brought us to this painful state?

A second instance of the same mkBreeze design shows that even a repeatable design doesn't have to be identical in execution. Photo: John Swain Photography

We finally realized what we wanted simply did not exist. When I first embarked on this journey, I wasn’t thinking like an architect. I was just another renter in search of a decent home to buy. As an average, middle-class professional in the San Francisco Bay Area, I assumed that with enough patience and searching, I would be able to find a modest, affordable home. Was I ever wrong!

After walking through a seemingly endless array of overpriced, uninspiring houses, I began to realize that the architecture profession had largely overlooked the needs of the average aspiring homeowner like me. Architect-designed, personalized homes can be miniature masterpieces, of course, but they are rarely affordable for anyone but the most affluent. As well, most architecture firms focus their energies on designing skyscrapers, museums, and other civic structures; thus the job of creating functional, well-designed housing for average families has largely become the business of the building industry. Although the industry has done a good job of meeting consumer demand, these homes, which are often large and poorly designed, are not always beautiful and inspiring.

We decided to build something for ourselves. I was an architect, and Kevin, a builder. So it seemed like a reasonable option.  Luckily for us, we were naïve to not realize the challenges that lay ahead. We were also under the impression that Kevin’s experience in cabinet, furniture, and stair making would not be so different than building a whole house.

A third built instance of Michelle Kaufmann's mkBreeze design. Photo: John Swain Photography

We looked for land, and found a lot within the first week. We worked together to design a home that was the right size for the two of us and our two dogs, that embraced the outdoors, and that collaborated with the landscape. Kevin challenged me on every decision, always questioning and pushing for solutions that used the least amount of resources from the earth in terms of our the materials were made, and/or how they were to be maintained over time. We designed the house not for how it looked, but how it felt. We designed it to have a zero electric bill (through the use of PV solar panels). We designed it to use less (less water, less energy, less materials). We designed the home with a series of sliding glass doors, sliding wood panels, and sliding wood sunshades. Kevin, always thinking about the home sitting lightly on the earth, kept referring to them as “gliding” doors and panels. He jokingly started referring to our house as the “Glidehouse”. The name just stuck.

The next few photos show three built interiors stemming from same design as before - Michelle Kaufmann's mkBreeze - same three built instances. Photo: John Swain Photography

In the end, we have a home that we love that did accomplish all of our initial goals. However, it was not easy. It took a lot of time and a lot of energy.

After going through the process, I realized something extremely important. I realized that my earlier thinking that I, as one person, could not make a difference was simply not true. That thinking was lazy and made it easier for me to consume without consideration or thought.  Each person has so many choices, each day, that can result in a lot less usage, and a lot less waste.  In combination, each person can make a difference.

Aside from interior furnishings, another differentiator is of course site orientation, which in turn may affect how the interiors receive natural light. Photo: John Swain Photography

What I have found in the past years since building our home is that there a lot of people who feel the same way that Kevin and I did. They want green homes, they want lower energy bills, they want healthy environments for their families, they care about the environment and their children’s future. However, it is not always easy to find the solutions.

In fact, while we were building our house, we had friends and colleagues who asked if I could do a house for them. They wanted “clean and green” homes as well. (They too had been going to the open houses, not finding solutions, and were contemplating therapy.) This raised an interesting question. Could we make our Glidehouse in mass production?

I had been becoming increasingly aware of prefabricated construction. Through her work with Dwell magazine and her book written with co-author Bryan Burkart, Allison Arieff had seemingly single-handedly made “Prefab” a word that embodied the goal of making good design for the masses. Allison spearheaded the Dwell Home competition, which demonstrated the varied ways prefab could be well-designed, beautiful and sustainable. After decades of being viewed as substandard, white-trash, and trailerhomes, “prefab” was now high-design.

Same house design as before, but each built instance still has unique touches that reflect the owner's choices and desires. Photo: John Swain Photography

Also, before we started building our house, my friend Ryan Stevens talked to me about prefabrication. It was kind of the like the scene in the movie, “the Graduate” when the word “Plastics” is whispered in Dustin Hoffman’s ear, as though it were the answer to his entire future. Ryan did the same with me. As my head was lying on the bar counter in exasperation, as I was recounting my lateset frustrations with looking for a house, Ryan whispered, “Prefab. You should look into it.  Maybe that is your answer.”

In fact, the home Kevin and I built for ourselves was prefabricated in a small way.  We used SIPS (structural insulated panel system) for the walls, floors and roofs. These panels had been precision cut offsite, and shipped to our site on a truck.  The literature on the SIPS panels had promised less time, less money, and higher insulation value. While the insulation was more energy-efficient than typical insulation options, the use of these panels for our home did not cost less or take less time.  However, this may be a different story if they are used in mass production.

As I thought about the idea of making our house in mass production, I started looking into different prefabrication techniques.  I found that modular factories existed, and have the potential for high-quality design, with precision cutting, less waste, increased quality control with less time than the equivalent site built.   This answered my question. Yes, we could make our house in mass production. And, in doing so, we can significantly reduce waste, maximize material efficiency, and save on oil usage.  We could offer our design, so others can have a more accessible green home, without having to go through the painful process that my husband and I had to.

I then started Michelle Kaufmann Designs as an architectural practice specializing only in green, modular designs, all working toward the goal of making thoughtful, sustainable design that is accessible to all. Sustainable, healthy living should be for everyone. It shouldn’t just be for the wealthy, or for hard-core environmentalists.

