IT’S NOTHING NEW TO SAY THAT CHANGE IS A CONSTANT.

The Greek philosopher

Heraclitus first made the point back in 500 B.C. Twenty-four centuries later,

Karl Marx tagged change as the prevailing characteristic of the Industrial Age

in a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto: “All fixed,

fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable

prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones

become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts

into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to

face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and

his relations with his kind.”

If change is constant, the rate of change is variable. Sometimes it creeps, nearly
unnoticeable, as during the monolithic 3,000-year reign of the Egyptian pharaohs.
Sometimes it moves with devastating speed, as when the Black Death cut the
population of Europe by a third in just four years: 1347 – 1351. Lately, change has
hit a surreal pace, as though some giant Monty Python cartoon hand is dropping
our ancient and venerable prejudices—about architecture, the economy, weather,
the government—into a blender, and the
machine is set to “liquify.” Who knows
what bizarre concoction will eventually
come pouring out?
The uncertainty can be crippling. In
2009, in just four months, demand for
mental health services in the U.S. doubled,
as measured in a survey commissioned by
Spectrum, a healthcare consultancy. And
according to a December 2010 Rasmussen
Reports poll, only 23 percent of Americans
believe the country is headed in the
right direction. Our national stress level
is orange.
A COLLABORATION WITH BRUCE MAU DESIGN It’s not so easy to track the demand for
mental health services among architects.
But the profession’s exceptionally high
unemployment rate would suggest that architects are feeling the effects of change more than most. The economy is just
one concern among many: emerging technologies, the imploding star system, a widening generation gap, a shifting
regulatory climate, decaying suburbs, shrinking cities, intensifying global competition.
Consider this issue of ARCHITECT as an antidote to our stress-inducing zeitgeist, a necessary investment in
professional therapy. The topic, content, and structure are an industry-wide group effort; they emerged from in-
person and online conversations with architects, evolved in discussion with the magazine’s new editorial advisory
committee, and took final form in collaboration with our creative partners at Bruce Mau Design.
To get the conversation started, we organized the feature section around five deliberately provocative statements,
such as “Your clients are really old” and “Your architecture is a commodity.” Articles respond to each provocation
from a variety of perspectives, some favorable and others oppositional. In trying to understand the transformation of
architecture and spark dialogue around the deceptively simple question, “What’s next?,” it’s critical to recognize that
there are no right or wrong answers, merely intelligent guesswork. JOIN THE CONVERSATION AT ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM.

TEXT BY NED CRAMER

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ARCHITECTURE FIRMS ARE GENERALLY INEFFICIENT, saddled by a 19th-century
business model and tethered to the boom-bust economics of the real estate
industry. As an antidote, AIA chief economist Kermit Baker suggests the
stabilizing benefits of paraprofessionals. Business consultant Paul Nakazawa
encourages architects to go with the flow of the financial crisis. And students
from across the globe share their plans for architecture in the 21st century.
124 THE NEXT NORMAL

ADD
A LAYER
IS A LICCENNSEED ARRCHHITTECCT DOINGG YOUUR
DRRAFF TINGG? AIAA CHIEEF ECCONNOMMISST KEERMMITT
BAAKEER SUUGGGESSTSS THAAT ARCCHITEECTTS SHHOUULD
DOO WHAAT THHEYY DOO BESST— —DESSIGGN— —ANDD
HIIREE PARRAPRROFFESSSIOONAALS TO DOO THEE
REESTT. TRYY ITT. YOUUR PRROFFITAABILITYY MIGHHT
JUUSTT SKK YROOCKKETT.

PRINCIPALS/PARTNERS
ARCHITECTURE, WHEN MEASURED IN ECONOMIC TERMS, is not a terribly efficient
profession. This is not in any way meant to imply that architects aren’t
hard workers or that they waste their time on unimportant details.
Rather, it has to do with their productivity—their output per hour of
labor—or, more specifically, the historically low levels of productivity in
the construction industry.
Over the past two decades, employment at architecture firms has
been increasing at a rate of about 4 percent per year. However, over
this same period, the volume of nonresidential construction being built
has increased by a little more than
1 percent per year. There are good
DEPARTMENT HEADS, reasons why it takes more hours to
PROJECT MANAGERS design a square foot of space today
compared with two decades ago:
Buildings are more sophisticated;
clients are more demanding; building codes are more complicated;
there are a lot more products to choose from. But architecture firms by
and large are not being compensated for these added responsibilities.
According to the AIA’s The Business of Architecture, 2009, annual net
billings per architecture firm employee averaged just $130,000, and
for most small firms they didn’t
exceed $100,000.
ARCHITECTS/DESIGNERS Obviously, a firm’s revenue per
employee establishes the upper
limit for the compensation it can
offer, so firms with higher revenue per employee will likely pay higher
salaries. More broadly, professions that bring in higher revenue per
employee will likely have higher compensation levels. Lawyers, who on
average bring in almost twice as much revenue as architects, also have
compensation levels about 60 percent higher.
Hiring paraprofessionals is one important way to manage costs
and increase staff efficiency. Paraprofessionals are typically trained
to be proficient in a more limited set of functions than a full-fledged
professional.
Other professions have made extensive use of paraprofessionals.
In law offices nationwide, for example, paralegal and legal assistant
positions total more than a third of the number of lawyers, according
INTERNS
I.T., MARKETING, OTHER
NONARCHITECTURAL STAFF
DESIGN
PARAPROFESSIONALS
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 125
to the U.S. Department of Labor. In dentistry, there are twice as many
dental assistants as there are practicing dentists. But medicine is the
profession that has made the greatest use of paraprofessionals: from
licensed practical nurses to registered nurses to physician assistants,
there are many more paraprofessionals than physicians. The healthcare
field is structured to efficiently leverage a physician’s time.
The Department of Labor projects that growth in paraprofessional
positions will outpace growth in professional positions over the
coming decade. In some professions, such as medicine, the supply of
physicians can’t keep up with demand, so the growth is met through
paraprofessionals. Using paraprofessionals is deemed to be a more cost-
effective use of resources because these workers need less training and
are paid only a fraction of a physician’s salary.
Some larger architecture firms have positions for CAD and BIM
specialists that are not filled by licensed architects. However, the use
of paraprofessionals for technical design tasks is not widespread in
the architecture profession. In fact, at many small and midsize firms,
nonarchitectural functions such as information technology, graphic
design, and marketing are commonly performed by professionally
trained architectural staff, usually interns or recently licensed architects.
Design paraprofessionals are so uncommon that the Department
of Labor hasn’t even published estimates or projections. We shouldn’t
be surprised that revenue per employee and compensation is so low in
architecture when we have professionals performing functions that
could be done by paraprofessionals.
In addition to increasing compensation in the profession and
allowing architects to concentrate on those things they were educated
and licensed to do, there is another benefit of expanding the use of
design paraprofessionals. Architects work in a unique industry. Both
residential and nonresidential construction are among the most cyclical
sectors of our economy, meaning that there is an inherent boom-or-bust
nature to them. It is not uncommon—in fact, it is almost expected—that
years of strong growth will be followed by years of steep declines.
Architecture firms are constantly struggling to match staff resources
with fluctuating workloads. Given the cyclicality in the construction
industry, a period of being understaffed, when a firm is struggling to
meet project deadlines, is likely to be quickly followed by a period when
a firm is overstaffed and needs to go through the destructive exercise
of salary freezes, furloughs, or downsizing. Think of 2007 and 2009, and
how quickly we went from boom to bust.
How have we coped with this downturn? The way we always have,
by eliminating a lot of our “paraprofessional” positions: interns and
recently licensed architects who perform these more standardized
design functions.
If there were true design paraprofessionals, they could move more
fluidly into and out of a broader range of positions in the design and
construction industry as needs changed—working with engineering
firms, construction companies, developers, facility managers, and
building owners, in addition to architecture firms. This would allow
architects to pursue the creative design careers that they envisioned
when they made the decision to invest so much time and money into
becoming an architect.
But when we use emerging professionals to manage the ebb and
flow of the construction cycle, we also risk eliminating the future leaders
of firms, as well as the future leaders of the profession, in hard times.
To this day, the profession has not fully recovered from the early 1990s
construction downturn, which forced a lot of younger architectural staff
out of the profession, never to return. 
126 THE NEXT NORMAL THIS YEAR WILL BRING LITTLE comfort to
architecture firms that are just hanging on,
hoping to ride out this recession without
making fundamental changes in mindset,
behavior, and practice. Ironically, the potential
of architects and allied professionals to make
substantive contributions for the betterment
of society has never been greater, yet we are
trapped in an emotional quagmire of wanting
to “recover.”
So, let’s be clear—the foreseeable future
only requires about half of the pre-recession
workforce in architecture. Those who remain
in the profession need to augment their
knowledge, create and deliver a much higher
level of value, and be open and willing to work
productively in a highly complex and often
disrupted business and societal environment.
Market downturns and recessions would
be far less damaging if individuals and their
respective organizations were more skeptical
about success in good times and less panicked
in difficult ones. The rule-of-rules in the world
is that change is a condition of life. So leading
firms never assume that the underpinning of
their success is permanent.
When things seem most successful and
secure, top managers in such practices insist
the most strongly that their
organizations stay tuned into

