Kids’ Pod v1
Painted cement sheet cladding, timber external batten screen, timber framed strip windows, fixed timber louvres to windows, roof deck, steel ladder

What is it?

Our architectural design process at Mihaly Slocombe is pushed and pulled by many forces, though recent self-reflection has made us realise that perhaps no more so than by the opposing pair of conservatism and experimentalism. The conflict between wanting to be like everyone else and be different from everyone else sends powerful currents rippling beneath the surface of every decision we make.

On the one hand, architecture is a serious undertaking. It requires the commitment of very large sums of money and the preparedness of many people – our clients principal among them – to follow our creative vision even though they might not fully understand it. Spending hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars on an idea that might not work is not an easy sell. We make safe decisions: use details that have been successful in the past; choose materials that we know will be durable; work with consultants and suppliers that we trust.

This approach is not necessarily negative, indeed it leads to buildings that don’t leak, age well, are timeless. It makes sense to develop a common language through our opus that helps each project learn from the last. To paraphrase something we dimly recall Le Corbusier once said: we try to get the details right so the poetry of our ideas might be experienced unencumbered.

On the other hand, architecture is nothing without risk taking. We can’t live up to our duty as custodians of the built environment without venturing into the unknown. Be it a big idea about sustainable urbanism or a small idea about welded steel door handles, we must constantly search for the new: new possibilities for materials, new opportunities for inhabitation, new strategies for urban density.

Risk taking, together with its first cousin experimentation, involve nutting things out: on paper and in the computer within the studio; then with timber and steel in the factory and on site. It means prototyping options, testing the results, tweaking and testing again. It means evaluating materials and systems with our hands and bodies, understanding them at 1:1 scale. And through it all, it means accepting a certain level of uncertainty: the experiment may work brilliantly or maybe not at all.

Kids’ Pod v1.1
Corrugated steel cladding, short timber overlap junctions

Kids’ Pod v1.2
Long timber overlap junctions

Kids’ Pod v1.3
Galvanised steel vertical support battens

Kids’ Pod v1.4
Timber vertical support battens

Kids’ Pod v1.5
Green powdercoat painted support frame

Kids’ Pod v1.6
Shadowline joins at timber ends

Kids’ Pod v1.7
Overlap joins at timber ends

Kids’ Pod v1.8
Clear sealed cement sheet cladding

Kids’ Pod v1.9
Cement sheet cladding continues up to height of balustrade

Kids’ Pod v1.10
Clear sealed cement sheet cladding, black powdercoat painted support frame

Kids’ Pod v1.11
3x batten spacings to window louvres

Kids’ Pod v1.12
4x batten spacings to window louvres

Kids’ Pod v1.13
5x batten spacings to window louvres

Kids’ Pod v1.14
6x batten spacings to window louvres

What do we think?

The opposite demands of conservatism and experimentalism enjoy an uneasy and ill-defined truce within our architectural practice. It is hard to know sometimes whether or not we are just reinventing the wheel, a necessary individual journey perhaps but hardly experimental, or whether we are truly striking out into new territory.

The analogy of the baker

The architect spends her days working on projects with unique sites, clients, climates, histories, cultures, contexts and regulations. The ever changing matrix of these ingredients demands invention. Her designs are complex and unique, balancing the demands of their ingredients in new and unexpected ways. But are they experimental, or do they merely apply the same rules to different starting conditions?

In contrast, the baker spends her days baking the same, simple loaves of bread: every day, she makes baguettes, cobs and viennas. Experimentation is easy to detect and control here: an extra pinch of flour, a new seed or grain. It is the teacup principle at work, the daily sameness of the baker’s activity makes any change immediately recognisable.

The baker has three important lessons to offer the architect:

1. Simplicity. It must always be possible to distil her architecture down to a handful of essential ideas. These ideas drive a project and every decision it demands, from the largest gestures to the smallest details.
2. Critical self-awareness. She must understand her own design processes, the what, how and why of her decisions. Then she can begin to differentiate her successes from her failures.
3. Restlessness. She must learn to evolve her ideas outside of the specificities of a project. Only when she can distinguish between reinventing the wheel and true experimentation can she be sure she is pursuing the latter.

Kids’ Pod v2.1
Timber cladding, scissor lift external shutters, hit and miss vertical timber battens

Kids’ Pod v2.2
CNC routed shiplapped timber lining boards

In his recent Australian lecture tour, Small Projects, Malaysian architect Kevin Low exclaimed gleefully that his own house “leaks like crap”. Before trying something new with a client that might sue or vilify him, he first tries it out on himself. And so, our recent self-reflection has revealed, is the case with us. One of our projects currently under construction and the indirect subject of this article, Kids’ Pod, is for family and so has been the recipient of an unusually high dose of design experimentation.

Our experience of this project has so far been deeply gratifying: relentless design testing in the studio; exhaustive analysis of materials, finishes, junctions and details; collaboration with builder, engineer, craftsman; iterative prototyping in the factory. All of which is only now finding its way onto site.

In the studio, we began with an idea for the identity of the project: a place for grandchildren should be like a supersized cubbyhouse. We sought to embody qualities of robustness, playfulness, theatricality, secrecy, the treetops. We examined every element of the architecture: its programming, siting, proportions, material, fixing, finishing, junctions, span and spacing. We tested materials and interrogated their availability, durability and section sizes; we looked at corner detailing; we investigated the limitations of laser cutting and CNC routing; we examined solar protection options, from fixed louvres to operable shutters. We iterated our design over and over again.

Kids’ Pod v2.2.1
Steel shutter prototype

Kids’ Pod v2.2.2
CNC routed timber prototypes with varied board widths, varied hole sizes, spacings and depths, varied finishes

In the factory, we needed to discover whether our ideas were both possible and affordable. We worked with our builder and metalworker to devise a prototype for an operable shutter system: we tested cladding weight, examined bearing options, shifted stopping tabs by 10mm. We worked with our timber supplier and CNC router to test cladding board widths, holes sizes and positions. We had our painter coat samples of both external cladding and internal linings with various finishes of various gloss levels. We returned to the studio to extrapolate our findings and then went back to the factory once more.

On site, it is all coming together. Kids’ Pod has a slab, wall framing, services rough-in, roof framing and roof cladding. The operable shutters are pinned temporarily in place while we wait for windows to arrive on site. Once installed, cladding boards will be installed, then insulation, internal linings, services fit-off, joinery, finishes.

We have yet to confirm how we will lift the operable shutters: we have ideas, but they have yet to be tested. We will order some components – a cheap boat winch, a couple of electrical switches, some wiring – and see whether they work. Fingers crossed our mathematic equations will permit the shutters to break smoothly open and not bind on themselves. We have yet also to decide on the finish for the timber cladding: do we want it to retain its colour or grey off? We will investigate the best sealers to use to achieve both the former and the latter.

What can we learn?

Architecture is a long game, with development in our ideas and processes leap-frogging across projects that take years to execute. It is tempting for us to err towards conservatism, easy for us to lose sight of the bigger picture. The complacent architect responds by falling on the crutch of familiarity, but the genius manages miraculously to hold onto the trajectory of the bigger picture. It is whispered for instance that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had only one design idea, which he used for all his projects and evolved carefully across decades.

We can aspire to Mies van der Rohe’s commitment and self-awareness (though perhaps not his myopic focus). In a philosophical sense, this means an abundance of deep thought and self-reflection: a dedication to the long play. Practically, it means establishing the rigour of critique, regular intra- and inter-studio design reviews whose aim it is to draw out the meanings of things.

It also means a commitment to research and experimentation: architecture exists at the intersection of ideas and making. These realms collide in all sorts of interesting ways, both limiting and accelerating the other. A thought on paper is just as easily resolved as hindered by the exigencies of craft. It’s only when we put them together, shift from the representation of the thing to the thing itself, the architecture, that we can find out whether or not our ideas will work. And so it comes back to risk taking and the value of experimentation.

We guess it’s not called architecture practice for nothing.

Kids’ Pod v3
On site, construction underway

Who was he?

The name, Robin Boyd, should be known to every Australian architect. He was a Melbourne architect prominent in the postwar era, but many decades ahead of his time. He was a proponent of an environmentally sensitive and locally specific adaptation of modernism, a teacher, a writer, an ambassador for the profession, and a political agent committed to the advocacy of good design.

Boyd was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal in 1969 in recognition of “the many distinguished works of architecture and architectural writing for which he has been responsible.”

Though his design career encompassed a number of larger works, including churches, colleges, some of Australia’s first motels and the Australian Pavilion for the 1967 World Expo, Boyd’s enduring focus was in the residential sphere. Working predominantly with lower income families, his houses were the results of an egalitarian commitment to accessible architecture. In a country staunchly and inexplicably devoted to housing designs poorly suited to its culture, climate and construction technology, Boyd utilised effective design, simple materials and new prefabrication methods to provide cost effective, high quality buildings.

Throughout his two hundred or so completed houses, Boyd’s work was characterised by restrained materiality, a sympathetic engagement with the natural landscape and a warm humanity. They were also polite buildings, as mindful of their neighbours and streetscapes as they were their internal amenity. A half century before the Victorian ResCode planning scheme enshrined in regulation the need to consider a building’s impact on its surrounds, Boyd’s work sought sensitive solutions for both his clients and the built environment.

As indicated in the Gold Medal citation, this approach was reflective of a broader dedication to good architecture and the propagation of its values to all Australians irrespective of wealth or background. In addition to his residential work, Boyd is remembered for The Australian Ugliness (1960), a timeless attack on the fickleness of Australian cities and one of nine books published in his lifetime; the National Trust of Victoria, which he helped establish in 1956; and the Small Homes Service, whose first director he was from 1947 until 1953.

First edition dust jacket of The Australian Ugliness, 1960

What is his legacy?

More than any of his contemporaries, possibly more than any Australian architect since, Boyd’s engagement with architecture and the built environment extended far beyond the confines of his individual projects. The Small Homes Service and associated lifestyle articles in The Age influenced a large part of an otherwise design illiterate public; his lecturing posts at universities here and abroad influenced the next generation of architects; and his publications have continued to influence every generation since. If we were to distil all of these activities, and the values behind them, into a single phrase, it would be to expose the general public to the benefits of good architecture.

Since 2005, this philosophy has taken formal shape in the Robin Boyd Foundation, a not for profit organisation originally established by the AIA and National Trust, and committed to the continuation of Boyd’s legacy. Beginning with the purchase of Boyd’s own house in Walsh Street, South Yarra, the Foundation now runs half a dozen open days a year providing access into modernist and contemporary houses; seminars from contemporary architects and their clients at Walsh Street; annual publications returning Boyd’s writings to print; and, beginning at the start of this year, an intensive workshop session for architecture students not unlike the Ozetecture Summer School in Sydney.

These programmes all share a common DNA intimately tied to the Foundation’s mission statement. The open days are most representative: according to Tony Lee, executive director of the Foundation, typically 50% of the five hundred or so attendees at each open day are not associated with the design industry. Then there are the open houses themselves: otherwise inaccessible to the public, they are either modernist projects by Boyd and his contemporaries or new houses by some of Australia’s best architects. Here is an ongoing opportunity for architects and architecture to engage closely with the general public, and in so doing for the public to learn about the value of both.

There is another initiative the Foundation hopes to undertake, one that perhaps will even better respond to Boyd’s legacy. The reincarnation of the Small Homes Service as the New Homes Service will revive what we suggest was Boyd’s greatest achievement. Originally a canny collaboration between the AIA and The Age, the Service published weekly designs from 1947 into the 1960s for small houses of 100 – 120sqm in the Tuesday Age, available for members of the public to purchase for £5. Boyd accompanied each submission with articles offering comment on design and lifestyle ideas resonating with his modernist values.

The Small Homes Service was born from a simple idea, but achieved a sophisticated array of positive outcomes. Such a coup is almost impossible to imagine these days, addressing many of the aims that Boyd, and indeed the entire profession, holds dear:

• Boyd’s weekly lifestyle articles were eagerly anticipated, an injection of design culture both desired and valued by the general public.
• The complete design and documentation packages were available for purchase for what in today’s money would equate to $2,500, a fraction of an architect’s usual fee.
• The limited run of each design, capped at 50 editions, returned 40% of proceeds to the design architect promising an income similar to one-off projects while also providing a measure of exclusivity for purchasers. Much like a limited edition print of an original artwork, this was an immensely appealing way for homebuilders to achieve high quality design solutions with great cost effectiveness.
• The houses were built by sections of the public otherwise unable to afford boutique architectural design, thereby expanding the influence of architects rather than competing with their usual client base.
• And most importantly, the general housing stock was improved through the broader involvement of architects, developing real alternatives to the environmentally insensitive, cookie-cutter offerings of volume builders.

Lee believes the key to the success of the Small Homes Service was its ability to offer houses radically departed from the typical housing stock of the day. Skillion roofs, open plan living, planned extendibility, large expanses of glazing and northern orientation were at the time highly challenging concepts. Neil Clerehan, director of the Service from 1954 to 1961, adds that this success was also in very large part thanks to Boyd’s unique combination of qualities: a talented designer and writer, he was also a respected commentator and enthusiastic ambassador for the profession. The truth is revealed in the numbers: according to Clerehan, as many as 10% of all new homes constructed in Victoria during the Service’s peak were built according to its designs alone.