Things happened REALLY fast after that, it really exploded. This was in 2003. It requires scale, but now there’s no “if” when it comes to green, healthy, efficient homes. Everyone wants that nowadays.

Even a mass-produced home can achieve a sense of interior spaciousness and scale - if the designer is Michelle Kaufmann. Shown here is Kaufmann's mkLotus prefab home design.

ME: There’s a perception that green and prefab are mutually exclusive, that prefab can’t be green. And there’s a perception that neither can be beautiful, except at a high premium.

Early on, I made it my goal to marry good design with minimal environmental impact to create “green” homes that would be available to everyone. To do this, I had to create an uncomplicated system that would use the principles of mass production to blend sustainable home layouts, eco-friendly materials, and low-energy options to create a “prepackaged” green solution to home design. A few architect friends of mine expressed skepticism about the viability of such a mass-production endeavor. As they pointed out, many architects before me had tried, some more successfully than others, to design prefab structures for the masses.

Compare the kitchens in this photo and the next two. The same three built instances of Michelle Kaufmann's mkBreeze design are shown. Photo: John Swain Photography

Others warned that promoting design for the masses might lead other architects to view me as “selling out.”  But I strongly believe that architecture is a service, one that shouldn’t be available only to the wealthy or highly educated. Good design can and should make life better and more beautiful for everyone.

I soon realized that I would have to start thinking less like an architect and more like a product designer. As I began researching the history of mass production and product design, I was delighted to realize that I was following in the footsteps of other architects who had successfully created great design for minimal cost, largely by making use of standardized parts.

These kitchens are a good test of basic spatial design. We don't need finishes to "rescue" an awkward space if that space is well-planned to begin with. Photo: John Swain Photography

Charles and Ray Eames, for example, the legendary American designers in the 1940s-1970s, were best known for their work in architecture, furniture design, industrial design, and manufacturing. The Eameses’ unique vision was to bring “the good life” to the general public through modern materials, new technologies, and high-quality design. To do this, they promoted mass production of their furniture and architectural elements. Their groundbreaking work included the iconic Eames Chair and their Case Study House in Pacific Palisades, California – widely considered to be one of the most important post-war residences ever built. I was greatly encouraged by their firm belief that design – big or small – could improve people’s lives.

Minor details like the corner windows also provide variation in this third built instance of Michelle Kaufmann's mkBreeze design. Photo: John Swain Photography

I explored the work of Joseph Eichler, a revolutionary developer from the 1950s, who redefined suburbia by teaming up with architects such as Quincy Jones to create affordable, progressive home designs. Between 1949 and 1974, Eichler built 11,000 unique homes using mainly prefab parts, providing much-needed housing for the 1950s middle class. Today, Eichler’s pioneering homes are still beautiful, modern, enduring masterpieces. With efficient, open floor plans and light-filled atriums, the homes feel as fresh and innovative today as they did 50 years ago.

I also drew inspiration from the work of my mentors Michael Graves and Frank Gehry, two of contemporary architecture’s most remarkable practitioners. Although best known for their stunning building designs, both Graves and Gehry are also product designers. Michael Graves was one of the first contemporary architects to venture beyond the realm of building design into product design. The teakettle he designed for Alessi, a playful and beautiful recreation of the standard kitchen kettle, quickly became a modern icon and quieted the criticism of other architects who had cynically predicted failure for his product designs.

This custom home designed by Michelle Kaufmann uses the same systems and modular spatial thinking as the prefab versions. Photo: John Swain Photography

Today Graves has branched out to design home furnishings, jewelry, and dinnerware for companies such as Disney, Steuben, Phillips Electronics, and Black & Decker. Most recently, he teamed up with Target retail stores to create 100 beautiful, affordable products that remain some of the store’s most popular housewares. Frank Gehry’s signature, sinuous style of architecture can also be found in objects other than his buildings. He has designed six different lines of jewelry for Tiffany & Co., and has worked with other companies, including Alessi, to design furniture, light fixtures, and housewares.

The adjustable shading shown on this custom home from Michelle Kaufmann helps to control daylight and heat gain, and is a common feature in many of her other designs. John Swain Photography

RF: Can prefab really be profitable to build, AND beautiful, too?

Although prefabrication and mass production can save time and sometimes money, it has to be intelligent and thoughtful. No one wants to live in a generic box of a house that fails to respect a particular site’s climate or orientation. I recognize the importance of working closely with clients to create a home that is uniquely in harmony with its surroundings. Our homes need to meet the individual needs of the people who live in them. This is the kind of architecture that energizes me — homes that are economical to build and operate, that serve the people who live in them, and that don’t take too much from the earth.

ME: Has there been any industrial push-back? Lennar Homes and the other big guys – aren’t those tract home developers already doing prefab, in a sense?

Kaufmann: There are a lot of prefabricated components in their homes (roof truss systems, panels, etc.). They just don’t promote it that way.

Interior rendering of the mkLotus home design by Michelle Kaufmann.

RF: They’d have to change some of their ways to be sustainable, though. They’d have to consider the full building life cycle more carefully.

Kaufmann on Treehugger: Knowing that our needs and desires change over time, we can design for efficient deconstruction (rather than demolition) resulting in zero waste. For example, currently, if one remodels their kitchen most of the countertops, cabinets and plumbing fixtures are ruined with the removal because of typical construction techniques and how they were originally constructed. However, if we design and build an entire kitchen module that could be removed (floors, walls, mechanical systems and all) and a new kitchen module inserted, the old kitchen stays intact and can be reused by someone else with no waste produced.

