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 7th and final of the seven key stages we undertake for each of our projects.[1] An archive of all seven stages can be accessed here.

7. Construction

In this the final stage of a project, your house gets built. All the hours and weeks and months of design and documentation are rewarded by the wonderful experience of witnessing your dream home take shape. The responsibility for driving the project forward transfers from us to the builder. After all our hard work, this is a considerable relief.

The design and documentation process is not completely finished however. In addition to certifying payments, assessing variations, and responding to queries, we continue refining and improving your project. Unexpected problems arise on site, exciting opportunities present themselves, and mistakes are made. The builder might demolish a wall and discover a rotten section of ceiling that needs to be removed, covered or replaced; a specified tile, oven or tap may no longer be available; when the wall framing goes up we might discover an unanticipated but particularly beautiful view we want to capture. For all of these situations, we resolve detailed construction questions with the you and the builder on site and back in our studio.

The duration of this project stage is first and foremost dependent on the size of the project, and second on its complexity. While there is an economy of scale, more building typically means more time. Complexity requires higher levels of supervision and presents fewer opportunities for fast tracking. There is also a minimum time to construction. We have found that even the smallest construction projects, with barely 3 months of work to do, will take at least 6 months to complete.

In total, you can expect an architectural project to take a minimum of a year and a half from conception to completion. The maximum we’ve discussed here is 3 and a half years, though this is dependent on a number of potentially unquantifiable factors, including a drawn out town planning process and lengthy construction stage.

Stage duration = 6 – 18 months
Architect’s time = 200 – 600 hours
Specialist consultants = Structural engineer, building surveyor
Documents = Site details, progress payment certificates and variations
Scale of drawings = 1:10 – 1:5
Quantity = 40 – 120x A4 details depending on duration and complexity of project

Who is he?

An italian architect and “urban change agent”[1] who divides his time between Carlo Ratti Associati, the innovation and design studio he runs from Torino, and SENSEable City Lab, the research laboratory he leads out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. Ratti’s design and research work overlap significantly, both focussing on the transformative effect of new technologies on our built environment and daily lives.[2] The scope of his projects is incredibly wide, ranging from drone-based wayfinding to experimental furniture to citywide data mining.

Ratti was in Melbourne last month for a week of programs courtesy of the International Specialised Skills Institute. We attended the lunchtime seminar he presented at the University of Melbourne entitled, Decalogue for a [smart] SENSEable city. It was hosted in conjunction by the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning and the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute.

What did we think?

Ratti began his seminar by quoting controversial American activist, George Gilder, who in 1995 claimed that “cities are leftover baggage of the industrial era… We are headed for the death of cities.” More moderately, fellow MIT scholar, Nicholas Negroponte, wrote in 1996 that “the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence on being in a specific place at a specific time.”[3] Far from the death of cities however, Ratti observed that the past twenty years have instead witnessed their unparalleled prosperity. Global urbanisation is more widespread now than at any other time in history, with just over half of the world’s 7.1 billion population living in urban areas.[4]

Cities are thriving, but so is the penetration of digital technology into their fabric. “The digital revolution did not end up killing our cities, but neither did it leave them unaffected. A layer of networked digital elements has blanketed our environment, blending bits and atoms together in a seamless way.”[5] Evidence of this physical and digital conversion – the cyberphysical – is everywhere: from the 4 billion smartphones in circulation globally and the infiltration of social media into daily work habits, to the proliferation of remotely controlled security systems and transport infrastructure.

For Ratti, the exciting extrapolation of this process is our ability to use digital technology to learn from cities in order to improve them. Many of his projects involve crowdsourcing tiny fragments of data that are in themselves meaningless but when gathered together form very large sets of useful intelligence. He seeks to convert the city into a realtime control system, with inbuilt feedback loops that improve its economic, social and environmental sustainability. A difficult undertaking with a simple justification: while the physical layers of the city – roads, buildings, services – are expensive to build and respond slowly to change, the digital layers are cheap to implement and able to evolve very quickly to changing circumstances. In essence, Ratti wants the digital to allow us to better use what we already have of the physical.

Ratti structured his presentation around a series of diverse themes of urban engagement, including Smart phone smart city, i-Mobility, New universities, and Living together. The projects employed a compelling cocktail of skill sets, involving among others architectural design, graphic design, algorithmic computing, electrical engineering and web app development. Intervening in the emerging overlap between the physical and digital space of the city, they convincingly capture Ratti’s inexhaustible inventiveness and hunger for urban change.

Though Ratti covered a lot of ground during his hour-long seminar, we will focus here on three projects only, the ones that struck us as most clearly demonstrating his multi-disciplinary approach to urban problem solving.

170 million annual taxi trips in New York City

Journey from West 15th to East 54th Street

HubCab
www.hubcab.org
Project video via YouTube
i-Mobility
2014

HubCab is an interactive visualisation that allows users to explore every taxi trip taken within the City of New York in a year: a network of journeys that leave no lasting trace but nevertheless stitch the whole city together. Like many of SENSEable City Lab’s projects, the seduction of the visualisation masks an extraordinary backend algorithm processing vast quantities of information. According to the HubCab website, the basis of the project is “a data set of over 170 million taxi trips of all 13,500 medallion taxis in New York City in 2011. The data set contains GPS coordinates of all pick up and drop off points and corresponding times.”[6]

Employing an efficiency concept developed by Ratti’s team, shareability networks, the data set is analysed for potential redundancies i.e. whether a taxi trip travelling from point A to point B can be combined with a second trip travelling from point C to point D, thereby eliminating one trip entirely. When we click on a nominal trip, say from West 15th to East 54th Street (see above image), we can see that it forms part of a route with annual savings of $3.1m, 1.6m kilometres and 445,000kg of CO2. Ratti explained that employing shareability networks within a large, dense city like New York has the capacity to reduce the number of taxi trips in a year by a staggering 40%.

Map of Singapore where the scale is not measured in kilometres but travel time

Maps of central Singapore comparing mobile phone usage on typical days (left) and during the Singapore Grand Prix (right)

LIVE Singapore!
www.senseable.mit.edu/livesingapore/
Project video via YouTube
Public engagement 2.0
2010

LIVE Singapore! is an exercise in citywide mapping, establishing “a feedback loop between people, their actions, and the city.”[7] It gathers useful information like temperature, mobile phone usage, rainfall, taxi availability and traffic, and maps them with localised detail in realtime. The project team curated the mapping process, for instance juxtaposing taxi availability against rainfall, or mobile phone usage against a popular sporting event.

The selection of information types and process of juxtaposition reflect the true agenda of this project: “giving people visual and tangible access to realtime information about their city enables them to make their decisions in sync with their environment, with what is actually happening around them.”[8] If traffic congestion mapping can accurately tell us how long it will take to get somewhere, we can leave early enough to arrive on time. If we know that taxis are likely to get snapped up whenever it rains, we can take the train (or authorities can ensure greater supply).

The tracking device used in TrashTrack

Movement of waste after two months

TrashTrack
www.senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/
Project video via YouTube
Waste tracking
2009

This project asks the question, “why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little about the removal chain?”[9] It suggests that our interest in the supply of local produce does not extend to waste processes in large part due to our lack of awareness of them. TrashTrack seeks to highlight the movement of our waste products from household bins to final destinations.

Using a simplified version of technology found within mobile phones, Ratti’s team developed a tracking and broadcasting device that could be attached to pieces of waste. The team then invited 500 volunteers to tag regular pieces of household rubbish, 3,000 items in total ranging from old sneakers, to empty cans, banana peels and dead batteries. Once the volunteers went home and threw out their tagged waste items, the tags started reporting their locations and establishing tracking vectors of their movement.

The tags, or smart dust as Ratti referred to them, established a network of tiny locatable electromechanical systems. The video of the mapping process is astounding: items of waste found their way from Seattle to every corner of the United States, in the case of some alkaline batteries not coming to a rest for two months.

What did we learn?

To understand Ratti’s work, we must consider the way he views the major forces affecting contemporary urban environments. The rapid growth in global urbanisation is his first and perhaps most important influence: Ratti does not deny the decentralising tendencies of digital technology, but attributes the city’s survival despite these tendencies to our deep need for social contact: people want to live together. His works are inherently social, interested in enhancing the connections between people and their environments. Rather than permitting digital technologies to alienate the inhabitants of a city, he wants to empower them with new and unprecedented control.

Second, and essentially the core area of Ratti’s interventions, is the aforementioned and ever-expanding blanket of networked digital elements. He is impatient with the slowness of hard infrastructure, far more interested in the opportunities presented by new digital technologies: data, networks, connections and apps that have the power to reach and affect millions of people at a time. He reasons that a city is not such a big place nor such a mysterious creature to understand, not when millions of people are already walking around in it, already absorbing and transmitting data about their environments.

For us, we are most impressed with the clear DNA of Ratti’s projects. They tackle issues of environmental sustainability, quality of life, resource use, cultural engagement and social spaces. If these questions seem familiar it’s because they are: they’re the same questions architects face. What the architecture profession traditionally addresses via urban and building design, Ratti addresses with digital, scaleable technologies. His is an exciting new world, one where the practice of architecture retains its worldview, but expands to encompass whatever tools and skills are necessary to get the job done.

This thinking has been recently manifested in a project not discussed by Ratti in his presentation but already receiving a lot of attention online and now available for pre-ordering, the Copenhagen Wheel. An electric motor that attaches to the rear wheel of a bicycle, it “transforms the bicycle into a hybrid e-bike that also provides feedback on pollution, traffic congestion and road conditions in realtime.”[10] This project is an exciting development within Ratti’s work, one that shifts his practice beyond demonstration into application. We look forward to seeing more of it.

