We now have the Thanksgiving holiday behind us, and we are closing in on the end of Q4 2010. There may be ups and downs in the stock market but, barring any embarrassing Wiki-leaks involving the Bank of America, the year’s financial performance is all but over. All that remains is the writing of reports documenting the year’s financial story. Attention is now focused on holiday-driven retail performance and consumer spending.

This is the time of year when wealthy individuals begin to consult with their accountants and financial advisers to assess how their investments have performed in the past 12 months. Although financial advisers are rarely advocates for spending, this year may reveal a modest exception. Losses sustained by investors since December 2007 have been made almost whole again – even if the profit has not been realized, at least the invested principal.

Reed Construction Data reports that architecture billings are finally on the increase again.

Here are a few statistics that indicate the wealthy are in the mood to spend money:

• Hermes, the French luxury leather goods manufacturer and retailer, has already announced that 2010 is the most profitable year in their six-generation history.
• Neiman Marcus San Francisco hints that their retail sales are already 17 percent ahead of what they were at this time last year (2009).
• San Francisco’s Emporio Armani is closing its popular café at the end of this year to, one would imagine, create more retail space.
• BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi are curtailing year-end vacations and increasing the lengths of worker shifts to accommodate a steep, year-end increase in orders of luxury automobiles.
• And Wal-Mart has reported a 9.3 percent increase in quarterly profits (the battered middle class has stepped down a notch and is shopping more frequently at discount stores)

How does this information affect the architectural and allied design professions? For one thing, wealthy individuals have more than two years’ worth of pent-up demand for design services. The upper middle class has stashed away savings and are looking at spending strategies. Since banks are not lending with great ease to consumers, a few potential clients with recovered investment capital are ready to allocate a bit of their money to re-boot dormant or deferred projects. These individuals are, just now, receiving news from their advisers. And these individuals may, in turn, begin to call you to revive dormant projects, or to discuss new projects that might begin in 2011.

Which market sectors will benefit most from this new (albeit modest) willingness to spend money? Certainly the very high end of the single family residential market is seeing new life. Sales of $10 million houses are up, and inventory in this stratum is down. The market sector just below is seeing similar, if less vigorous, sales figures.

Renovation and remodeling projects are picking up, although the most recent data indicates that these projects are smaller and of lower construction value. For the most part, these projects are paid for in cash. Fees for design services are often lower, too, as a result of lower construction value (and value-driven clients). Fee erosion is an issue across all market sectors, but that is a separate issue.

According to Reed Construction Data, the projected growth rate for construction in 2011 is 3 percent across all market sectors, across all regions in the USA. Most of that growth is expected in the second half of the year. The first half of the year may well be close to flat but it is anyone’s guess. The bright spot in this gloomy forecast is that the Bay Area is one of five regions in the country that is expected to see growth that is double the national rate. (The others are Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.) The single family residential market may see greater growth than that, with a projected growth rate of about 10% over last year.

Reed Construction Data information shows recent growth in the commercial/industrial sector.

Follow this link to a downloadable PowerPoint produced by Reed Construction Data, in collaboration with the Associated General Contractors and the AIA. The presentation is a great resource of projections and comparative data regarding design and construction across all regions, market sectors, material costs and employment. I suggest you quickly flip through it to identify projections for your specific market sectors.

Architects and interior designers should see this as an opportunity to refresh the list of key contacts and clients with dormant or deferred projects. Call or email them. Ask clients if they have news that might motivate them to resume progress on the project. If you are a landscape architect, structural engineer or general contractor (for example), contact architects whom you know to have projects on indeterminate hold. If possible, ask them if they have checked in with their clients. Develop and hone the ability to detect signs that clients are receiving good news from the people that manage their money.

I hope that your see your prospects trending towards “positive”. Maintain an optimistic outlook. Most importantly, do not wait for the telephone to ring or for that email to arrive. Make this the year that you commit to an increase in weekly or daily business development, because 2011 will be the year in which there will be a noticeable increase in business to develop.

This is a follow-up to our earlier post on KA Connect, a conference on knowledge management for architects.

Michael Bernard writes: Here we are in the quiet of 2010. Think back two years ago: July 2008. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stood at 11,326. Many firms were busy with abundant work, months of assured work in the pipeline, and stunning new prospects to fill in the void. Finding qualified staff to handle the copious workload was the major challenge. Entry-level designers who entered the job market in May 2008 had the prospect of three or maybe four offers of employment.