ME: What else are you working on now?

Kaufmann: A resort in the Caribbean that’s being fabricated in South Carolina. It’ll be a Net Zero project.

Michelle Kaufmann is currently working on a Net Zero Energy resort for Orbitz Travel, to be located in the Bahamas, using all renewable-energy systems.

A very recent community project shows where I think prefab is REALLY headed. Casa Chiara is a multi-family dwelling for the Sisters of St. Francis, and it’s one of the first multi-family, modular, sustainable projects built in the U.S.

Casa Chiara, designed by Michelle Kaufmann, is a sustainable multi-family dwelling using a prefab, modular building design/build approach.

Now is really the time for companies with this technology, where there’s a need for good housing and fast. Places like Haiti as a matter of fact, that need disaster aid including housing. But not temporary housing! Temporary housing, like those FEMA trailers, is unhealthy and disposable, not sustainable.

In addition to Casa Chiara, I’m working on a community right now in Denver called AriaDenver. We just completed the first phase of 8 homes. There will be 106 homes in total, some affordable, some market rate, and some co-housing. The intent is to design it to be multi-generational, and take the best parts of the co-housing to use as design criteria for the entire community.

ME: Did you do anything in Louisiana following Katrina?

Kaufmann: No, I had to stick to California at that point.

Transporting and assembling prefab housing can be quite an adventure. Michelle Kaufmann's mkBreeze home design goes together in large chunks onsite, saving labor and time.

ME: How did you get from Gehry’s office, with its monumental civic architecture, to doing prefabricated private homes?

Kaufmann: My experience as a user drove me to it, when I couldn’t afford a place to live. I said to myself, “This is WRONG! What can I do to have as much impact, bring good design back to the masses?”

Homes like this one are for sale in towns all over the Bay Area. Generally, the interior spaces aren't optimized; they don't flow as well and there never seems to be enough room where you want it, and too much in other spots where it's wasted.

When my husband Kevin and I decided to build our own house, we wanted it to be healthy with no mold (as I was getting migraines in our apartment in Sausalito and we found it was because there was mold in the walls); we wanted no energy bills (we were and are on a budget); we wanted low water bills (that budget thing again); we didn’t have a lot of money so we couldn’t build a big house but still wanted it to feel spacious; I thrive on natural light, so I wanted the house to use natural light in a smart way so we wouldn’t have to turn on lights during the day. Kevin wanted to make sure we chose materials that would last a long time with little maintenance.

In the end, all of our qualifications defined a green home. But it was before the term “green” was being used. And definitely before green was cool. My mother used to call many of the green design elements “being frugal” when I was growing up.

ME: In residential work, even for the masses, you really have to love your clients. You have to care.

Kaufmann: It’s very intimate.

Even a prefab home like the mkBreeze can create intimate social space. Photo: John Swain Photography

Kaufmann: I do love my clients, and I care about them deeply. That is what drives me to not want to give up on the idea. So many wonderful clients invested in this idea of prefabrication and accessible, thoughtful design. So I won’t give up on that.

Another interior treatment from one of Michelle Kaufmann's mkBreeze projects. Photo: John Swain Photography

ME: How many of these projects actually got built? What sort of person was your typical buyer?

Kaufmann: 54 to date. Our clients are a pretty diverse group. All over the map, really, regarding age, ethnicity, and finances. However, there are some common characteristics: they are all really smart, many of them related to the design or technology professions, and almost all of them listen to NPR. A good proportion were travelers – maybe that adventurousness attracted them to this new type of housing. Turns out that is also one of the best descriptions for my ideal friends in life too.

ME: Within your method, do you see a conflict between personal-scale and commodity-scale building?

Kaufmann: You have to set up a network, do something grass-roots as a proof of concept. Grass roots first, then scale it up. An example of that is Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia sportswear [working with Wal-Mart on end-to-end supply-chain sustainability]. He was grass roots, they were the scale. There’s a moment in time when those priorities align.

ME: How do you reach your audience with your message?

Architects have gotten too far from the mainstream. They don’t re-think it, don’t reach out. There are tools now that educate people on good design. Even my grandma watches design shows on TV! Of course she’s getting a lot of crappy information. But there’s some good content, too.

The Slow Home movement is attempting to wean the American public from their "individually wrapped lives" and tract-home communities that look like "17,500 fast food meals to go"

ME: There’s a sense of openness right now that I didn’t used to have in my practice. Was it the critique system in school that taught everyone to hoard their ideas?

Kaufmann: We made some critical decisions early on with our web site, to create a hybrid that combined both architectural design and work product. We had tools for people to make their own decisions. We tried to make it as transparent as possible. Some of our clients hadn’t worked with an architect before. Were we giving our game away? Maybe, but we decided to be transparent, to be open. A key part of the work was just putting it out there, and helping others to build this way successfully. The more of us that are doing it well, the better.

Almost every other design-oriented architect wants to retain intellectual copyrights to their designs, but Michelle Kaufmann decided to allow people free use of her designs. Note the background; the example here stood outside Chicago's City Hall for several months as a demonstration of sustainable design.