1. Carlo Ratti in Melbourne; ArchitectureAU; 13th March 2014
2. Studio synopsis; Carlo Ratti Associati; accessed 20th April 2014
3. Nicholas Negroponte; Being Digital; Hodder and Stoughton; 1996
4. In 2011, 52.1% of the world population lived in urban areas. By 2050, this is projected to grow to 67.2%. Source: World Population Prospects; Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat; 2011
5. Carlo Ratti; Digital Cities: ‘Sense-able’ urban design; Wired; 2nd October 2009
6. Project description; HubCab; accessed 27th April 2014
7. Project description; LIVE Singapore!; accessed 27th April 2014
8. Ibid.
9. Project description; TrashTrack; accessed 28th April 2014
10. Project description; Copenhagen Wheel; accessed 29th April 2014

Image credits:

1. Carlo Ratti. MIT Technology Review, author unknown.
2. Annual taxi trips, for HubCab; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; New York City; 2014
3. Journey from West 15th to East 54th Street, for HubCab; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; New York City; 2014
4. Isochronic Singapore, for LIVE Singapore!; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; Singapore; 2010
5. Formula One City, for LIVE Singapore!; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; Singapore; 2010
6. Trash tag v2.0, the tracking device used in TrashTrack; SENSEable City Lab, MIT; Seattle; October 2009
7. Trash tagging map, for TrashTrack; SENSEable City Lab, MIT; Seattle; October 2009

What was it?

The Australian Institute of Architects’ national architecture conference, held last month at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. Creatively directed by Sam Crawford, Adam Haddow and Helen Norrie, it explored the “act of making; in the dirtiness, directness and honesty of architecture… both the machinations of the process, and the beauty, delight and surprise of excellence.”[1]

This was the tenth conference since Kerstin Thompson was appointed the first creative director in 2005, and addressed a decade of recent history that saw international speakers drawn predominantly from Europe, North America and Japan. In their opening address, Crawford, Haddow and Norrie showed map overlays of this tendency, revealing a sizable hole in our own backyard. Thus they explained the strong regional focus of Making, with most speakers selected from Asia.

The directors noted that the conference location in Perth – another first in a decade – was unanticipated when they were appointed, but serendipitous. The city’s position on the west coast of Australia is closer to some of our regional neighbours than it is Melbourne and Sydney. With the world’s epicentre shifting to China and India, this is a timely and welcome acknowledgement of the architectural value to be found in Asia, one for which the directors should be applauded.

The conference was divided into four subthemes that sought to extend an intuitive definition of making: an exploration of not just the physical act of building, but its more ephemeral effects. Making culture, making life, making connections and making impact were each anchored by an Australian architect, who presented their own work, introduced the international speakers, and chaired thematically driven discussion panels. This division of duties had the curious side effect of reducing the prominence of the Australian voice within the broader discussion. We were interviewers, not interviewees.

Making culture
Andrew Burns, Australia (anchor)
Richard Hassell, Singapore
David Adjaye, England

Making life
Elizabeth Watson-Brown, Australia (anchor)
Wen Hsia and BC Ang, Malaysia
Cazú Zegers, Chile
Vo Trong Nghia, Vietnam
Marina Tabassum, Bangladesh

Making connections
Emma Williamson, Australia (anchor)
Sek San Ng, Malaysia
Gurjit Singh Matharoo, India
Andra Matin, Indonesia
Lyndon Neri, China

Making impact
Timothy Horton, Australia (anchor)
Justine Clark and Naomi Stead, Australia
Beth Miller, United States of America
Alejandro Echeverri, Colombia
Jo Noero, South Africa

What did I think?

While website descriptions of the way each subtheme would be explored were clear enough, overlap between all but the making impact theme had the unfortunate side effect of rendering them essentially indistinguishable from one another. This would have been less confusing if all the speakers reflected on their work with reference to the conference themes, but a few resorted to cookie-cutter lectures that failed to address them in any meaningful way.

For instance, Lyndon Neri was very entertaining, but his image-heavy lecture was light on insights. Andra Matin was invited to speak thanks to his role in establishing a network of young architects in Indonesia, but neglected to discuss this entirely, offering little more than walkthrough descriptions of his projects. This was a disappointing distraction that had me questioning the wisdom in including the subthemes at all.

In a thoughtful and detailed email response sent to me after the conference, Norrie explained that the subthemes were however never meant to establish a rigid thesis or architectural taxonomy. The intent was to develop a “curatorial framework” that would broaden the scope of making and provide direction for discussion and audience reflection. Programming the conference was a fluid task, with speakers constantly moved between themes: the directors went through twenty-one iterations before settling on the final programme.[2] Even then there was crossover, with some speakers presenting under one subtheme and participating in the discussion of another.

Retrospectively assessing the conference, it is clear how this approach encouraged debate amongst the delegates and interrogation of making. One colleague commented that architecture cannot make life or culture: life and culture make architecture. I suspect Crawford, Haddow and Norrie were interested however in exploring the role architecture plays within these fields, both as a recipient of and agent for change. Tabassum’s sublime Independence Monument and Liberation War Museum was a good example of this duality. A tribute to the tens of millions of people killed or forcibly displaced during the Bangladesh Liberation War, it is a project both shaped by political events of the past and able to influence a country’s sense of identity in the future.

What were the highlights?

The best speakers were those able to provide meaningful self-reflection and an analysis of their work within the broader contexts of not only the conference themes, but architectural production and national identity also. Richard Hassell was fascinating, the prodigal Perth son whose casual demeanour is a mask for extraordinary success across Asia. Wen Hsia and BC Ang presented a portfolio populated by small projects in concrete and timber, each executed with delightful creativity. And Sek San Ng’s irreverent humour aligned perfectly with his resourceful and honest design work.

Above all, the making impact subtheme stood out, differing from the other three in the clarity of its purpose and focus of its speakers. Populated by individuals operating outside the traditional territory of architecture practice, it was interested in outcomes beyond the built form, like gender equity and community wellbeing.[3]

Timothy Horton’s wide-ranging experience as a political operator made him an excellent choice for anchor. In his introduction he made reference to Rory Hyde’s impressive book, Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture, a pioneering series of short interviews exploring similar questions of architectural territory. He recalled some of Hyde’s descriptive titles for contemporary practitioners operating on the edge, titles like the Urban Activist and the Community Enabler, suggesting an exciting world of new opportunities for a profession in crisis.[4]

The presentations of both Alejandro Echeverri and Jo Noero demonstrated the positive influence of high quality public buildings on the informal settlements of Medellin in Columbia and Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Their carefully considered architectural interventions inspire urban and social change in cities with deeply segregated populations. They slow the progress of downwards-economic spirals and act as foundation stones from which disadvantaged communities might begin to rebuild themselves.

The Community Design Collaborative in Philadelphia, of which Beth Miller is executive director, matchmakes deserving community projects with architects who work pro-bono to prepare sketch design proposals and seek financial backing. The CDC believes that good design is not a luxury but a public right, and since 1991 “have coordinated the donation of 100,000 hours of volunteer design work to a portfolio of 600 not-for-profit organisations.”

Finally, Justine Clark and Naomi Stead’s research through Parlour into gender equity has established a far-reaching and invaluable tool for understanding the current state of Australian architecture practice. Broadening the scope of their findings from women specifically to an entire profession, they argued that, “women architects are like the canary in the coalmine,” their equity issues indicative of much more widespread problems. Positive change to this status quo is to be sought from “pragmatic, collective and sustained advocacy.” The conference coincided with the release of their Guides to Equitable Practice, an important milestone towards a fairer Australian architecture profession.

The making impact theme was exceptional for two important reasons. First, more than any of the others, it demonstrated that architecture is not only influenced by its various contexts but can in fact exert influence over them. And second, it was most expressive of the conference’s aspirations, expanding the realm of architectural activity beyond buildings. For Australia, where the services offered by the architecture profession are continuously marginalised, we need to be proactive about uncovering new ones. Making impact offered substantial proof that our profession can be more than mere beautifiers of facades, more than a luxury service affordable only to the wealthy.

The work of Parlour strikes me as most radical in this respect. It is unprecedented for the architecture profession, not just for Australia but possibly the world. Could the Parlour research team generate sufficient expertise to start exporting its services? Could it transcend its scope as an auditor of an industry to an industry in its own right? In the battle for new territory, this is as good evidence as I have ever seen of the architecture profession creating new value from our unique and often underappreciated worldview.

What did I learn?

During the making impact discussion session, the outspoken Jo Noero memorably broadsided Dutch architecture studio OMA for designing a media headquarters for “one of the world’s most oppressive regimes.” He added that, “arguing China will develop a more moderate approach to freedom of speech in 25 years isn’t good enough. As architects, we need to do it now.” Noero has a well-earned reputation for unwavering and polemical morality, inspiring more than one of his fellow presenters to confess their feelings of guilt over the wealth of their clients.

Noero’s comment raised a provocative and enduring question in my mind, one that was accentuated by the choice of speakers for the conference and the region they represent. According to the World Bank’s index of per capita gross national income, Australia is the eleventh wealthiest country in the world. China is ranked 83^rd, Indonesia 109^th and India 118^th, their combined GNI measuring just over half of our own.[5] By focussing on Asia, South America and Africa, the conference inevitably targeted speakers from some of the poorest countries on the planet.

This disparity was not explicitly addressed by the conference themes, but it was implied everywhere: from the costly burden of air-conditioning in tropical climates, and consequent necessity of natural ventilation; to the opportunities provided by materials-light but labour-intensive construction techniques; to the repeated celebration of resourceful architecture. This commentary established a fifth and not-so-subtle subtheme running through every presentation and discussion: making money. The genius of the creative directors, intended or otherwise, was to ensure that the entire socio-economic spectrum be represented, from Sek San’s orphanage built entirely from donated funds and village labour, to Wen Hsia and BC Ang’s work on both private housing and social projects for indigenous Malaysian tribes, to the extraordinary lavishness of Matharoo’s pivoting marble-clad walls.

