Architectural Practice Today

 I have been in the architecture racket for a long time. My first job in an architectural office was before I went to architecture school. It was the one I mention in my earlier article, “Checking Architectural drawings and specifications”, that featured the drawing checker Mr. Brown. Its organizational structure was typical of the time: a Senior Partner, a Junior Partner, a design architect, a group of draftsmen, an Interior Design guy, and me, the Summer Gofer. I did many things that taught me a lot, none of which would mess up any of the active projects if I did them wrong. I was helped to get them right, of course. 

When I got out of architecture school, I was lucky to find myself a job in a very small firm whose two other members I already knew. Our team was the owner and the two of us. The owner got the work and initially did most of the design. As time went by, we became a very cooperatively operating outfit even as more people came and went. I later went to work for a larger firm, with a founding senior partner and two or three junior partners. In this situation, the architectural design was much more reserved to the partners, and the junior partners sometimes had their own projects, but the firm’s work was still closely identified with the founder. The rest of the staff were predominantly production people, with the usual tree of Job Captains keeping them in line.  

When I moved to the Bay Area the firm that hired me was a local partnership that was sold to a national firm when I was on the way to California. 

I think that this what has happened generally in the architecture business. The result is that the individual practitioners of the past are becoming rare. The big firms that have taken over have a certain headless quality that is more characteristic of the corporate world than the professional one. People of influence in the firm that I worked at in California seemed to be interested in climbing the corporate ladder in many cases and would move to a different firm if the opportunity arose. 

This has meant that a project might not have a readily identifiable “head”. The architectural team for a recent project for which I was the inspector changed completely during a couple of years of construction. The new people seem to be good, smart, and capable, but they have clearly had a lot of catching up to do, and it is not clear whether they have any deep identification with the project. Would they have designed it differently in the first place? Is it now just another “job”? 

I feel that this change in structure changes, in subtle but significant ways, the way the employees work and how they are treated. Excellence in design, which is nurtured by a degree of closeness, cooperation, guidance, and interdependence, is harder to achieve. 

There are other changes that have occurred. The technological revolution that makes what was a physical process into a virtual one is deeply significant. Of course, it is impossible to return the immediacy of drafting by hand --- the very word means pulling, drawing, the pencil or pen across the paper. The advantages of informational coordination and multiplicity of views and aspects are too great. But the relationships must be realized anew among all the actors in the design process. 

We have had a new obstacle put in the way by the requirement to thwart a destructive pandemic. I don’t know how today‘s firms have coped with the pandemic. At the very least, the necessity of working remotely adds to the distance between us when it is perhaps what we need most.  

In the face of the obstacles and changes in structure and technology that are part of the architectural world today, it must be necessary to spend some design time not just on the projects themselves, but on the very processes by which they are accomplished. It has always been my feeling that a cooperative, synergetic design and production environment is bound to be the most effective. What are the ways that this can be created or re-created? Who are the best people to have working together? What knowledge and skills do they need to have?  How can their capabilities and effectiveness be nurtured and improved? Where will these people be found? 

This is clearly a design project in itself. If Architects are trained designers, are they up to the task?