Month: August 2017

A checklist to tell if you are in a design studio or architecture cult?

A checklist to tell if you are in a design studio or architecture cult?

Peter Raisbeck

During the week, I watched a documentary on L. Ron Hubbard the founder of the Scientology religion.  It was fun to read about Ronnie and his Sea Org followers. This also made me think a bit about the architecture cults I have known. At the same time, I was also communicating on social media with someone who thought that, the complete lack of interest, or knowledge, regarding money by architects is bred into young architects at architecture school. This made me think that architecture school was also like a kind of cult thing. Lets face it for many of us architecture school was a cult experience. 

My friend argued that at archi-school we learn: it is noble and heroic to “struggle” and “starve” for our vocation; we learnt that we should never “sell-out” to the Money God; and we can only ever be validated through our own architectural integrity. In other words, as my esteemed friend noted, we are taught in architecture school, through the studio system, that the only thing that can validate our existence as individuals is our wonderful designs.

That’s ok if you have decent work or designs that will actually validate your existence. Hard to do if you only ever do bathroom renovations. Most architects seem to struggle to even get one great project designed and built.

My cult memberships 

Yes, I also drank that Kool-Aid at architecture school as well. I drank a lot of cultish Kool-Aid there. I suppose the first archi-cult I fell into at architecture school was the Aldo Rossi cult. I wanted to be in a car accident just like him. Then design a cemetery.  Then it was the Carlo Scarpa cult. I wanted to live half the year in Venice and the other half in Istanbul. Then, of course, the Corbusian cult. I wanted to start a practice in Chandigarh. For a while I was in love with Michael Graves and I wanted to draw classical figures on yellow trace just like him. I wanted to channel James Stirling and go live in the Florey building in Oxford. For a young architecture student from the outer suburbs, where the consumer consumption roller coaster reigned supreme, all of this Modern and Post-Modern architectural goulash was heady stuff.

At architecture school, I also fell in, as a follower, with a few of the local heroes. I followed around a few of these emerging architectural cult figures until they gave me a job. Then, usually, they sacked me. It was almost like every semester I was in a different studio cult. I was always so desperate to fit in.

The problem is that the norms and forms of cult behaviour ingrained into us as architects means that not only are we architects hopeless at money, but, we are also hopeless at management. As a profession, we need to get out of the ever diminishing and downward spiral of cult behaviour. It’s not healthy because most cults rely on charismatic, leaders, bizarre initiation rituals and secret circles of knowledge. Sounds like Architecture doesnt it?

Usually these cults favour those who will do whatever the cult leader says. These architectural cult leaders often take their cultish and bad behaviour into their firms. Maybe thats why architects are crap at management. Architects need to avoid the cultish behaviour. Because it is actually brutish behaviour. In your current studio, office or project team ask yourself the following questions:

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Charles Manson

The architectural cult checklist

  1. Authoritarianism or paternalism without accountability. Only the lead architect or studio leader can make decisions or is empowered to do so.
  2. No tolerance in the group for critical questions or inquiry. The architect or studio leader only likes the followers who ask the questions that affirm the cult. Followers compete for the leader’s attention.
  3. No open and transparent disclosure regarding the project or the client etc. Information “leaks” out to the followers. Some followers or team workers get more privileged information than others. Followers spend time second guessing the leader.
  4. Unreasonable criticism about the broader architectural culture outside of the office or studio. There are enemies and tribes and other architects or styles to envy or hate. A us against them mentality.
  5. There is no legitimate reason to leave: former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even “evil.” They are never seen or spoken to again. They are seen to have made bad career choices.
  6. You work lots of overtime and your remuneration is not aligned with the agreements and awards. You do things that effectively subsidise the office. You are literally paying ypur employer to work where you work.
  7. The charismatic architect who leads you is abusive and may often get angry. The tantrum over “design’ or “aesthetic” issues is all too common.
  8. You feel that you can never be good enough or you will never get it right.
  9. The architect or studio leader is always absolutely correct and never wrong.
  10. The architect or studio leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.

Most architectural teams and studios (and even bigger organisations) will exhibit some of these tendencies to a degree. But, if there are too many of the boxes ticked in the above list, then you are possibly and most likely in cult territory.