Noero was provocative, declaring his refusal to design any private house larger than 150sqm, but he was only pointing out the obvious elephant in the room. What role do architects have to play in addressing inequality? When Matharoo or Matin or Neri accept a commission for another expensive mansion, what responsibility do they have to the welfare of the millions of their countrymen and women irrevocably unable to afford their services? What responsibility does an Australian architect have to the same (though less extreme) divide here?

For me, this was the most striking subject to be drawn from the conference. It was not the first time such issues have been raised in public forums and nor will it be the last. I can’t say with any certainty what responsibility architects have in challenging poverty or deep economic segregation, but I hope that future conferences continue to focus their gaze on our region and on the great inequality that continues to exist here. Such a focus is an essential extension of the questions explored by the making theme and one I would like to think is given significant attention by our profession in coming decades.

Overall, Making 2014 was an engaging, contextually relevant and at times inspiring conference. The creative directors successfully curated a selection of speakers producing meaningful work far outside the starchitecture with which we are otherwise bombarded on a daily basis. Above all, it was a rewarding opportunity to recharge my batteries, to step back from the daily activities of being an architect and remind myself of the bigger picture.

I look forward to next year’s conference, Risk 2015, to be held in Melbourne and explore the troubled nexus “between the professional necessity to take calculated and creative risks and a world incapacitated by risk minimisation.” It will look backwards at humanity’s historical architectural achievements and will, I hope, show how we can rediscover our preparedness to take risks for the sake of great rewards.

I can’t wait.

This article was commissioned by, and first appeared in, Architecture AU.

1. Sam Crawford, Adam Haddow, Helen Norrie, creative directors; Overview, Making 2014 National Architecture Conference; accessed 11th May 2014
2. Helen Norrie, Making 2014 creative director; private correspondence with author; May 2014
3. Even Jo Noero, the only practitioner within the making impact subtheme, is arguably a political activist first and architect second.
4. Dr. Rory Hyde; Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture; Routledge; London; 2012
5. In 2012, the GNI of Australia was $42,540, of China was $10,900, of Indonesia was $8,750 and of India was $5,080. These figures are in international dollars and based on the gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity i.e. taking into consideration the relative strengths of the listed countries’ currency to achieve a more realistic comparison. Source: GNI per capita, PPP; The World Bank Databank; accessed 20^th May 2014

Images sources:

1. Perth from the air; modified from the original photo by Kristian Maley
2. Sekeping Serendah by Seksan Design; image courtesy of Sekeping Serendah resort; author unknown
3. Chempenai House by WHBC; modified from the original photo by Aina Liyana
4. Red Location Museum by Noero Architects; image courtesy of Noero Architects via Abi Millar‘s insightful article, Architecture of Necessity

The 24th instalment in a series of lessons learned over the years. What do I know now that I didn’t then? What wisdom would I impart to my younger self, given the opportunity?

This lesson also formed part of a lecture given for the May Process forum, The Jump, exploring the challenges faced when setting up a practice. Process is a monthly information sharing series curated by the Victorian Young Architects and Graduates network.

23. Architecture is old fashioned

The 21st Century is a brave new time to be an architect. The digital revolution is having as profound an effect on us as it is everyone else. Parametric tools are rewriting the way buildings are designed; BIM is rewriting the way they are documented; social media is rewriting the way we connect; and the cloud is rewriting the way we communicate. But for all that, architecture is old fashioned.

We still need to be people people to thrive. Of the 53 project enquiries we have received since starting our architecture practice, word of mouth has generated 58% or 31 of them. Even more tellingly, word of mouth is responsible for 82% of the 22 projects we have undertaken. In other words, while our website, online portals like Houzz, television slots and the Australian Institute of Architect’s Find an Architect service provide us with a decent proportion of our project enquiries, they are not very successful in converting them into commissions. Trust remains an irreplaceable factor in helping clients choose us as their architect.

Our clients are in some sense much more than clients: they are partners. They feed us our inspiration, provide direction, support and feedback. They are as integral to the success of a project as we are, and they are not alone. We have to engage with surveyors, town planners and engineers too, each of whom can be a obstacle or a gateway. We must know how to help them buy into our direction for the project and become as invested in it as we are.

Then there is what we do: we draw and we make models. We use the computer a lot, but pens, tracing paper, card and PVA are still the tools we use to design. It’s as though we have been hardwired to gain satisfaction from the energetic loop that runs from mind to hand to paper to eye to mind. Digital technologies interrupt this flow, but a quick sketch is as natural as speaking.

Finally, there’s the pot of gold that waits for us downstream. All our research, design and documentation efforts are channelled into the production of a set of drawings that tell a bunch of blokes with drills, saws and sanders how to put things together. Blogging may only date back to the 1990s, but bricks and mortar go back millennia. Our involvement with materials and relationships with builders has an affect on us that other creative thinkers lack. They tie us to the history of a place and culture, anchor us in the ongoing legacy of the built environment.

Architecture is old fashioned.

1. James Bond. Passion Without Limits, author unknown.

The 24th instalment in a series of lessons learned over the years. What do I know now that I didn’t then? What wisdom would I impart to my younger self, given the opportunity?

This lesson also formed part of a lecture given for the May Process forum, The Jump, exploring the challenges faced when setting up a practice. Process is a monthly information sharing series curated by the Victorian Young Architects and Graduates network.

24. Architecture is slow

In our university days, a project took precisely 12 weeks: no matter how resolved it was, come the end of semester we presented, were judged and moved on. In practice, 12 weeks is a blink of an eye. Hill House, our first project, took us six years to complete. Basser House and Farmer House took us three. Howard Street is an ongoing labour of love, five years old and counting. The musician has an enviable relationship with her art: design and feedback are simultaneous. Architecture is the opposite… slow.

The slowness of architecture has a few notable effects on architecture practice.

First, it is no coincidence that architects are considered young until at the very least we’re 40 (the digital maestros of Silicone Valley are considered ancient once they’re 30). It’s remarkable that the great Oscar Niemeyer continued working until his recent death at the age of 105, but maybe it was just because it took him so long to get started.

Second, it takes decades to explore, test, refine and perfect new ideas. A steel door handle detail we designed for Farmer House in July of 2012 is only now being fabricated. It may be many months until we use the idea on a subsequent project, and many years until we resolve it to a point that we feel sufficiently comfortable to use it with abandon.

Third, the growth of our practice matches the pace of our projects. We established Mihaly Slocombe in 2010 and are only now reaching the end of our first round of built projects. We have a graduate working with us part time now, which represents a 50% boost in personnel. We’re very busy, but in no need of further expansion at the moment. This is a glacial growth rate when we compare ourselves to a friend of ours who started a yoga studio not long after us - she is already in the process of opening her sixth outlet.

Fourth and perhaps obviously, architecture requires patience. The approach required to be a successful architect has a lot in common with long distance running. Every step must be considered in the context of dozens of kilometres, every ounce of exertion measured against the hours of running still to be done, every moment of pain acknowledged as advanced payment for the glory that awaits at the finishing line.

Architecture is slow.

1. Little turtle. Mr. Wallpaper, copyright Ines Martinez.

The 25th instalment in a series of lessons learned over the years. What do I know now that I didn’t then? What wisdom would I impart to my younger self, given the opportunity?

This lesson also formed part of a lecture given for the May Process forum, The Jump, exploring the challenges faced when setting up a practice. Process is a monthly information sharing series curated by the Victorian Young Architects and Graduates network.

25. Business is not a dirty word

Architects have long held the unflattering reputation as being poor businesspeople. This is probably rooted in truth, and all the more unfortunate because of it. The equation is simple: we may start our architecture practices because we love designing, but the only way we can keep doing so is if we are good at business.

There are three areas of business activity for which we have developed (and continue to develop) appreciation and skills.

We must manage our time. We need to budget how long it will take us to complete a project so we don’t end up diluting our fees so much we could have earned more flipping burgers. Typically, we earn $40 – 50 an hour on a project, gross. This is probably half what it should be, and a source of constant reflection. Budgeting our time also helps us meet our deadlines and keep our clients happy.

We must manage our finances. We need to keep a track of income, salaries, overheads and cashflow. Knowing how much we earn and spend helps us structure future fee proposals to better cover our costs and profit. Knowing when we earn and spend helps us avoid a dangerous boom and bust financial cycle.

Finally, we must manage our public profile. The most lasting and meaningful marketing lesson we have ever learnt is this: do good work, then put it where people can see it. What’s so important about this lesson is its two halves. Doing good work is critical, but it’s not enough. We need to be good designers and we need to be good sellers. An extension of this insight, and the second most meaningful lesson we have ever learn is this: more is more. Marketing is a both / and scenario, an additive numbers game. We spread our work as far and as wide as we possibly can in the hope that of every 100 people who see it, one will give us a call.

Business is not a dirty word.

1. The Great Hong Kong Garbage Patch. Journey to the Plastic Ocean, copyright Tracey Read.

The 26th instalment in a series of lessons learned over the years. What do I know now that I didn’t then? What wisdom would I impart to my younger self, given the opportunity?

This lesson also formed part of a lecture given for the May Process forum, The Jump, exploring the challenges faced when setting up a practice. Process is a monthly information sharing series curated by the Victorian Young Architects and Graduates network.

26. Architecture practice is an emotional rollercoaster ride

When we worked for other architects, life was pretty simple. We worked on the projects our bosses gave us, and when they dried up for whatever reason – client review, town planning, tendering, budget collapse – we worked on the new projects our bosses gave us. The glaringly obvious truth that we failed to anticipate when we started Mihaly Slocombe is that the boss’ life is not so simple. When a project dries up, so do our fees and so do the things that keep us busy.

A month ago, we were up to our eyeballs in work. Juggling our nine active projects that all needed attention was very stressful and a task we only barely managed. But then within a matter of weeks, two projects finished construction, one finished documentation, one went into town planning, two paused until we received land surveys, two paused until we received client feedback and one died due to an irreconcilable budget and brief. We were left with nothing to do.