The New Homes Service will be established on the same principles as the original, but is likely to neither aim for nor achieve its predecessor’s impressive market saturation. Lee acknowledges that competing with today’s volume builders would be undesirable. Instead of trying in vain to match their prices, he instead sees the revitalised Service as a vehicle to once again test radical housing proposals. Arguing that Australia’s housing stock has remained largely unchanged since the significant leaps of Boyd’s era, perhaps design can once again transform the industry. Lee says he would be satisfied to achieve fewer built projects with the compensatory hope that, much like the car industry whose new technologies trickle down from the most expensive models to their utilitarian counterparts, new ideas achieved in those projects might have a positive impact on the rest of the housing market.

What should we learn?

To be successful, the New Homes Service will have to overcome significant hurdles not yet in existence in the 1950s. A wider array of lot sizes, established building stock in both inner city and middle suburban areas, stringent town planning regulations and more expensive construction costs will all take their toll. However, careful targeting might ameliorate at least some of these complexities. The larger lot sizes, greenfield sites and looser planning controls of the outer suburban growth areas are all conducive to the Service’s offerings, as is a population demographic usually more interested in volume built housing than architectural design. This is the one area of Melbourne where architects have the least involvement and where the New Homes Service stands to have the greatest positive impact.

A further challenge is the Service’s current lack of a media partner, a critical ingredient to the original’s success. Lee’s preference would be to have The Herald Sun on board, though how a newspaper, in today’s media-saturated environment, will help generate community interest and design sales is yet to be determined. Similarly, the absence of an environment in which an individual with Boyd’s complimentary talents in design, writing and construction finance, together with his willingness to act as ambassador for other architects, will further test the benefits of a newspaper mouthpiece for the Service. One thing is for certain; no single media outlet will be able to match the brand prominence Boyd was able to achieve with The Age. Maybe its natural successor is not a newspaper at all, but a television show like Grand Designs or another organisation entirely, unrelated by industry but connected through shared values and worldview.

Perhaps in pre-emptive response to this issue, Lee is taking a different strategy to Boyd’s original practice of anonymity within the Service. Due to what Clerehan explains was the common social practice of frowning upon advertising within the professions, Boyd architecturally edited submitted projects to suit the Service’s needs and then released them for consumption without attribution to their original authors. In poignant reflection of our contemporary attitudes towards advertising, the New Homes Service will conversely utilise established architects with their own cultural capital to attract early interest. For now, Lee is remaining tight lipped about whom he has approached, though we wager that the architects whose work features in various Foundation initiatives will be first on the call sheet.

This strategy indirectly highlights a challenge that is made all too clearly when reading The Australian Ugliness today, 53 years after its publication. The social, regulatory and communications conditions in Australia may have changed significantly since the 1950s, however our built environment is as ever riddled with poor quality housing. Looking back at Boyd’s ideals and considering the legacy he has left behind, it is unsettling to realise how many of the changes experienced by housing in the intervening decades have been negative. We may have planning regulations requiring consideration of neighbourhood character and amenity issues, but that has not stopped the bulk of housing becoming larger, more neglectful of the natural environment, less considerate of climate and less well designed.

This is not to suggest that architects are designing poorer houses, far from it. It is the absence of architectural involvement in what has anecdotally been described as 95% or so of all new houses in Australia that is to blame. If the architecture profession ever wants to shift this percentage in its favour, it needs to undertake a significant paradigm shift. If Boyd has taught us anything, it is that the conscientious architect is not just a designer of expensive beach houses. There is a social dimension to our profession, an important responsibility we have for the built environment. While there are any number of very good organisations engaging with the communities most in need around the world, there are few prepared to deal with the less glamorous, everyday kind of isolation experienced by the significant part of Melbourne’s population living in its outer suburbs.

Should it come into being, the New Homes Service may well respond to this challenge, however house design is only one part of a large, complex problem, nor does it eliminate the responsibility shared by the rest of the profession. What we are suggesting is not necessarily that architects design more houses. Indeed, Boyd himself recognised the paradox of this position, noting that “there are not enough artists to cover the world’s architecture; but if there were it might be too many”. Instead, we need to step beyond our design roles, take on advocacy positions, invest ourselves in political and regulatory change, and most importantly, expose the general public to the benefits of good architecture.

Walsh Street House, home of the Robin Boyd Foundation

This is the full and unedited text of an article by the same name that appeared in the March issue of Architecture Australia. A subsequent release on ArchitecureAU can be viewed here.

What is it?

A film by Mexican director, Alfonso Caurón, that explores the fragility of human inhabitation of space. Gravity begins 600km above the Earth’s surface, where a NASA Explorer shuttle is docked to the Hubble space telescope. Civilian scientist, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), is retrofitting the telescope as part of a scientific grant, employed we imagine to replace NASA’s dwindling government funding with private investment. Despite her determination, she is nauseated by the zero gravity, slow moving and clumsy. Floating with contrasting ease on a compressed-air thruster pack is Lieutenant Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a veteran astronaut whose cheerful countenance masks reassuring capability.

This is to be the last spacewalk for Kowalski, who will retire upon returning to Earth. His only disappointment is that his cumulative time in space will be 75 minutes short of the (correctly referenced) world record held by Latvian cosmonaut, Anatoly Solovyev.

Easy chatter between Kowalski and Houston is interrupted by a matter-of-fact announcement that a Russian test missile has accidentally struck a nearby satellite. The announcement feels commonplace and unthreatening, a scholarly observation. But it soon evolves into a mission abort order when shrapnel from the collision causes a chain reaction of further satellite impacts, flinging a cloud of high-speed debris towards the Hubble. As the cloud destroys satellite after satellite in its path, communication with Houston is lost. Within minutes, the cloud reaches them and rips telescope, shuttle and astronauts to shreds.

The boom to which Stone is tethered is sheared from the shuttle and both are flung away from safety in an uncontrollable spin. Stone manages to untether herself, but is unable to slow her spin and quickly loses all radio contact. The scene, of a tiny white figure alone against the vast backdrop of the Milky Way, personalises the devastation of the collision. For long seconds, the camera focusses only on Stone’s face and the panic written all over it: the tiny gap between life and death in space is made all too clear.

When minutes later (though it feels like hours) Kowalski locates and retrieves her, the feeling of relief that floods us is palpable. He is non-plussed, almost casual in his demeanour. Despite the extreme fragility of their circumstances, he calms both Stone and the audience, more reassuring than ever. Illogical as it may seem, we feel certain that both will survive this ordeal. Dear readers, we strongly encourage you to see Gravity for yourselves to discover how the rest of it unfolds.

What do we think?

Gravity is extraordinary, the simplicity of its story rendered perfectly by the grandness of its setting: a scientist is retrofitting a sensitive piece of equipment, a soldier is on hand to ensure she can do her work safely. Disaster strikes, and both scientist and soldier must struggle to survive. This trajectory could have easily been set in Afghanistan, out at sea or next to a volcano, but none of these would have matched the power and majesty of space.

It is a disaster film, as much about its magnificent use of computer generated imagery as anything else, but it nevertheless manages to convincingly flesh out the personalities of its characters. Caurón treats both Stone and Kowalsky with endearing tenderness: he makes us understand that they are good people, remarkable for having been selected to travel into space, but not superheroes. They are grounded by their own histories and aspirations, backstories that make sense of the actions they take under extreme circumstances.

Bullock is excellent. Her long conversations with American astronaut, Cady Coleman, have resulted in a character that is both physically and emotionally convincing: the way she gulps in air to calm her early nausea; her helplessness after she untethers from the shuttle; her swimming movement through the International Space Station. How she managed, in normal gravity, to film the motion of her limbs so they portray a person in zero gravity is beyond us.

But most arresting is the film’s unerring faith to the limits of reality. Caurón chose not to invent new spacecraft with which to tell his story, “why invent when we have the most amazing technology already up there?” He has anchored it instead in scientific fact: the shuttle, telescope and space station feel familiar and contemporary. The bulky suits, modern materials and micro-gravity of space travel are as close to the real deal as he could possibly make it.

Sound is critical in conveying this quality: the disembodied voices of fellow astronauts, pilots and ground base; the intimate sound of Stone’s breathing, and the way it changes when she is scared, exerting herself or low on oxygen; the low-tech crackle of radio chatter and the strange vibrations of tortured metal; and throughout it all, the uncanny silence that accompanies even the most horrific of explosions.

Poetic licence has been taken only with the positioning of the various satellites and space stations that comprise the film’s sets. In reality, it is not possible to travel from the Hubble to the International Space Station, nor from the space station to China’s space lab, Tiangong 1. Caurón acknowledges that these craft are carefully choreographed specifically to avoid the sorts of catastrophes that drive his film, but says “we had to put them in a similar orbital plane because otherwise we would not be able to tell the story.” An early script that attempted to stay true to every facet of the space programme was towering and soon discarded, “everything was just about explaining to the audience about all that stuff, so we had to try to create a balance.”

There is only one scene that strays from the strictures of reality, a scene that David Stratton argues “should never have been included.” We’re in two minds: on the one hand, it is the weak link in a film otherwise firmly anchored in, and made plausible by, the physicality of modern space flight; on the other, it is an understandable segue into the inevitable psychological distress that the preceding catastrophes would establish. Either way, by providing a framework for the bulk of Gravity of such convincing realness, Caurón has crafted an environment in which the most extraordinary of events are unimpeachable.

We watched the film in 3D at the IMAX cinema in Melbourne Museum, easily worth the extra $6 ticket price. If there were ever a film to convince us of the benefits of 3D cinema photography, this is it: its spectacular imagery of both orbit and collision are breathtaking. Where the perception of depth is constrained in other films by horizons and buildings, here there is only hundreds of kilometres of empty space.

Gravity is a tense film, not for the faint-hearted, and unexpectedly difficult for a parent to watch. But it is mesmerising throughout. 4.5 stars.

Today, Panfilocastaldi turns 3. We have survived another full year of blogging. We have narrowed our focus somewhat, engaging more deeply with events in Melbourne. We are writing less about art and photography, and more about architecture and architectural practice.

Our posts have become less frequent, but also longer and, we hope, more insightful. We were pleased this year to have our first articles published in other online outlets and print media. Our favourites from the past 12 months:

• Chutzpah. The first of 10 things one needs to start an architecture practice.
• Sharing is better than hoarding. A rallying call to the architecture profession to get better at sharing knowledge, processes and resources.
• The invisible profession. Generated contact from the legal department of the Australian Institute of Architects, identifying our unauthorised use of the AIA logo and instructing its removal. A plea to Victorian Chapter Manager and national CEO was to no avail. We removed the image and remain bemused that our first official contact was a legal sanction.
• Dear Sir or Madam. An open letter to architecture graduates revealing how to write a better job application. Useful too: we now direct all hopeful applicants to read and learn from it.
• The legacy of Robin Boyd. Our first commissioned article, for the March 2013 issue of Architecture Australia. Republished here 7 months later unedited and in full.
• Pretoria travelling studio. Our first article by a guest contributor, Jake Taylor.
• Out of Practice and Small projects. Reviews of lectures from inspiring international architects, Gregg Pasquarelli of New York and Kevin Low of Kuala Lumpur.
• Material 2013: An overview. The AIA 2013 architecture conference in review.
• Vote Flinders Street: conclusion. The last of many articles examining the much hyped Flinders Street Station international design competition.
• Bad architecture drives out good. A treatise on the demise of the built environment, and what we can do about it.

Once again, we have synthesised this year’s key statistics into a series of infographics:

And some highlights in plain English:

• 43 new posts, with a maximum of 11 in April of this year.
• 19 current post categories, up from 18 last year. 7 categories received no new articles, evidence of our shift in writing focus, while Architecture and Architecture practice, the 1 new category, each received 22.
• 139 new tags, bringing the total to 1,122 and ranging from Stalinism (1 post) to Australia (26 posts).
• 135 new comments, up from 84 last year and bringing the total to 331.
• An exponentially increasing 13,605 new spam comments, up from 2,055 last year and 408 the year before. This represents 98% of all comments making their way onto Panfilocastaldi.
• 40,479 new page views, bringing the total a touch past the magic 100,000 to 103,398.
• A slight reduction in our readership from last year, down from 120 to 111 page views a day. Our busiest month this year was surprisingly January, which has previously been amongst our quietest, with 5,534 page views or an average of 179 per day.
• Visitors from 154 different countries, ranging from Papua New Guinea (1 page view) to Australia (13,649 page views). Australia now outranks the United States as our number 1 source of visitors by a significant margin.
• 25,188 referrals from search engines, comprising thousands of unique terms predominantly in English, but also in Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Dutch. Our favourite, surely based on spoken words misheard, was, miss van dero.
• 3,582 referrals from 210 other websites, with a maximum of 881 of Twitter, supplanting Facebook as our primary social media platform.
• 83 blog followers, more than doubling our count of 39 this time last year, with a further 14 comment followers and 296 Twitter followers.

Thank you for your support this year. Who knows what 2014 will bring for us, or how Panfilocastaldi will evolve? For now, it continues to be a labour of love, self-sustaining because it is enjoyable for its own sake. If you promise to keep reading and commenting, we’ll promise to keep posting and replying.

Yours sincerely,
Warwick Mihaly, Erica Slocombe and Dew Stewart.