None of us could have easily predicted that, three months later, the stock market would drop almost 3,000 points. Nor could we have predicted that five months later, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would drop to 6,626 points. Eventually, in a span of under eight months, the stock market dipped 4,700 points. By December of 2008, the outlook was as gloomy as the winter weather, with no end in sight.

Depression-era unemployment was supposedly a thing of the past - until the present.

Of course, the world did not entirely come to an end. Since March 2009, the market has recovered somewhat. However, despite the market’s apparent recovery, the architecture and interior design professions are not seeing the same rebound in inquiries and signed contracts. Unemployment among design and construction professionals still stands between 15 and 20 percent. Clients who still have funding for their projects continue to drive hard bargains on both soft and hard costs. Clients who don’t have the money in hand are having difficulty financing, despite the fact that money has seldom, if ever, been less expensive than it is today.

What’s more, we recently received discouraging news in a newsletter from the AIA:

‎” . . . the AIA Consensus Construction Forecast Panel was downbeat on the prospects for the year [2010], projecting a 13% decline in spending (inflation adjusted) for nonresidential building projects. Halfway through the year, prospects have deteriorated, with the current consensus predicting a 20% decline this year.”

Link follows here.

What does all of this mean to the average small or medium-size design firm?  Many firm owners are working twice as hard to capture half the commissions, and those contracts are likely to be smaller in scale and lower in value – leading to leaner design fees. In an uncomfortable turn of events, we may find ourselves competing against our colleagues in market sectors where that was formerly not the case, such as single-family custom homes.

Meanwhile, the evolution of technology in everyday practice continues, even in the absence of billable projects. Software licenses expire regardless of economic swings. Computers become obsolete. The employees we have been fortunate enough to retain now need to learn new programs to stay current. Our servers are undersized and sometimes cannot handle the new software. Our bandwidth/DSL is inadequate. In order to compete with our colleagues, we now want software to track every hour spent on every project in order to understand what a project actually costs us to deliver. Large-scale projects are increasing in complexity, requiring ever-tighter integration between disciplines and wholesale data conversion from 2-D drawing libraries to 3D building objects. (Translation: more training, more software and more hardware, more overhead cost – when we can least afford it)

And we are two years into a recession, the end of which has been predicted unsuccessfully a number of times.

Paul Downs, a Philadelphia-based cabinetmaker, chronicles his efforts to balance cash flow and technological evolution in his New York Times blog post, “You’re The Boss”. In his post, Mr. Downs makes the ironic observation that, while he builds durable objects intended to last a long time, software is designed with the opposite premise in mind. And the software costs money that we might otherwise spend on business development and/or staff retention.

We have two choices, it seems: We can hibernate for a number of years, like Rip Van Winkle, waking conveniently to a new world. (For most of us, this is not a viable option.) Or we can make the time to consider new business development strategies that highlight our firm’s value and that put us closer to new projects. Concurrently, we can consider ways to improve our ability to stay abreast of trends in technology and practice.

Left: Washington Irving's character Rip Van Winkle woke up after a 20-year sleep. Right: Hibernation pods have been a popular sci-fi storytelling device, but the sleepers don't accomplish anything in the interim.

[This is easier if you can optimistically treat your down time as a sabbatical, an opportunity to update your infrastructure in ways that you don't have time to do when you're busy. You won't accomplish much by viewing the recession as a punishment imposed by circumstance. - RF]

Staying abreast is more than just learning the newest version of ArchiCAD, though. It’s more than springing for a bunch of new software licenses and computing equipment. Now is a good time to think about how you run your practice, especially how you organize and store information. Technology sometimes makes familiar tasks faster, but it’s also an enabler that can sometimes open up a whole new way of doing things. Technology enables knowledge: how you acquire and share knowledge, how you store that knowledge in a meaningful way, and how you organize information to find things quickly.

This past April, I attended the inaugural meeting of Knowledge Architecture, KA Connect 2010. I listened to a wide range of perspectives on the evolving nature of capturing and disseminating design and construction knowledge. The speakers proposed that such knowledge is its own form of “architecture” that gives organization and structure to design practice, to construction, to collaboration and to learning. Many of the short talks are available here. They represent an accessible trove of (no-cost) knowledge that can help you in your daily practice. I encourage you to take a few minutes to view these talks, which add a new perspective to the world of design and construction.