Watching one project after another grind to a halt – at least as far as our contributions were concerned – was even more stressful than having too much work to do. We had a terrible month of invoicing that, to add insult to injury, was coupled with a terrible month of expenses. And suddenly, we had to fabricate things for us to do.

Thankfully, our drought was short-lived, barely three weeks long, as half of our paused projects quickly woke up again. But the enduring lesson is troublesome: despite our best efforts at spreading out our projects so they’re unlike to all dry up simultaneously, it still happened.

Architecture practice is an emotional rollercoaster ride.

1. The big dipper. Photo Everywhere, author unknown.

The 27th instalment in a series of lessons learned over the years. What do I know now that I didn’t then? What wisdom would I impart to my younger self, given the opportunity?

This lesson also formed part of a lecture given for the May Process forum, The Jump, exploring the challenges faced when setting up a practice. Process is a monthly information sharing series curated by the Victorian Young Architects and Graduates network.

27. The architect is a Renaissance Man

The daily life of an architect is far from linear. We must multitask across many activities, zigzagging between projects, project phases, skills and languages. I have never understood the interest in working for a large architecture practice, where each project is assigned a team, where teams are often restricted to single project phases, where individuals are employed to execute the same task over and over and over again.

Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance Man, an architect and urban designer and sculptor and painter and poet and inventor and builder. What an era and country in which to have lived, when the world’s artists were able to apply their abilities across so many media! The modern architect working in a small practice is no different. We are problem solvers and creative thinkers and craftspeople and scholars and leaders and businesspeople and politicians and polyglots.

The job is exciting, every element of it multifaceted. We draw by hand and in the computer, make physical and digital models, write fee proposals, town planning applications and specifications. We sit at a desk, visit showrooms and factories, and inspect construction sites. Some tasks are more enjoyable than others, but the discordant rhythm of them all keeps our minds engaged and our spirits fulfilled.

The architect is a Renaissance Man.

1. Vitruvian Man. Hal Robert Myers Photography, copyright Leonardo da Vinci.

The 28th instalment in a series of lessons learned over the years. What do I know now that I didn’t then? What wisdom would I impart to my younger self, given the opportunity?

This lesson also formed part of a lecture given for the May Process forum, The Jump, exploring the challenges faced when setting up a practice. Process is a monthly information sharing series curated by the Victorian Young Architects and Graduates network.

28. The lifestyle is bitchin’

We currently run Mihaly Slocombe out of our spare bedroom. Our dining room, which is located at the front of our house, has one wall lined floor to ceiling with our architecture books, and doubles as our meeting room.

There is comfort in this arrangement, a threat to productivity no doubt, but a pleasure nonetheless. The commute time is exceptional – I can’t even begin to imagine where in my life I would find the two hours it used to for me to get to and from my old workplace. I never have to prepare my lunch in the morning, leftovers are reheated or jaffles are toasted as I feel like it. Working late if necessary isn’t a hassle as I can do it from the couch, all my resources still accessible but slippers on our feet.

The hours I work are flexible. Between three of us, we collectively work 9 FTE days a week. If I have to I can shift my days and hours around to attend workshops, visit remote sites, or take days off. I can match our practice work with teaching, other projects and, most importantly of all, parenting.

Our two year old son sees more of both his parents than most children and, in return, we have the joy of always being around. We have lunch together and Oscar works with his Daddy a few times each day, studiously playing with my phone while sitting on my lap, my arms wrapped around him to reach the keyboard.

The lifestyle is bitchin’.

1. The Fonz. Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, copyright Associated Press.

Wen Hsia Ang and BC Ang are the two halves of WHBC Architects, a young studio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As they explained in their presentation at the recent National Architecture Conference, they regard architecture as an exercise in problem solving. Each project demands a singular idea that can define and carry it. To attest to this philosophy, their website catalogues their projects according to simple sketches: if they can’t draw a single sketch to explain the core idea of a project, then the idea isn’t strong enough.

I had the pleasure of interviewing them after their conference presentation, and found much in common with their passion for ideas, craft and the making of buildings.

Durian Shed, Negeri Sembilan

Thank you for your lecture, it was very engaging.

Wen Hsia: Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Even though I was familiar with a number of your projects, the discussion of your thinking behind them offered new insights. Can you describe your work in its geographical context, whether you see it as particularly Malaysian?

BC: We believe geographical boundaries are man-made, so we relate first of all to the climate, which is pretty similar in Malaysia, Indonesia or other Asian countries. But on another layer, when you look at the construction context in Malaysia we have a combination of migrant and local workers. These different kinds of craftspeople make a big difference to the design. The climate, the people making the buildings and the people we are making them for all influence us. For us, there is no Malaysian design per se.

WH: Yes, we are always constrained by our tropical climate, the budget and the way our buildings are made. Certain materials may be cheap in Australia, but expensive in Malaysia. We do a lot of our projects in concrete because in Malaysia it is cheaper to build with concrete than steel or timber.

BC: Labour is cheap in Malaysia.

That was my next comment actually. Labour is cheap, concrete is cheap because it’s essentially just dirt, but steel is expensive.

BC: Yes, we have a labour-intensive culture, of building with wet works, reinforced concrete frames, bricks and mortar. This culture has existed in Malaysia for thirty to forty years and is cheaper than doing for instance a steel building.

As an Australian architect, I’m envious of the possibilities inherent in that culture. Here, the labour component of a project may be 60% of the construction budget, so we make decisions that use less labour but more materials.

WH: Yes, this affects our design decisions, but the other way around.

BC: We use concrete whenever it is appropriate as a way of responding to the Malaysian construction industry. Even when we are doing our early design work, we are already thinking about who can build it, which craftspeople have the skill to do it. If they are not available, we might have to relook at it…

WH: We might have to simplify some of the details, so the details evolve with the job. We have to think about how the builders will work and try and adjust our designs accordingly.

At last year’s national conference, Yosuke Hayano from MAD Architects in China discussed the challenge of building very large, highly technical buildings with old-fashioned construction techniques and labourers. Does this issue affect the way your ideas find their way into your projects? Do your ideas sit in the details or, knowing that the details aren’t necessarily going to be executed the way you want, in the bigger picture?

WH: That’s a very interesting question. We like our design concepts to be very strong. If our idea is strong enough, even if the details are not what we expect, the idea can carry the whole weight of the project.

BC: We like to be very pragmatic. On any project no matter its scale, the important component for us is still to have a good idea that solves a good problem. If our project can solve that problem, we go into the project with our eyes open, knowing that execution might not be as good as we really want it to be. We believe that doing good things is more important than crafting them perhaps.

WH: We do believe that all buildings should be well executed, and we try to be very particular about that aspiration, but in order to achieve it then we have to really think about how the building is going to be carried out and then work backwards.

So we struggle with exactly the same issues, no matter which country we are practicing in! Sometimes a project comes along with a very low budget and you know that you are not going to be able to execute it to the level of craftsmanship that you would like, so you make design decisions that can be achieved by a lower quality of craftsperson on site. It’s not ideal, but it’s a job and you do it…

WH: As long as the idea is achieved, that is something that we cannot compromise.

BC: If a project comes to us and we are just supposed to build the building, without adding any value or solving any problems, then there is no point doing it.

Do you say no to many projects?

WH: Yes, yes we do.

Is it hard to say no? It takes a lot of confidence to turn down a project…

BC: (Laughs) Even after we start working on a project, if we find it not working out then we will just have to move on.

That’s great. One of Glenn Murcutt’s pieces of wisdom that has always struck with me is that the future of our lives as architects is defined more by the projects we reject than the projects we accept.

WH: Exactly, yes.

Dog Hotel, Negeri Sembilan

What I think is interesting about your work is that there is actually much more than pragmatism, there’s also whimsy and humour. Like the skylights in your dog hotel, why wouldn’t a dog want some skylights? Is this a conscious process for you?

WH: (Laughs) Well, we love to have some sense of humour in all our projects. We tend to not take ourselves too seriously. We try and have fun with our projects.

BC: We have fun if the clients are good. With most projects, with the pole house and dog hotel, we become good friends with our clients.

WH: We know that we only have so much time, if we waste time on a project that we’re not happy about, then we can’t do really good work.

Yes, and then you start getting a reputation for doing bad work and all of a sudden more opportunities for bad work come to you.

BC: It’s like a vicious cycle.

Telegraph Pole House, Langkawi

You are partners in life as well as in business. Do you have complementary skills; do you share the roles on a project?

WH: It is actually quite good; we complement each other because we are two very different people in terms of architecture and in terms of thinking. The way BC thinks is quite German.

BC: We think in nationalities, I’m German or Japanese, very logical.

WH: And I’m more French (laughs), more intuitive and passionate. If I don’t like something, I’ll just come out and say what’s on my mind. We started working together seven or eight years ago and found very early on that we can be completely honest with each other. In Malaysia, people can be quite shy. But we have a partnership that works well because of our honesty with each other. We can tell each other off, I can tell BC that his scheme is really bad.

BC: So we have a fight about it (laughs), but then we get over it.Sometimes we both try to work on a design for one project, and will come out with different proposals. Whoever has the best idea leads the project, or whoever gets on best with the client.

WH: It changes from project to project.

Having been in practice together for a while now, do you know what you want for your future? Do you want your practice to stay the size it is now or grow? One of the issues with a small practice is being limited in the scale of projects you can take on.

BC: We are happy with the scale of our office now, just the two of us, but I disagree, I think a two-person office can do a very large project, but only one at a time.

That’s interesting. There are some strong similarities there with fellow Malaysian architect, Kevin Low. Has he influenced your approach at all?