EMBRACE
changes in the business world.
In the most challenging times,
they act tactically to limit
losses while continuing to
make strategic investments.
In this recession, these
actions have included very

THE CHANGE
MOOVE YOUUR BUSSINESSS BEYOONDD TAACTTICAAL RESSPOONSSES TO THE
RECCESSSIOON, ANND STAARTT THIN NKING STRRATTEGGICCALLLY.
ARCCHITECCT ANDD BUUSINESS GURRU PAUL NAKAZZAW WA OFFFERS
STEEPSS FOOR REBBOOTINNG A BEELEEAGGUEREDD ARCHHITTECTTURRE FIRM.
difficult decisions, such as laying off significant
numbers of staff with years of dedicated
service; remaking practices from the ground up
by reconceptualizing business models, service
offerings, and the number of staff required
to address the future needs of clients and
markets; and moving into new markets and
territories of practice.
Unfortunately, the story for the majority
of practices is a litany of casualties due to lack
of foresight and procrastination in the face
of major change. The common casualties are
vision, communication, focus, development,
and investment. They are commonly displaced
by short-term survival tactics, suspension
 of communications and developmental
initiatives, and complete loss of discrimination
regarding what work the firm pursues.
Firms that have fallen into the latter group
of behaviors need to reestablish a discipline
of returning to first principles as the basis for
moving forward. Here’s how.
Step 1. Constantly articulate and reevaluate
your firm’s vision.
The basis for every sustainable enterprise is
the investment of people in efforts that are
meaningful. The first principles that generate
practices and the core values that inform them
endure over time. The larger an organization
becomes, the more critical it is for the
principles and values of the firm to be made
explicit, and to be constantly revisited as a
way to promote an effective firm culture.
The failure of markets is not a failure
of a firm’s values, but it signals the need to
A fork in the road is coming into focus, between super-large
firms providing commodity service on the one hand, and small-
to-midsize firms devoted to cultural
production on the other.
reevaluate the firm’s goals and strategy in light
of disruptive changes. A firm’s vision fails when
the collective is unable to chart a new course.
In many ways, the industry’s continued
emphasis on marketing professional services
serves to contain the profession within fairly
narrow boundaries. Without new visions
for practice—sited in a broader context of
issues, ranging from cultural change to the
growth of cities—how can we imagine that
the profession can produce a whole new
constellation of value?
Step 2. Make sure your firm has a well-
understood theory of business and practice—
one that fits its size.
Having a clear vision for your firm is necessary,
but that alone is not sufficient to have a
sustainable enterprise. The key propositions
about what your company really does and
what accounts for success need to be well
understood if you want to fully capture
opportunities for organizational learning
and growth. These propositions are not
immutable, but the lack of them reduces firms
to completely reactive behaviors.
The increasing scale of horizontally and
vertically integrated practices—i.e., AECOM,
URS Corp., Jacobs, and Stantec—signals
profound changes in critical parameters of
practice, including capabilities to service
ARCHITECTURAL MAD-LIBS: VIA TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND LINKEDIN, WE ASKED READERS TO FILL IN THE BLANKS. THE RESPONSES APPEAR THROUGHOUT THE ISSUE.
I AM AN ARCHITECT. I THINK Y OU NEED FRIES WII TH THATT. TONY GARZA I DESIGN BUILDINNGS, NOTT COMPUTT ER SYSTT EMS! DANIEL HEATON, AIA
95%% OF THEE CLOTHES I WEARR ARE BLAACK. CHRISTOPHER WEBSTER
clients globally; scalar issues of business risk
and financial capacity tied to larger projects;
and single-source responsibility tied to more
integrated forms of project delivery.
Since most of the super-large firms are
publicly owned entities, their drive for market
dominance over the coming years will shift
the paradigm in ways that are parallel to
other professions, such as medicine, in which
an increasing percentage of doctors work for
healthcare systems instead of private practices.
Assuming that the current trend in industry
consolidation can be sustained through the
treacherous straits of the global financial crisis,
the prognosis for midsize practices grounded
in a business model of commodity service and
delivery is increasingly uncertain.
Small practices can survive if they are
principally focused on a specific locale or
network and serve as a community resource.
But small-to-midsize firms that have a strong
propositional basis in practice, are able to
work across different
fields of knowledge,
are technology-savvy,
and are woven into
multiple networks of
societal stakeholders may have the brightest
future. They include a category of firm whose
output is represented as “cultural production,”
working across the full spectrum of scale and
type of objects, territory, and infrastructure.
Such practices exist mostly in networks that
include established knowledge communities
in educational institutions, governmental
bodies, and major corporations.
The fork in the road that is coming into
clearer focus reveals an increasing scale of
organizations providing commodity service
and delivery on one hand, and on the other
a class of practices driven by the production
of knowledge and content. The two classes of
firms potentially have an even greater universe
of collaborative possibilities and value creation
when they come together to address the most
challenging problems of our time.
Step 3. Take a hard look at your firm’s
developmental assets and make sure you’re
investing in the right things.
How many firms find that they are pitted
against competitors they have never seen
before, for work that they could have
easily won before the recession? How
many principals find that their marketing
departments are putting out proposals that
completely miss the boat on what their clients
are looking for now? How many firms find
that their ownership transition plan has failed
because the presumed successors cannot
provide the needed leadership and vision?
I CAANNOT SPELL TO S AVE MY LIFE. THOMAS HACKETT
The developmental assets of architecture
firms are largely intangible and reside in
people and complex webs of connectivity that
bind them together. There are four classes
of assets: ideas (intellectual capital); image
(symbolic capital—the power to represent
ideas, convey meaning, and communicate
identity); networks (social capital); and
capabilities (implementation capital—the
abilities to conceive, program, plan, develop,
and deliver work). These four asset classes,
when properly connected and orchestrated,
catapult firms from being above average to
being exceptional.
When the underlying paradigm of society
shifts, the edifice of these assets—which
represent years of dedicated effort and
financial investment—is badly shaken, if not
toppled. The canonical modes of practice,
whether general practice, market-sector
leadership, or “starchitecture,” are repudiated,
and the investment strategies that correspond
to a firm’s developmental assets are all open
to question.
The leadership and other key members
of firms, who have built successful careers in
various modes of practice, understandably
have a very difficult time letting go and
embracing an uncertain future. But in a
time when investment capital is scarce,
the alignment of vision and strategy is
imperative. We can say with a high degree
of confidence that investing in yesterday’s
success is, at best, misguided.
Step 4. Face and embrace the future.
The profession of architecture in the United
States was codified during the 19th century.
While many aspects of the profession have
changed substantially since then, traces of past
modes of thought and behavior are far from
expunged. Collectively, we remain captive to
19th-century notions of organization. It is clear
that further changes in architectural business
models and organizational structures will track
the global trend of outdated social, political,
and economic structures being shed.
For the moment, architectural practice
appears to embrace two distinct, but
complementary, trajectories. The first aims
to capture the service and delivery needs of a
world that will be increasingly urban, and the
vast utilitarian and infrastructural needs of
a rapidly expanding population. The second
is sited in the multiple layers of issues and
meanings of complex societies and is directed at
the development of communities and cultures.
The opportunities for our profession,
equipped with our unique capacities for spatial
thinking and design, reside in embracing these
challenges. 
I CRY MYSSELF TO SLEEP. @GRAPHITETREE