Cult’s never really last

Inevitably these cults implode, they are by their nature self-sabotaging, self-destruction of one kind or another, staff turnover is too high (costly), or things don’t get done properly (implementation issues). Usually, the architecture is actually not as good as it could have been with better less cultish management in place. 

It is an easy thing to do. Being in a cult as you develop has its place but not forever you as you will end up like Gollum living in the shadow of some minor architectural cult leader

When I left architecture school no wonder I wanted to start my own cult. I wanted to be the cult leader rather than the follower. This of course, caused all sorts of problems. I think at the peak of my cult when I taught and was in practice I may have had, 6 and possibly 7, followers. I was on fire. Just like all good cult leaders.

According to my blog stats, and Google Analytics I now have a few more cult followers than suggested above.  So, thank you so much to all of you who follow this blog and watch out for the next blog which will come to you from London as I attend ARCOM 2017 in Cambridge. 

 

We Need To Talk About MONEY: 10 profit drivers of small architectural practice.

We Need To Talk About MONEY: 10 profit drivers of small architectural practice.

Peter Raisbeck

I can already see the disgust in the faces of those of you who have just read the title of this blog. This is supposed to be a kind of architecture blog and not a money blog. The P for Profit word, and of course, the D for Drivers word. Some of you will also be thinking we never talked much about money at architecture school. So why should we talk about it now?

The AIA in America (not the other Australian one with the similar acronym) 2016 Firm Survey reports that in American firms in 2015 9.7% of firms were not profitable.  21.5% were very profitable with profits above 20% of revenue. 27.6% had profits of between 10 and 20%. But, for 41.2% of everyone else, they only had profits of less than 10% of revenue.

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In Sydney the other week, I mentioned this to another MBA graduate who was managing a large firm. It was the usual Architects with MBAs conversation, bemoaning the financial knowledge of architects. This person suggested that there would only be a “few firms” in Sydney that were making a profit of more than 10% or even 5%. If that’s all you are doing then you might be better off putting your money in the bank or buying some shares that will give you a 5 or 6% dividend.

The following is for you: 0 to 10 percent architects, for the architects, wanting to get out of the doldrums of low margin profits. There is no one silver bullet for making your small practice, or even large practice, more profitable. Unfortunately, managing a practice is about getting whole range of little things correct to make it profitable.

1. Don’t guess or make up your charge out rates.

Don’t guess it or make it up. I am thinking maybe there are still people who actually don’t bother to work out charge out rates. Your charge out rate has to cover your own salaries, superannuation and all overheads. The Australian ACA has a great tool that can be found here.

2. Charge for everything (and I mean everything).

Don’t give anything away for free. Not your Intellectual Property, not your time and not anything else. Think like a lawyer and charge your clients for copying, printing, travel and especially your EXTRA time. Charge for EXTRA time expended on a project as a result of client backtracking, indecision, planning or other stuff ups outside your control.

3. Fix (or actually have) your office systems

Ever get the feeling you are spending your life trying to find bits of information no matter in what format or where they are stored. The essential bit is being able to find information quickly and efficiently.  Having in place databases, filing structures and systems that makes workflows quicker is important given that your time is the biggest cost in a practice.

4. Negotiating: Say no and be willing to walk away

Don’t take on a job at a low price because you need the work. What’s the point of doing a job at such a low fee that you are either making a loss or you cannot pay your staff to do it. That’s like you are actually paying the clients to let you do the job.

5. Cash Flow

Sadly, this can be almost full-time job and requires constant vigilance. Get a bookkeeper. Cash flow is volatile. If you think architectural practice is about a steady stream of cash or revenues coming in you are very wrong. You need to manage the volatility of erratic and chaotic cash flows. Use the dreaded Excel sheet.

Figure out when your bills or expenses are coming in and when you will get paid. Try and understand the concepts of Free Cash Flow and Economic Value Added. Managing your cash flow means you will not crash and burn and always be lurching from crisis to crisis because you have no money for stuff. There is great advice and techniques here about Cash Flow management for small practices at Panfilo.