Last week a recent architecture graduate from the University of Melbourne, Graham Bennett, asked via Twitter what his social network thought about working for free. The barrage of responses from architects and commentators, myself included, was rapid and a little outraged:

It’s illegal.
Claire Hosking

It’s both illegal and illogical: if a practice needs you to do work, it should also be earning fees to pay you.
Warwick Mihaly

Students and graduates working for free endangers sustainability of honest practice.
Melonie Bayl-Smith

It reinforces poor business practices by architects! Morally and economically dumb.
Charity Edwards

You will learn more about architecture getting paid to push a lawn mower than working as an unpaid intern.
Clinton Cole

If students and graduates aren’t getting paid, or are getting underpaid, it’s time to name and shame!
Gintas Reisgys

Revolution!
Justine Clark

Though it’s possible that those with dissenting opinions were either too sheepish to contribute, or entirely absent from this particular network, the above comments reveal agreement among practitioners that graduates working for free is inappropriate and unethical.[1] This is echoed in the excellent speech given by the Australian Institute of Architects Victoria Chapter President, Jon Clements, at this year’s state architecture awards, where he condemned the retention of unpaid staff. He asked us to consider the “progressive compromise of our profession that results if we reduce the costs of delivering our services to unsustainable levels based on inappropriate employment conditions”.[2] Despite this, and despite the clear position of the Fair Work Act 2009 that all Australian workers must receive a minimum wage, we know it happens.[3] We know that in some practices graduates work for free, are underpaid, or work long hours without overtime.

The conditions that encourage this behaviour are embedded into the very fabric of contemporary architecture practice, making them hard to comprehend and even harder to remedy. There is insufficient scope within this article to meaningfully unravel these conditions, however I offer the following broad observations:

• Supply currently outstrips demand. The value of building activity in Australia since June 2008 has remained stagnant, yet there are around 1,000 students that graduate from Australian architecture schools each year. [4][5] To put this into perspective, since 2008 the architecture profession has swelled by nearly 5,000 new architecture graduates or approximately half the number of currently registered architects. [6] As Clements put it, the architecture profession is increasingly forced to compete for slices of a shrinking pie. Leading up to the global financial crisis, demand for new buildings was high, and the Melbourne skyline seemed to be decorated with as many cranes as skyscrapers. In 2008, enthusiasm for the construction boom led to Monash University opening Victoria’s fourth and Australia’s seventeenth accredited architecture school. Despite the clear downturn in the construction industry since the exhaustion of Prime Minister Rudd’s 2009 economic stimulus package, the schools continue to pour out graduates.

• Architects are undervalued. From my experience within our architecture practice, and according to the anecdotal reports of colleagues, architectural fees are under constant siege: by local Councils whose projects are procured according to fee competition; by residential clients who are unable to distinguish architectural services from those offered by draftspeople; by developers who prioritise the cost and timeliness of a project over design quality; and most disconcertingly, by architects looking to undercut one another. It is no coincidence that when the client sits down at the table with her architect, engineer, project manager, town planner and quantity surveyor, it is the architect who is earning the lowest hourly rate. It can be argued therefore that it is only natural that a profession as financially squeezed as ours will pass on its own poor remuneration to its staff. My Career analysis confirms this: in the third quarter of 2013, architects were amongst the most poorly paid of all construction occupations. [7] Our average salaries were less than those of all other sub-sectors save interior designers and draftspeople, and as little as half those of project and construction managers.

• Architects work for free all the time. In addition to inadequate fees, we spend a sizeable portion of our time doing work for free. We meet with potential clients, we enter design competitions, we undertake unsolicited projects, we write blogs, we do work for our families, and we offer opinions around Sunday barbecues. Some of this we do for the love of architecture, but all of it we do because the success of our practices relies heavily and somewhat frustratingly on serendipity. Every interaction we have with other people, no matter how innocuous, might lead to a future project. As such, we are obliged to treat each opportunity as though it will. I like to call this the long play. It is a strategy that relies on the prolific commitment to loss leaders: time spent willingly and for free now so that paying work may eventuate later. Since we inhabit a working environment where loss leaders are necessary for survival, who are we to criticise graduates from exercising the same long-range strategy?

• Architects are not businesspeople. Our savvy engagement with the long play aside, the architecture profession is dogged by a collective reputation as poor businesspeople. We barely know how to keep our invoicing straight, let alone appreciate the complexities of employee rights and ethical business conduct. This may in part be because many architects are in business to make buildings, not the other way around: we feel that business is for the bankers and accountants, we just want to get on with the real job of architecture. So, it is entirely feasible that architecture practices entertain the idea of volunteer staff because we don’t know any better. Perhaps, when we are regularly bombarded by graduates offering their time for free, temptation gets the better of us. For architects with strong design reputations, this is particularly true: working for a local starchitect carries a great deal of prestige so graduates seek them out even at the cost of lower salaries.

• Graduates want to get ahead. In our currently downturned economic environment, competition for scarce graduate architect positions is inevitably fierce. It is not enough to finish top of the class, nor have an impressive portfolio: graduates feel the need to think outside the box to obtain employment. In email correspondence following his controversial Twitter query, Bennett noted that his lack of experience and contacts is holding him back from finding employment. He would be happy to sacrifice pay for 3 – 6 months to gain that experience. He also pointed out that while working for free does not necessarily assign appropriate value to his time, it’s better than not working at all. A discussion with my Masters level Design Thesis students at the University of Melbourne revealed similar sentiments. While all were opposed in principle to working for free, deeper probing revealed that some were prepared to entertain it under certain circumstances i.e. working for the right architect, for a limited time, or with a guarantee of fast-tracked registration.

These conditions do not justify working for free, but they do serve to muddy the waters somewhat. It seems that the current economic climate is forcing the architecture profession into a tight corner (desperate times call for desperate measures) and I am left somewhat less certain about my position on this issue than when I first offered my quick response to Bennett’s tweet.

Importantly, what is revealed is that unpaid work is not a standalone issue: it is wound up with a plethora of other concerns, none of which can be solved on their own. Given this entrenched complexity, where and how could we possibly intervene to affect positive change? Do we tell the graduates struggling to find work to stop offering their time for free? Do we tell the architects whose fees are a fraction of their construction industry contemporaries to stop accepting them? Do we tell the universities whose federal funding is ever diminishing to reduce the size of their classes? Do we tell the profit-motivated construction industry to improve its valuation of the architecture profession at large?

There are no easy answers, but perhaps we don’t need there to be. Engaging unpaid workers has an ethical dimension that precedes any legal or economic influence. As professionals and as human beings, it is imperative that we conduct ourselves to the highest possible standard of social responsibility. Profiting from the free labour of staff does not accord with this responsibility, with our collective position as design and built environment leaders, or within the constraints of fair and decent behaviour. In ethical terms, it is much simpler to determine the correct course of action.

Any employer is in a position of power over her employees and as such has a duty of care to ensure their financial livelihood. As a colleague remarked to me, the limited experience of the graduate architect means she can only base her opinions on a restricted understanding of the socioeconomic framework in which she is hoping to work. The long play might be suitable for the principal of an architecture practice, because there is a clear understanding of the associated risks and an explicit transaction between the work done for free now and paying work received later. But a graduate is not yet fully equipped to foresee or extract the benefits from this transaction: what’s stopping her employer from accepting six months of free labour and then dumping her for a newer, fresher face?

Proponents for unpaid, studio-based internships might argue that it takes upwards of twelve months before a graduate is able to contribute financially to a practice anyway: why should we have to spend large amounts of time training graduates and pay them too? I return to the imbalance of power in the employer / employee relationship: the opportunity for exploitation is too easy. There is little preventing an employer from neglecting her role of stewardship, and it takes a particularly gutsy graduate to voice dissatisfaction with bad treatment. The Association of Consulting Architects warns against this outcome, citing expert legal advice from DLA Piper: “Where the arrangement between an architecture practice and an unpaid student takes on the characteristics of an employer-employee relationship, he or she may be owed minimum entitlements”.[8] What was initially promised as an unpaid internship too easily devolves into a position with the same responsibilities as any other paid employee. Even though the graduate may still learn a great deal, there is no guarantee of it, no regulated criteria by which to judge progress, and no way to enforce a commitment to a paying position at the end. Perhaps the introduction of a formal internship period under the oversight of the various States’ registration boards could alleviate these issues, but I know of no plans to implement such a scheme.

Discussing this issue earlier in the year on The Architects on Triple R, architecture critic Rory Hyde raised a further ethical criticism of the practice, noting that unpaid graduate positions bear an inexcusable social inequality.[9] In Japan, where starchitects are numerous, unpaid positions are commonplace and working hours are intolerably long, only the independently wealthy can afford to gain the necessary work experience. Poorer or unsupported architecture graduates, no matter how brilliant, are excluded from the best design studios because they can’t afford to both work for free and feed themselves. Transported to Australia, a country that rightly prides itself on its egalitarian values, this scenario is deeply unsettling.

We abolished slavery, set a minimum wage and established a 38-hour working week for good reasons, in short: to protect the quality of life of the individual. We were all graduates once, and have all benefited greatly from the generosity and tutelage of our own early employers. As we progress through our careers and move into positions of greater power, we need to protect and nurture our profession’s youngest members.

For me, the contemporary conditions that facilitate unpaid staff are not relevant, because the ethical position is clear: free labour might be tempting to offer and hard to refuse, but it serves the interests of neither graduates nor architects. As Clements suggested to the gathered crowd at this year’s awards, unpaid work fails to protect the future robustness of the architecture profession. He asked, “At what point do practices forget the real cost of the professional services that we should be expected to deliver? Do they stop to consider where the industry will be one year, two years or ten years down the track?”[10] If we are interested in the built environment, in good quality architecture, and in sustaining the profession for ourselves and for future generations of architects, we must promote a financial framework in which we are paid what we are worth to do the work that needs doing.

How this might be achieved is a subject for another day, though it’s safe to say that procurement methods for both public and private sector work, partnership arrangements on large projects, the financial structure of fee agreements, and the scope of services offered by architects are all in need of renovation. The improvement of public advocacy and our roles beyond the construction industry, in politics, media and education, is essential. Representational bodies must also play an important role. The Royal Institute of British Architects is taking a stand, warning last year that “practices which take on unpaid students will be stripped of their accreditation”[11] Will the Australian Institute of Architects get behind their Victorian Chapter President and take a similarly visionary position?

We may not be able to encourage Bennett and his fellow graduates to stop offering their time for free. We may not be able to prevent individual architecture practices from accepting unpaid labour. We may not be able to instruct the universities to reduce their class sizes. But we can and should work towards realigning our perceived value within the construction industry and the broader Australian experience. This is the break in the cycle our profession sorely needs, the one that will reverberate through all the complexity of our contemporary condition: it will help architects earn what we’re worth, ensure our graduates are paid fairly and allow us to keep doing what we do best.

This article is co-published on Parlour, an online resource on women, equity and architecture.

San Sebastian Kindergarten, Münster 2013

What was it?

A national lecture tour presented by the Australian Institute of Architects‘ 2013 Gold Medal recipient, Peter Wilson. In eloquent symmetry, Wilson returned last month to his alma mater the University of Melbourne to present the final lecture of his 10 day tour. The Carillo Gantner theatre was filled with a respectable though not overwhelming audience, the front row of past medallists and dignitaries most notable for its abundance of middle aged men.

Wilson delivered his lecture in an accent more non-specific European than Australian, a symptom no doubt of his late 1960s gap year to Europe that has never ended. He finished his studies at the Architectural Association in London in 1974, then went on to teach there for 16 years. He was Rem Koolhaas’ first teaching assistant, an intense experience it appears, as Wilson still recalls Koolhaas’ indomitable personality, “When you are with Rem, there is no room big enough for a second ego.”

In 1989, Wilson and his wife, Julia Bolles, won a design competition for their celebrated Münster City Library and moved to Germany to establish their practice, Bolles + Wilson. Though we see from their website that they entered this year’s Lodge on the Lake competition in Canberra and have completed a multi-residential project in inner Sydney (Victoria Park, 2006), we wonder how often Wilson returns to Melbourne and whether he still identifies with the much-altered built fabric of his home city.

The early competition win for the Münster Library has evolved to underpin much of Bolles + Wilson’s work, with libraries featuring heavily amongst their finished projects and competition entries still representing 80% of their portfolio. The Gold Medal jury acknowledged “that it’s not easy to gain commissions in Europe, however Wilson’s firm’s ongoing success with international competitions has intensified his reputation and further supplements his powerful collection of architectural works.”

Prime Minister’s Lodge, Canberra 2013

What do we think?

Bolles + Wilson’s projects share a DNA of formal invention, or as Sir Peter Cook has described it, recognisable armatures and “ship shapes”. In his introduction to the AS Hook Address, AIA Victorian Chapter president, Jon Clements, remarked on this quality as particularly Australian. At first we couldn’t see it, the projects, like Wilson’s accent, striking us as non-specific European in their urbanism and detailing. But further consideration has made us rethink this early impression: their often exuberant forms would happily snuggle up against the cerebral works of ARM or Lyons, and their bold materials and palette of primary colours have more than a little of artist Jeffrey Smart about them.

If anything, the Australian-ness of Bolles + Wilson’s projects lies in their playfulness, the gentle good humour they share with Wilson himself. Most illustrative is Suzuki House (Tokyo, 1993), an asymmetrical composition in concrete punctuated by unusual protuberances and described by Wilson as “a house glanced by a passing ninja.” In this instance the protuberances comprise a series of uneven windows and a small gantry crane to permit the delivery of furniture, however these design gestures reoccur at all scales of their work, fine details supersized to match the size and context of even their largest projects.

Wilson related an encounter he had with the daughter of his clients for Suzuki House some years after its construction. He was interested to discover if she had “suffered any psychological trauma as the result of growing up in the house,” but was bemused to discover that to her adolescent mind, the black ninja blob was the eye patch of a giant panda. To us, the eye patch, window protuberances and leg columns recall the fantastical creatures of Perth children’s book illustrator, Shaun Tan. We imagine Wilson would welcome this reading, his good humour masking a deep interest in layered narratives and unexpected interpretations.