LISTEN
TO THEM
FOURR STUUDENTS, FIVE QUESSTIONNS: MEMBBERSS OF THE CLAASS OF 20111 SHAARE THEIR
PRIORITIEES FOOR THHEIR OWNN CARREERRS, ANND FOOR THHE FUTURE OF ARCHITTECTURE..
1. Has architecture school been the way you imagined it would be when
you enrolled?
Kale: My undergraduate education was more about gaining skills and
learning crafts. Graduate school made me think beyond the architectural
scale and introduced cross-disciplinary learning possibilities. It became
my personal enlightenment.
THHE FUTUURE, FRROM LEFFT TO RIGHTT: Risch: Not at all. I didn’t really expect
something precise, but I liked (and still
Yiggit Kaalee • 244 • Annkaara,, Tuurkkey • Paarsoonss
do) very much what I discovered.
Thee Neew Scchool forr Deesiggn • M..Arcch.
Linndssayy Nennchhecck • 277 • Morrristtow wn, N.J.
2. Do you want to become a licensed
• Wasshinngttonn Unniverssityy inn Stt. Louis • M.AArcch.
architect, and do you see that as essential
Maartiin Risschh • 25 • Tscchapppinaa, Switzeerlaandd to your future career?
• École Pollyteechhniqquee Féédééralle de Lausaannne •
Nencheck: With three years of internship
M.SS. inn archhiteecturee
experience, I will take the licensing exams
Draakee Fayy-PPaggett • 233 • Rossevillee, Caliif. •
shortly after graduation. Licensure is a
Woodbburry Univerrsitty • B.AArchh.
step toward a position of leadership and
increased responsibility within a firm, and
for me would be an important culmination of my years of study.
Risch: Due to legal regulations in Switzerland, you don’t really have a
choice [other] than to become a licensed architect; otherwise you can’t
get building licenses. But as a graduate of a Swiss federal institute of
technology, one quasi-automatically becomes a licensed architect, so this
isn’t an issue of concern to me.
Kale: Yes, but [I] don’t know how. Today we study and practice
architecture globally but still get licensed by local authorities. Licensure
is even more challenging for architects with foreign degrees. There is a
need for an international accreditation system.
3. What do you want to be doing, and where, in five years’ time?
Fay-Paget: In five years’ time, I would like to be somewhere in the
Midwest, where I will open my own business that offers architectural
design, construction management, and structural engineering.
U.S. ARCHITECTURE SCHOOLS ARE DOING A GREAT JOB OF CRANKIING OUTT CAD/PRRESENTTATION MONKEE YS. KEVIN PARENT, AIA ASSKING THEIR ALUMNI FOR COONTRIBUUTIONSS. JAMES MOSER, AIA
INSPIRING ANDD EMPOO WERINNG THEIIR STUDDENTS @JOHN_WARBURTON
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 129
Nencheck: In five years, I plan to both practice architecture and continue
the independent research projects I pursued in graduate school.
Risch: I want to be doing architecture, but where and how is open for now.
Wherever I go, I probably won’t stay long, in order to benefit from the
knowledge and culture of different architects.
4. What does an architect need most: design talent, social commitment,
or business savvy?
Fay-Paget: The architecture student in me says “design talent,” the
entrepreneur in me says “business savvy,” and the woman in me says
“social commitment.” But I feel that an architect needs design talent
above all else, because without it, nothing would be designed worth
building.
Risch: Design talent and social commitment are essential for
meaningful architecture, but business savvy is even more essential for
successful architecture. As the values that generate great architecture
are mostly not … [economic ones], every architect has to find ways of
combining these.
5. What’s the biggest problem that architects of your generation will
have to help solve?
Nencheck: The greatest issue facing architects today is climate change.
Architects have a responsibility to design and build environmentally
sensitive and sustainable buildings in order to preserve existing
resources.
Fay-Paget: I believe that the biggest problem with architecture today is
that most of it is “dead.” By this, I mean that most firms simply cut and
paste buildings or entire complexes from one project to another. The
intricate design process of a project has been mutilated by budgets and
timelines that no longer allow for design to actually occur.
Kale: We should make ourselves believe that having a green building is
as ordinary as having a fire-safe building. So that sustainability can be
perceived as a social necessity, not an overused marketing term. 
COUURSE. ROGER NILSEN
WHERE’S ROBERT MOSES WHEN YOU NEED HIM? These days, it’s
tempting to wish for an all-powerful champion of design. But
be careful. As the master planner for Hanoi, Vietnam, architect
Brad Perkins learns that working for an authoritarian, single-
party government doesn’t eliminate every roadblock. New
Urbanist Andrés Duany decries the “orgy of public process”
that inhibits urban planning. And three students, by
contrast, tap into community organizing in their
competition-winning scheme for suburban
Long Island, N.Y.
 AVERAGE NUMBER OF DAYS
TO OBTAIN A CONSTRUCTION
PERMIT IN THE U.S.