BC: Yes, Kevin influences us a lot; he used to teach us both at school. I also worked with him at GDP Architects [a large Malaysian architecture office] before he set up his own practice. So yes, Kevin does influence us but the context of where he operates and where we operate is the same

Is the architecture community close in Malaysia? Is it knitted together across the whole country or if you’re practicing in Kuala Lumpur you don’t really know what’s happening in other cities?

WH: I think everyone does influence each other…

BC: But we are very quiet people so we don’t really go out and mingle. What’s more important is the craftspeople, the materials and the climate: they are the same problems that all architects in our region will face.

As you were saying earlier, it’s important to have the right craftspeople on a project. This reminds me actually of Low’s approach to construction, where he has developed an attitude where errors in construction are not necessary bad, and shouldn’t be replaced and covered over.

BC: I don’t entirely agree with that. I believe that you can’t start with the attitude on site that there are going to be errors. If you start with that attitude you will breed complacency. The industry will not improve; it will keep deteriorating.

How are your relationships with the builders and craftspeople on site established then? Do you deal only with the head builder, or deal directly with each trade?

BC: We normally engage each trade separately.

Is that typical?

BC: No, it’s not very typical. We used to practice by engaging the main contractor, and they would have their own sub-contractors. But then we started finding that the preferred sub-contractors would be busy and we would get someone less competent instead. This created whole kinds of trouble on site, so we started engaging directly with the trades.

WH: We request our clients to trust us while we are doing their project, and we trust our builders as well. In order to build that trust we need time to do the project our way. If a client can’t give us that trust, they will have to go to someone else.

So you are closely involved in construction, not just as observers?

BC: We don’t manage the site, but we are closely engaged in it. When we draw, say, concrete formwork using 8 x 4ft sheets of plywood, this equates roughly but not exactly to 2.4 x 1.2m. If we draw our lines at this distance apart, the builders have to spend their time cutting 20mm from every sheet that comes to site. So the builders speak to us about the materials they are using and we are able to save a lot of time, resources and money. Simple things like this engage us in the construction process. They allow us to change things to make building our designs easier not harder.

WH: This conversation doesn’t just happen on site, it happens while we are designing as well. When we design we are quite clear of the ideas that we want to have in our projects, but we are relaxed about the small things.

So we finish where we started: architecture is an exercise in problem solving. The central idea, as represented by the simple sketches you make for each project, is most important.

WH: Yes, that’s right.

Thank you both very much for your time.

Chempenai House, Kuala Lumpur

This article was commissioned by, and first appeared in, Architecture AU.

1. Durian Shed, WHBC Architects. This and subsequent images courtesy of the architect.
2. Dog Hotel, WHBC Architects.
3. Telegraph Pole House, WHBC Architects.
4. Chempenai House, WHBC Architects.

When we are first approached by prospective clients, we have found that few fully understand what an architect does. Many interview draftspeople and volume builders also, and find it difficult to distinguish between the various levels of expertise and design engagement on offer. Invariably, a large part of our first discussion is devoted to explaining how our services differ from those of other building designers and why there is great value in the cost of an architect.

What follows is the 1st of ten articles that explore the question: why engage an architect? An archive of the series can be accessed here.

1. Our work is all about you

Every client is unique. You have a unique personality and lifestyle. Your tastes are unique, as are your work habits and hobbies. You might work from home, entertain regularly or have your parents visit each month. You might be a passionate chef, film enthusiast or weekend craftsman. You may be starting a family, on the brink of your children leaving home, or not interested in kids at all. You might be cautious with the money you spend on your house, or excited about stepping into the unknown.

Unlike volume builders, we do not assume we know what your house should be like before we’ve even met you. We do know that your home should complement your personality and nurture your daily life. It should fit you like a glove, growing and changing as you do. It should delight, inspire and comfort you. It should be as unique as you are.

Which is why we design every project from scratch.

We start each project with a blank page, and keep it blank until we have taken the opportunity to learn about you, your family and your lifestyle. We assist you to formulate a detailed project brief, describing everything from how long you hope to live in your new house, to how many bedrooms you need, to what sort of storage requirements you have. We ask you to explain the requirements you have for every room, their sizes, intended furniture and connections to one another. We encourage you to develop a portfolio of space, joinery and materials ideas that you like, either online or in hardcopy.

Only then do we put pen to paper and begin our design work.

In architecture, there is no such thing as one size fits all. The house we design for you will be unique, with no other like it on the planet. It will be as powerfully influenced by your personality as it is ours.

1. You, author’s own image.

When we are first approached by prospective clients, we have found that few fully understand what an architect does. Many interview draftspeople and volume builders also, and find it difficult to distinguish between the various levels of expertise and design engagement on offer. Invariably, a large part of our first discussion is devoted to explaining how our services differ from those of other building designers and why there is great value in the cost of an architect.

What follows is the 2nd of ten articles that explore the question: why engage an architect? An archive of the series can be accessed here.

2. Our work is site specific

Just as important as your requirements are the requirements of your site. It has a specific climate, context, history and landscape. It has a specific shape and relationship to the street. It is regulated by local planning and building controls, and has a specific vegetation pattern and soil profile.

We ask questions like: do you live in the city, the suburbs or the country? Are your neighbours clustered in close or spread out over the horizon? Are you near the sea or deep inland? Which way is north? From where do the prevailing winds originate? Does your site have a rich environmental, cultural or building history? Is it bushfire, termite or inundation prone?

These may seem like simple questions, but neither a draftsperson nor a volume builder will ask them. The former will commit to paper whatever you tell her, with minimum contextual modification. The latter will simply rotate one of its off-the-shelf plans to face the street, the source of sunlight and wind neglected.

We believe however that these questions are essential to understanding the limitations and opportunities of your site. In designing for you, we consider and address them all. We spend time on your site, photographing and measuring it. If you are renovating your house, we draw it in detail, capturing every wall, door and window. We commission a land survey to confirm the location of your site’s boundaries, its trees and services, its contours and fencing. We investigate the planning regulations that cover it, its zoning and overlays, and determine any likely areas of non-compliance. We ask what you like about your site and what you don’t like about it.

If you live in the city, we examine the local built fabric. Do you live in an area recently established or dating back a century or more? Does it have a unified or mixed neighbourhood character? If you live in the country, we examine the landscape. What is its topography? Where are the best views? Are the plants native or introduced? Where is the best place to put your house?

If you were to commission us to design two houses on two different sites, even right next door to one another, you would receive two different designs. Our ultimate goal is a building that is as much a part of the land as the grass and the trees.

1. Site, author’s own image.

When we are first approached by prospective clients, we have found that few fully understand what an architect does. Many interview draftspeople and volume builders also, and find it difficult to distinguish between the various levels of expertise and design engagement on offer. Invariably, a large part of our first discussion is devoted to explaining how our services differ from those of other building designers and why there is great value in the cost of an architect.

What follows is the 3rd of ten articles that explore the question: why engage an architect? An archive of the series can be accessed here.

3. What you see is what you get

The name, architect, is protected in Australia by the Architects Act, first established in 1922 to govern the registration and performance of architects. Only someone meeting the educational and accreditation requirements described by the Act is permitted to call herself an architect.

Thus, when you engage an architect, you know with certainty that she must have studied and graduated from an approved 5 year Bachelor or Master of Architecture degree. She must have trained for a minimum of two years under an already registered architect, and gained experience across a broad range of professional activities. She must have passed written and oral examinations that test her contractual, administrative and construction knowledge.

You also know that once accredited, an architect must be registered by the relevant State authority, which in Victoria is the Architects Registration Board of Victoria.[1] You know that in order to maintain registration, she must be covered by a professional indemnity insurance policy with a minimum $1,000,000 coverage. And depending on the State, she must undertake a minimum of 20 hours of continuing professional development each year.[2] You can view the national list of architect registration boards here or view the database of Victorian architects here.

Many architects, ourselves included, are also members of the Australian Institute of Architects, the professional representative body for architects in Australia. The AIA maintains a professional code of conduct, which requires members to uphold values of “ethical behaviour, equal opportunity, social justice, aspiration to excellence and competent professional performance”. The AIA also provides professional support and advocacy, and recognises the best new architecture each year via an extensive awards programme.

The minimum expertise of an architect is therefore well established, all that remains is your connection to our work ethic, client engagement and design philosophy.

1. The ARBV is soon to be absorbed into the newly formed Victorian Building Authority, however its existing course accreditation, professional examinations and registration, and disciplinary processes will remain. The Architects Act will also remain as the regulatory framework within which architects practice.
2. Continuing professional development is compulsory in New South Wales, Western Australia, Tasmania and Queensland. It is also compulsory for A+ members of the AIA nationally.

Image source:

1. WYSIWYG, author’s own image.

When we are first approached by prospective clients, we have found that few fully understand what an architect does. Many interview draftspeople and volume builders also, and find it difficult to distinguish between the various levels of expertise and design engagement on offer. Invariably, a large part of our first discussion is devoted to explaining how our services differ from those of other building designers and why there is great value in the cost of an architect.

What follows is the 4th of ten articles that explore the question: why engage an architect? An archive of the series can be accessed here.

4. We have creative vision

Designing a building is a sophisticated exercise in problem solving. Our clients come to us with a problem (you need your house to accommodate a growing family) and we provide the solution (a renovation comprising extra bedrooms and mixed use living spaces). This is much easier said than done. To design a house, we must navigate many oceans full of potential icebergs: functional performance, sustainability, contextualisation, planning regulations, building regulations, structural engineering, construction, durability.

The best solutions are the simple ones, the ones that resolve all the parts of the problem into a singular, holistic form. Neither draftspeople nor volume builders attempt this. The products that they sell are solutions for only a tiny fraction of the full problem. They sell houses that ignore the unique requirements of site, context, history, culture and client.

The reason for this is that simple solutions are very difficult to produce. They require deep research, sustained effort and a great deal of patience. They require creative vision.