Beyond questions of form and identity, Wilson spoke extensively of architecture’s relationship to urbanism. He described the Japanese city whose entire DNA is contained within every fragment; the impact of digital technologies on the centralised, European city; and of sequential planning, buildings that reference their context in turn becoming the context for yet other buildings. Here Wilson spoke with great authority, a result no doubt of his built experience across a dozen or so European countries.

New Luxor Theatre, Rotterdam 2001

Of the projects presented, the New Luxor Theatre remains for us one of Bolles + Wilson’s most engaging urban interventions. Located close to their earlier Bridgewatchers House (Rotterdam, 1996), it began life as part of a masterplan for the waterfront district of Rotterdam, its amorphous shape earning it the affectionate title, The Blob (or in Dutch, The Bloob). Formally, the red motif that defines the project begins with the flytower, in many ways the functional heart of any theatre, and wraps around all facades. Wilson remarked that the New Luxor is unique for having no back end, it is all front. Its organisation is in fact ordered around truck access, which for acoustic reasons is separated from the auditorium by a deep atrium. A ceremonial stair follows the truck ramp and atrium, a strategy that relates to Wilson’s “bottom up pragmatism, the design originating from the pragmatics of its context.”

Less urban but more fanciful are the executive offices for German furniture chain, RS+Yellow (Münster, 2009), a project Wilson revealed with canny showmanship and careful choreography. First he showed images of an elegant pavilion nestled within a large lake, an idyllic rural setting for an office building. Soon though came the big reveal: the lake is only a few hundred millimetres deep, spanning the 60 x 66m rooftop of a conventional warehouse building, “the Mekong Delta brought to the German suburbs.” A great deal of attention was paid to infinity edge detailing and compartmentalisation of the water, together intended to prevent wind-driven water from creating artificial tsunamis across the roofscape.

Finally, Wilson presented ideas of material, space and light, all tied together by what he termed operative beauty. In the Münster City Library, light is channeled down from the roof via long skylights, bounced off internal white walls and along the angled outer wall, clad in acoustic timber panels. The further one moves away from the timber wall and towards the depths of the library, the darker and more intimate the reading spaces become. Wilson explained that Bolles + Wilson developed from 3 to 12 people during the design and construction of this project. In addition to shaping their future expertise in competitions and libraries, its 3 year documentation period also defined their “entire language of details”, all the way down to custom cast-aluminium bookshelf legs that they continue to use today.

What did we learn?

During his address, Wilson presented a large number of projects, touching all too briefly on the significant elements of each. Covering so much territory, we found it difficult to draw out the essential themes of his architecture: Wilson’s ideas of bottom-up pragmatism and operative beauty could and perhaps should have filled the entire lecture. On the one hand, we suppose the very mandate of the AS Hook Address is to display a life’s work, but on the other, we feel it should also be an opportunity for self-reflection: to not just summarise, but analyse.

Assessing Wilson’s small drawing of Water House, Sir Cook notes that he has “yet to see a more evocative depiction of water and stream in any human-produced drawing.” We would have liked to learn more of Wilson’s attitude towards the drawings for which he is rightly famous, or the influence his expatriate identity has on his work, or Bolles + Wilson’s approach to winning competition entries and their general mode of practice.

This criticism aside, the extensive oeuvre of Bolles + Wilson is impressive, in both its typological and geographical diversity. We are keen to visit some of their projects as we imagine them to be even better in the flesh than they are on celluloid. Peter Wilson is a worthy recipient of the Gold Medal, another in the long line of Australian artists flourishing overseas and rightly recognised for his long career of important architectural contributions.

Water House, 1976

In the early 1960s, during construction of the Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon and his office designed and documented his own house in Bayview, 30km north of Sydney (1965, unbuilt). Utzon agonised over the extent of windows facing a particularly beautiful view. Should the wall be fully glazed or only partially?

After many weeks of indecision, he summoned his staff into the bush and down onto the beach. Utzon had them sit between two large sand dunes, facing towards the water. Their entire field of view comprised the straight line of the sea and curving lines of the dunes. “Watch and wait,” they were instructed. Presently, a seagull flew into sight from behind one dune, across their view corridor, and disappeared behind the other.

Utzon turned to his staff and said, “Only show a part, never show it all. The imagination can fill out the picture more powerfully than reality ever could.”

Palm Garden House, 1976

Who is he?

One of Australia’s most important architects, and also one of the most private, Leplastrier graduated from Sydney University in 1963 and worked with Jørn Utzon then Kenzo Tange prior to establishing his own practice in 1970. He works from his house and studio in Lovett Bay on small, intensely crafted projects. He draws by hand and builds 1:20 scale models detailed enough to be the blueprints off which his designs are built. He is a national treasure who was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1999 and made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2011.

Leplastrier presented the final lecture of the Zeitgeist series at Walsh Street last week, a collaboration between the Robin Boyd Foundation and Centre for Cultural Materials Preservation. The series sought to understand the consequences of making and conserving works of architecture, and to what extent their physical fabric is a measure of design intent. I discussed the first lecture of the series, given by Brian Donovan in February, here.

To wind down the last of the early evening light, Leplastrier began his talk without slides, reflecting on half a century in architecture. He spoke of his university years and the lasting influence of Lloyd Rees, with whom he and his fellow students drew and painted every Wednesday afternoon for five years. He spoke of his apprenticeship in Utzon’s office, still proud that he worked on the Opera House, if only for three weeks, and still disgusted that Utzon was exiled from the project and the country. He discussed his time in Japan, and life lessons learned under Tomoya Masuda, the subtlety of that culture mingling with the brashness of his own middle-class Australian upbringing.

When afternoon eventually graduated to dusk, Leplastrier segued into his visual presentation, beginning with photos of the people by whom he has been most influenced: Rees, Utzon and Masuda principle among them. Then, a selection of slides from around the world that are to him archetypes of sustainability, beauty and cultural value: the Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen, a masterpiece in brickwork so perfect that no brick was cut in its construction; the Ise Naikū Shrine in Japan, that has been rebuilt every twenty years for almost two millennia; and the Stick Shed on the Wimmera, an enduring legacy of Australian wartime ingenuity.

What do I think?

Leplastrier structured his presentation around four projects: his own house and studio, and three houses for private clients spanning forty years. This was a fascinating way of revealing the development in his philosophy of architecture, from the intricate and expensive detailing of Palm Garden House (Sydney, 1976) through to the humble forms of Cloudy Bay Retreat (Bruny Island, 1996) and a recent cottage for an elderly couple, the name of which I have forgotten. Unlike many architects, whose budgets and design ambition expand as their reputations grow, Leplastrier seems to have achieved the reverse. His projects are simpler now, more modest, more direct in their crafting.

I can only speculate, but I imagine this trajectory is reflected in his fees and the cost of his buildings also: they are made from fine materials, but they are small and assembled with a deeply efficient understanding of structure and construction. Leplastrier is not interested in architecture for the money (though as previously discussed, who amongst us are?). Instead, he works for remarkable clients with remarkable briefs on remarkable sites. They all have their own stories, cultural capital from which Leplastrier draws his inspiration. The relationships with the people around him and the land his designs touch, these are the things he cherishes.

Leplastrier is not the sort of architect to whom one goes for a quick bathroom renovation or back verandah extension. To him, architecture is “symphonic, every part crucial to the completeness of the whole. It is more than building, realised through a thorough understanding of place, space, light and structure. Launched into life, such works do not need owners but custodians.” Leplastrier’s clients are his patrons, passionate about the natural environments they inhabit and his vision for their dwellings. He spoke of his first visit to the Palm Garden House site, a piece of land covered end to end by a tropical profusion of palm trees. His future client asked what he had in mind for  the house, to which he answered, “You already have the house, it’s here under the canopy of these trees.” His client said, “I think we can work together.”

He built many of his early projects himself, Palm Garden House and Lovett Bay amongst them, though readily defers to the abilities of master craftsmen. It was clear from his slides that some of his oldest and closest friends are the builders with whom he has worked. Growing up around boats, and the “great boat builders of southern Tasmania,” Leplastrier developed a lasting passion for timber. Synthetic materials, he explained, are remarkable in their own way, but no other material can match the versatility and beauty of timber. He still marvels at the diversity of this naturally-grown material, each species with its own qualities and purposes.

Cloudy Bay Retreat, 1996

What did I learn?

Much in keeping with Leplastrier’s approach to architecture, he does not have a website. Printed publications of Leplastrier’s work are also scarce: there is only one that I have come across, in honour of the 2004 Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award, and it has been out of print for years. A small selection of his work can be viewed on the Architecture Foundation Australia website: hopefully this will lead the way in the near future to a much-needed monograph.

The AFA is an organisation that, among other activities, runs annual Student Summer Schools on the Pittwater north of Sydney, a masterclass I was fortunate to attend in early 2008. Leplastrier, together with fellow architects, Peter Stutchbury, Lindsay Johnston and Glenn Murcutt, acted as guide, mentor and critic during an indelible week of collaborative design, drawing, thinking and making.

Even in that setting, surrounded by architects of extraordinary integrity, Leplastrier stood out. His approach to architecture is legendary: he camps for days or weeks on a site prior to commencing design work; his understanding of timber and its characteristics is unparalleled; he eschews fixed price contracts and the detailed documentation they require, working instead within cost plus frameworks and resolving most of his detailing on site; he does not work with ordinary builders, but master craftsmen; he is, and has been for forty-three years, a sole practitioner. Leplastrier is as close to the architectural version of the Bush Tucker Man we have.

Despite not having seen him for five years, Leplastrier recognised me when I greeted him prior to the Zeitgeist lecture, commenting that the audience (whose tickets were all purchased within a day of going on sale) comprised many of his past students. It came as no surprise that the devotion Leplastrier pays to his craft was returned with such enthusiasm. He is a wonderful man and a powerful reminder that architecture can offer something beyond building contracts, marketing and office systems: he is the embodiment of that oft-cited but rarely equalled claim of Frank Lloyd Wright, that architecture is the mother art, without which our civilisation has no soul.

Lovett Bay House, 1994

What was it?

Part one of an all-day seminar we attended late last month, presented by marketing guru Winston Marsh and held at the State Library for a group of 20 – 30 architects, mostly small practitioners. Beginning with the plain-spoken promise that good marketing will help us earn lots and lots of money, the seminar provided a series of challenging ideas for connecting with new clients. We will discuss part two of the seminar, Cost Planning 101 presented by quantity surveyor Geoffrey Moyle, tomorrow.

Marsh was an entertaining as well as informative public speaker. He dangled alluring tales of explosive business success, the pots of gold tantalisingly real, then dissected the marketing strategies that underpinned them. He advocated a significant paradigm shift from the way architectural services are typically sold, his entire presentation underpinned by a single concept:

Marketing is not about you, it’s about your client.

What was discussed?

Marsh introduced the concept of the loyalty ladder, a marketing tool invented by Neil and Murray Raphel in 1995 that identifies the importance of relationships in the growth of a business. It recognises that any stranger thinking about commencing a building project has the potential to develop into a client, or even better, an evangelist who works to seek out further clients on our behalf:

Everyone

Suspect

Prospect

Client

Advocate

Evangelist

The purpose of marketing is not just to attract new clients, but to assist in the advancement from any and to any rung of the ladder. Marsh distilled this process into the three devices we’ll need to create, maintain and improve relationships with our clients:

A device to generate an endless supply of prospects

Let’s say we do most of our work within a particular municipality. In the City of Yarra there are around 80,000 residents or 30,000 households[1]. Based on our empirical observations from living and working in Carlton North, we would say that 1 in 100 of these are at any given time building or renovating. This means there are 300 suspects within spitting distance of our studio who might benefit from our input.

Thus the first task of marketing is to turn suspects into qualified prospects, that is, people who want what we do, have the authority to make decisions and the money to spend on our services. As Marsh pointed out, the biggest impediment to achieving this transition is awareness: most people don’t know who we are. Having marketing material like a website, business cards, site banners, advertisements etc. is not enough, we need to target them. To unravel how we might go about doing this, we should start by asking ourselves three key questions:

Who are our ideal clients?

Why should they choose us, rather than choose our competitors, do it themselves or do nothing?

How can they find out about us?

Understanding the characteristics of our ideal client is essential. Marsh encouraged us to be specific: gender, age, family situation, car ownership, business position, personal wealth, location. The more we know about our target audience (or suspects), the better we’ll be at focussing our efforts on their specific situation. Here Marsh introduced the principles of AIDA:

Attention
Interest
Desire
Action

If we were to analyse the way most architects structure their marketing material, we would quickly discover that they ignore at least three of these principles. Marsh furnished examples that were instead driven by them, including advertisements in local papers, websites and business cards. All demonstrated the ability to:

Grab a suspect’s attention. Marsh suggested we use a headline that speaks about our target suspects, not us, for instance, Thinking about renovating? or If you need help designing your dream home, you’ve come to the right place!

Develop the suspect’s interest. In an advertisement, this might be three or four paragraphs that amplify the headline. They should tell a story, be written like we talk and, again, be about our audience, not us.

Create desire. This could be images of our work, sexy spaces that make the suspect want one of their own. They key here is to understand that like breeds like: we shouldn’t use images of libraries to win cafe projects.

Establish a direct course of action. Here, Marsh advised that we “offer something of compelling interest and value”, for example, Call now for The 5 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Renovating.

A device to make and maximise the sale

Once we have a suspect on the phone, they’re officially a prospect and we must now begin the delicate work of advancing them yet further up the ladder into a client. Marsh made a few phlegmatic recommendations, things like having a script to follow and a checklist of information to obtain. More instructively though, this is where understanding both our strengths and weaknesses, and being able to articulate the answer to, Why should our ideal client choose us? is critical.