AVERAGE NUMBER OF DAYS

TO OBTAIN A CONSTRUCTION
PERMIT IN CHINA

the cities of Jinan and Nanjing, under Sun Yat-sen. (Previously, he had
worked as a top deputy at Burnham and Root.) His father, Lawrence B.
Perkins, FAIA, was founding principal of Perkins + Will, which is now a
frequent competitor with Perkins Eastman on international projects.
His brother, the political economist Dwight Perkins, was until recently
the director of Harvard University’s Asia Center and has in the past
served as a development consultant to the Vietnamese government.
“I vetted everything with my brother,” Perkins says. His expertise
was useful, and his contacts and credibility within the Vietnamese
government, Perkins believes, helped Perkins Eastman (in collaboration
with the Korean firms Posco E&C and Jina Architects, the Vietnamese
Institute of Architecture, Urban and Rural Planning, and the Hanoi
Urban Planning Institute) win the job over RTKL Associates and a joint
bid from Arata Isozaki and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
Certainly, though, Perkins knows the Asian ropes in his own
right—he has made 105 trips there (more than 20 of them to Vietnam),
and quite literally wrote the
KEY TO THE CITY book on foreign architectural
practice: His primer,
LOW-DENSITY RESIDENTIAL International Practice for
MIXED RESIDENTIAL Architects, was published in
LOW-RISE COMMERCIAL/RETAIL 2007. In it he writes, “Vietnam
HIGH-RISE COMMERCIAL/MIXED-USE has the potential to be a real
market for North American
OFFICE/RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT PARK
design services.”
EDUCATIONAL/INSTITUTIONAL The extent to which that
PUBLIC FACILITIES potential has been realized has
PUBLIC RECREATION surprised even Perkins, given
AGRICULTURAL the troubled history between
Vietnam and the United States.
RURAL CONSERVATION
“It’s amazing how warmly
we’re treated,” he says. The relative youth of the Vietnamese population
of 89.6 million accounts for this to some degree; a significant majority
is under the age of 35 and therefore has no memory of the war. Hanoi
itself came through the war largely intact. The country’s historic
tensions with its Asian neighbors, in particular Japan and South Korea,
play to the favor of American firms.
It is Vietnam’s youthful and rapidly expanding population that
is placing such enormous pressure on its urban centers. Hanoi, the
national capital, is at present a city of 6.5 million, but demographers
project that number to rise by some 40 percent in the coming decades.
To account for the city’s growth, the new master plan will push
development out to five satellite cities separated from the historic core
by a greenbelt of parks, lakes, and land reserved for agriculture. “Our
plan was built around sustainability,” Perkins says. “We’re trying to get
Hanoi to recognize they have this wonderful one-time opportunity to
do something the Chinese have not done, which is to protect one of the
great architectural zones, which runs through the center of the city.”
This new vision is dependent on a radical overhaul of the city’s
infrastructure. “The existing system cannot keep up with the pace of
THE BIGGEST MYTH ABOUT ARCHITECTURE IS THATT ANYBOODY CANN DO IT.. DOUGLAS SPOHN
THAT ARCHITT ECTS LIVE IN REALLY COOL HOOUSES. MICHAEL POYNTON
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 133
the population growth of the city, especially in the ancient quarter,”
says Do Dinh Duc, director of Hanoi Architectural University. Essential
services such as power and sewage treatment are woefully inadequate
even for Hanoi’s current population, never mind what it will be in 10 or
20 years. Residents, for instance, depend on some 10,000 illegal wells
for potable water. The new plan would answer that demand with a pair
of water-treatment plants. Also among the items the plan calls for: a
new light-rail system, a new regional road network, a new international
airport, and a vastly improved flood-management system.
If it all sounds enormously ambitious, that’s because it is. “Daniel
Burnham’s ‘Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s
blood’? That’s really only possible in a place like Vietnam,” Perkins says.
“As a planner, that makes it quite enjoyable. The government has the
ability to make big plans. And they really believe that planning matters,
and they take it very seriously.”
Indeed, the plan has the strong backing of Prime Minister Nguyen
Tan Dung, the head of government in a one-party state without a free
press. This does not mean, however, that it has been or will remain free
of opposition. “When you get there, you realize how hard it is to control
anything,” says Paul Buckhurst, a principal at Perkins Eastman who
spent 34 weeks in Hanoi during the planning process.
“It’s fairly common for low-income people to protest in front of
local authority offices,” Spencer, of the University of Hawaii, says. In
the past year alone, some 200 building projects in Hanoi have been
halted due to public opposition. “It’s not a system where the state can
just do anything.”
Thus far, the new master plan has been fairly well received,
according to Perkins, pointing to an 87 percent positive response to an
anonymously conducted survey. “In the presentations, people could
stand up, and did,” he says. “There was a good deal of pushback.”
The success or failure of the plan will in large measure reside in
the team’s continuing ability to satisfy local community groups, many
of which are faced with relocation or other significant changes to their
traditions and habits. “It’s one thing to define a vision, and another
to realize it,” Spencer says. “The vision and the plan can be great
technically, but unless you have widespread buy-in and a lot of goodies
for people who are existing stakeholders, it’s going to be very difficult.”
Preservation is a particularly challenging issue, and one
that has left the team, on occasion, at odds with members of the
Vietnamese government. In a rapidly modernizing city with such
a mixed architectural heritage—historic Vietnamese, French, and
Soviet structures in varying states of distress—there are persistent
questions as to what is worth saving. “Every act of preservation is a
reinterpretation of what Vietnamese history is,” Spencer says.
If all follows according to plan, by 2050, Hanoi will have emerged
as a city on par with London, New York, Moscow, and Tokyo. The path
for that growth is now set, but it is only a path. “One of the wonderful
things about Hanoi, and one of the reasons it has a chance to be a great
world capital, is that it’s just beginning its development,” Perkins says.
That, of course, is both its burden and its opportunity. 
T HAT WE ARE W EALTHH Y AS DOOCTORR S AND LAAWYERR S. DOUG RICHARDS
IT’S A RICH MAN’SS HOBBYY. JOHN CRUET JR.,AIA
CONTROL
THE
MASSES
ANDDRÉS DUAANY IS SOURING ON WHAT HE SEES AS EXCESSIVE,
OBSSTRUCTIONNISST COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT IN URBAN PLANNING.
ATT AN EVENNT LAST YEAR, THE CO-FOUNDER OF NEW URBANISM
COMMPLAINEED OF “AN ABSOLUTE ORGY OF PUBLIC PROCESS”
INN THE U.S.:: “BASICALLY, WE CAN’T GET ANYTHING DONE.” IS THERE
A PLACE ANNYMORE FOR BOTTOM-UP PLANNING?