Kaufmann on Treehugger: Some of the most interesting work being done is through collaboration of different disciplines. Imagine a design team comprised of a molecular biologist, a farmer, a building automation specialist as well as an architect. The focused intensity of all these individuals, who might not normally be in the same room together, could be apt to ignite some truly amazing and innovative solutions to current day problems.

ME: You can’t hoard information anymore, not with the Internet. But here’s a question I always ask people. What do you think about Dwell magazine? A lot of people have strong feelings about it.

Kaufmann: Today, we can be stronger by building networks and by sharing information. We shouldn’t fear it anymore. Dwell makes people feel empowered. They totally cracked open the idea of accessible modern design for the masses. They really supported the idea of prefab, too, so I’m very thankful.

ME: Print magazines are fading away.

Kaufmann: Dwell will survive. They went online early.

ME: What are some of the limitations of prefab?

Kaufmann: It changes where you feed your creative soul. It used to be we’d create one-off homes where every detail was unique. But with prefab, you can get super-strategic in other ways. It’s like designing a home version of the iPhone: making a well-designed model for mass-production, but also allowing for a slew of personalization.

Prefab designer housing can be more appealing if it's "customizable" just like an iPhone. But not too customizable. This instance of the mkSolaire house was shown in Chicago last year, along with the mkLotus shown earlier.

RF: There’s an idea, “hackable” homes. What latitude do you have with prefab for customization?

Kaufmann: That depends: where does your business plan lie? We offered preconfigured designs, four plans all with the same roof plan and same structural system. But, there are limits to what you can customize. It’s like going to an auto dealer and saying, “Well, I want a Prius, but I’d like it to have 2 inches extra leg room in the back seat.”

Preconfigured homes are like cars - you can't just take a Prius and make it 2 inches longer in the back.

You can’t do that with a car, and you can’t do it with prefab either. You can’t make the kitchen two feet longer or the roof two feet higher. Eventually, we realized that we had two categories: preconfigured, and custom. The custom stuff was still built in the factory, so even though they were one-off designs, there was less waste.

Another custom home from Michelle Kaufmann. Photo: Jim Thompson/Destination Productions

ME: What about other home kit companies? Are they a series of details, materials, and systems, or are they a kit of parts like erector sets?

[One example is The Acorn Deck House Company]

Kaufmann: You need healthy constraints, but you have to think of them in more thoughtful ways.

"The space should feel big, but you don't have to make it big." Michelle Kaufmann's home designs make the most of what's already there. Photo: Jim Thompson/Destination Productions

RF: What constitutes good design, even with prefab?

Kaufmann: How you make spaces, views, and light. The space should feel big, but you don’t have to build it big. It should feel in scale with our bodies but also feel grand. These tract homes with their punch windows are too big sometimes, out of scale with the body. I am thrilled when I hear people walk through a home I have designed and say “I feel great here. I don’t know why, but I do.” Music to my ears. Goal achieved.

Michelle Kaufmann's mkGlide house, shown as a rendering

ME: Housing is a commodity valued solely on the number of bedrooms.

Kaufmann: Speaking of commodities, I think we need nutrition labels for homes. How’s the air quality? What’s the water and energy usage? Much like nutrition labels for food, we need more accurate and easy to understand information on products and buildings to help us make better choices. Carbon Emissions labels (including embodied energy) could be on all products, buildings, foods and services.

An instance of the mkGlide house, built in Novato. The interior layout is similar but not identical to the rendering shown above, and also we can see what happens with the interior light with a different compass orientation.

RF: Since you so kindly shared with me much of your other interview material, I’d like to include these unpublished excerpts from a third-party interviewer who asked you about the role of design in building strong communities.

First, how can you take the single-family principle and replicate it at the community level?

it is important to imagine the community rather than just putting together a bunch of homes, as the outdoor spaces are just as important as the indoor spaces. And how the homes open to one another and to the street is critical to providing options for how people can build vital connections with one another, while maintaining some privacy.

If you build a good design, will community come? Or do you think community must be preexistent, and good design flows from that?

There are examples of both. However, most communities that we might think  of as being wonderful places organically develop over time. You need good master planning, sustainable design criteria, and phasing. Phasing is key.

Michelle Kaufmann wants to create beautiful “green” homes that would be affordable for everyone. Photo: Bruce Schneider

Do you think beautiful, well-crafted, affordable buildings can create community in and of themselves?

Sea Ranch works really well. But it was built over time. The design criteria has lasted over time as well, because it was based on the climate and the environment rather than a particular style.

Do you think creating a group of a certain type of architecture breeds a certain type of community?

While good architecture cannot solve everything, it certainly can go a long ways to inspiring, empowering and encouraging certain types of thinking and values. Communities that have particular principles of design and sustainability (like Sea Ranch, or Greensburg) or modern design (Sagaponac) will attract a particular type of family, and that is great – because then they will protect, develop and flourish with those values and make sure it is a sustainable community over time.

For example, the people who live in Eichler communities LOVE their homes and their neighborhoods. They are proud, and take care of their homes and help one another in ways that neighborhoods adjacent to them do not.  That is the type of community design I want to be a part of – both as an architect, as well as a home-dweller. My best designs come out of me designing places I want to live in.

[This is the second part of a two-part interview with the principals of Walker Warner Architects.]

Let’s talk about your early influences that led you to become an architect.

Growing up in San Francisco, I was exposed to architecture at an early age, although no one pointed it out as such. At age 3, I visited my great-grandmother’s house in Carmel. She owned a very unique Frank Lloyd Wright house, which to me was a magical world. Della Walker – that was her name – was widowed after WWII, and had a real artist’s sensibility. She bought land in Carmel on a rocky outcrop right by the water. It was the coolest little house.