Once again, Marsh encouraged client-focussed specificity. Instead of,

We’re great designers.

We’re award winning architects.

We should say things like,

We are a small design studio that listens to our clients. You will always be able to get one of the principals on the line.

We have many years experience in the Carlton North area and know everything there is to know about its town planning requirements.

We need to go a step beyond grabbing the attention of the prospect, we need to provide “meaningful propositions and specific examples.”

As important as understanding our virtues is to understand our weaknesses. Here Marsh asked us to consider negative aspects of the architectural profession’s collective reputation, perceptions like how expensive we are, or how our building projects run over time. Instead of ignoring this herd of elephants in the room, Marsh endorsed facing it head on:

Prospect: Your fee proposal is very expensive. We’ve received a much cheaper price from a draftsperson.

Architect: Is cheap [pause] important to you?

Prospect: Well… I just don’t understand how you can be so expensive.

Architect: Of course, you get what you pay for, so let me explain what our service includes.

The message here was clear: there are many options for a prospect to consider as an alternative to engaging our services. We are competing against builders, building designers and draftspeople. We are also competing against the prospect taking the project on herself or, most commonly, deciding that it’s all too difficult and not doing anything at all.

Luckily, when someone wants something, she becomes “a ferret for facts and conscious of detail.” It’s our job therefore to educate, inform, explain and lead: in effect, craft our message so in the eyes of the prospect, we are not just a service provider, but an expert in our field. We need to communicate the benefits of using an architect, the value a client receives by deciding to engage us, the expert. We can do this via offers of compelling interest and value, addressing the elephant in the room and the use of testimonials.

A device to maintain and build the lifetime relationship

The final step of Marsh’s marketing strategy relates to how we engage with our clients once their projects are underway and / or complete. We’re not sure where he obtained the figure, but Marsh noted that 92% of any professional’s clients come via word of mouth, making it important we push those we have up the final one or two rungs of the loyalty ladder, into advocate or evangelist territory.

Essentially, this means maintaining a database and staying contact. A newsletter that shows past and potential clients what we’re up to, updates on new content added to our website, and Christmas cards are all good examples of nurturing the lifetime relationship. Marsh discussed a few ways that generating referrals can be achieved:

Ask a client for a referral

Offer a reward e.g. a discount on future services

Make the client say, Wow!

Marsh suggested getting in contact every couple of months, a piece of advice echoed by Moyle, who maintains that the more often someone receives an invitation or piece of information, the more likely they are to act on it.

What did we learn?

In short, a great deal. We took pages of notes during Marsh’s presentation, and have only been able to capture a fraction of it here. Marsh made a number of challenging suggestions, many of which will require considerable effort to execute. His appeal to the attendees was that we undertake at least one of them, make at least one change. Reflecting on his list of suggested actions, we hope to achieve at least a few, including new site banners, business cards, a newsletter and a database.

It’s important to acknowledge that the examples of Marsh’s recommendations were not pretty. They might have been suitable for a local plumber in the days of the Yellow Pages, but for design-literate architects in the information age, they were cheesy and unappealing. According to Marsh however, they were extremely effective. He noted that slick and stripped-back websites are fine if what we’re after is a bit of professional masturbation, but if what we want is to win clients and earn money, we need to change gear. His marketing strategies talk to, not at, the people who might be thinking about paying us to work for them. For residential clients in particular, who have typically never worked with an architect before, this conversation must be framed in language with which they can identify. By definition, it will be language far removed from the sort we use with one another.

Thus we arrived at the following epiphany:

How we think about our work and how we sell our work are two separate issues.

We encourage you to attend the next instalment of Marketing 101 yourself, particularly if you’re interested in learning about the reams of additional advice not covered here. Moyle and Marsh are planning new seminars for 2014. They will repeat those discussed here, plus add Marketing 102 to continue the discussion and address topics not already covered. Once confirmed, details can be found on Moyle‘s website.

What was it?

Part two of an all-day seminar we attended late last month, presented by quantity surveyor Geoffrey Moyle. With the tagline, Under control or over budget?, the seminar provided strategies for effectively managing the cost planning of residential projects. In addition to broad commentary, Moyle discussed the results of analysis he undertook on eighteen recent projects he has costed for Melbourne architects (see below). We discussed part one of the seminar, Marketing 101 presented by marketing guru Winston Marsh, yesterday.

Despite having worked with Moyle on a number of projects, this was our first face-to-face meeting. With long hair, black T-shirt, jeans and boots, his appearance was more suited to a rock guitarist than a quantity surveyor. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised though: in our dealings with him, he has always been self-aware, passionate about architecture, and interested in thinking outside the box. He is as far from a bean counter as one can get, which is why we like working with him.

What was discussed?

Moyle began his presentation by defining cost planning as “monitoring, managing and maintaining a project’s cost, relative to a budget.” This is a critical distinction, as it identifies a client’s budget and her project’s cost as two separate questions, a statement that pleasingly ratifies our article from last year, Why your budget is not your brief. It is also important to adhere to the first part of the definition: a cost plan is not something done once and forgotten, it is something to continue developing alongside design and documentation.

Moyle noted that fuzzy project cost planning is common but dangerous. He recommended instead beginning an objective and transparent planning process as early as possible. This is not as simple as it might sound though. Indeed, it’s an issue with which we have been grappling ever since we started our architecture practice. Like it or not, the early days of a new project are a delicate balance between the truth and trust: deliver a client bad news before trust is established and she might walk; wait too long to deliver it and she might feel feel betrayed.

Early on in our practice, we were honest and upfront with clients about their budgets even before they had formally engaged us. This regularly led to commissions going elsewhere, we imagine to architects more willing to delay the cost planning discussion until deeper into the project. So we changed our approach, accepting clients’ budgets at face value but designing to their briefs. We then used a professionally prepared cost estimate as a gauntlet through which we had to pass before submitting a town planning application. Unfortunately, this led to one notable disaster, where our and our clients’ budget expectations were revealed to be grossly out of sync with each other and we lost the commission.

When we raised this complex balancing act with Moyle, he introduced the analogy of the mechanic.

The analogy of the mechanic

A young mechanic discusses his new business with an older, more experienced colleague. He complains about the cost of training new staff, “Why should I waste time and money training my new staff, when most of them leave within twelve months?” His colleague considers for a moment, then answers, “You might waste money training staff that leave, but what if you don’t and they stay?”

In other words, while being upfront with a client about the cost of her project may risk losing it, avoiding the truth may result in an over-budget project proceeding far beyond where it should have.

So by trial and error, and reflecting on the ideas raised in Moyle’s seminar, we have arrived at our current strategy. We accept our client’s budget, but prior to starting sketch design we map out a number of rough layout options for comparison, each accompanied by a simple estimate of its cost. This is essentially a design-driven feasibility study, one with three key benefits:

1. It involves our client in the design process from a very early stage, empowering her to choose her preferred design direction.
2. It educates our client about the relationship between scope and cost.
3. It allows us to interpret our client’s brief, often reducing it in size, prior to attaching costs.

Once we have balanced the budget and brief, often via compromise of both, we finalise the sketch design and obtain a professionally prepared cost estimate. Though retaining the services of a quantity surveyor for the duration of a project can get expensive (at least relative to the small renovations for which we are regularly approached), our preference is to do so up to and including a pre-tender estimate. Thus the cost plan develops alongside the design plan, always in sync.

Rippleside House option 1, 180sqm

Rippleside House option 2, 208sqm

Rippleside House option 3, 221sqm

Rippleside House option 4, 221sqm

Rippleside House option 5, 221sqm

Rippleside House option 6, 221sqm

What did we learn?

There was strong agreement between attendees that Moyle’s recommendation of a staged strategy is the best way to approach cost planning. He advised we begin every project with a simple good egg / bad egg test to know whether or not its budget and cost are reconcilable. To do this, he armed us with construction cost averages based on eighteen recent projects on which he has worked:

• The projects ranged in cost from $430,000 to $4,580,000.
• They ranged in size from 130sqm to 540sqm.
• They ranged in cost per square metre from $2,640/sqm to $7,420/sqm[1]. The lower end of the spectrum was still for architect-designed prototypes, but with simple forms, economic building components and basic finishes.

From his analysis, Moyle offered the following observations:

• The size of a project is not necessarily tied to its construction rate. He had expected that larger projects would be slightly cheaper per square metre due to their economy of scale, but found no such indication. Indeed, the most expensive project per square metre was close to average in size.
• The form of a project is also not necessarily tied to its construction rate. Most relevant is the complexity of its detailing: a rectilinear box might be simple in form but still have extremely fine detailing and be expensive metre by metre.

• The average project cost was $1,790,000.
• The average project size was 344sqm.
• The average cost per square metre was $4,970/sqm.[2][3]

These were, for us, eye-opening figures. It was only recently that we were telling clients that $3,000/sqm is a generous construction rate at which to aim. But according to Moyle, this is only just over the minimum and will not allow for the design content we know from experience costs more. Yet, for a profession that has surrendered vast swathes of its responsibilities in recent decades (engineering, project management, environmental design etc.), Moyle’s figures are also empowering.

Construction rates are not our own, they are the construction industry’s: we can tweak but not reconfigure them. We need to be less emotionally encumbered by how much a building costs and more objective in communicating with our clients. If a client wants to add a roof deck to her project, it’s okay to be excited by the prospect of designing it while simultaneously informing her how much it’s going to cost. This dual perspective should not be alien to us: architects are, after all, jacks of all trades, skilled at synthesising conflicting agendas into cohesive outcomes.

If we are truly to monitor, manage and maintain a project’s cost, we must do so continuously, all the way up to (and during) construction. This is part of our role as architects, and by mastering this process we can only serve our clients better. No sheepishness, no discomfort, just integrity and hard numbers. There are too many stories of fanciful architects forgetting to check the budget, of projects that finish at twice the cost of where they started. It’s about time we get better at opening up the design process to acknowledge and incorporate cost. Understanding what it costs to build gives us a great deal of control over how a project proceeds or, to extend Moyle’s succinct analogy, whether the mechanic that stays is a joy or a burden.

We encourage you to attend the next instalment of Cost Planning 101 yourself, particularly if you’re interested in learning about the reams of additional advice not covered here. Moyle and Marsh are planning new seminars for 2014. They will repeat those discussed here, plus add Marketing 102 to continue the discussion and address topics not already covered. Once confirmed, details can be found on Moyle‘s website.

Chai Viticole (Vauvert, 1998)

What was it?

A lecture held late last year as part of the Australian Institute of Architect‘s International Speaker Series. French architect, Gilles Perraudin of Perraudin Architectes, discussed his works and search for a timeless architecture. The lecture was attended by a sparse audience at sponsor Austral Bricks‘ Brick Studio and hosted by Peter Mallatt of Six Degrees.

Perraudin travelled extensively after his graduation in the mid-1970s, spending time living in Ghardaia, a city in the Sahara without any form of industry or access to external resources. The vernacular urban fabric, made entirely from materials sourced locally, left a lasting impression, the processes and aesthetics of building in stone finding their way many years later into his work.

Perraudin established his practice in 1980 and at first explored lightweight construction techniques and materials. Maison Ceyzérieu (1980, unbuilt) was his first project, a competition entry that promoted an architecture of minimal energy consumption. Designed around the concept of a house within a house within a house, the environmental isolation of the central core permitted energy-independent temperature control. Perraudin noted wryly that the client didn’t understand his design, wanting a normal house with solar panels on the roof, while his design originated from a more fundamental idea of a house requiring no energy at all.

Perraudin’s own house, Maison Individuelle (Lyon Vaise, 1987), continued this early exploration into lightness and thin skins. Mobile, nomadic and deconstructible, it reminded us strongly of Richard Rogers’ work of the preceding decades. Unlike Rogers however, Perraudin abandoned this experiment, arguing that the lightness of its materials was a lie: steel, canvas and aluminium might have appeared economical but they consumed exorbitant energy in their production.

This realisation led Perraudin to the architectural language he continues to use today. Chai Viticole (Vauvert, 1998), a winery he built for himself, was his first project in stone. Looking towards the Roman aqueduct for inspiration, the project employed very large blocks of stone uncut beyond their extraction from the ground. The stone had little embodied energy and promised great efficiency in its use, performing holistically as structure, skin, waterproofing, thermal mass and linings. This economy of material is central to Perraudin’s design philosophy, as are the project’s rhythm, proportion and light, tenants he asserted are at the centre of architectural expression.

Perraudin built the winery himself, with little help but from a small mobile crane to lift the blocks into place. The careful nature of the project’s masonry construction earned him the local nickname, The Egyptian, a fitting title for an architect whose contemporary works so closely resemble those of our ancient past.

Cave des Aurelles (Nizas, 2001)

What did we think?

Perraudin’s work is elegant but rudimentary, the scale of his stone blocks rendering everything else inconsequential. Inhabiting Maison et Galerie d’Art (Lyon, 2010) would be like inhabiting a landscape: walls are cliffs and corridors are canyons. The human scale is lost or ignored, very little operating within reach of, or of a size that can be touched and manipulated by, a person’s hand. This manipulation of the rudimentary occurs in his planning also: the Musee du Vin (Patrimonio, 2011) has open pergolas running around enclosed museum spaces designed to support the growth of canopy vines and encourage an outdoor microclimate. Instead of artificially managing diverse internal heating and cooling needs, Perraudin elected to simply push the museum’s corridors outside, letting nature do the cooling for him.