6. Looking after the talent

Don’t underpay your staff. That can be illegal. Don’t discriminate. Don’t treat your staff like shit. You will reap what you sow. It takes a lot of time and money to employ new staff. Don’t yell at them, don’t give them conflicting messages or information. Manage staff in a timely manner. Recognise if you are employing less experienced people who are cheaper to hire, then please help them to be more experienced.

This is a huge subject, and it goes without saying the better you can mentor, manage, and treat your staff the more profitable you will be. Take the time to be with them and provide them with everything they need to get things done for you. Managing and empowering your staff so they can do the boring stuff means more time for you to design.

7. Managing your portfolio of projects

Don’t try and design everything. Spend design time on the projects that matter to you. Decide which projects are trash-for-cash. Don’t waste your time on these get them done. For every five projects in an office one will be great, one will be a nightmare and 3 will bring in the dollars.

8. Competitive strategy

Having a strategy means you know what you are doing and what it is you will design. Don’t waste time designing things that don’t matter.

Every small practice, in my country does housing of some sort. Every architect says they are into sustainability. How are you going to market yourself so that you are seen to be different?  How is your practice going to deliver its services to clients in a way that makes them want to come back one day in the future?

9. Research

Do some research or design research (maybe the odd competition or speculative project) that will build design knowledge in your firm. Work on it when the drudgery of everything else gets to you. Build expertise in something you are passionate about and this will help you differentiate yourself and win work.

10. Operating priorities to build capability 

One thing at a time. Do you have an operational plan? A plan that helps you to prioritize the next three to six months? Do you have projects in the office that will make you more productive? Projects that build capability. Like sorting out the material samples, reviewing the marketing stuff, getting some new software?

Finally: Andy and Philip

For those of us who drank the Architecture Kool-Aid when we were young architecture students the future seemed rosy. Imbued with the Kool-Aid toxin I was convinced that I could make a go of it. I would live the jet-setting architecture lifestyle and hang out in the art galleries in NYC with the New York 5, Nico, Andy W, Lou and the Velvets, and go to a loft dinner with Fischerspooner and Laurie Anderson. We were spoon fed this stuff and these days the star-architect’s dream now seems embodied in Bjarke, Rem and Schoomie.

The more efficient and profitable your firm is the more time you will have for design. In a strange way design is actually all about the money. I am definitely sure Andy Warhol (and this most subversive of architects) would agree with this proposition as well.

Enough of the Parametric and BIM Stuff: Why we need to teach Excel in Archi-School

Enough of the Parametric and BIM Stuff: Why we need to teach Excel in Archi-School

Peter Raisbeck

The Salon on Standards

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a NSW Registration Board a panel discussion called the Salon on Standards. For those reading this blog from outside of Australia, the national accreditation board, or the AACA, administers the standards of practice. In other words, the knowledge and skill set that architects are required to learn at architetcure schools:

“The Standard describes what is reasonably expected of a person who can demonstrate the standard of skill, care and diligence widely accepted in Australia as a competent professional Architectural practitioner.”

On the panel we all decided that we love the standards and that they are an important element in the setting the territory of what architecture is as a discipline.

Firstly, a few acknowledgments.

Professor Kirsten Orr of UTAS was also on the panel and her history of the AACA has been ably and deftly researched, You can find her paper here. Plus, I also had the pleasure of being on the panel with Melonie Bayl-Smyth a Sydney architect and NSW board member. All of this was ably presided over by registrar Timothy Horton. Byron Kinnaird facilitated the discussion and  Professor Gerard Reinmuth of UTS was there and was generous enough to be gracious towards me. As well and as Martin Bryant head of the Architetcure School at UTS

What should we teach ?

So, what do we need to teach in the architectural curriculum? At the panel, I really shot my mouth off and blurted out all the things I think we need to teach architecture students: strategy, finance, research methods, negotiations, innovation and leadership. I may even have said ecology; as compared to that sustainability greenwash policy Kool-Aid we currently make the students drink.

In other words, money, (finance), management, (organisational sciences) and research methods, are mostly what is missing from our standards. These are all the things I think should be taught in architecture school but don’t teach. But then I wondered if we should make greater efforts to teach these things through the design studio rather than via various add-on subjects.