Two of the speakers at KA Connect focused on very different strategies for changing how we practice, asking two important questions:

• How can we leverage our existing resources to distinguish ourselves from the rest of a highly-qualified pack?

• How can we stay nimble and responsive in an unpredictable marketplace?

Staying nimble in this new economy is not as easy as it sounds.

Communicating Value To Your Clients

In her talk, “Communicating Value to Your Clients and Prospects”, Nancy Kleppel addressed the perennial importance of fostering a design culture where the entire firm is engaged in the effort to communicate value to (new and repeat) clients. We must communicate to our employees the essence that drives us to pursue our projects: is it for love? Or is it for money? Employees in turn should be coached and encouraged to communicate their awareness of value to clients in every interaction. By creating a “project landscape”, where the value, significance and relevance of every project is understood by each member of our team, we can grow our firms not just in size, but more importantly in depth of technical and business development expertise.

Nancy Kleppel writes:

“We begin by evaluating who we are as designers, what defines our own individual firm and separates us from our many competitors. This requires an in-depth understanding of not only the kind of work we do, but what we do best. We then must continue to develop our understanding of which of our attributes are most highly valued by our targeted clients and which of our projects best demonstrate our specific abilities. Next we need to create a common understanding across the firm that speaks to our specific firm attributes, talents, skills, mission and values. This must be clearly communicated to all staff in such a way that any one of them is able to serve as an ambassador for the firm in the full range of unpredictable circumstance where opportunities might present themselves. (We should also train them to recognize opportunities, but this is beyond our current focus.) Finally we must empower our staff to speak with a common voice, making it known that business development cannot be the provenance of a single individual or even a small group and create a firm structure whereby people who bring work into the firm will be properly recognized and rewarded.”

Global Outsourcing: Better Get Used To It

Darren Rizza, CEO of Satellier, addressed the reality of global outsourcing, which is likely to change both the nature of firms of every size, and the range of services they deliver. Highly-educated, low-cost design professionals outside of the USA can work around the clock to deliver high-quality design documents using the latest software. They can convert drawings to 3D building objects, offer libraries tailored to local building codes in other parts of the world, and even leverage expertise that will win YOU new work.

The result? Being able to do more with less, with the architect of record efficiently providing services that focus on the initial design vision followed by subsequent document review for the duration of the project. This may be the future of practice for some of us: “on-shoring” services that rely on creative and intellectual design leadership, while the “big middle” of a project may actually be produced off-shore. This project delivery method is of increasing appeal to many clients who are bottom-line driven. If this becomes the desired means of delivering projects, we need to train now in order to respond quickly to our client’s requests. If we are not ready – someone else will be.

Business is currently “light” for many of us, to put it mildly. The “on-shore/off-shore” paradigm may seem like a remote possibility. Its appeal to clients may not be apparent today, when the demand for design services is temporarily low. But as project inquiries increase in frequency and predictability, when funding is more easily available, clients will invest their hard-won funds in hard costs, with the possible effect of even leaner design fees.

Meeting the demands of a lower fee for service might be accomplished through carefully-structured outsourcing. The potential effect of such global outsourcing is that the very nature of how we practice may change. Rather than the traditional design practice hierarchy of “junior-intermediate-senior” staff, we may find that we are better suited to a “senior designer-job captain-document reviewer” arrangement, with a very small number of junior designers to support the initial design effort.

Our role as design service providers may evolve into one that is largely editorial and less supervisorial, as globally-produced data models find their way into our FTP drop-box. Our day-to-day tasks may shift from directing in-house staff to one where we review outsourced documents for design and code compliance. Consider this as a possible paradigm. Can you fit in – and if so, how? Would you and your staff be able to embrace such a prospective arrangement? And, assuming that you want to take the leap to try this new approach, how do you structure your firm so that delivery of services in this manner generates revenue?

Workshare: The New Word for Outsourcing

Darren Rizza writes:

“The opportunity to rebuild your firm as the industry comes back slowly will require new ways of putting teams together and producing design, analysis and construction documentation and modeling. The majority of firms have scaled down to their ‘A’ teams. But these teams may not be able to provide all the necessary services and billable hours for a project.