Perraudin eschews the millennia of materials development that has permitted new forms, fine detailing and the spanning of large distances. He has also disengaged with modernity at a cultural level: the heaviness of his structures do not lend themselves to a long life / loose fit understanding of occupation, nor do they facilitate activated street edges or contemporary living that moves easily between inside and out. By employing mass material assembled like supersized LEGO blocks, his walls become very thick, his openings are necessarily small, and columns are required at regular intervals.

This might seem an unusual direction to take, though in quoting French philosopher Roland Barthes, Perraudin clarified his position, “Suddenly I realised it didn’t bother me not to be modern.” Arguing also that “the evolution of technology is not a good focus for an architect,” Perraudin has, as his nickname suggests, firmly anchored himself and his work into a methodology thousands of years old.

Maison et Galerie d’Art (Lyon, 2010)

What did we learn?

Perraudin spoke at length about values-driven architecture. Rejecting the image-driven discipline of post-modernism and contemporary architecture, he criticised the world’s architectural schools for graduating their students without an understanding of material and making. He argued that “schools mask their conceptual ignorance by guiding their students into various forms of extreme formalism. Architecture should be about satisfying a social need, not about addressing a financial condition.” When the latter is pursued, “architects are transformed into the stooge of speculation. It is not a question of talent, but ethics. Using natural materials will escape the constraints of speculative industries, and return to a socially-alert, environmentally sustainable architecture.”

This admirable position reminded us of Moshe Safdie’s oration we attended in late 2012, where Safdie reflected on his dedication to place-making, contextualisation and the ethical practice of architecture. Unfortunately, it also revealed the disconnection between the way both architects spoke about their work and the work itself.

Central to this disconnection was Perraudin’s use of stone. While he praised its recyclability, economy and capacity for adaptation and future flexibility, we could see none of these claims in the work he presented.

• Recyclability. Each block of stone is the size and weight of a small car. Who would move them, how would they do so and why? The Romans built in massive stone not so it could be recut and repurposed, but so it would last thousands of years.
• Economy. Perraudin used stone for his Logements Sociaux Collectifs (Cornebarrieu, 2011), a social housing project, but this economy appears to be the exception not the rule in his work. Typically, his projects are expensive and exclusive. The client for his Chai Viticole in Lebanon (halted indefinitely due to the war in Syria) was so particular about the stone to be used, he bought the whole quarry.
• Adaptation. The stone could be cut to accommodate new openings and services, but would it ever be? Each column and wall is load bearing: cutting new openings would require new concrete footings, steel columns and lintels.

Perraudin might like to think his projects are recyclable, economical and adaptable, but these are all qualities far more aligned with his earliest work in lightweight construction, or in the ongoing oeuvre of Rogers, who continues to explore this ideology with real success. It would be more apt for him to discuss the idea of sustainability through durability: an idea discussed recently by Gregg Pasquarelli, where sustainability is achieved by building architecture that people love, “the don’t get torn down every 10 – 20 years.”

Is Perraudin’s work interesting or is the very nature of his past-modernism merely a process of reprising the forms, spatial relationships and techniques of past eras? There appears to be no theoretical overlay to his work, just performance and craft, so it is hard to argue that the work acts as a commentary on wastefulness. The buildings are expensive and exclusive, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it seems he is working hard to contradict his own agenda. In using such heavy materials, in such ancient patterns, his work is in denial of the modern condition. Our lasting impression of Perraudin’s work is not that they are timeless but out of their time.

Chai Viticole (Romania, due 2014)

The relationship we enjoy with our clients is a unique one. We work very closely together with them, often over a number of years. A good client can make even the most difficult project a pleasure, while a bad client can make the easiest a misery. Whether a client will be the former or the latter can often be sensed in the first meeting, but as with any relationship the full tapestry of her personality takes time to be revealed.

The intensity and emotional involvement of the design and construction processes will mean we grow close to our best clients. While we may begin their projects as strangers, we often emerge as friends.

One might expect such a critical element in the success of a project to be something we curate. However, while much effort on our behalf goes into describing what we do, what an architect is, very little in fact goes into explaining what a client does and is. Luck plays too large a part in this arena. We have had clients who understand very well the distinct roles of client and architect, but we have had others treat us like draftspeople or even servants. Perhaps some delicate role education would have prevented these misunderstandings from becoming so painful.

Glenn Murcutt has said he expects his clients to work very hard on his projects, and we imagine he is certainly in a position to only accept those who are prepared to do so. But this statement is at least somewhat true for any positive client / architect relationship. We need a client to invest in her project, dedicate time and energy to it, so that we can better shape it to her needs, tastes and way of living.

This is but one dimension of the role of the client. To understand the nature of the ideal client, we must first ask:

What is a client?

In a world dominated by online shopping, faceless corporations and consumption, a client is almost an archaic concept. Indeed, to understand what a client is, it helps to take one further step back and understand what differentiates her from that other type of consumer, the customer[1]:

client \ˈklī-ənt\
1) one that is under the protection of another
2) a person who engages the professional advice or services of another

customer \’kəs-tə-mər\
1) one that purchases a commodity or service

The client is not the same as the customer. Notice how the dictionary definition of the latter makes direct reference to a commodity, the entire nature of the customer being shaped by the good she hopes to purchase. A customer for a pair of jeans is by nature different from a customer for a wedding dress. The dictionary also makes no reference to the need for expert advice: when the customer walks into a store, she already knows what she wants, be it a car or a chair or a box of cereal. She has a problem (she’s hungry) and knows how to solve it (she buys a box of cereal).

In contrast, the client is shaped not by the good she hopes to purchase but by her relationship to her service provider. Like the customer, she has a problem (she wants somewhere to live) but unlike the customer, she doesn’t know how to solve it. This is typically because the problem is sufficiently complex to require specialist expertise to solve. Thus she engages an architect to help her solve her problem, to provide the house she needs but cannot yet understand.

So, a client is someone who has a problem that needs solving, but lacks the vision and expertise to do the solving on her own. We often think that an important part of the architect’s role is to provide guidance through the murky waters of design, so the further definition of a client as one who is under the protection of another resonates with us. The client solves her problem thanks to this guidance from, and in collaboration with, her architect.

What is an ideal client?

We have been in practice for long enough to have worked with an ever-widening variety of clients. Some are intensely involved with the design and construction processes, interested in participating in every decision and attending every site meeting. Others are much more hands-off. Some are remarkably design literate, while others can only read floor plans, and yet others only physical models. Some are confident in their decision making, others require extensive support and hand-holding. Some interfere with our work, second guessing and micro-managing us, others leave us alone to get the project done.

We have had good clients and bad clients, and have grown familiar with the qualities that comprise both. The ideal client is:

1. Self-aware

She understands herself, her lifestyle, her tastes and her preferences. She is able to communicate these characteristics to us so that we may enshrine them in our design solution. She recognises that she is not a customer, that she does not know how to solve her problem. She has engaged us to do what she cannot and is comfortable with this relationship.

2. Honest

She treats us not as an opposing force that must be managed, but as a partner in the shaping and execution of her dream and our design vision. She is honest with us, providing both positive and (constructively) negative feedback. She is also honest with herself, recognising that her budget and brief must be aligned with one another, a process of compromise that will require a great deal of self-reflection.

3. Trusting

She inescapably comes to us with a pre-formed picture in her head of how she imagines her project will be. But if we were to design that picture, we would not be doing our job as architects. Our mandate is to take that picture, understand its ambitions and qualities, and improve upon it. A positive emotional response to our design is ideal, but when our proposal differs from the picture in the ideal client’s head, trust in our vision is essential.

4. Decisive

She is not overawed by the quantity of decisions that must be made during the design and construction processes. She can review all the possible kitchen sink options, accept advice on the ones most suitable, choose, and more on without second-guessing herself. She understands that the construction of a building costs a considerable amount of money, and is prepared (if not necessarily overjoyed) to spend it.

5. Committed

She is committed to design quality and appreciates that a work of architecture embodies relationships to history, culture, the city, the street, the natural environment and future generations. She is enthusiastic about our interest in these relationships and is committed to exploring them with us. She shares our architectural values of sustainability, craft and the sublimely utilitarian. She understands the difference between cost and value, and is willing to invest in good design.

What can we learn?

The importance of good clients has long been understood within the architectural community. Historically, the best relationships between architect and client have produced works of great art: from the Medici and their numerous patronages, to the Kaufmann family that commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, to Denton Corker Marshall and their careful collection of jewel-like houses. When the symbiosis during the journey is right, there is no limit to the success of the destination.

To paraphrase Murcutt again, the future of an architectural practice is more powerfully defined by the clients and projects we refuse than the ones we accept. We think he is referring here to the business of architecture. Good clients are vital to the ongoing financial success of a practice: they pay us now, and market us to their friends so that future clients will pay us later. As discussed recently, Neil and Murray Raphael’s loyalty ladder proposes two relationship tiers above client to which an architect can aspire: the advocate and evangelist. In a profession where repeat clients are rare and word of mouth is king, our clients’ preparedness to procure new projects for us is essential.

Despite this understanding, the methods by which we might procure commissions from new clients – great or otherwise – are rarely discussed. Architects are, we believe, needlessly guarded about this subject. Rather than hoard this knowledge in an effort to gain a bigger slice of a shrinking pie, why not share it so that we can all get fair slices of a growing pie? We hope that by understanding what characteristics constitute the ideal client, we will be better armed to attract more of them.

What is it?

A familiar project management tool, in its simplest guise represented by a triangle with scope, cost and time at each of its vertices. On design projects, the triangle is actually a triangular pyramid, with quality added at the fourth vertex. The iron pyramid’s principle is that on any project it is only possible to achieve three of these four goals: a project may be good, big and quick, but not cheap; or it may be cheap, quick and good, but not big.

The architect‘s priorities are scope and quality, the two potentially interchangeable depending on the project and the client. This is embodied in our values, charged as we are with the responsibility to provide design solutions for our clients’ briefs. It is embodied in the documents we produce: our drawings, models and specifications all describe the scope and quality of a design. It is embodied in the building contracts we administer, where our role first and foremost is to ensure builders are faithful to our documents.

This is not to say that the architect is neglectful of cost. Our projects live and die by the limitations of our clients’ budgets. To act responsibly, in accordance with The Architects Act and in keeping with good business sense, we must respect the economic realities of our projects. It is a matter of self-interest also: only when our projects are built and our clients satisfied do we stand the chance of winning future commissions.

Time, admittedly, is the architect’s lowest priority. The unique conditions of each of our projects demand prototypical responses, the production of which cannot be achieved quickly. Making architecture is like investing all the research and development that goes into designing a new car, but then building it only once. Ultimately, we are content to dedicate the time necessary to achieve a good design outcome.

The architect’s priorities

What do we think?

We unfortunately live in a country and era where scope and quality are the priorities of neither the construction industry in which we operate, nor many of the clients that commission our services.[1] The evolution of Australia’s $100b construction industry may be beyond the control of the architecture profession, but we only have ourselves to blame for our atrophying role in its largest projects.

During the financial boom of the 1980s, the architecture profession made a significant tactical error. With too much work to handle, we began refusing to work on the building phase of projects. At a crucial time in the history of construction, just as private speculative development came to dominate the industry, we shunned the construction site for the drawing board.[2] Inevitably, a new occupation materialised to fill the hole left by our snobbery. More than happy to slum it with the builders, the project manager quickly developed sufficient construction fluency to replace us on site.

The importance of the architecture profession has since steadily receded while that of the project manager has exploded. Salaries are hardly the only measure of success, but they do reveal a great deal about perceived value. The My Career summary of average construction industry wages in Australia reveals that the average annual salary for architects is $82,000, while for the project manager it is $134,000. The minimum and maximum indices tell the same story: $40,000 and $200,000 for architects; $60,000 and $250,000 for the project manager.

Today’s architecture profession is shaped as strongly by this shift as any other. The project manager not only earns more than we do, he is usually given the role of running the projects on which we work, and is empowered to decide which of our contributions are included and which are rejected. He has not only replaced us on site, he is the conduit to the most important person on a project, the client, guiding her very agenda.

Why has the project manager been so successful?

The project manager‘s raison d’être is to prioritise cost. Given the speculative nature of the majority of his projects, by prioritising cost he is by definition also prioritising time. Scope comes third and quality a distant fourth. This order of priorities frames every decision he makes, from selecting construction systems that permit faster erection times, to details that permit off-site assembly, to design solutions that maximise gross floor area.

The project manager is successful because he understands and responds to the zeitgeist of the construction industry. Scope and quality are luxuries: even beyond the speculative apartment market, financial control and risk minimisation are regularly the starting conditions of any project. Todd Reisz in Rory Hyde’s deeply engaging book, Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture, observed how entire cities within the Middle-East are being planned and executed not by architects, nor even project managers, but by bankers.[3]

Within our downturned economic climate, the people and organisations commissioning new buildings are more cautious than they have ever been. The elements of a building considered essential have contracted, with design quality relegated to image-making artifice. In a world where everyone borrows to build, cost and time are king, and the project manager is the guardian of both.

The project manager’s priorities

What can we learn?

Since at least the time when we were at University (and really, since the collapse of the great Modernist experiment), the architecture profession has been in a state of crisis. It is arguably remarkable that we’ve survived so many decades on the brink of doom, but it would be naïve to ignore the signs of peril around us. Our fees and salaries are increasingly insufficient; we are forced to share a shrinking slice of the construction pie; we are overlooked by government, media and the public; and most crazy of all, we value our work more than the people who use it. By and large, the world survives without architects.