Brooks Walker visited his great-grandmother in this home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Carmel.

It was a small house, originally only 1300 square feet or so. It was very site-specific, perched like a bird on the rocks. Even at age 3, I was wowed. It wasn’t like the other houses I was used to.

This house by Frank Lloyd Wright was designed on a tessellated hexagonal grid.

The living room was a hexagonal glass pavilion anchored around a wedge-shaped stone fireplace. It took 5 years to design and build, and my great-grandmother fought with the architect about the kitchen. I still have the correspondence about it.

The wedge-shaped fireplace in this home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright anchors the rest of the room.

She wanted an exit to take out the trash, and Wright insisted that it would destroy the integrity of the grid. Wright was willing to sacrifice practicality for an architectural idea. She had to fight to get a door. The kitchen is cramped and tiny, but for site context, the house is brilliant – a perfect fit for the tide pools all around. Going to that place was a transformative experience for me.

I’m fascinated by that hexagonal grid.

Wright’s work here is comparable to a Bach fugue. There’s theme, and variation, and repetition of it in various places, within that disciplined geometry.

What about other family members?

The rest of my family also inspired me. Della’s son, Brooks Walker, was my grandfather. He decided to become an inventor. He was the best grandfather a person could have. He was sort of a mad scientist. He was a machinist, too; he had a full wood and metal shop. He invented an anti-pollution device for cars long before they were popular. His influence on me was the fascination of building and making things.

Brooks Walker of Walker Warner Architects comes from a family of architects, artists, and inventors. Photo: Bruce Damonte

My uncle is still a practicing architect in San Francisco. Through him, I was exposed to the profession of architecture. In the 6th grade, I remember being in the middle of a geometry exercise in school, and I decided to become an architect. I told my dad, and he responded, “There’s a lot of starving architects out there.” I was crushed.

It’s a variant of the “You’ll never make a living at it” that I got from my folks about being an artist.

Maybe he was just spouting off. He was a businessman, and saw everything from that perspective. Still, it was discouraging. But I didn’t give it up completely. In high school, I was thinking about college and was into the outdoors – fly fishing and hiking among other things. I went to a boarding school with a great wood shop and worked on the weekends to build a kayak.

My mom took me to an occupational psychologist for career counseling. I took a bunch of tests and they suggested landscape architecture. It seemed to have all the things I loved the most: building, construction, design, landscape, the outdoors. The University of Oregon had a good landscape architecture program.

How did you like the architecture program at the University of Oregon?

The first year, all the architectural students were together. We all did the same design exercises. The second year wasn’t as good – it seemed vaguer and less structured, more about feelings and less about principles.

Architecture school had a philosophical divide between the architects and the landscapers in how you treat land. It’s a bit like the Democrats vs. the Republicans. The architects seemed to pay only lip service to context and site. The site was just a place for them to plunk down their architecture. It was about ego. The landscape designers actually mocked the architecture students as being insensitive to site.

Can you give some specific examples of buildings that you feel are successful, or unsuccessful, regarding site response?

Well, one example that I consider to be unsuccessful is actually the Federal Building here in San Francisco. It was designed by Morphosis in LA, and LA is a land of freeways. Buildings there are plunked down and connected via freeways, with no pedestrian experience. LA is all about fabulously sculptural architecture that you have to drive to.

The Federal Building in San Francisco was designed by Morphosis, a firm based in Los Angeles.

I think that urban buildings should enrich the pedestrian fabric. They shouldn’t be black holes. That building was a missed opportunity.

What about the plaza at the Federal Building? Don’t people visit it?

The plaza there doesn’t enrich the street experience.

[Conversation turns back to early influences]

Frank Lloyd Wright was very good at siting his buildings. He was very good at siting his buildings. Taliesin and Fallingwater are two examples of that, especially Fallingwater. It simultaneously blends with nature, and sits in opposition to it. There’s a tension between them. The stone versus the concrete cantilevered planes.

Frank Lloyd Wright's designs could be very sensitive to site and context. Shown here is his own studio, Taliesin.

Another influence that I was exposed to on a daily basis was Arthur Brown, Jr. He was a Beaux-Arts architect who designed San Francisco’s City Hall. When I was 10 years old, our family moved into a private home that he designed, and I grew up in it.

Frank Lloyd Wright's design for Fallingwater is probably his best-known work. A natural stream runs right through the building.

The Beaux-Arts movement trained people in things like scale, proportion, and symmetry – things that aren’t necessarily taught today. I never appreciated it that much growing up – too formal – but subconsciously I osmosed it. The house was so harmoniously laid out, like classical music. It was stodgy in a neoclassical way, but well-executed.

Quality can be hard to define. You don’t always know what it is, but you know it when you see it. As architects, our role is to educate our clients, to draw upon our clients’ experiences for what they’ve seen and liked in the past. They don’t always know why they like something and it’s our job to help discover that.

So that’s what constitutes good design?

Here are two quotes for you. One is by T.S. Eliot from the last of his “Four Quartets“:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

The other is from John Fowles’ The Magus: “Design is a process to understand the essence of the client’s idea.”

How about a building that’s a good site response?