A small firm can use outsourcing to scale up for a big project - including specialized skill sets.

“How do you as a firm/project leader re-staff without affecting your bottom line profitability? Workshare, or outsourcing, is a logical path for recovery given its low cost/high value. Workshare is not only about staff, it is truly about process. Your workshare team needs to understand your design services process and execute it as you would. Typically, the workshare team would be task driven leaving the design aspects to the client. However, even this is shifting as those who have utilized workshare for years before the downturn are now better equipped to have design services executed through workshare thus reducing their internal needs while maintaining and in some cases increasing their ability to service more projects and clients.

“Need to execute in BIM? Don’t have BIM processes in place? Don’t have BIM software and really can’t afford the upgrade investment? Workshare is seeing significant increases in clients who are requesting or requiring services to be executed in a BIM process. In fact, more than 50% of all new workshare services involve BIM processes.

Pre-created Building Information Modeling (BIM) objects can save a lot of re-drawing time. These examples are available from Reed Construction Data.

“Workshare is not limited to architecture and engineering firms only. Increasingly, contractors and owners are seeking out workshare services to help improve their visibility into their projects as well as gain process knowledge they may not have on their teams. Owners now more than ever realize the benefits from a BIM or virtual design and construction [VDC] process and are now seeking workshare services for the management of their project as a way of managing the overall project and multiple team partners.

Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) can be used among other things to simulate construction sequencing, generate construction documents, and detect conflicts prior to construction.

“Our projects are no longer in our own backyard. Our building products and materials are not sourced from our own backyard. Our hardware, software and support are not from our own backyard. Our internal project teams are no longer from our own backyard as well. The recovery is shifting the balance. Flexibility and responsiveness will allow us to move forward successfully.”

Outsourcing: Friend or Foe?

Rebecca Firestone writes: As soon as people hear this particular word they think, “American jobs lost!” but actually, it can be a gain as well. I spoke at length with Darren Rizza to ask him some hard questions about outsourcing. His answers about how to get the most out of it – even for small firms – were very enlightening. Let’s face it, architectural firms have always outsourced the work they don’t want to do themselves, tasks that are not part of their core competency – marketing or tax accounting, for example. But now for the first time A&E firms are exporting large chunks of design work as well.

Outsourcing as a buzzword got its start with the information technology industry, when it became synonymous with “offshoring”, i.e., the moving of jobs overseas. (Prior to that, the migration of manufacturing jobs overseas was simply called “the migration of manufacturing jobs overseas”.) Customer call centers were next, moving to places like India, Ireland, or the Philippines. Now, people travel to India even for surgery. What’s next… outsourcing our hangovers (now there’s a thought)? It doesn’t matter if we view outsourcing as friend or foe, because we’ll have to embrace it in some form or another.

Below, Darren Rizza of Satellier, a company providing outsourced services to the architecture and engineering industries, answers questions from Rebecca about the meaning and value of outsourcing for firms large and small.

How do I know when to outsource? Are any of your remarks applicable to small design firms that work locally on one-off custom residential projects for private owners?

Darren: Regardless of what you’re outsourcing, you have to start with one fundamental question, namely, what do you consider your core business to be? Your core business is what sets you apart, why you are here. These functions are things you might want to control very closely.

But there are other tasks that we all have to do as part of our primary professional function, about which we say, “I don’t come to work to do this”. Outsourcing should make your processes more succinct. You don’t necessarily have to outsource across continents, either. You can find outsourcing firms in Iowa now, because the cost of labor is still lower there than it is in places like New York.

Small firms might outsource other functions, like accounting, legal, or HR – not necessarily A&E.

How do I know if my firm is organized to outsource successfully?

Darren: You have to understand your own process steps first, regardless of whether you outsource or not. Whether you’ve got six people in one office at home, or 75 people abroad, you have to determine:

• Who needs to do each one

• Where are the handoffs

• What are the yes/no decision points

Before you can outsource portions of your own work process, you need to understand the process, including decision points (shown here in this example as diamonds), and who is responsible for each task.

Good communication is essential! There should be shared understanding about the tasks, such as how long each one takes. Then you have to work out how change management is handled, including notifying stakeholders. In fact, I’d say of all the things that make for successful outsourcing, change management is in the top 3.

How do I select a good firm to outsource to? How do I kick their tires to see if they know what they’re doing?