The zeitgeist, it is not surprising to discover, has moved on without us. The great innovators of the era, the shapers of our daily environments, the future visionaries, are no longer architects. We live in an era where the city-builders are the moneymen. Design might be tentatively re-entering the social conscious in Australia, but more often than not, it is within the project manager’s order of priorities. With housing becoming an “investment opportunity rather than a basic human right”, where are the architects?[4] What are we doing to impose our values on this trend?

Well, we do make buildings. Our design output is our most significant contribution to the fabric of the city. It is certainly our best opportunity to demonstrate best practice, shape current trends and create new ones. But take a look around: fantastic buildings are being built every year, in every country on the planet, yet they have little effect on the pecking order on site, on the decisions that get made in boardrooms, on the importance of architecture in the public’s eye. The crisis of architecture does not originate in what we do, but in how we do it.

We are talking about architecture practice here: the skills we develop; the frameworks of our businesses; the relationships we nurture; the services we offer and the way we charge for them. If we are to take one lesson from the success of the project manager it should be that we need to learn how to become indispensable. One does not self-prescribe medicine or self-represent at a court hearing. Doctors and lawyers are indispensable, why aren’t architects?

The solution will begin with good design, and with the unique world view offered by our profession. If the construction industry and general public aren’t interested in good design, we must try to change their minds instead of sulking about it. It is estimated that around 95% of all new houses in Australia never pass under the eyes of an architect. It’s not hard to see why: volume builders build at less than half the rate per square metre of architect-designed houses.[5] By thumbing our noses at the great unwashed, we are hastening our own extinction. If we don’t like the zeitgeist, if we don’t like novated contracts, if fringe suburbs of soulless McMansions make us ill, if cities designed by the profit imperative is not to our liking, we can’t wait for someone else to fix it. We need do it ourselves.

We have spoken before about what an architect is and what we can do to arrest the inexorable slide towards architectural poverty, but to become indispensable we need to think way outside the box. We need to take our heads out of our architecture journals, our pilgrimages to Falling Water, our awards processes. We need to do things differently. We need to lobby government or even better, run for government. We need to push better design into the speculative markets or even better, finance the speculative markets ourselves. We need to expand what we do, relearn how to build or learn how to code. The architect of the 20th Century is dying, it’s about time we start defining the architect of the 21st.

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.[1] Thomas Edison said this in an era when inventions of the mechanical, electrical and medical varieties were constantly rewriting the script of modern life. Anyone can have an idea, he suggested, indeed good ideas are floating around all the time and all over the place. But success, and the genius that achieves it, lie in the months and years of effort to execute the idea, to turn it from fantasy to reality.

This is more true today than it has ever been before: the world is a small place now and the hurdles to creating something are at an all time low. Success, however, is as elusive as ever. Pop quiz: have you ever heard of PicPlz? How about Everpix or Color? No? Well, they have two things in common: 1) they are photo sharing apps for smartphone and web, and 2) they have all been discontinued.[2] Despite positive critical reviews and millions in seed funding, none made the cut. In contrast, Instagram is the archetype of success. It currently has around 150 million users worldwide and sold itself to Facebook in 2012 for AU$1.1b.[3]

This is as clear evidence of Edison’s insight as we have ever seen. The essential idea of Instagram is the same as its failed competitors, so cannot possibly be the reason for its success. The recipe of its genius instead involves ingredients outside the core idea, things like its functionality and style, the timing of its release and the networking of its founders.[4] In other words, the 99% for Instagram was about making sure the idea worked well and looked good, then executing it at the right time and knowing the right people to turn it viral. Luck, too, may have been a factor, though we believe you create your own luck… Build it and they will come.

How does this relate to the practice of architecture?

Comparing architecture to the volatile, manic depressive and massively lucrative world of software development may seem a bit of a long bow to draw. But dig a bit deeper and we discover that all creative fields are underpinned by the same influences. The methods may vary, but the parameters of commercial success exist independently of scale and industry.

The analogy of Schrödinger’s architects

A family wants to build their dream home. They are wealthy and passionate about architecture, and they want a house designed by one of Melbourne’s most recognised and highly awarded residential architects. They interview John Wardle, Sean Godsell and Kerstin Thompson. But they can’t choose between them, they love their work equally. So they commission all three to design their home.

Each design is unique and wonderful. Wardle’s is an exquisitely folded volume, its timber and zinc surfaces sliding over one another, its details impeccable. Godsell’s is an unapologetic masterpiece, a perforated, operable steel skin filtering the light to bold interiors. Thompson’s is considered and subtle, hugging the landscape, concrete and glass revealed in their natural beauty. The family retreats into a closed room to contemplate the three projects and make their decision.

Outside the room, the architecture community awaits the announcement. Which design will be successful? Much like Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat, at this moment, any of the three is equally likely to be chosen, and any of the three is equally likely to result in a magnificent building. The moment drags on.[5]

Considered in the broader context of Australian architectural production, does the outcome matter? We’re sure the family would live long and fulfilling lives in the Schrödinger house no matter its architect, but it would be less notable for its individuality than its position in an enduring body of work. The residential projects of Wardle, Godsell and Thompson are excellent, very different, but excellent. But if we and the family are unable to differentiate between them based on merit, what separates them?

The answer of course is the 99%: communication, style, persuasiveness, amicability, networking. In any competitive environment, the armature surrounding the architectural idea makes the difference. We thrive or perish depending on our relationships, how we present ourselves, our past experience, our enthusiasm, our fees. This armature influences how desirable we are to potential clients, the prestige of our commissions, our profitability, our success.

What can we learn?

The architecture profession dedicates considerable time to the 1%. We go to design lectures, read design journals, attend design conferences. We love our work and we love talking about it. Our ideas have great cultural value, they have the power to affect positive change in the built environment, but they aren’t going to make any of us Instagram. If success relies so heavily on the other 99% of our efforts, why aren’t we doing more to improve them?

Getting better at the hard work of executing our ideas, carving built reality from visionary fantasy, would benefit us all. The world of ideas is still welcome to operate within this framework, we suggest it would even benefit from such solid footings, but the 99% deserves more airtime. Imagine: we attend a design lecture and learn about the inspirational work of the speaker. But we leave with more than a sense of awe, we leave knowing the strategies the architect used to explore her ideas, the methods she used to convince her clients of their merit, the experimentation she did on site to resolve them. Simon Knott touched on the importance of this issue on The Architects preceding an interview with Indian architect, Bimal Patel.[6] He said,

“Coming up with good ideas is a small fragment of what architects actually do… Getting them built is the real challenge. Advocacy skills and your ability to fight to the death for an idea are critical. People working in really good design practices understand there’s a real doggedness to pursuing things to the end. Whether it’s a cupboard handle or a hinge or a screw fixing, it’s an attitude that flows right through the project.”

With the strength of Wardle, Godsell and Thompson’s design ideas being equal, the Schrödinger house would get built by the architect most capable of relating to the client, the one most persuasive, most seductive and most passionate. But no one teaches these lessons in school, and no one talks about them in the profession.

Don’t get us wrong, we love ideas. They’re what we fall asleep thinking about, and the reason we get up to go into work in the morning. But we need to loosen our collective grip on them, they’re holding us back from seeing the bigger picture. We need to take a leaf out of Mr. Edison’s book: ideas are all well and good, but genius is in being prepared to do whatever it takes to turn them into reality.

[1] Thomas Edison; spoken statement circa 1903; published in Harper’s Monthly, September 1932.
[2] For an obituary of PicPlz, see this article on TechCrunch. For Everpix, see this article on The Verge. For Color, see this article on Mashable.
[3] Eric Jackson; What would Instagram be worth today if it IPO’ed?; Forbes; New York; September 2013
[4] For other commentary on the success of Instagram, see Why is Instagram so popular? on TechHive and Why Instagram is so popular: quality, audience and constraints on TechCrunch.
[5] Schrödinger’s Cat is the famous thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, in 1935. It illustrates superposition and entanglement, two of the fundamental questions of quantum physics. This short video explains the paradox.
[6] Simon Knott and Rory Hyde, co-presenters; Show 368: Interview with Bimal Patel; The Architects; May 2013; 6.05 – 7.00min.

Image sources:

1. Money. Author’s own image.
2. Erwin Schrödinger, Top Yaps. Copyright Arun Thakur, modified by author.

What is it?

An unsolicited project our architecture practice, Mihaly Slocombe, recently completed. We redesigned a segment of Drummond Street in Carlton North, the street where we live and practice.

The project began with conversations with around two thirds of our neighbours, who helped us understand the cross section of the community for whom we were designing, as well as providing specific project briefing requirements. We published (and continue to maintain) a blog that tracked our research and design activities, and facilitated ongoing feedback to the community. The blog can be viewed here.

Our essential agenda for Streets Without Cars is best summed up by the opening remarks on the project blog:

Around 50% of all developed land in Melbourne is consumed by space for vehicles, most of which is streets.[1] The characteristics of a street, its dimensions, footpaths and traffic volume, all contribute to the wellbeing and happiness of the people who live along it. Drummond Street boasts a generous green median strip, but of its 28m width, 14m is reserved for car traffic and car parking. For the 130m between Curtain and Fenwick Streets, that’s a total of 1,820sqm, or around 15 typical Carlton North terraces. Also consider how little of the time this space is in use: on average, people are either entering, exiting or driving their vehicles for only 14 minutes in every hour.[2] So not only does Drummond Street dedicate a lot of its valuable space to the car, this space is left unused most of the time.

Imagine if there were no cars: no need for car parking or wide moats of asphalt reserved for car traffic. What could we do with the space and how might we foster new ways of living together as a community?

Once we began work on the project, it became clear that while removing all cars was a romantic proposition, it was not viable. We elected instead to explore a shared or living street philosophy. This is an idea that requires a street to be designed for walking first, cycling second and driving third. It slows down bicycle and car traffic; removes the traditionally separate zones for people, bicycles and cars; replaces asphalt with materials typically associated with parks and plazas; and encourages communal engagement between all streets users. We discussed aspects of this idea here.

What did we design?

We have just published our full design proposal to the Streets Without Cars blog, which can be viewed here. An animated flythrough of the project can be viewed on our Vimeo page.

We also presented the project at Volume 22 of the Pecha Kucha Melbourne series earlier this month. The 20 slides x 20 seconds format of Pecha Kucha offered the productive opportunity to distil the project down to its essential aims and qualities. Also relevant was the theme of the event, Members Only. It asked presenters to consider the value of clubs, their members, why and how we gain access, and what we do once we’re in. We titled our presentation, Getting Back into the Players Club.

The visual and spoken content of our presentation was as follows:

Good evening. I’m Warwick Mihaly, a principal architect of Mihaly Slocombe. Every year we like to work on a speculative project that engages in questions of urban design. I’m going to present our 2014 project to you tonight via my presentation, Getting Back into The Players Club.

Who are the current members of the Players Club? They’re the people and corporations shaping the future fabric of our cities. Once upon a time they used to be architects and urban designers, but this is less and less the case. These days, they’re mostly project managers, developers, even bankers.

There are now whole cities springing up from the desert sands whose core focus is not livability but investment opportunity.

Recent approvals for very large towers in the city, coupled with the poor urban outcome of the Docklands and dubious planning strategy for Fishermen’s Bend, shows that this is happening in Melbourne also. Do we really want our city to be corrupted by money?

The traditional procurement model looks like the top line. A big investment company commissions a building design, then markets it to smaller investors who aim to lease out individual apartments. How the inhabitants are involved in this process is not clear. What we’d like to do is explore the bottom line, where design and community consultation drive the development process.

Which brings me to our project, Streets Without Cars. The premise of the project is this: we wanted to redesign the street where we live and practice as a shared space, with pedestrians as its highest priority. We also wanted to engage our local community, so we spoke with as many of our neighbours as we could to understand how they would like the street to work.

This is the site. It’s a 120m long section of Drummond Street in Carlton North, running between Curtain and Fenwick Streets. It’s 28m wide, 14m of which is currently covered in asphalt to provide room for north- and southbound car lanes. It has a central grass strip that is already reasonably well utilised.

We were able to interview 22 of our 39 neighbours within the site zone and received rich feedback containing both concrete and aspirational design direction. One of our neighbours, James, gave us the phrase that ended up guiding our entire design process, “Like a big backyard for everyone.”

We discovered a lot about the demographics of our neighbours. We now know there are 2.6 bicycles per household, that around 72% of our street works within a 5km radius, and most households have limited access to private open space. We were also able to collate the many briefing comments into groups of activities to design for: living, eating, socialising and play.

So we came up with a design that removed the southbound car lane and used the space for a 17m wide strip of activity space bordered by a narrower strip of paving to be shared by bicycles, cars and pedestrians. A series of small pavilions runs down the length of the site, providing shelter and gathering.

Our material palette is robust and urban. We used Bluestone paving on the ground, steel structure for the pavilion roofs, hit and miss brickwork and timber battening for the pavilions themselves. The four mature trees on site were retained and added to.

At the heart of the site are the living and dining rooms, terraced spaces that can be used for just about anything. Gentle slopes in the terraced platforms allow us to catch pools of water for play and cooling. The roof over the dining room kicks up to support a solar panel array. All roofs collect water for irrigation.

The dining room is loosely divided into four sub-spaces, some of which are undercover and others in the open. They are bordered by an open weave of brickwork that permits air movement, and down the track, trained vines.

Running the full length of the site is a community vegetable patch. There’s also a fruit orchard embedded into the side of one of the pavilions. Our hope is that these would become activity centres to strengthen the local community. It would be pretty handy to harvest a few extra apples and a sprig of coriander too.