Public engagement in the community planning
process is a relatively new phenomenon. Is it
good evidence of American democracy in action
or of public skepticism about the planning
profession?
Urban planning with public participation has
not always existed, nor has it been deemed
necessary. Even 50 years ago, planners were
still considered demigods. They had reformed
cities to be beautiful, healthier, cleaner, and
more stable. Planners had done more for public
health than doctors. By making lives much
better, they had come to be trusted by the
people.
For example, take John Nolen, whose small
office delivered hundreds of city plans in the
1920s. How did he do so much? San Diego is
“Conventional public participation
makes the mistake of privileging
the neighbors. … You can’t confuse neighbors with the community as a whole.”
an example. He visited the city for a couple of
weeks, spoke to whomever he needed to, then
got back to Boston, prepared the documents,
and mailed them back to San Diego, and … it
was implemented over the years.
In the 1950s, planners were still considered
so trustworthy that when they had that towers-
in-the-park idea, they could flick their hand
and get an entire neighborhood demolished.
But those inner-city plans became socially
toxic almost immediately, and as the suburban
promise was betrayed, confidence in top-down
planning evaporated.
Participatory planning rose out of that
disappointment. It wasn’t just the result of Jane
Jacobs versus Robert Moses—it was categorical,
a nationwide insurgency by people who had
never heard of those two.
The Congress for the New Urbanism has
popularized the charrette as a process. Where
does it fit into the range of civic engagement?
Bottom-up avoids the big mistakes of top-
down planning, but it is quite inefficient. New
Urbanism merges the virtues of top-down and
bottom-up planning, combining the principles
of its charter and the participation through the
charrette. This is something new. The planner
adjusting principles to local circumstances is a
system that has now worked very well indeed
hundreds of times.
But we seem to be reaching a tipping point now
where municipalities will give up on engaging
the public because it’s gotten too time-
consuming and too expensive.
We were involved in Miami 21, a citywide
charrette. That process was bottom-up and
required convincing everyone concerned. It cost
millions of dollars and took four years. It was a
magnificent result and the most comprehensive
such effort by any big city, but it will probably not
be repeated. The economy has changed all that.
While the New Urbanist system may work
well, it is also expensive. To mount a charrette
requires those rare, highly skilled professionals
that can speak to regular folk, think clearly, and
draw quickly. Charrettes can cost $300,000. We
need to get the cost down to $50,000.
The other complaint you’ve voiced is that
NIMBYism has become too obstructionist. Is
there a better way to get public participation
in the design process without a project falling
prey to local interests?
Conventional public participation makes
the mistake of privileging the neighbors, the
people who live within a half-mile of the given
proposal. So it becomes extremely difficult to,
say, locate a school or an infill project. While
democracy doesn’t need a great number of
voters to function well, it does require a full
cross-section to participate. That is the source
of its collective intelligence. You can’t confuse
neighbors with the community as a whole.
We propose using the jury pool or the
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 135
phone book to invite a random group, which
is then understood to be apart from the self-
interested neighbors, just as the developer or
the school board are acknowledged as vested
interests. The neighbors must be seen as vested
interests as well.
But how are municipalities going to be able to
make big decisions?
If you can’t build a bike path or lay a power
line that connects to the new solar energy
farm, then you can’t engage in the 21st century.
We have also been developing the concept of
subsidiarity, the design of decisions: what issue,
by which people, and when.
The region makes decisions about heavy
infrastructure, the neighborhood decides
about traffic, the block makes decisions about
parking, the household makes decisions about
its building, and the individual makes decisions
about the bedroom. The smallest group at the
latest point in time that can competently make
a decision—that is subsidiarity. Thus we’re
evolving participatory planning towards a more
intelligent democracy.
A lot of architects are working in China, which
doesn’t have much of a public process to speak
of. Should we copy their model?
It’s much easier to get things done there. But
they’re also making terrible mistakes. The
outcome of their planning is generally awful
and provides evidence that you need some sort
of public participation.
But if you want to be cynical about it, the
West will benefit from sending over all those
irresponsible designers who are screwing
up their quality of life. China will become an
undesirable place to live. In the future, their
best talent will choose to live in San Francisco
or Seattle. It is poison-pill planning. The CIA
couldn’t do better. 
INTERVIEW BY DIANA LIND
PHOTO BY NOAH KALINA
136 THE NEXT NORMAL
START A
REVOLUTION
THHE INNNOVVATTIVEE STUDDENNT WIINNNERR INN A PLLANNNINNG
COOMPETTITTIONN FORR LOONGG ISSLAANDD, N.Y.,, EXXEMPPLIFFIESS
HOWW RAADICAAL DEESIIGNN INNTELLLIGGENNCE CANN
REVIITALIZZE SUBBURRBAAN AMMERRICA.
TEXT BY EDWARD KEEGAN , AIA
“THE TIME FOR THINKING CAUTIOUSLY IS OVER,”
exclaimed the call for entries in the recent
Build a Better Burb competition. Ryan H.B.
Lovett, John B. Simons, and Patrick Cobb’s
student entry, Upcycling 2.0, responds with
multidimensional intelligence to the brief,
which requests that participants be “bold” in
developing ideas to retrofit the downtowns of
New York’s Long Island.
Organized by the Long Island Index, part
of the Rauch Foundation, the competition
clearly resonated with the design community,
attracting 212 submissions. The jury chose 23
finalists and five primary winners, one people’s
choice winner, and the student winner,
Upcycling 2.0.
Long Island Index director Ann Golob
succinctly explains the impetus behind the
competition: Long Island is having a hard time
getting its young people to stay. Low-paying jobs
for younger adults and the lure of edgier New
York City are resulting in an aging population.
“We need to reinvent ourselves,” Golob says.
In developing Upcycling 2.0, arguably
the most innovative of the competition-
winning designs, Lovett, Simons, and
Cobb—all enrolled at Columbia University’s
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning,
and Preservation—tapped into their training
as architects and urban planners. They also
applied innovative practices from economics,
community organizing, and other disciplines.
And as members of the competition’s target
demographic, they know their audience.
Competition juror Daniel D’Oca, a partner
at Brooklyn, N.Y.–based Interboro Partners,
called the plan (portions of which are shown
above) “a creative, optimistic reading of
the suburb and its building blocks, which it
proposes to combine in interesting ways.”
At the largest scale, the scheme accepts
as a given the existing regional configuration
3
of towns and mass transit that connect Long
Island to New York. But it is at the local level—
namely, Hicksville, N.Y., a bedroom community
of more than 41,000—that the students turn
traditional suburbia on its head.
Upcycling 2.0 posits that in order
to encourage community participation,
individuals and organizations should combine
revenue streams—such as a portion of rental
and lease income and membership dues—and
then use the funds for public development (1 ).
This overarching idea intrigued jurors: “It’s not
just about design—it’s about how these people
can pool their money,” Golob says.
Lovett, Simons, and Cobb would
administer the funds and the projects through
a nonprofit community-improvement group.
“The project title is misleading. This is less
upcycling than a homeowners association
with a conscience,” says juror Allison Arieff.
The group would encompass local residents,
OUR ANCESTORS MANAGED FOR MILLENNIA WITHOUT AIR CONDITIONING, electric light, and the other