Darren: If you’re outsourcing out of your local area, you will have to consider how to do business across a different continent, culture, and legal rules. Whatever your industry, you want to ensure that your needs will be met by the service provider. Look on CIO.com for the top 100 questions you should be asking your outsource service vendor.  Although many of them pertain to the information-technology industry in particular, many of the questions are applicable outside of IT.

Questions like:

• Why are we doing this?

• What are the success criteria?

• How much experience does my organization have with managing outsourced engagements?

Specfic content-related questions that you can ask a provider for A&E include asking them to show their details for things like doors, ceiling plans, framing plans, vertical circulation. These can serve as dictionaries, and are valuable aids. By looking through these templates, you can see what they know, and what they can potentially reference. If there is a discrepancy between the building codes that they use in their details and the ones that your project needs to use, this will also be apparent.

Ask the outsource vendor to show you some of their typical detailing, and see how close it is to what you would need for your projects.

The provider should also have experience working with Westerners – including your region, as well as experience with the type of project you want to do.

What are the logistics of moving to an outsource provider?

Darren: Again from CIO.com, here’s a sampling of checklist items that you should take into consideration.

• Is there a master services agreement in place?
• How long will it take new supplier resources to learn their jobs?
• Will there be layoffs among my staff?
• How should I divide the project work among several suppliers in different locations?
• How can I get enough sleep when my project team is on different continents?
• What are the major holidays? When can I expect to find people in the office and when not?

In the "Dilbert" comic, the fictitious nation of Elbonia somewhere in Eastern Europe serves as a stand-in for offshoring jokes without having to offend any "real" nationalities.

What’s a good sort of trial project to use with a new outsourcing firm?

Darren: One major task in adopting new technology is simple data conversion. A small firm could use outsourcing to convert all their existing 2D libraries into 3D building objects. If the firm is looking to grow and embrace new technology, this is one way to get a leg up. It’s a lot quicker than trying to learn the tool and doing all the conversion yourself.

How do I get off on the right foot with my outsource team?

Darren: You need to allow for some ramp up time. Give some thought to the types of projects and length of engagement. Once the new team has learned how you work and what your expectations are, they can truly be an additional right and left hand for you.

You also have to remember that the outsource team are people. Another aspect of Indian culture to consider is that people will be extremely dedicated to their work will leave a company if they don’t like it. If they don’t like the people, or they don’t like the work, or the commute is too long, they’ll leave. Many people live with extended families and can afford to change jobs but more to the core of motivation is their belief of personal happiness. So you have to give feedback, compliment the team for doing things like meeting a major milestone. In meetings, you should praise the entire team, not individuals – you can always praise individuals in private.

In some cultures, it's important to praise the entire team in group meetings. Offering individual praise is best done in private, to avoid the appearance of slighting the other members of the team.

A few years ago, when Satellier was really busy, U.S. clients would send over gifts like coffee mugs and caps. Even small firms can do this. The remote teams want to know who they’re working with and what they’re doing. So you can, for example, post things like photos from the San Francisco team’s outing, sharing day-to-day experiences. Learn who the individuals are on your team – learn their names and pronunciation, learn their backgrounds of education, family, from where they come. A lot of people may not understand the importance of this effort, but it makes a big difference in building tight connections.

My feeling about new technologies was that they trickled down eventually. They might start as the sole provenance of large firms, but then 10 years later everyone’s got it right on their desktop.

Darren: Do technologies trickle down? Not necessarily. Larger firms may adopt greater quantities of technology. But some alternatives may disappear over time due to consolidation.

The trickling that happens tends to be across firms. Employees at one firm may take their tools, preferences, and processes with them when they change companies. This can happen from large to small firms, but also from small to large. That’s one way that stuff gets adopted.

As staff move from one firm to another, they bring new knowledge, tools, and methodologies. Firms can thus acquire skill diversity without sacrificing their core competencies.

This “stuff” can include new work processes, ideas, and methodologies. It can be disruptive, or not. Sometimes there’s a temporary disruption in efficiency that I call a type of “bubble”. There’s the disruption, there’s the bubble as the company learns to deal with the new information, and then things settle down again. Outsourcing, and offshoring, is one of those bubbles.

How much visibility does each team need? If they only understand their piece, they can’t spot discrepancies that could affect things later on the way an integrated team would.