A big part of our design thinking revolved around transport. We decided to retain around 80% of the existing carparking, then added a couple of carshare spaces and 96 bicycle parking spaces within secure storage sheds. These anchor the ends of the site, free up valuable space within peoples’ homes, and encourage more integrated use of the street.

The kitchen is a small cafeteria located adjacent to the dining and living rooms. Its operator would also act as caretaker for the vegetable patch and orchard, to keep them from getting unruly and providing an opportunity for the enjoyment of local produce.

We met with the sustainable transport group at the City of Yarra today to present the project. They didn’t exactly front up a few million cash to build it, but they were very enthusiastic about the community consultation and radical, for Melbourne, urban design strategy. Our vision is that this sort of project could be rolled out across an entire municipality, small insertions designed to decrease our reliance on the automobile and increase our shared use of our streets. They could be spaced out so every resident has access to one within walking distance: another, finer layer of public parkland.

That’s a 20-slide tip of the iceberg. We’ve been engaging with our neighbours via a dedicated project blog. If you’d like to find out a bit more about us, you can look us up on our website, design blog or twitter feed. Thank you.

Where to from here?

Our design may be finished, but the project is far from over. As mentioned above, we are now embarking on consultation with the local council to investigate ways we might implement this project. With some considerable determination and a bit of luck, future funding earmarked for the Carlton North area as part of the City of Yarra’s Local Area Traffic Management scheme might very well find its way towards Drummond Street and Streets Without Cars.[3]

When we take potential clients through the time programme of the architectural process, we are often asked why it takes so long. In our recent article, The iron triangle, we discussed the hierarchy of the architect’s priorities and how expediency is unlikely to be as important as quality or economy. As we noted in that article, every project we undertake has “unique conditions that demand prototypical responses, the production of which cannot be achieved quickly. Making architecture is like investing all the research and development that goes into designing a new car, but then building it only once.”

This is the broad answer. More specifically, and to assist you in fleshing out your expectations of the architectural process, what follows is a description of the 1st of the seven key stages we undertake for each of our projects. Included are indications of how much time it will need, the number of hours we spend, other specialist consultants involved, and the level of design resolution and documentation you can expect at its conclusion.[1] An archive of all seven stages can be accessed here.

1. Research

During the research stage, we gather as much information as we can about you and your project. We visit your site more than once and explore it thoroughly with camera, measuring tape and sketch book. We procure a copy of the title and we assess the town planning regulations specific to your site.

If the project is a renovation, we measure the house’s internal rooms in detail. We capture room sizes, ceiling heights, wall thicknesses, and the positions and heights of doors and windows. For both renovations and new builds, we commission a land survey of the site. This captures building footprints, heights and rooflines, contours relative to the Australian Height Datum, positions and heights of trees, and locations of fences and visible services. It also establishes the precise location of the title boundary.

Most importantly, we ask you to tell us about yourself, your tastes, lifestyle and your dreams for your new home. We take your answers and prepare a project brief that becomes the guiding document for the entire project.

Stage duration = 4 – 6 weeks
Architect’s time = 40 – 50 hours
Specialist consultants = Land surveyor
Documentation = Land survey, existing conditions drawings
Scale of drawings = 1:200 – 1:100
Quantity = 6x A3 pages

1. Disclaimer: time allowances are estimates only and will vary depending on project size and complexity.

Image credits:

1. Clocks. Author’s own image.
2. Research. Author’s own image.
3. Farmer House research. Author’s own image, see here for further details.

When we take potential clients through the time programme of the architectural process, we are often asked why it takes so long. As we noted in our recent article, The iron triangle, every project we undertake has “unique conditions that demand prototypical responses, the production of which cannot be achieved quickly. Making architecture is like investing all the research and development that goes into designing a new car, but then building it only once.”

This is the broad answer. More specifically, and to assist you in fleshing out your expectations of the architectural process, what follows is a description of the 2nd of the seven key stages we undertake for each of our projects.[1] An archive of all seven stages can be accessed here.

2. Sketch design

We split the sketch design stage into two parts. In the first, we undertake a design-driven feasibility study. This involves exploring a series of layout options with you, each approaching your brief in different ways. We do this through simple, hand-drawn floor plans that encourage objectivity and open-mindedness. Each option is accompanied by a brief cost estimate based on its size and our understanding of your expected level of construction quality. We use this process to help you establish an accurate project budget attached to a defined scope.

In the second part, we flesh out your preferred design arrangement into a three dimensional building. We resolve the layout, form and materiality of your house, and communicate these to you via floor plans, elevations, sections and materials palettes. More evocatively, we build a physical model of the project from card, pasteboard and balsa wood. Often we produce a digital model also, though nothing beats the childlike joy of holding a miniature house in your hands and imagining yourself wandering its rooms.

Once you have given us the tick of approval for our design, we put together a written scope of works document and submit it, together with our drawings, to a quantity surveyor. She then prepares an elemental cost estimate of the project, refining our initial feasibility study by studying each component individually e.g. separate costs for structure, windows, joinery, plumbing works etc. If necessary, we work with you and the quantity surveyor to tweak both the design and your budget until they align. By the end of this process, we have produced a resolved design that you both love and can afford.

Stage duration = 10 – 12 weeks
Architect’s time = 80 – 120 hours
Specialist consultants = Quantity surveyor
Documentation = Sketch floor plans, elevations, sections and model
Scale of drawings = 1:100
Quantity = 8x A3 pages + model

1. Disclaimer: time allowances are estimates only and will vary depending on project size and complexity.

Image credits:

1. Sketch design. Author’s own image.
2. Farmer House sketch design. Author’s own image, see here for further details.

When we take potential clients through the time programme of the architectural process, we are often asked why it takes so long. As we noted in our recent article, The iron triangle, every project we undertake has “unique conditions that demand prototypical responses, the production of which cannot be achieved quickly. Making architecture is like investing all the research and development that goes into designing a new car, but then building it only once.”

This is the broad answer. More specifically, and to assist you in fleshing out your expectations of the architectural process, what follows is a description of the 3rd of the seven key stages we undertake for each of our projects.[1] An archive of all seven stages can be accessed here.

3. Town planning

In this project stage, we meet with a representative from the town planning department at your local Council for a pre-application meeting. This helps uncover any potential thorny issues in our proposal prior to submission of our application.

Once we’re satisfied that our design is as compliant as we can make it (or not, if you are masochistically interested in pushing the planning envelope), we convert our sketch design drawings into a package ready for submission. This involves tweaking the whole set to alter their main purpose from communicating our design to you, to demonstrating compliance with town planning regulations. We produce additional drawings like a site analysis, design response and shadow diagrams, and prepare a town planning report that assesses our design against the relevant zoning and overlay requirements.

Once we submit, we wait. Council will assign our application to a town planner, who will review it and request additional information if necessary. She will then arrange an advertising period where neighbours are able to review the proposal, will consider any objections received and prepare her report. Depending on the number of objections, either the planning coordinator or a full sitting of Council will consider the report and decide the project’s fate.

This is a highly variable stage of the project. Simple applications can fly through Council in a matter of weeks, while those that receive significant objections can get bogged down in months of bureaucracy. The worst case scenario is that the project will wind up at VCAT, which can take the better part of a year and cost many thousands of dollars in legal and consulting fees. Fortunately, most single houses do not go down this path. These will receive planning approval within the maximum 3 month period allotted to Council to assess applications.

Stage duration = 3 – 12 months
Architect’s time = 40 – 60 hours (excluding VCAT hearings)
Specialist consultants = Town planning consultant and lawyer (for VCAT hearings only)
Documentation = Town planning drawing set and report
Scale of drawings = 1:100
Quantity = 12x A3 drawings + 10x A4 report pages

1. Disclaimer: time allowances are estimates only and will vary depending on project size and complexity.

Image credit:

1. Town planning. Author’s own image.
2. Farmer House town planning. Author’s own image, see here for further details.

When we take potential clients through the time programme of the architectural process, we are often asked why it takes so long. As we noted in our recent article, The iron triangle, every project we undertake has “unique conditions that demand prototypical responses, the production of which cannot be achieved quickly. Making architecture is like investing all the research and development that goes into designing a new car, but then building it only once.”

This is the broad answer. More specifically, and to assist you in fleshing out your expectations of the architectural process, what follows is a description of the 4th of the seven key stages we undertake for each of our projects.[1] An archive of all seven stages can be accessed here.

4. Detailed design

Once we have planning approval, we proceed to detailed design. On less risky projects, we sometimes get started on this a little earlier: after Council has indicated their support for our application but before they have formally approved it.

We begin by seeking your briefing input once again. As the name of the project stage suggest, this time we are interested in the details. We ask whether you prefer cupboards or drawers, what height you like your benchtops, whether you have a large shoe collection, how many game consoles you own.

We then thoroughly resolve a great number of design decisions. We select materials, finishes, plumbing fittings and fixtures, appliances, lighting, electrical fittings, heating and cooling systems, door and window hardware. In the sketch design stage, we might have proposed a ceiling be lined in timber, now we nominate the timber species, dimensions of the lining boards, supplier, profile and finish. We also design every built-in joinery unit, from wardrobes to vanity units to bookshelves to, often most important of all, the kitchen. We nominate the locations of appliances, sizes of drawers, types of cutlery inserts, and thicknesses of benchtops.

While this detailed process is unfolding, we also being consultation with a structural engineer, confirming the broad principles of the structural design, and a landscape architect, to collaborate with us on the design and documentation of outdoor garden areas.

Your involvement in the detailed design stage is dictated by your interest in its primary focus: some clients are happy to let us select everything, others love spending their weekends shopping for toilets and ovens. By the time this project stage is finished, we aim to have every significant design decision for the house made and approved.

Stage duration = 6 – 8 weeks
Architect’s time = 80 – 100 hours
Specialist consultants = Structural engineer, landscape architect
Documentation = Joinery and lighting drawings and schedules
Scale of drawings = 1:20
Quantity = 10x A1 drawings + 4x A3 schedules

When we take potential clients through the time programme of the architectural process, we are often asked why it takes so long. As we noted in our recent article, The iron triangle, every project we undertake has “unique conditions that demand prototypical responses, the production of which cannot be achieved quickly. Making architecture is like investing all the research and development that goes into designing a new car, but then building it only once.”

This is the broad answer. More specifically, and to assist you in fleshing out your expectations of the architectural process, what follows is a description of the 5th of the seven key stages we undertake for each of our projects.[1] An archive of all seven stages can be accessed here.

5. Documentation

By the time the documentation stage starts, 99% of the design decisions are made. It’s now time to produce a documentation set that helps us perform three tasks:

1. Obtain a building permit.
2. Receive tenders from one or more builders to build your project.
3. Build your project.

We lock ourselves in our studio and go non-stop until we’re finished. We produce a very large quantity of drawings, including a site plan, demolition drawings, floor plans, reflected ceiling plans, elevations, sections, stair details, construction details, joinery plans and elevations, joinery details, and a window and door schedule. We also produce a written specification with attending schedules and appendices. The drawings explain the where and the how much; the specification explains the what and the how.

We work closely with the structural engineer, environmental consultant and landscape architect, both guiding their work and coordinating it with our own. While larger projects often involve further specialist consultants, this list is typically sufficient for single houses. We pay careful attention to the overlap between the consultants’ documentation sets to make sure heating ducts don’t need to be where columns are, and neither need to be where the kitchen sink is. We also submit our documentation to a building surveyor, who assess it against relevant building codes.

Finally, we end up with a highly detailed set of drawings and specifications that cover every scale of the project from site setout, to structural grid, to joinery details to tile types. These documents, together with our ongoing involvement on site, ensure the many months we have spent on creative thought find their way into the built form.

Stage duration = 3 – 4 months
Architect’s time = 200 – 300 hours
Specialist consultants = Structural engineer, environmental consultant, landscape architect, building surveyor
Documentation = Full construction drawings and specification
Scale of drawings = 1:200 – 1:5
Quantity = 20x A1 drawings + 50x A4 specification pages

1. Disclaimer: time allowances are estimates only and will vary depending on project size and complexity.

Image credits:

1. Documentation. Author’s own image.
2. Farmer House documentation. Author’s own image, see here for further details.

When we take potential clients through the time programme of the architectural process, we are often asked why it takes so long. As we noted in our recent article, The iron triangle, every project we undertake has “unique conditions that demand prototypical responses, the production of which cannot be achieved quickly. Making architecture is like investing all the research and development that goes into designing a new car, but then building it only once.”

This is the broad answer. More specifically, and to assist you in fleshing out your expectations of the architectural process, what follows is a description of the 6th of the seven key stages we undertake for each of our projects.[1] An archive of all seven stages can be accessed here.

6. Tendering

In this project stage, we procure 1 or more tenders to build your project. A tender is essentially a quote, though more detailed and tied to both our documentation and the eventual building contract. There are a number of ways we can go about tendering a project, a topic we have previously explored here, but each essentially boils down to this:

1. We submit our documentation set to 1 or more builders.
2. We give the builders 4 weeks to prepare their tenders.
3. We meet with the builders on site and respond to queries via tender addenda.
4. At the end of 4 weeks, we negotiate with the preferred builder until you, she and we are happy with the scope and budget.
5. We prepare duplicate copies of the building contract and documentation set for you and the builder to sign.

The tender period is typically set at 4 weeks, though the time required for the negotiation that takes place afterwards is dependent on how close to your project budget the tenders are. Since we carefully curate the builders with whom we work, all should be capable of executing the project. The only decision that needs to be made is on price.

Stage duration = 6 – 8 weeks
Architect’s time = 40 – 60 hours
Specialist consultants = N/A
Documentation = Tender addenda as required
Quantity of drawings  = N/A
Scale = N/A