The Primacy of the Design Studio

When I was a wretched student, the people who taught, me were obsessed with design. I think it was partly a reaction to their own training in the dark ages when hard-core pragmatics and necessity ruled the day in the design studios. So, at my Archi-school in those heady post-modern years, it was about being free, it all became about conceptual design and design and design and design and design. It was all about the primacy of the design studio as a place where architectural knowledge is transmitted. As pointed out by Angers Bergstorm, Donald Schon in his seminal work The Reflective Practitioner identified the primacy of the design studio but Schon also argued against a design studio culture cut off and isolated from either practice itself or other knowledge domains.

Balance

So maybe Schon is now right and the balance has gone too far the other way. Maybe the Design Studio has so over swamped and taken up space in architectural education for the last 30 million years that it has now become isolationist. Sure, we all love our design studios. We all like to talk about them and use them to reach out to other disciplines and be trans-disciplinary. But are we as trans-disciplinary as we make out? Should other knowledge be inscribed into the competencies we need to learn? Maybe what architects and architectural educators, are really doing too often, is importing knowledge into the studio for quick and easy adaptation. Maybe, this process is too often too token.

I think in the past building types and programmatic typology was seen as the stable point of architectural education. It was thus easy to design an architecture course around types. Architecture schools kinda went like this. In first year, they messed with your mind, in second year you designed a house, then in third housing and then, maybe a school, and then in final year a grand institutional building. I guess in many places this is still how it is done.

Data overload

But with new technologies alongside the fragmentation of cities into smaller and smaller bits, that can be plugged in to other bits to make money, the typological understanding of buildings and the city no longer seems relevant.

As architects, we are confronted with a never-ending flow of fragmented, variable, disjointed and seemingly disconnected data. In saying all of this, I am not tryng to argue, the old chestnut of, what we teach at Archi-school is too theoretical, or not pragmatic enough, or is not making the instantly graduates “employment ready.”

What I am saying is this, we really need to have this debate as a profession: What is that we should be teaching in the architecture schools? What should we be teaching in our offices as young architects leave universities. I guess if you never learn about money, managing stuff or organisations at Archi-school you don’t often think about the need for career pathways for young architects.

 The problem of specialisation

Fragmentation and specialisation within our discipline is a problem when we have to teach design. The problem is everyone in architecture thinks their own specialisation or field is the design studio: The architects with construction knowledge, think their subject is what a design studio should be all about; the architectural historians think their subject what the design studio; the sustainability architects think their subject are what the design studio should be all about; The workshop digital fabricator types think subject are what the design studio should be all about.

But actually, the design studio is a place where all these things are supposed to come together. Not as add-ons, not as a few guests, but a place where different knowledge territories are debated, analysed and then synthesised into the design process. That’s what design studios are about. About getting the balance right. Design is design and should never be beholden to one specialisation.

Finally 

The Salon on Standards was great. They even took me out for dinner afterwards and I thought that they had developed a great sense of community between the profession the NSW registration board and the school at UTS. We need more of that and now that the Australian Institute of Architects and the Registration boards appear to have parted ways its great to see what the NSW board is doing. It even runs the Sydney Architetcure Festival. 

But next time I run a studio, I might just get the students to design something using an Excel Spreadsheet. Maybe some Discounted Cash Flows or some funky Population Ecology Dynamics. Yip, as well as ecology we might even discuss money in the studio. Think what might happen if we actually had architectural graduates who knew how to use Excel as well as the all consuming Revit?

 

 

 

The story of the Gloop and emerging architects

The story of the Gloop and emerging architects

Peter Raisbeck

A few years back I was invited to do a poster, so I made a kind of comic which I then turned into a larger collaged piece within a frame. Given my total, and in some ways perverse, avoidance of digital skills I have always been more comfortable creating with photocopied images from books using crude collage techniques. My brain is a library of all the images and memories of architecture I have consumed in life. Some of these are in the Gloop narrative.