appurtenances of modern life. So should the profession’s efforts to go green necessarily involve

more technology? The recipient of a $129 million government research grant explains his

ideas for making buildings more energy-efficient. (Hint: Technology is only part of the solution.)

A consortium proposes a counterintuitive strategy for New Orleans’ flooding problems. And a

professor suggests that architects need to design, and build, more simply.
AVERAGE WINTER TEMPERATURE
NORTH OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

AVERAGE INTERIOR TEMPERATURE

OF AN INHABITED IGLOO
140 THE NEXT NORMAL

FIND YOUR
INNER
SCIENTIST
PENNN STTATE’’S ENERRGYY INN
NOVVATTION N HUUB HASS RECEIVVED A $1129 MILLION
FEDEERALL GRANTT TO PURRSUEE NEE W GREEEN BUILLDING TEECHNNOLLOGYY. JAMES
FREIHAUUT, THE HUB’’S TEECHNICAL DIRECTOR, JUSTTIFIEES THE EXPPENSE.
DATING FROM THE ERA of the Revolutionary
War, Philadelphia’s Navy Yard was a bustling
shipyard for more than two centuries. During
its World War II heyday, it employed 44,000
people, and by 1995, when the U.S. Navy closed
the site, there were over 200 buildings from a
pastiche of eras on the 1,200-acre spread. The
Navy Yard became a business park, providing
office space for about 80 companies, including
Tasty Baking Co., the Philadelphia-based maker
of Tastykakes, and Urban Outfitters.
Now it has become a laboratory for the
buildings of the future. Led by Pennsylvania
State University, a consortium of 112
organizations from academia and industry has
just received a federal grant of $129 million to
study what it takes to build new structures
that use minimal energy and to retrofit, for
efficiency, everything from modern office
buildings to drafty old gymnasiums.
In an interview with ARCHITECT, James
Freihaut, the consortium’s director of
operations and technology, who is a professor
of architectural engineering at Penn State,
describes how, in addition to revolutionary
components and systems, we need a revolution
in collaboration—and in policy.
The Navy Yard consortium is the nation’s
third Energy Innovation Hub: the first two,
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at
CalTech, focus on nuclear energy and solar
energy, respectively. Why is this hub focused on
energy-efficient building?
We use 40 percent of all our primary energy
in operating building systems. Yet unlike the
automobile, aerospace, and manufacturing
industries, which have seen dramatic decreases
in their fuel consumption over the last 30 to
40 years, there has been no really appreciable
change in buildings’ energy use. We really need
to address this.
How does the project’s focus on retrofitting
deal with that problem?
There are 5.2 million or so commercial
buildings in the U.S. with lifetimes of 20 to 40
years or more. If you just concentrated on new
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 141
construction, it would take 20 to 30 years to
realize any significant energy improvements.
We need to really concentrate on existing
buildings and making them much more
energy-efficient.
It’s also a much more difficult job to do,
technically and economically. If we can tackle
the retrofit market, then we will be able to deal
with new construction fairly easily.
What does a full retrofit entail?
First, you characterize how much electricity,
natural gas, or oil the building uses and break
that down to the various subsystems, like
lighting and HVAC, to see which aspects of the
building are contributing most to that usage.
Then you do a systematic “what if” redesign,
coming up with technology for each of the
components that would radically reduce the
energy used.
What new technologies are Hub researchers
developing for such retrofits?
One example is active façades, which respond
142 THE NEXT NORMAL
dynamically to the building’s environment.
These might have embedded phase-change
materials, a wax or gel that can absorb heat as
the façade gets hot from the sun. As the heat
starts to transmit through the building’s façade
into the interior, the phase-change material
slows down the temperature increase inside, so
that the air-conditioning system doesn’t have
to use as much energy to keep up.
We’re also studying building coatings
that respond to the intensity of sunlight and
become more or less reflective or diffusive, so
that the heat doesn’t get into the structure to
begin with. People are looking at protective
coatings that are also energy generating, as
well as photovoltaic shingles and sidings that
generate electricity. Crucially, we’re also looking
at extensive use of sensors in buildings, to
develop a control system that will distribute
“Everybody has their own little design tools and is trying to optimize
their profitability from their part of the design. You don’t get a product
that gets the best performance for the
lowest cost and lowest energy use.”
heating, cooling, and ventilation to where the
people are, rather than the building as a whole.
Some of these materials already exist. Some
of this technology already exists. But it’s not
being used correctly.
One example is on-site power systems,
which generate electricity using photovoltaics,
wind turbines, gas turbines, or internal
combustion engine–based systems, which have
the added benefit that all the heat energy from
the exhaust is recovered to provide hot water,
heating, and even cooling. You can buy systems
like these that generate power and store it
for the building’s use, like a hybrid car, right
now. The reason they’re not used more often
is that buildings aren’t designed to use them
efficiently, so the payback period may be five
to 15 years.
As it stands, a lot of this technology isn’t
economically feasible to use in a building.
How much would it cost, per square foot, to
have all this technology?
Thousands of dollars. If you wanted a totally
instrumented, dynamically responsive building
with pseudoactive materials, it would be very
expensive.
How can we deal with the cost barrier?
A major problem is that we don’t have good
modeling tools that can simulate all the
different systems in a building, which would
let the design and construction team see
the advantages and disadvantages of each
of the proposed technologies. The whole
package might be overkill for some buildings.
Furthermore, many systems are most cost-
effective when they are designed in concert
with the rest of the building.
They do modeling like this all the time in
the automobile and aerospace industries. The
reason we don’t do it in the building industry
is that the design process is really fragmented.
A developer hires an architect. An architect
suggests an architectural engineering firm. The
architectural engineering firm suggests certain
contractors, construction companies. You hire a
commissioning agent downstream.
Everybody has their own little design tools
and is trying to optimize their profitability
from their part of the design. You don’t get a
product that
gets the best
performance
for the lowest
cost and
lowest energy use. We need all these people
working together—a vertically integrated
industry. For that, we need new design tools.
The hub is working on that.
Complicating all this, however, are certain
policies. If you are using public funding, you
have to have fair competitive bidding on each
aspect. If I want to do an integrated design
with architectural engineers, contractors,
construction, and commissioning agents all
in the same room, how can I bid out different
parts of the job?
How is the Hub dealing with that issue?
We’re trying to figure how this would work
by doing some real projects. At the Navy
Yard, we’re renovating a gymnasium that
was built in 1942. It may have lead paint
problems—a typical retrofit issue—and is
historically significant, so it’s going to be a
challenge. Furthermore, using state funds for
it is going to make it very difficult to do an
integrated retrofit.
But, obviously, we want to practice what
we preach. We’ll have Penn State physical plant
people, who deal all the time with state funds,
in on this process, telling us good ideas and
explaining the problems they have run into
with specific state policies. Then we have to
document that and find a way around it that
the rest of the industry can follow.
We’re also doing a retrofit with private
funds. Urban Outfitters, whose international
headquarters is here, has asked us to help
renovate a 70,000-square-foot older building.
There will be a different set of issues in
each of these projects—and that’s good. We
want to see the different issues that come
up and figure out a way to either change
those polices or to find a creative way to
address them.
How much energy would a retrofitted office
building save per year? And how soon would
such a package be available?
Just by using integrated design and existing
technology, we think we can get a 30 percent
reduction. With a more intense design process
and advances in dynamic controls, smart-grid
technology, and materials, we can get to 50
percent. If we really put some long-term effort
into new materials and smart-grid technology,
we think we can get 80 percent. Though we
are still grappling with the business model, the
hub hopes to have a package of suggestions for
the 30 percent reduction retrofit available to
developers within one to 1.5 years.
You’ve received $22 million in federal funds this
year and are expecting similar amounts over
the next five. But that depends on congressional
appropriations. If funding is canceled, how will
you spin off what you’ve accomplished into
something useful?
We’re not going to accomplish enough in one
year, that’s for sure—maybe in three years.
Certainly in five years, our plan is to be self-
sufficient. It’s actually very complicated, as I
think you can see now. It’s not just a technology
issue, it’s a policy issue, it’s a business model
issue, it’s a cultural issue.
The World Business Council for Sustainable
Development had an energy-efficient building
task force for five years, and their conclusion
was pretty much the same thing. If we don’t
do integrated design and delivery of buildings,
we’re not going to get anywhere in building
energy efficiency. But it’s such a complicated
problem that no one company, even United
Technologies or IBM or GE, can take the
financial risk to do what it’s going to take. We
need the government to share the risk with us.
The Achilles’ heel of all this could be the
policy issues that encourage the current form
of behavior. I can guarantee you countries
like China and India—who are growing
exponentially and want to develop energy-
efficient systems—have learned from our
mistakes. They’re learning that they need to
do integrated designs and building systems
development, and I bet you that they do it. 
INTERVIEW BY VERONIQUE GREENWOOD
PHOTO BY NOAH KALINA
 ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 143