Darren: Who says outsourced teams can’t be integrated?

The question is how much visibility into adjacent pieces should a team have. More insight does lead to smoother understandings. It’s good for the teams to understand how the outcomes of their tasks affect things down the road. Although most schedules are expressed in terms of daily or weekly deliverables, these deliverables can have a conditional effect.

The more visibility the team has into the overall process, the better they will be able to contribute.

The management team must provide guidance to the outsourced teams so that those teams can make decisions with forethought. Even rote tasks require some decision making. For example, in an office building, how does a particular door operate? What codes will it need to meet? If the person designing or configuring that door doesn’t know what the next steps or the needed outcomes are, there’s only a 50-50 chance they’ll make the right decision.

Visibility can be a problem even if the team is all physically in the same room. If there’s one person who doesn’t share information, it can affect everyone. Some people may be just fine with a handoff, but sometimes they can be frustrated by their own inability to have an impact on the work – because they don’t know how their work contributes.

Does it matter where the outsourced team is located or who they are? Do local cultural norms ever inform a team’s working style?

Darren: Local culture is a big consideration. When I moved to India, I read up on it before coming and continue to do so every day. What was I getting myself into? One of my main references is Speaking of India: Bridging the Communication Gap When Working With Indians by Craig Storti. Yes, they speak English – British English that is, but it’s not always the same meaning.

For example, Storti explains that traditional Indian business culture is very hierarchical. There might be three or four levels within an Indian organization, but each one only talks to the level immediately above. So Level 4 would talk to Level 3, and Level 3 with Level 2, and so forth. Rarely is management structure flat. In fact they have a term for it: “skip-level meetings” where a Level 4 can speak directly to a Level 2 and not be frowned upon.

Improv theater master Keith Johnstone described a status game where each person can only give orders to the person immediately beneath himself - thus an order to the lowest menial has to be repeated by each successive level of management.

Here’s another example. Indian culture places a high value on saving face, which discourages people from being openly critical. They will always present information in a positive way, they’ll always say “yes” but you have to listen to it in an Eastern way. They mean “yes, but only within this time frame” or some other set of parameters. It’s a very thin line. There are many workarounds in how teams operate, and what they present as information.

Local knowledge includes things like building codes, too.

Darren: It’s that, and also how to use language to talk about things like building design and construction. It’s worth asking a potential vendor what their experience is with US building codes as opposed to, say, Australia. But this is an asset that an outsourced company can offer as well, a skill set that the engaging firm might not possess.

How do you de-code communication styles?

Darren: When considering an outsource provider, ask about their experience of working with Westerners, and specifically with different types of Westerners: Americans, British, Australians, Germans – even within a single country there are regional differences in attitude that can be important. These attitudes inform the communication style. After all, with a remote team you’ll spend 99% of your time with them as phone or email communication. When someone makes a statement, you have to interpret it according to local conventions.

For example, at a former position we had offices in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. Each office produced the same quantity and quality of work, but their attitudes towards getting it done were radically different. In New York, everything was speeded up – “go go go”. San Francisco was more laid back: “OK, we’ll take care of that.”

Specific to Indians and their native languages (the majority of Indians are bi- and trilingual), they speak quickly. You can miss up to a third of what they’re saying. But, in business they will restate everything at the end of the conversation, and that is THE critical piece of the conversation. They will base their understanding on this summary. Later on, if you discover that the quality is not what you needed, they will refer back to this portion of the conversation to show how they arrived at their final work product.

Email is another realm. We communicate so much via email, and if those email messages are very terse, it can be hard to know what someone actually meant. I subscribe to The Times of India via Facebook as a way to learn how to read ‘Indian’, and the commenters often use an Indian texting style with alternate spellings that make sense if you say it out loud, but you have to read it with a Hindi accent. With written language, you have to slow down. You can’t just fire off a response. Take the time to really read what they wrote, then figure out what they meant.

But eventually you have to learn enough to be able to immediately respond. A lot of cross-cultural communication really hinges on this first response, or their reaction to something you did. But you have to step outside of your own culture.

You’ve mentioned that even design can be outsourced. But design seems so… sacred.

Darren: Hah! There are no sacred cows here, as I recently learned. One Saturday there was actually a cow on my street in India, which was unusual for that street, and a very odd thing happened. Within seconds, a young woman appeared on a bicycle with a stick and started whacking the cow to get it to move. Cows may be revered in India but they still can be motivated to do what you want.