When I produced the Gloop collage it had been quite some time since I had actually done anything creative. This was because in some ways being creative was beaten out of me at architecture school. Firstly, I wasn’t good looking or charming or genteel enough to get a High Distinction for my architecture thesis. The High Distinction in my year went to the taller, good looking architect, who then went to the east coast graduate school. I was pretty annoyed that my tutors gave him an extra two weeks to do his work. Arguably, my special brand of thesis craziness, evidence by my drawings, was never going to get the big mark. But nonetheless, it certainly wasn’t a level playing field and that is probably why to this day I feel that studio jury and moderation processes in architecture schools need to be absolutely transparent and fair. The masculine clubs, networks and pedigrees that seem to confer design authority on some and not others has always repulsed me.

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Architecture Thesis 1986: Federal Court of Australia 

When I did my Masters of Design after my Bachelor of Architecture I tried to design a few things but was beaten down by the tutors whose idea of architecture was so precious, and dare I say it anal, that every fucking line had to be argued and justified. I certainly didn’t think that designing was about drawing the same line over and over again, until you break out into a sweat,  and then finally, and inexorably, draw an oblique line; or get some banal insight into a typological context or history that propels you to draw more of the same lines again. Or worse still, draw the lines over and over again, waiting around for some second-rate “Master” or auteur to tell you what to do when they get back from the client meeting.

Even when I was in practice there were only a few things I felt I had actually designed. Mostly, these were competitions which were always won by the usual suspects, and lists of big networked firms, who had lots of infrastructure and staff. Everyone else seemed to win these except for our practice. Well thats how it felt at the time. We did about four or five competitions over about  2 years and no-one who mattered really took much notice. Doing these competitions killed the practice because of the resources they depleted.

None of our competitions were published and I had to grovel to get a sessional teaching job from the local overseas implanted head of the architecture school. The comic aesthetic didn’t really help. Nor, did it help that we weren’t in the boys club of that time. I drove cabs and my partner did planning gigs. Although, during this time in practice I did manage to design one thing that still exists today and I was relatively happy with. Even though the client wanted to sue me. After a while I ended up leaving architecture. I was so sick of it and the lack of opportunity and generosity and the clubbiness.

Nowadays, I really think we, all of us in the cult and discourse architecture, need to encourage small practices and emerging architects. We need more competitions, we need more enlightened larger clients who take risks with smaller practices and we need larger firms to mentor smaller firms. We need more mentoring and authentic career pathways in architecture. We need professional associations that actively foster and mentor small young practices. We need more inclusiveness. We need exhibitions that show what emerging prcatices are doing. We need to save and archive the outputs of the studios led by young and emerging architects. We need to look after each other.

By the time I did the Gloop collage I had come back to the fold of architecture. It was probably the first creative thing that I had done for many years. I did the collage in the space of two days. The collage and the images quickly came tumbling out. In my conceit, I felt like Ranier Maria Rilke at Dunio near Trieste when he wrote Duino Elegies, after not writing any poetry for a long time. Maybe, I should change my name to, or name my next child, Rilke Raisbeck.

But the real point of this is that it doesn’t matter how unksilled or messy we feel we might be as architects. As architects, we are all struggling in systems, or contexts, that do not seem to value our efforts. Despite my bloggy cynicisms, I think that even when we are unable to design or build, or we lose the competitions, or we go bankrupt, or the clients want to sue us, or we are discriminated against, we should never let go of our own ideas or sacrifice our continued learning and development as architects.

I hope you enjoy the story of the Gloop.

New Paths of Architectural Practice: Not everyone is going to be an architect with a capital A.

New Paths of Architectural Practice: Not everyone is going to be an architect with a capital A.

Peter Raisbeck

There has been a lot of chat lately about new models of practice. Increasingly, the scavengers and myriad tribes of architects that exist find it difficult to make their practices profitable in the face of intense fee competition and, what some have called, the economics of austerity. I have touched on alternative modes of practice in a few other blogs but I thought I would say a bit more.

No Silver Bullet

Foremostly, I am worried that practitioners think that there is a silver bullet or a simple solution to this issue. That we can wave a magic wand over the structure of their practices and it will all be better. I am worried that practitioners think that if only they had restructured their practice in a different way in the first place things would be easier. Yet, the legal and corporate frameworks for practice are normally quite limited within, and across different countries. There is no one way or legal “switch” that a practitioner can switch on or off if a practice is not profitable or not seeming to get anywhere. Changing the legal or financial structures may not change things. If you are not making money you are not making money.