ARCHITECTTUREE FIRRM WAAGGOONNEER & BALL HAS TEAMEED WITH THE DUTCCH GOOVERNMENT AND THE AMERICAN PLANNING
ASSOCCIATIION TO PRROVEE THAAT SAAVIN
NG NEW ORLLEAN NS COULLD BEE AS SIMPPLE AS LETTING THE WATER IN.
TEXT BY KATIE GERFEN
IMAGES COURTESY WAGGONNER & BALL ARCHITECTS

NEW ORLEANS ARCHITECT DAVID WAGGONNER, FAIA, has been on a four-year crusade in defense
of water. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, everyone from the federal government on
down has been focused on keeping the water out of New Orleans—building bigger,
better, higher levees and finding new ways to contain any water within city bounds.
But Waggonner is leading a veritable Enlightenment salon of thinkers to question every
aspect of moving water in and out of New Orleans, and to reestablish the connection
between residents and this most basic of resources.

Waggonner hasn’t embarked on this journey alone: He is working
with people such as U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who as early as 2006
organized a series of trips to exchange ideas with the people who know
flooding best: the Dutch. Out of those talks emerged a series of three
formal workshops at Tulane University, known as the Dutch Dialogues.
The first took place in March 2008 and centered on Louisiana’s landscape
and its properties; the second, in October 2008 during the American
Planning Association (APA) convention, focused on planning at the
regional, city, and neighborhood scales; and the third was in April 2010,
when participants developed a water strategy that would “nourish the
whole system,” Waggonner says. Landrieu continued to lead concurrent
delegations to the Netherlands to learn as much as possible and to
establish relationships between Dutch leaders and key U.S. decision-
makers, including Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator
Lisa P. Jackson.
The water-management concepts that emerged from the Dutch
Dialogues suggest that throwing more infrastructure at the problem
PROPOSED LAFITTE CORRIDOR
is not the best solution: “As we’re thinking about the infrastructure
we would need, we’re shifting more toward the Dutch model,”
Waggonner says, “which is really starting with the ground and water
and biodiversity layer, and then [moving] to the infrastructure layer,
then up to the habitation layer.” The idea is to analyze the groundscape
of the city and environs or “reshape the bowl,” as Waggonner puts it,
to create a series of drainage pools and canals that would run through
the city, managing stormwater runoff by gravity rather than pumps.
Bringing water back into the urban fabric creates new opportunities for
redevelopment of communities as well. “Water is an attractive thing, a
thing to reconceive this place,” the architect says. But, he adds, “It’s not
so easy when you’ve been traumatized by it.”
The existing, “primarily technologically based system,” as
Waggonner refers to it, collects water in three main outfall canals—
enclosed by stem walls, or mini-levees—and uses pumps to eject the
water into Lake Pontchartrain (1 ). This system is not just in place for
catastrophic hurricanes, but also to accommodate runoff from the
near-tropical rainfall that regularly blows through the area. Part of the
Dutch Dialogues scheme involves setting the average surface level at
5 feet below sea level, which would allow for the removal of concrete
floodwalls and the creation of a series of canals and waterways. Gravity
keeps water circulating through the system. “You don’t want dry water
courses,” Waggonner says. “A dry ditch is not an attractive thing.” The
new system creates visual, physical, and social connections between
the water and the neighborhoods and provides storage to accommodate
storm surges or runoff from massive rains.
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 145
Removing the stem walls and creating a connection, both visual
and infrastructural, with the canals creates a waterfront destination in
place of decaying urban barriers (3). Widening the canals where possible
allows a more natural waterline and additional capacity for both storage
and pumping. Another motivation for taking down the walls isn’t
urbanistic, it’s psychological: “You do a better job of maintaining what
you can see,” Waggonner says.
After Dutch Dialogues II, a local community group, Friends of Lafitte
Corridor, approached Waggonner and his firm to work on a sustainable
water strategy. Currently, stormwater is collected in an open box culvert.
A proposed solution involves expanding the culvert and covering it
over; water would still run through it, just underground (2). This new
structure would allow for a second layer of water from the Bayou to run
over the top—essentially creating a double-layered canal—as part of the
circulating water system that draws water through the city and back out
to the lake. The scheme also looks at the nearby Carondelet Canal, which
ran from Bayou St. John to the French Quarter but has long been filled in.
The canal is somewhat reestablished, this time as a bioswale, creating a
stormwater storage and bioremediation zone separate from the larger
water system. It’s about “modifying the engineered structure and getting
back toward the natural condition,” Waggonner says. “It’s not just about
New Orleans, it’s about applying these systems across the boundaries.”
But despite the involvement of planning luminaries such as Paul
Farmer, executive director and CEO of the APA, who helped Waggonner
lead the Dutch Dialogues along with economist Dale Morris of the
Royal Netherlands Embassy, the scheme to rethink New Orleans’ water
infrastructure is having trouble gaining traction. The U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers has two options on the table for New Orleans: repair the
existing stem walls and keep them in place, or remove the walls and
the current pumping system, and dig trenches (as deep as 30 feet) to
serve as water storage. The first option costs roughly $800 million—the
amount earmarked by Congress—the second $3.4 billion, according to
the Army Corps. The City of New Orleans would be left to foot the bill
for maintenance. The plan that emerged from Dutch Dialogues II and
III would come in between the two in terms of cost but would arguably
create a much better urban experience and require less maintenance.
Support for changing the paradigm is easy to find among intellectuals
and foreign governments, but harder to wrangle at home. “New Orleans
is a test case,” Waggonner says. “We’re the canary in the coal mine with
regards to American infrastructure.” But with a new mayor prioritizing
water management, and the interest of a U.S. senator, the EPA, and
the APA, the plan could move forward—and help to heal New Orleans
residents’ relationship with the water that so defines their region. 
146 THE NEXT NORMAL
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AN ERRA OF RAPIIDLLY DIIMINISSHINGG RESOURCES, IS