The California Academy of Sciences is a good example – in contrast to the De Young, which sits across from it in Golden Gate Park. The De Young is confusing. The massing is disappointing – to me, at least – and the interior is disorienting. I prefer an organized space with a central point from which to branch out. What’s interesting about the De Young is the copper skin and the detailing on it, the progressive perforations.

The De Young Museum in San Francisco, designed by Herzog de Meuron.

The Dominus Winery in Napa was done by the same architects as the De Young – Herzog and de Meuron. The rock wall there is conceptually brilliant. But, they were Swiss architects who didn’t think of rattlesnakes. They don’t have rattlesnakes in Switzerland, but they do in Sonoma. So that winery has a bit of a problem with attracting mice, which in turn attracts the snakes.

The Dominus Winery in Napa was designed by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.

By contrast, Cal Academy has a central organizing concept so you don’t get lost. It’s built to a high environmental standard, and enhances its site with a light presence. It’s uplifting, rather than being a brooding monolith.

The California Academy of Sciences designed by Renzo Piano is possibly the most famous green design in the world, at least at the moment.

Another example of a well-sited building is Frank Lloyd Wrights’ Marin County Civic Center. It sits in the saddle between 2 hills, and by being in opposition to them it actually heightens those landforms.

Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Marin County Civic Center heightens the surrounding landscape.

A lot of modern museums are really disorienting to me. They’re like airports, but without the helpful signage.

Well, what is the purpose of a museum? At one time, a museum was a receptacle for its contents. But now, it’s about making a statement. The art is secondary. Buildings should be practical. Otherwise, it’s just really expensive sculpture, and it’s wasteful. It’s irresponsible to make buildings that are purely sculptural. It’s about the architect’s ego – a desire to create monumentality.

[ we had a short detour into the importance of the curator in a museum - not just to present the contents, but to educate people by telling a compelling story. From that perspective, certain design choices might be more justified. ]

Consider the motto: “do no harm”. It’s the architect’s version of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take – don’t kill your patient. Don’t mess it up. It’s not a foregone conclusion that a building will automatically enhance the landscape.

Do you ever work in a modern style yourself, perhaps for a particular project where that would be a good fit?

We don’t usually get to work in a modern style, but one urban project we did was a remodel of a William Wurster house in San Francisco.

Walker Warner Architects renovated this San Francisco home originally designed by William Wurster. Photo: Matthew Millman

There was a fairly extensive historical review process that took 18 months to complete – eventually we got the project approved, and we really sought to be true to the spirit of Wurster’s original design.

Original project sketch by William Wurster of a San Francisco home that was later renovated and expanded by Walker Warner Architects.

As a kid, I had also been exposed to Wurster’s work. We were friends with the Gregory family who owned the Gregory Farmhouse, which was also designed by Wurster. We would get together for Thanksgiving potlucks, sometimes upwards of 30 families. It’s a compound, with several buildings actually. It was built during the Depression with simple construction and a modest budget. But to me, this type of building is emblematic of the California countryside.

Brooks Walker spent some of his childhood at the Gregory Farmhouse designed by William Wurster in the early 1930s.

This is quintessential John Steinbeck country. Agrarian buildings, rolling hills, oaks, white barns, and a white water tower. It was buildings like this that started the trend of “ranch style homes” as a response to the boxy homes of places like Levittown.

Walker Warner Architects, Sonoma Ranch. The two-storey tower structure in this new-construction home is a direct tribute to William Wurster's design for the Gregory Farmhouse. Photo: Steven Brooke

What about places you’ve been?

In terms of travel, one trip that made an impression was driving cross-country to take my sister to college in Maine. The deal was, I would escort her but we would stop along the way to visit buildings that I wanted to see. We saw the bank by Louis Sullivan in Iowa, and work by Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago.

Rugged Scottish landscapes made a powerful impact on Brooks Walker during his European travels. Shown here is Eilean Donan Castle.

In Europe, the land made a powerful impact. Especially Scotland – it’s a very strong landscape compared with California. By contrast, here in America there’s a mercantile mindset. Driving up to Tahoe, for example, you see endless sprawl – strip malls in an endless replication of chain-stores and tract housing.

[Note: Lower image below is from The Onion and is not a real strip mall.]

European villages harmonize better with the landscape than strip malls - but you can't find a Home Depot in Tuscany, or can you?

Compare that to the villages in Scotland. People have been living in them for thousands of years.  It’s more in harmony with the landscape, not the slash-and-burn architecture that you find here. Here the developers have a short-term view. They are not creating compelling environments that people will want 100 years from now. In Europe, they still think they’re building for future generations, not bulldozing agricultural fields for another strip mall.

This stone house in Scotland has a feeling of permanence and harmony with its surroundings.

A good motto might be “Design something like you care.”

Hmm, so what do you think about people like Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry?

There’s a place for that kind of architecture, a place for pushing boundaries of what architecture could mean. But the lessons to draw from that are limited. Most of those designs are computer-enabled – new materials, new visualizations. It doesn’t create a fabric for cities. One exception in my opinion is the Guggeneheim museum in Bilbao [by Frank Gehry]. It’s a good response to its site and works within the context of the industrial town that it’s in. But it’s an exception.

Brooks Walker cites the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as an example of how even ultra-modern architecture can still fit the site - in this case, by echoing the industrial focus of the surrounding area.

Zaha Hadid is first and foremost an artist and a sculptor. Rather than Zaha, my hero here would be Louis Kahn. His architecture shows a very deep understanding of how buildings are really put together, and their purpose. His notion of “servant spaces” for example.