Confronting the sacred cows of our own preconceptions can be a very "moooo"-ving experience.

Our preconceived notions about design are a kind of sacred cow, too. Not that it isn’t a wrenching experience to give up some of the creative design work. It’s easier to give up technical documentation. But here’s an example of how we did it recently.

A recent design project we had involved a large British firm. In the U.K., it’s much harder to downsize and lay people off in the U.K. than it is in the U.S. So this firm had already set a ceiling for how big they wanted to grow. Then they won a very large project, so large in fact that they were forced to outsource much of the design. They had 1/3 of the design team in the U.K., and then the remaining 2/3 of the team was at Satellier in India.

What evolved was a hierarchical design process where they set the partí and the general direction, and then we would design according to their high-level directives. This was the first time we had to design directly from a conceptual standpoint, and we had to document the process of questioning and answering that happens as a part of design. It’s not about outsourcing the creativity, it’s about decision making, so that the outsource firm can make decisions in the same way that the client would be making them.

The division of labor for design tasks involves multiple levels of decision-making, with the primary design firm providing overall guidance, with the outsource firms also responsible for some portion of the creative work.

Design is quantifiable in some ways, in terms of quality control and noticing where the process works and where it doesn’t. Outsourced designs already occur in other industries such as product design, clothing design, and manufacturing design (prototypes).

Outsourcing can help smaller firms to win bigger projects without having to ramp up and do it all themselves.

Darren: It’s one way for a smaller firm to have a bigger piece of a project than they would otherwise be able to handle. That’s one thing that small firms who were early adopters of BIM and Revit taught us all. They made the transition from using drawing tools to information modeling. Suddenly a small firm could produce the same quantity of work as teams three times their size. A firm of 2-3 people could manage an outsource team of 10.

By teaming up with an outsourcing firm, not only can small firms do more work, they can gain work in new sectors, with the outsourcing firm providing specified expertise and skill sets that the bidding firm may not possess themselves.

Outsourcing for small firms can be beneficial in that they don’t have as much employee overhead. They can staff by project and gain the ability to scale. The downside is that you have to pay the outsource firm on a regular basis. You might get paid based on milestones of project completion, but the outsource firm may need to be paid monthly. So you have to plan for this upfront.

Any famous last words?

Darren: Hmm, how about “Try it, you might like it”? More seriously, don’t view outsourcing as a necessary evil. Embrace it as a way to grow your business and increase your reach. It’s all in how you use it.

[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.

Recently, I attended “KA Connect 2010”, a conference focused on the growing role and importance of knowledge management and information systems in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industries.

Christopher Parsons, founder of Knowledge Architecture, a San Francisco-based knowledge management and information systems consulting group, organized KA Connect 2010. His premise for doing so is clever and impressive. Chris had many questions and ideas with respect to information technology as an influence and driver of architectural and engineering practice and of the construction industry. Rather than pick up the telephone and, sequentially, call everyone he knew in order to exchange ideas and to obtain data one-on-one, he organized a conference and invited everyone he knew that might help inform the current state of IT.

Can you still expect to use old-school tools to design a twisted glass tower like this one?

KA Connect 2010 was the result of his effort: more than 35 speakers participated in the conference, representing the spectrum of AEC professionals: architects, engineers, software developers, client-side construction managers, business development consultants and outsourcing consultants. All were brought together for two days of 360 degree, highly interactive knowledge sharing, structured in an unusual and effective format. Talks were short and numerous, and were divided into two categories: “Blue Sky” talks focused on new trends now in development but that have not yet been integrated into practice. “Pecha Kucha” talks focused instead on issues relevant to current practice. The gap between these two perspectives on information technology and its role in the world of AEC, presented a rare opportunity to speculate on how to transition from present to future practice.

The Benjamin D. Hall Interdisciplinary Research Building designed by M.A. Mortenson Company was a winner in the Third Annual BIM Awards. In this case, the technology wasn't used so much to create a wild shape. Instead, it was used to facilitate the integration of complex MEP systems within tight zoning constraints.

[Note: I found an interesting in-depth discussion of both the BIM projects shown in this article.]