The great German industrial designer, Dieter Rams, preached the maxim, “Less but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects… Back to purity, back to simplicity.”[1] Steve Jobs passionately followed this philosophy in establishing Apple, the largest and most design-focussed company in the world. He observed, “It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”[2] Jony Ive, Apple’s head designer, agrees: “Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity… You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”[3]

A building is as complex a product as any, requiring not only technical expertise to reconcile its many different requirements, but creative vision to do so in a simple, sustainable, resourceful, inventive, enduring and beautiful way. This is perhaps the greatest advantage of engaging an architect: our creativity stems from both technical and artistic understanding. We are able to solve your problem with both pragmatism and imagination.

1. Dieter Rams; 10 Principles of Good Design; Vitsoe; accessed 22nd June 2014
2. As quoted in Walter Isaacson; Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography; Simon & Schuster; United States of America; 2011; p. 343
3. Ibid.

Image source:

1. Creativity, author’s own image.

What was it?

A series of recent lectures by Japanese architect, Sou Fujimoto, touring Australia as a guest of the excellent C + A journal. Fujimoto presented his philosophy of architecture together with a tailored collection of his projects, including the building for which he is best known, the 2013 Serpentine Galleries pavilion in London. Not only did the Serpentine commission elevate him into the rarefied air of the likes of Zumthor, Koolhaas, Nouvel and Gehry, at the age of 42 he became the youngest architect to have achieved this honour.

Fujimoto began his lecture by contrasting the place where he grew up – a small rural town in Hokkaido, the north island of Japan – with the place where he studied to become an architect – Tokyo. Despite the apparent differences between the two environments, Fujimoto explained that he has always felt at home in Tokyo. For him, the forest and city are compositionally similar: immense spaces made up of many smaller pieces. Natural and artificial artefacts – leaves and branches or street signs and window panes – operate in both places at the human scale.

As the title of his lecture suggests, the natural world has long been a fascination for Fujimoto. Indeed, the forest and city anecdote underpins two related themes that drive all his work and were the subject of his lecture. First is his exploration of field architecture, or the fuzzy zone that exists between fixed states. Second is his interest in the contrast and collision of opposites: natural / artificial, inside / outside, simplicity / complexity, small / large.

The projects presented ranged in scale from the very small to the very large; from a single toilet in Ichihara, Japan, to a 1.5km long shopping strip in the Middle East. The two themes wove their way through all of them, finding expression in the cloud-like edges of the Serpentine pavilion, the fragmented floor plates of NA House, or the undulating canopy of jutting balconies in the White Tree Tower.

Serpentine Galleries pavilion, 2013

Fujimoto seemed in awe of the Serpentine Galleries and their investment in the annual pavilion programme. He noted the ambition of their commissioning body, who each year seek to recreate the spirit of inventiveness of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. With some whimsy he also described the designs that were rejected, first for being too Fujimoto-like and then for being too not-Fujimoto-like. The successful design proposal managed to stay connected to, but was still a departure from, his existing canon.

It is remarkable that both he and his client could have such confidence and self-awareness to be able to appreciate and direct this process. Insightful self-reflection is not often a trait associated with architects, though perhaps the international speaking circuit has pushed Fujimoto into understanding and articulating the trajectory of his work. It is clear also that the Serpentine is no ordinary commissioning body. They seek out and attract some of the best architects in the world, demand enormous creativity and effort from them (highly experimental pavilions executed from commission to construction in just three months), and have achieved a lineage of follies that are covered by architectural and mainstream media in every corner of the globe.

Fujimoto’s winning proposal started from the idea of a continuous surface wrapping around the core cafe function of the pavilion, a simple sketch that looked a bit like a rolling wave. But both surface and programme were dissolved and deconstructed into a repetitive matrix of 20mm white steel pipes, assembled across a combination of 400 x 400mm and 800 x 800mm grids. From a distance the pavilion resembles a soft white cloud, a carefully determined shape that somehow resists a determined form. Constantly shifting, from one angle (the first photo, above) it mimics the roofline and window reveals of the Serpentine Galleries behind, from another it becomes tree-like, from yet another the rolling wave reasserts itself.

Drawing the design in two dimensions was unhelpful, nothing more than fields of dots on a page. Even the three dimensions of a digital modelling environment lacked the depth and nuance the project required. So Fujimoto’s studio built a 1:10 model and the design development process saw him stalking it with a pair of scissors in hand, pruning a stick here and there as though the model were a topiary hedge. A staff member would trot after him, attaching coloured tape to the modified areas so the minute changes could be fed back into the computer-based documentation.

In this project, the field is strongly evident. The pavilion’s form is somehow both finite and constantly shifting, its programme is intimate yet undefined. Even furniture has an opportunity to unravel the order of the grid: standard cafe furniture create plinths for the “bottom parts of the body, their charming quality offseting the clarity of the grid.” The spacing of the grids permits further disruption: by dogs that walk through them and children who climb into them. The pavilion is a symphony of opposites: simple grids of sticks achieve great formal complexity; inside and outside are indistinguishable from each other; the traditional tectonics of buildings (walls and roofs, stairs and seats) are playfully dissolved.

NA House, 2011

In a hip, lively part of Tokyo, NA House is located on a typically small Japanese parcel of land measuring just 6 x 9m. Fujimoto felt that a large room on this site was not possible: it could only ever support a large small room. Fortunately, the clients were a young couple enthusiastic about (and presumably wealthy enough to take a risk on) an experimental house.

Fujimoto’s response was based on two radical gestures: first, the front and side facades are almost entirely transparent (even curtains appear to have been avoided); second, the floor plates are split across many levels, dissolved into small parts.

Fujimoto spoke mostly of the floor plates, describing them as mini platforms operating at the scale of furniture. They are separated vertically according to the heights of chairs, tables and benches – the dimensions of the human body. In some instances, ceilings are as low as 1500mm, creating nooks to be crawled into. Life is distributed fluidly across the platforms, a nebulous field that expands and contracts to fit the activity and size of gathering at hand. There is nothing as prosaic as a living room, meals area or bedroom in NA House. The platforms become whatever is needed: a bench seat now, a work surface later. This intent is revealed by photos that show bags, books and computers strewn freely across the floor. The house is full of edges, each creating temporary territories that its residents configure and reconfigure as required.

Though he didn’t discuss it, the transparency of NA House is truly bizarre, particularly in a city as dense as Tokyo. It is far more common to see Japanese architecture that carefully orchestrates views into and out of the interior volumes (indeed, last week Dezeen published a 2009 project by Hiroshima-based UID Architects that incorporates a solid floating fence that wraps the site in a privacy screen). The interior life is entirely on show here, as much a part of the streetscape as Tokyo’s famous Omotesando flagship retail stores. Not unlike Fujimoto’s glass toilet in Ichihara, private space is pushed right up to the edge of public space. We wonder what it would be like to live here at night, with each window a glowing billboard of one’s life? Would the house’s residents feel exposed, or would they feel protected by the anonymity of the street?

If anything, NA House is as clear a demonstration of the experimental quality of Sou Fujimoto’s work as the Serpentine pavilion. In a typology generally defined by conservative, risk-averse commissions (a topic we have previously discussed here), it is a radical redefinition of the programming, tectonics and urbanity of inner city living.

White Tree Tower, 2014

Fujimoto won the White Tree Tower project following the aptly named Architectural Folly of the 21st Century design competition. It is perhaps no surprise that a competition so named would be won by an architect who wraps toilets and inner city houses in glass. It is a multi-residential tower located amongst the good food, good weather and good life of the Mediterranean, with an undulating facade sprouting a dense canopy of deeply cantilevered balconies.

The interior volumes of the apartments look much like any other contemporary apartment design, but the balconies are a clever and formally evocative gesture that responds well to the local climate. Fujimoto observed that the majority of Mediterranean life is spent outdoors, is indeed the defining characteristic of the region: why should living in an apartment not provide the same opportunities? The building not only functions like it belongs in a warm climate, its tree-like form makes it look like it does too.

The balconies are this project’s expression of the fuzzy field. In Australia, we are used to seeing facades designed parametrically to obscure unwanted sun, with each window carefully finessed to achieve maximum thermal performance. Fujimoto is not interested in performance-driven architecture though (the balconies wrap 360 degrees around the building, despite the fact that the north face will not receive much direct sunlight): for him, narrative and social context are more valuable. The randomly jutting balconies and roofs will provide shade in an unpredictable pattern; a true intersection of natural and artificial constructs. The tower’s residents will live at the edge of a built forest, shifting positions on their (sometimes multi-storey) balconies to catch the last rays of sun or find relief in the last square inches of shade.

Like NA House, White Tree Tower pushes the most intimate of residential spaces to the very edge of the building. Life is put on display, the building energised by the activity within it. The exciting parts of the building are at its edges, precisely where the field likes to operate. Fujimoto has juxtaposed the public and the private, but big and small, inside and outside, climate and climate-control also.

What did we think?

We recall studying the theory of field architecture during our Bachelor of Architecture degrees, but until hearing Fujimoto speak, have never encountered a practicing architect who proactively explores it in his or her work. It’s not just rhetoric either: Fujimoto’s buildings are genuinely strong expressions of the undefined area between opposites. Edges of roofs are slowly dispersed to blur the boundary between inside and out; deterministic room types are dissolved in favour of platforms that support shifting regions of activities; balconies provide shade without symmetry.

Across all scales, Fujimoto is deeply experimental. Even the 1.5km long Souk Mirage masterplanning project explores the juxtaposition of natural and artificial orders, and the possibilities of undefined, field behaviours that can be found in the zone between. This is an impressive trajectory that reinforces the clarity in Fujimoto’s self awareness: each project teases out the issues further, finds new formal expression for old ideas.

He is also a great distiller: a project is reduced to its core idea, which is then expanded to cover all facets of a design. This is of course true of his formal gestures: for instance, a grid of sticks to makes walls, roofs, stairs and furniture. It is also true of his ideas: he “thinks about nature simply,” proceeding step by step to deepen the relationship between the architectural and natural environments.