The Salk Institute in San Diego was designed by Louis Kahn. All the windows face the ocean.

Kahn’s work for the Salk Institute in San Diego is great and timeless design. It’s a laboratory where all the labs are pods, with views of the ocean. But there are also interstitial floors between the habitable spaces that have room for the building systems. Kahn knew that those systems would likely be replaced by new technologies later on, and he allowed for it in the design.

This cross section of Louis Kahn's design for the Jonas Salk Institute shows the "servant spaces" between the floors.

Kahn also drew from architectural history. I mean, why was the Parthenon great? It’s not about copying those buildings, but about the essence of scale, proportion. What is the meaning of arch, lintel, void, window, mass?  Much of today’s so-called postmodern or deconstructivist work is not human-scaled. It has no sense of human proportion. But Kahn’s work will create great ruins!

Imagine Louis Kahn's work as a ruin a thousand years from now.

It’s odd that preserving buildings often means the facade, but you can do anything you want inside it.

Floor plans aren’t sacred. It’s communal property rights that are sacred. So anytime a building’s exterior impacts the communal pedestrian experience, it’s a sensitive matter to change it. But inside… the owner has full rights to do whatever he or she wishes. Planning agencies can’t interfere with the owner’s right to modify their interior spaces. There are many examples of this in San Francisco, where a traditional facade in front conceals an utterly modern interior behind.

Now, just because you can gut the interior, does that mean that you should? My personal philosophy is to say that the inside of a building should somehow present a consistent experience with its exterior. It’s a matter of architectural honesty.

Unlike some San Francisco remodels whose starkly modern interiors bear no resemblance to their painstakingly preserved Victorian facade, Walker Warner's renovation of this William Wurster home is consistent between interior and exterior. The home seems in harmony with the greater site, even with the more traditional house next door. Photos: Matthew Millman. Interiors by Douglas Durkin Design

Well, other things have changed since the 30s. For one thing, floor plans are so open now that there’s no privacy at all. I know it’s the style, but does everyone really like that?

It’s a balance between promoting privacy vs. social interaction. In the old days, the kitchen was separate because likely there was domestic help in there. Nowadays, our clients don’t want to segment the house that way. If anyone’s in the kitchen doing the cooking, its them. They want their friends to hang out with them while they’re cooking.

The kitchen in Walker Warner Architect's renovation of this William Wurster residence includes sliding glass doors that allow the kitchen to be either open or secluded. Photo: Matthew Millman

If you’re not a modernist, what are you?

With the Wurster remodel we did in San Francisco, it was fun to do something crisp and modern for a change. But it still feels timeless. Timelessness and sustainability are qualities we seek in all our designs. Our goal is to create a building that is so well designed, out of such durable materials, that no one would want to knock it down later on. It should be so well-thought-out that it wouldn’t need to be altered much to keep up with the times. For example, although our clients for the Wurster renovation chose not to install solar panels at the time, we actually designed for photovoltaics in the future, in case they wanted to add it later.

A building shouldn’t just feel right today, it should still feel right 50 years from now.

Has the architect's ego gone too far?

There’s a lot of architecture out there just to impress. Dubai and other emerging economies are all vying with one another to create the world’s tallest building. It’s like listening to children screaming, “Look at me! Look at me!”

We have to be careful about where and how much the architect’s ego should come in. After all, we’re not the end users. We want our buildings to outlast us. How do we design responsibly? So no, I’m not a “Modern”-ist. I’m a contextualist. I allow what is appropriate for the site to drive the design process.

The AT&T Building by Philip Johnson.

Architecture has lost its way. Post-modern architecture tries to make fun of historical references in order to “humanize” them. But there’s no understanding of what went into those historical forms.

Let’s talk about some of your projects. You’d mentioned Quintessa Winery as a good example of a site response.

It’s very gestural, driven by the client’s program which was to create a winery that used gravity crush instead of the more usual mechanical methods. It’s a method used by more high-end wineries. A winery is essentially a factory, but because of tourism, these factories look like chateaus, haciendas, and other fantasy buildings.

The Quintessa Winery, designed by Walker Warner Architects, blends into the hillside with a low profile - an antithesis to the soaring skyscraper. Photo: Mark Defeo

With Quintessa, we wanted to express its function while screening the less attractive work areas from visitors. It’s self-sufficient in energy use. On top is the visitors’ area, including sod roofs on either side which help stabilize the temperatures beneath. The white dots in the asphalt are actually chutes for the grapes, which are de-stemmed, crushed, and then funneled directly down into the fermentation barrels below. On the front, the stone wall arcs around, screening the less attractive work areas from view.

Walker Warner Architects screened the work areas at the Quintessa Winery, shown on the left, behind the sweeping curved wall shown on the right. Photos: Richard Barnes

A hand sketch of Quintessa from Brooks Walker showing a distance view of how the curved front wall integrates into the hillside behind.

When I’ve spoken with other architects, they always cite the client’s willingness to take risks as a major factor in what they can actually accomplish.

I like to say that great clients create great buildings. It’s a bit like making crystals in an 8th-grade science class. You need a string in the solution to give something on which the crystals can form. The collaboration between architect and client is a dynamic tension, a matrix for ideas to coalesce.