Part 1: How We Build

Volker Mueller of Bentley Systems and Calvin Kam from Stanford University kicked off first group of presentations. These speakers focused on the relationship between theory supporting software development (Parametric Design Knowledge) and the growing prominence of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in practice. These observations were complemented by a testimonial by John Moebes of Crate and Barrel, whose talk, “Design-Build-Bid” emphasized the need to “design the procurement” at the onset of a project. By doing so, project costs can be closely controlled while assuring high-quality output, consistent with the owner’s expectations.

The Loblolly House by Kieran Timberlake Associates used BIM technologies to facilitate simultaneous offsite fabrication to required tolerances, to spot design problems before they caused delays and waste, and to coordinate schedules and construction more efficiently. This project was also an award-winner in the Third Annual BIM Awards.

Subsequent speakers addressed the practical pitfalls characteristic of the current state of design practice. Paul Coates of Salford University in the U.K. compared open and closed models of person-to-person information sharing between architects in the public and private sectors in Britain. His point of view was that, architects employed in the public sector historically had access to knowledge about the client’s ultimate goals with respect to program and budget. In contrast, the private sector architect works in relative isolation, and seldom has access to the client’s high-level, long-term project goals. In the absence of these goals, Coates proposes, the value of the architect as vision facilitator is compromised. In order to derive the greatest benefit from the architect-client relationship, the client should share the goals of the project openly.

Andrew Arnold of Reed Construction Data addressed the challenge inherent in the inefficiency of finding and organizing elements and objects in the use of Revit and other BIM design software.

Taking a different perspective altogether, Justin Quimby of Quimby Heavy Industries compared the BIM model to the design methodology in his field of game design. Rather than rely on repetitive iteration and construction of data, a condition Quimby refers to as “Friction”, Quimby advocates for the development of “middleware”: software expressly designed to reproduce design elements that are used repeatedly. Quimby advocates for saving brain power for high-level creative endeavors, relegating repetitive tasks to software: “If you can do something by hand, build a tool to do it”.

Even our models of what knowledge "looks" like might have to radically change - after all, a linear or sequential hierarchy is only one of the almost infinite ways in which information can be encoded and accessed.

Josh Lobel (The Josh Lobel Initiative, Philadelphia, PA) addressed the leap that designers have to make in order to create coherent data that translate from design to built structure. His recommendation: “Think about how you talk about what you do.” In contrast to Quimby’s point of view, Lobel advocates the philosophy promoted by Richard Sennett, author of the book, “The Craftsman”:  repetition is actually a means of skill-building. Here, we address the need to remain in control of the software and to continue to treat it as a tool for design, rather than risk letting the software design for us.

These points of view were synthesized into the design approach implemented by Gehry Partners LLP. Michael Kilkelly described the Gehry process of translating hand sketches into physical models and subsequently into digitized models. The resulting data serve as the basis of the final design, such as was the case in the Beekman Place tower in New York. Kilkelly advocated for lots of friction in the design process! Only in that way, the use of friction as a “brake”, can we assure ourselves of authentic engagement with the design process.

Freeform shapes can be challenging to build. BIM is useful for generating the detailed technical renderings necessary for actual construction.

Future Installments

The remaining sections of the conference will be addressed subsequently in posts on Practice, Collaboration, and Learning.

About the Conference Sponsor

Knowledge Architecture, the sponsor of the KA-Connect Conference, is a knowledge management and information systems consultancy based in San Francisco focusing particularly on building dynamic, integrated intranets for small and mid-size architecture and engineering firms in order to provide them with the same strategic and technical resources as larger firms.

Speakers’ contact information from the conference can be found here.

On Friday, December 4, from 1:00-2:30 pm, the AIA San Francisco Office is hosting a seminar titled “The 2.0 Practice”. Mark English will be co-presenting at an elite roundtable discussion on the impact of social networking on design practice, including strategies that other firms can use to incorporate social media into their overall business plans.

Featured speakers include:

• Architect Mark English, principal of Mark English Architects and creator of two blogs: The Architect’s Take and Green Compliance Plus
• Interior designer Joel Robare, principal of JR Studio, a boutique firm with offices in San Francisco and Chicago
• Mike Plotnick, corporate communications manager for HOK

Traditional media, shown at top, do not offer the scalability and interactivity of social media.

This post will be published live during the seminar, and we will be inviting people to comment afterwards on what they got out of it.