Our lasting impression of Sou Fujimoto is a man of embedded contradictions. Like his work, he is the result of the contrast and collisions of opposites. He is confident in himself and his work, but he is also modest. He is playing on a world stage against architects pushing into their 70s, but he is still young. He makes serious architectural enquiries but retains a sense of lightness and humour.

It is easy to overlook his predominantly pristine, white work in a country of highly creative architects producing pristine, white work. But to our pleasure, we discovered that his architecture becomes much more interesting below the surface. It is inventive, rich and complex. Even the whiteness contains a story. When asked whether he’s ever thought about using colour, Fujimoto responded by saying, “I hate white. It is a very powerful colour, it grabbed me and doesn’t like to let me go.”

And why should it indeed?

Jo Noero is the principal architect of Noero Architects, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Noero is renown for his work within the shack settlements of South African cities, and is as outspoken on issues of ethics, professionalism and the built environment as his projects are engaging.

Noero visited Australia recently to present a lecture for the National Architecture Conference. I had the pleasure of interviewing him after his presentation, and enjoyed a conversation that touched on many and varied subjects.

Thank you for your spirited presentation today. A central part of your work is the importance of quality buildings within disadvantaged contexts, and the possibility they present of influencing the surrounding built environment.

Exactly, this is very important.

Can you talk about how this relates to your Red Location project in Port Elizabeth.

I’ll tell you how it all started. Many years ago when I was teaching, I felt quite alienated from mainstream architectural practices in South Africa, and I was looking for somewhere where I could locate both my research and practice interests. The places that I was drawn to were the informal shack settlements on the periphery of the city. I figured at that time in the country they were the only places where people acted with unfettered freedom in shaping their environment, even accounting for their extreme poverty. I have always held the idea that authentic culture grows from the bottom up: the people living in the shack settlements were outside government control and were just building for themselves, so I went and had a look to understand how they were building, and ended up spending two years researching the settlements while I was teaching.

Out of that experience grew an interest in taking the structural systems and materials that were in use in those areas, and formalising them through my work. I hoped to show local people a connection with what they were already doing themselves. It shows great resilience and energy to build something from nothing, and by incorporating this spirit into my own buildings I was also showing respect to the people living in the neighbourhoods around them.

I’ve read interviews with you where you discussed using packing crates from car manufacturing factories in your projects, a material already being used in the shack settlements.

You saw my talk this morning?

Yes.

And the reading room I did at the Red Location library, clad in timber?

Yes.

That’s the same timber that people use on their shacks, except that we took it, sanded it down, fixed it properly and varnished it. It’s the same material but we used it to clad the most important building in the project and in the neighbourhood.

Do you know whether that more refined material is now used within vernacular construction techniques?

I’m not sure. My sense is that people appreciate what I do, but I haven’t seen much evidence of whether they are actively trying to take those systems and develop them in the same way I have. The opposite does occur though: the timber cladding I used on the Red Location Library is now starting to find its way into rich houses, built by master craftsman in a shabby-chic style for a tremendous amount of money.

Really, I’m not even sure whether I want people to follow what I’m doing. It’s just me saying that I honour the people living in the shack settlements, I’m honoured to work in their space, so I look at how they build and work in the same kind of way. It’s simply that.

The shabby-chic style is curious. There was a bit of Twitter activity following your discussion.

Oh there was Twitter activity, good! Was it positive or negative?

Both sides of the fence were represented. Somebody said they really like the shabby-chic look.

(Laughs)

Others suggested it’s a very dishonest architecture, cladding wealth in a surface of poverty.

Exactly, it’s an architectural camouflage. It’s saying, “I’m rich but I identify myself with the poor, I’m a comrade in arms…”

Is it dishonest then, or just a less sophisticated form of honouring the context?

I think it’s a style, that’s all. Some stylists have got hold of the idea and suddenly shack-chic has become fashionable and people follow it. But the connection between the style and the people in the poorer parts of the city is usually lost in translation. I like to think that at the very least there is some residual subconscious sense of the discrepancy.

There is a man called Neil Leach who has written about this process. Around fifteen years ago he wrote a book called The Anaesthetics of Architecture that describes two things that happen in the world. First, is that the greater the flows of information, the smaller the knowledge base. This particularly affects students, who have a tendency to place predominance on the image over everything else, without understand its context.

Because the issue with the modern day is not that there’s not enough information, there’s too much.

Yes, and I don’t think we’ve learnt how to filter it effectively yet.

No.

The second thing that Leach describes is that capitalism depends upon novelty; it’s what sells things. Novelty is as much image based as it is commodity based, and architecture has fallen victim to that. We have to be novel; we have to produce new things. But the problem with new things is that once they are consumed they are no longer of use any longer. So we abandon images as quickly as we consume them. We have this lumbering machine called architecture which takes five or ten years to get a building from inception to completion, and it’s held victim to these lightning fast movements of novelty, images and consumption. I don’t think architects have done a good job of managing or understanding it, or trying to find ways of countering it through other means.

That’s a very fascinating idea. I’ve always thought that architects are largely opportunistic; we do the work that is offered to us. Flipping that status quo around and seeking work out is immensely difficult to do, particularly when we have to make a living off our labour.

Let me talk about what it’s like to be in practice. I get offered lots of houses, and usually they’re these big McMansion briefs, 1000sqm on the beach, all cantilevered, and I just say no. Houses like these are unethical. I don’t think you need anything more than 150sqm to live comfortably. We have limited space in the world and many people with nowhere to live at all, so how can you be given the right to waste resources?

The two or three people who have agreed with that philosophy have been the clients for the two or three best houses I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t think we do enough of that, enough proselytising. We are so stripped of any self-esteem or dignity as architects that we see ourselves as an industry there to serve public. But the public kick us around and tell us what to do. They’re not prepared to take wise advice from us, and I don’t understand why that should be the case.

I’m not sure if it makes me feel better or worse that this is happening to you in South Africa as well. In Australia, there are so many other voices competing for attention within the built environment, and most of them are focused on all the wrong things. Clients regularly have a real estate agent or builder mate whispering in their ear, saying, “You’ve got to do this because this is what the market wants.”

Absolutely. But I think there are useful ways of dealing with that situation. When I was in Peru about six or seven years ago, I spoke with a lot of architects practicing in Lima. It’s a tough city hit by civil war, but what a lot of the good ones do is build as well.

Architect-builders…

Yes. And in Buenos Aires in Argentina, the three to four storey, middle class apartment buildings are all built by architects.

Is that legislated or is it just how it works?

No. It’s just how it works. What they do is they find groups of people online who are willing to put money together to build something. It’s an opportunity to get a tailor-made apartment, even if it’s very small, because you are talking face-to-face with the architect rather than having to buy something that some developer has made.

So apartment buildings crowd funded by the end users?

Yes. Some of the best architects in Lima said to me they make money out of the building side of things. They build their own projects and the money they make is used to support them while they enter competitions. So they get the one good project to do, rather than running around after awful people doing shit that they don’t like.

My wife and I are starting to build speculative houses ourselves, tiny little ones. I’ve worked for so many people who make money out of my efforts, I thought, why don’t I put my money in the bloody ground and build something myself? We have two houses that are coming out of the ground now. I think there are lots of new and different ways that we can imagine working as architects in the world.

But the important message from my lecture today was that whatever strategies we put in place to survive have got to support the ideal of architecture. We can’t just want to become project managers because project managers are making money. I’m only interested in finding alternative ways of making buildings because maybe I’m being thwarted in one respect. In the end, I just want to make good architecture, it’s what gives me pleasure, and to make a bit of money out of it as well if I can.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to change subject back to the Red Location project. You talked today about how long it has taken, but also how good architecture takes time to get right. For the design and construction of one project to be spread across a generation, I feel that maybe the building is not the only end product, that there’s something even more meaningful to be achieved. Is there value in such a lengthy process?

Well, the project brief set up in the competition has changed over time. I’m still doing work on the project and it’s still seen as part of the competition, but it’s different from where we started. There was lots of community participation up front to formulate the competition brief, after which we built the museum. But then there was a hiatus when we started to talk to people again about the new buildings, and the brief changed and time got gobbled up. There were also issues of funding, and there was a change in local government, so it just took a long time to get things done.

It can be frustrating because the bureaucracy in South Africa works slowly, but having the luxury of a couple of years to work on a library is fantastic. I can design very fast, but then I can take it and show it to people in the community and adjust it if I need to. Buildings just get better when you have time to work on them, that’s all it is.

How important was the community consultation process?

I’m not a great one for upfront community participation. People don’t know what they want. If you just ask, you’ll find that everyone wants a three-bedroom house with two cars on a nice site overlooking the ocean. I find that the best way of getting people involved is to provoke. I make a proposition, present it and then kick it around. I think people feel much more comfortable with that as well. They don’t feel that they are being put on the line to make big decisions. It’s only through an interactive design process that you can reach some kind of consensus.

So when you present the initial concept on a project, which I presume is already a fairly resolved building…

Yes.

Do you find it changes in response to the community commentary you receive?

Yes, it does. Look, when I talk about participation, I mean talking to all the different groups who are involved in a building, from the local people who use it, to city officials, politicians, community representatives, the architects, library services, gallery services etc. So there are all these layers to the process and the design gets filtered through all of it. A project can take years to work its way through every group, and at every stage adjustments have got to be made.

That’s for me what community participation is. The common idea that you sit down with a group of people and they tell you how their grandmothers lived in the UK isn’t what community consultation is at all. You need to sit down with the people who are actually going to use your building, the workers and the visitors and the cleaners. Why should this be any different when we deal with poor people or rich people? People get strange ideas when you talk to a poor community, that the process is somehow special. But I don’t see any difference between talking to a community or a family or a business. It’s just briefing.