Thoughtfully finished natural materials such as stone and wood predominate in the visitor center at the Quintessa Winery, giving the rooms a timeless, elegant feeling. Photos: Richard Barnes

Constraints can be liberating because they give you a direction. It’s an art form, like classical music or haiku – there are constraints, and discipline. You can’t just do whatever you want. For us, the constraints are context and site. We spend a lot of time on the site itself.

Our ideal is to have a client who’s already lived on the site for years, and they know every breeze, every bit of hillside, every patch of sun. The site is not just the topographical contours! The map is not the territory.

Do you think a site can have an actual spiritual presence?

Christian Norberg-Shulz wrote a book called Genius Loci which means more or less spirit of place, or genius of place. The question with a building is, should it blend in, or should it sit in contrast. It’s important to note that a building can harmonize with the landscape even in contrast to it. Just because something is “contextual” doesn’t mean it always has to disappear. There is more than one way to harmonize with a landscape.

Even in nature, some creatures are almost invisible like the toad on the left, while others… who could say that this lion doesn't harmonize with his surroundings, even though he's clearly visible?

What about young architects today? Are they getting the right training?

The new kids coming out of school now have tremendous skills for 3D visualization on the computer, while we still use pencil and paper! Of course, we use hand sketches in combination with 3D visual tools. So does Frank Gehry. He just crumples up a piece of paper for the basic idea, but then he has a studio of designers to help with the detailed renderings.

Our office just implemented BIM technology. It took us a year and a half, and was very costly and time-consuming – training, designing templates, and just using the tool. BIM is very accurate in 3D visualization, but it’s easy to get sucked into detailing too early, before the overall design is really resolved. Its strengths, however, are that the next design phase is easier precisely because you’ve already worked out the detailing. It changes how we have to interact with clients, because the clients may not be ready for those details at the early design stages.

The courtyard of this William Wurster renovation by Walker Warner Architects shows how interior and exterior spaces flow into one another and present a consistent aesthetic that is true in spirit to Wurster's original design. Photo: Matthew Millman

The new generation of architects have such powerful tools at their disposal. They’re expert users in all these tools, but they’re lacking training in basics like proportion and scale. The schools used to teach that, but don’t anymore. There’s only so much you can teach in a five-year program, and the schools have to make hard decisions about how to focus their curriculum. What are the core skills that new architects need, in order to be prepared for today’s profession?

It’s like playing a style of music that’s purely improvisational rock. There’s no underpinnings, no discipline behind it, no real architectural knowledge. Picasso, for example, was classically trained. Artists from his era had skill sets so that they were departing from something, not from nothing. The newer generations can’t draw. How do they even know what is a really well-proportioned space? The schools are teaching a lot about sustainability these days, and that’s good. But sustainability can’t be at odds with livability.

A second view of the courtyard of the Wurster renovation, from the living room. The glass wall can open completely, further blending the indoor and outdoor spaces. Photo: Matthew Millman

I’m a history buff, with an interest in modern European and U.S. history, as well as that of Japan and Asia. It’s important to consider the economic, political, and ecological forces that shape societies. History is an instructive guide.

China is now a very interesting example. It’s one of the oldest cultures around, over 5,000 years old, very advanced, and disciplined. Then, in the 1960s they had the Cultural Revolution which swept away everything from the past. Now they have another revolution of sorts happening, in architecture, knocking down older buildings in favor of showy, ultra-modern marvels. European ego-architects who express the new Chinese culture of money. They’re putting up all these showy buildings that don’t fit with the site, and are not sustainable.

To create relevant architecture, you have to draw upon wisdom from the past and create a synthesis between past and present. As the saying goes, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The Woodside residence by Walker Warner Architects mixes old and new. The shape references local barn structures; the stone material references very old materials and building methods; however, inside the walls, shielded from the elements, is a modern and light-filled interior. Photo: Matthew Millman

In the previous segment of this interview, with your business partner Greg Warner, Greg mentioned that Walker Warner is very selective with clients. When do you actually turn away a commission?

Well, if a client really wanted us to re-create a 300-year-old Tuscan villa, that would be fake. We would instead want to look at the essential qualities – massive walls, for example, rather than seeking surface replication. Ultimately, we have to do what’s right for the region.

When clients ask you about sustainability, what do you tell them?

Basically, we think that sustainability should be a given – not an add-on. For one thing, our buildings are designed to last, to have usefulness beyond styles and trends of the moment, and to be cherished and preserved by their owners. Beyond that, we have a system for evaluating a client’s desires for sustainability. Finding out where each client stands on the topic is  important – it’s part of our process of getting to know our clients and helping to steer them in an appropriate direction.

Level 1 is our office “standard of excellence” and what I call the “pre-green” stuff. These aspects are practical, sensible considerations that should be part and parcel of every design. Response to climate, orientation, building envelope design, appropriateness of materials, natural light, ventilation, and solar access should all be considered to design an efficient yet livable home. It’s part of the basic responsibility that we as architects bear as part of our profession.

Level 2 is about using proven sustainable technologies, systems, and materials that can offer a return on investment over a period of time.  We conduct energy, habitat, and building site studies to identify the best opportunities to increase the project’s efficiency and lower the impact on the environment.  It’s always desirable for us to reach this level of sustainability.

Level 3 is for clients who are deeply committed to their green values. Quite often these sustainable choices do not directly benefit the project, but they do offer less impact on our environment, both locally and globally.

The overall goal is to enhance livability by promoting healthy indoor environments, comfort and efficiency, while creating architecture that will endure the test of time.