The traditional models of sole practitioner, partnership or even company model appear to limit what architects can do. Some of the mega-firms, or Transformer firms, as I have denoted them elsewhere, seem more successful. They appear to manage ok, by virtue of being extremely large and having integrated service chains that provide a potential client anything; let’s not think too much about how these large firms might manage their taxation affairs.

Critical Regionalism

For many smaller scavenger and tribal practices there is still the dream of criticality at a local level. Of doing great jobs that people love in your own city, street or neighbourhood. Thinking about this reminded me that in the early 80s Kenneth Frampton argued for a new architectural culture based on critical regionalism. Frampton advocated an architectural culture and discourse that was resistant to what he saw as processes of universalization. Frampton argued that optimising technologies had delimited the ability of architects to create significant urban form. For Frampton, the work of critical regionalism a practice focused on, and grounded in local traditions and inflections, was intended in Frampton’s words to “mediate the impact of universal civilisation.

I think that much of Frampton’s dream has come to imbue much of what we value in Architectural Practice and design. The Pritzker prizes seem to go to regionally inspired and grounded architectural auteurs. In my country a lot has been written about the two main city based “schools” or traditions of work the Sydney School and the Melbourne School. But, I worry that as architects we have been boxed in and swamped by global capital and technologies while we clong to models of practice are focused on the auteur. I think the the dream of critical regionalism is something that perhaps masks the real situation: The continuing commodification of architetcural knowledge.

Exploring new models of practice.

A few years ago, I got my architectural practice students to do business plans for Social Enterprises. In other words, for enterprises that had a social purpose or profit. In my naivety I thought they would love doing it. The idea was to encourage the students to think about how they would use their architectural skills and knowledge to determine the nature of a new social enterprise. It was a way to hopefully get the post-graduate Master’s students to think, yes actually think, about different forms and models of practice.

The better social enterprise plans were encouraging.  A number of plans aimed to address gender discrimination. One plan looked at commercializing feminine hygiene products in order to get homeless woman off the streets. Another group targeted the architecture and construction workforce by supplying sustainable personal protective equipment and then investing the profits to advance gender equality in the design and construction workforce. A few projects looked at issues around waste and recycling. For example, one project looked at recovering discarded food and food waste. One of the better social enterprise plans produced by the students was based on putting beehives into social housing estates and then harvesting, marketing and the selling the honey. Thus, employing some of the residents in the estates.

Thinking outside of the box. 

But by and large most of the students hated the exercise, my student experience scores that semester tanked, and my academic masters wondered “WTF” I was doing. A practitioner associated with the school asked, “why are you doing business plans at all?” I think the social enterprise plan about the Bees was the one that really drove everyone nuts. Of course, it didn’t really help that I said in the Assignment instructions that: “There are no prescriptions for this assignment. On the basis of the business plan, you will be assessed as to how well your social enterprise will realistically establish itself, survive, and grow.”

So much for getting the students to think out side of the box and deal with high levels of ambiguity.  This year we went back to business plans for the straight-down-the-line architectural practices.

Abandoning the old ways

If we are to talk about different forms of practice then I think architects really need to abandon their pre-conceived notions of what practice is. There is no magic solution. We need to use our learned creativity and design thinking skills to embrace new ways of doing business. Not everyone is going to be an architect with a capital A. We need more beekeeping ideas.

A recent exhibition at the CCA, and now travelling, suggests that historically alternative practice doesn’t always have to centre on the single genius.  At any point in time architects have always sought to explore new models of practice and escape the constraints that beset them.

Thankfully, there have been those in recent years who have broken out of the old moulds of architectural practice. Collective and collaborative action is a common theme on my short list. Notably, and not in any order, the following spring to mind:

Assemble, Parlour, Forensic Architecture, ONOFF, Sibling, R&Sie and Group Toma.

These  examples suggest, a wider range of practice, as well as the different ways, that architects might now practice. I am sure there are also other examples and I will add to this list over time. Contact me if you know of anyone. But the final upshot is this: Architects really need to think about these new paths. Because, architects can’t be sure that the old ways are going to work for much longer.