One of the things I thought about when you were presenting was the earlier lecture by Beth Miller from Philadelphia’s Community Design Collaborative. I felt quite anxious when she was talking about architects working pro bono. There has been a lot of controversy in Australia recently about architects working for free when the whole profession is struggling to make a living.

I never work pro bono, ever. I had a clear lesson on this when I first started working in Johannesburg. I did some work for the Anglican Church under Desmond Tutu. The first church I worked on I did for nothing. You know, I thought that’s the thing to do when you work for really poor people, but all I got was trouble from everyone. I went to speak to Desmond and I said, “Look, I don’t know what the problem is, but these people don’t respect a thing I do.” And he asked, “Are you charging them fees? Make sure you charge them money.”

People respect what they pay for.

Absolutely. From that time onwards it was their money on the line and they listened to everything I had to say. We shouldn’t ever have to work for nothing. I believe strongly in the dignity of labour. It’s like these architects who have interns but pay them nothing. I find that insulting.

That’s the controversy in Australia actually.

Well, I think anyone who takes someone on without paying them should be deregistered as architects. It’s immoral and unethical. What you’re saying to that person is that the value of their labour is worth zilch.

The immediate past president of the Victorian Chapter of the AIA, Jon Clements, made an impressive speech on that recently. I also read that RIBA has established a protocol that removes an architect’s accreditation if he or she is found to be employing someone without pay.

They did that in the US as well.

It will be a challenge to see whether or not there is enough steel within the Australian profession to do the same thing.

Look, I think the work Beth Miller does is great, but one of the things I’m interested in is the difference between architecture and social work.

Yes, you made that comment at the end of your speech.

I think there’s a distinction between being a professional architect and maintaining active citizenship. I mean, I’m actively involved in my country, but I don’t believe that through my architecture I’m going to create political change. If I wanted to do that I’d join a political party and I’d go out there and change things. Architecture doesn’t work like that. So it’s about understanding the limitations of architecture. Once you understand what architecture can and can’t do, you can be much more effective as an architect.

When I went to the last Venice Biennale, the American exhibition was essentially social work. It was about helping people learn to grow vegetable gardens in their back yards. I mean for fuck’s sake, that’s not what I want to do as an architect. That’s not stuff architects do, it’s what social workers do. We do other things. I think we’ve got to be a bit careful that the pendulum on social accountability doesn’t swing too far and we lose sight of everything.

In the end, the best thing we can do is make purposeful space that’s beautiful, which is bloody difficult to do as it is. If poor people get richer or sick people get healthier in my buildings, then that’s great, but I don’t think it’s a predictable outcome.

You know, I don’t go and look at any buildings I’ve done, I really don’t. When I hand a building over to my clients, it’s theirs and they must do with it as they see fit. I’m not going to go and sniff around and find out what they’ve changed, it’s their right to do whatever they like. For God’s sake, knock a hole in the wall, change the front doors, change the roof, it’s your building, do with it what you want.

Interesting. It’s an understanding that architecture involves the dignity of exchange.

Obviously, the client has paid for it. There’s a famous essay by Adolf Loos called The Poor Little Rich Man, it’s exactly this criticism. This poor little rich man, he went to the architect who designed anything, and then whenever he wanted to change a painting in his house he would have to ring up the architect to get his permission, and to get his advice. Is that what architecture is? That’s not architecture; it’s something else, control beyond any reasonable limits.

I agree, and I really think this shows in your well-built but humble work. Thank you for your lecture today and your candid discussion.

My pleasure.

This article was commissioned by, and first appeared in, Architecture AU.

1. Red Location Museum entrance, Noero Architects. This and subsequent images courtesy of the architect.
2. Red Location Archive reading room, Noero Architects.
3. House Sapieka front, Noero Architects.
4. House Sapieka courtyard, Noero Architects.
5. House Sapieka interior, Noero Architects.
6. Red Location Museum interior, Noero Architects.
7. Red Location Gallery, Noero Architects.

When we are first approached by prospective clients, we have found that few fully understand what an architect does. Many interview draftspeople and volume builders also, and find it difficult to distinguish between the various levels of expertise and design engagement on offer. Invariably, a large part of our first discussion is devoted to explaining how our services differ from those of other building designers and why there is great value in the cost of on architect.

What follows is the 5th of ten articles that explore the question: why engage an architect? An archive of the series can be accessed here.

5. We tell you how it is

The building industry has a reputation for being filled with sly half-truths and good intentions that go unfulfilled. If you’ve ever had a plumber tell you “I’ll come around tomorrow” and never call back, or a volume builder lure you with promises of rock bottom prices but then reveal the cost of all the hidden extras, you’ll know what we mean.

Building a house is like navigating between submerged rocks in a fast-moving river: almost impossible to do without a guide who knows the river like the back of her hand.

An architect is such a guide.

How much does it cost to build? Should you knock down your house and build new, or is renovating a better option? What planning zone and overlays affect your property? What considerations do you need to make for your neighbours? What advice should you seek from specialist consultants? What are the highest performing appliances and fittings on the market? Where can you source the most environmentally sustainable materials? With which building regulations do you need to comply? What are the standard construction technologies in use in Australia? Once you start on site, how often do you need to pay your builder?

These are just some of the questions you’ll need to consider when renovating or building your house.

Unfortunately, you will at times also find yourself embroiled in adversarial relationships: neighbours who think you’re overdeveloping your land; specialist consultants who don’t meet their deadlines; subcontractors whose work is of substandard quality. Such interactions are even more challenging as the other party is almost certainly more knowledgable about your dispute than you are.

Architects have significant expertise across all phases of the design and construction process. We appreciate the importance of strong creative vision from start to finish; are familiar with town planning and building regulations; understand the work of allied professionals like structural engineers and landscape architects; and can engage meaningfully with the builder during construction. There is no-one better equipped to understand the opportunities and limitations of your site and brief, and to design your house to navigate every requirement.

1. Truth, author’s own image.

When we are first approached by prospective clients, we have found that few fully understand what an architect does. Many interview draftspeople and volume builders also, and find it difficult to distinguish between the various levels of expertise and design engagement on offer. Invariably, a large part of our first discussion is devoted to explaining how our services differ from those of other building designers and why there is great value in the cost of on architect.

What follows is the 6th of ten articles that explore the question: why engage an architect? An archive of the series can be accessed here.

6. Research and development

A house is a complex organism, comprising tens of thousands of individual objects: sheets of reinforcing steel, lengths of timber stud, panels of plywood cladding, bricks, tiles, noggins, light fittings, appliances, bathroom fixtures, screws, bolts, nails.

For each item there are endless options available, each measured by a plethora of characteristics. Take floorboards for example: are the boards solid timber or engineered? What timber species are they? How durable are they? Where was the timber harvested? Do they conform with FSC or PEFC custodianship certification? How wide and thick are the boards? In what lengths are they available? Do they have a long lead-time when ordering? How expensive are they?

To make matters more complex, the building supplies industry evolves constantly. New materials become available and old ones are discontinued. Suppliers change their processes, create new colour options and occasionally go out of business. Considering the many months of documentation and construction, this shifting terrain makes choosing materials particularly tricky: a tile we specify in March may no longer exist by the time the builder is ready in October to start tiling.

All of which is why undertaking regular research and development is so important.

Architects take great care in the systems, materials, fittings, appliances and finishes that we specify. A significant part of our role on a construction project is researching these items and specifying them on your behalf. We develop and maintain a library of items we use regularly, and always have an eye on the next new thing. We value the visible qualities of materials as well as the hidden: ethical production, local manufacturing and environmental sustainability.

Unlike draftspeople, whose work is typically light on detail, we invest a great deal of time in understanding every last element of your house; from the sheeting on your roof to the secret nails in your floorboards.

1. Research and development, author’s own image.

When we are first approached by prospective clients, we have found that few fully understand what an architect does. Many interview draftspeople and volume builders also, and find it difficult to distinguish between the various levels of expertise and design engagement on offer. Invariably, a large part of our first discussion is devoted to explaining how our services differ from those of other building designers and why there is great value in the cost of on architect.

What follows is the 7th of ten articles that explore the question: why engage an architect? An archive of the series can be accessed here.

7. Quality not quantity

Australia has the largest average house size in the world. Since 1985, our houses have steadily grown from 150sqm to 215sqm.[1] We now eclipse the United States (202sqm) and almost triple the United Kingdom (76sqm). Despite this growth, during the same period the average household size has actually decreased, from 3.0 to 2.6 people.[2] To do some simple maths, this means that in a little over a generation the residential floor area required for each Australian woman, man and child has grown from 50 to 83sqm.

Volume builders play a large part in pushing this trend, with “top range” models like this from Metricon or this from Simonds weighing in at over 400sqm. The impact of these McMansions is twofold. Not only do they provide the opportunity to purchase and live in a supersized home, they shift the entire home-buying public’s expectations of what is normal.

Architects do not design such bloated houses. We will always encourage you to consider a more modest scope for your home. Our reasoning is simple: smaller means less expensive. It means less energy for both building materials and heating and cooling, and less of your valuable time in cleaning and maintenance.

Smaller doesn’t equal meaner however. We aim for fewer corridors and wasted corners. We dedicate ourselves to the smart design of compact spaces: rooms that are trimmed of their fat and serve multiple purposes, but retain their generosity, warmth and access to natural light. Instead of a study you use every now and then, plus a guest bedroom you only use when your mother visits from overseas, we combine the two and use clever storage design to facilitate both. A room for your toddler now can become a music room later. Your laundry can serve double duty as your pantry.

This prioritisation of quality over quantity requires the skill and vision of an architect. It requires our technical understanding of how space works, and our ability to synthesise your lifestyle into smart space. It also requires your enthusiasm and willingness to buck the trend, to make responsible use of our planet’s finite resources.

1. Quality, author’s own image.