ARCHHITTECCTURRE SOO TECHHNOLLOGICCALLLY COMPLEX?
TEXT BY KIEL MOE , AIA
GRAPHIC BY JAMESON SIMPSON

ARCHITECTURE DOES MOORE WITHH LESS CHARLES STARCK, AIA SYY NTHESISS @JIMSYME PAA ST, PRESENT AND FUTURRE LUANE FAUCHER DEE SIGN KEVIN PARENT, AIA
NAAIVETY? MISGUIDDED OPTIIMISM? @ARCHISPEAK ELITISM @AVSCAPEGOAT MUULTI-TASSKING MARK BERON ERRECTIONSS ROB ANGLIN
PUUSH THE ENVELOPPE MIKE WEBBER WOORK FORR FREE DAVID PERONNET

ARCHITECTS OFTEN HAVE A NOSTALGIC VIEW OF PROGRESS: Our feebly linear
understanding assumes that humanity always benefits when a new
technology arises. Architects frequently deploy systems, software, and
products to replace older versions and differentiate themselves in a
crowded and competitive marketplace. Many architects thus embrace
linear progress with excitement and incorporate technology with
misplaced enthusiasm, unaware that they are caught in a vicious cycle,
based on recurrent, and self-undercutting, obsolescence. Technology
is anything but new, and the traditional view of progress—a curiously
mixed cocktail of acquiescence and hubris—reflects little about its
real dynamics.
In reality, progress is nonlinear and unstable. As such, it is
very much open to design. Today, progress itself must be designed.
Contrary to the traditional model, one design for progress today would
selectively de-escalate the most egregious forms of technology in favor
of a lower-technology but higher-performance paradigm. Neither
stubbornly reactionary nor blindly optimistic, this lower-technology,
higher-performance approach is an intelligent mongrel of both the
archaic and the contemporary, and it can improve the performance of
our design practices and buildings.
Instead of adding ever-increasing layers of intricacy, specificity, and
coordination, architects should question the complexity that dominates
our buildings and lives. Using a low-technology, high-performance
approach, architects can exceed the performance expectations of a
higher-technology building, and in the process they can engender
durability, adaptability, tolerance, and, most importantly, resilience—
qualities that are increasingly fundamental to architecture. One cannot
underestimate the role of designed resilience in the 21st century.
Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Construction
The linear model of progress in architecture is invariably additive:
When architects encounter new problems and obligations, they often
respond by layering materials, technologies, consultants, software.
The double-glazed envelope is a classic example—a cascade of
compensations for the conceit of an overilluminated, underinsulated
glass box. The extra glass and steel, automated shading devices, fire
controls, and operable vents consume prodigious amounts of embodied
energy and coordination time. These costs are difficult to justify when
envelopes with a vastly more sensible 20 to 40 percent ratio of window
to opaque, insulated wall can
SECTIONS KEY yield much higher performance
for thermal conditions, lighting,
1 AIR PLENUM operational energy, embodied
2 EXHAUST VENTS energy, serviceability, and
3 OPERABLE LOUVERS resilience.
Monolithic wall assemblies
4 FIXED SUNSHADES
such as site-cast, air-entrained,
5 18 "-THICK INSULATING CONCRETE lightweight insulating concrete
6 OPERABLE WINDOW are, by contrast, an optimal
7 FIXED GLAZING approach to the de-escalation of
technology. The lower strength
of lightweight concrete requires greater wall thickness to perform
structurally. The concrete incorporates millions of air pockets that
provide insulation equal to layered insulated wall assemblies and
that manage vapor and water migration with its capacity to “breathe.”
Indeed, what are often seen today as problems inherent to building
envelopes, such as vapor or water migration, only became problematic
NOO T PAY CHRISTOPHER WEBSTER INTT ROSPECC TION @ARCH_TODAY
INTT EGRATEE BEAUTYY AND UTT ILITY @RWILKANOWSKI CEELEBRATE ITSELF JAMES MOSER, AIA
INTT ERVENTT ION @MFRECH
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 147
as assemblies became layered with thinner, task-specific systems and
air conditioning.
Whether lightweight air-entrained concrete, solid cross-laminated
wood panels, solid masonry, or solid stone, monolithic assemblies
become even more beneficial when coupled with a thermally active
surface for heating and cooling, created by moving water through
pipes that are embedded directly into walls and ceilings. Structure
becomes the primary mechanical system. In Portland, Ore., Opsis
Architecture renovated a masonry horse stable into its new office by
retrofitting the building with a thermally active surface, which at
once served as the seismic retrofit, the thermal-conditioning system, a
perdurable finish material, and a foundation for a future expansion.
Bureaucracy of Technique
Architects have inherited a mentality of overly programmed, layered,
engineered, additive, complex, and obsolescent design from the 20th
century. We routinely strain against the bureaucracy of techniques
we have passively grown to accept. We lose more ground than we
gain in our successive attempts at “progress,” and yet, somehow, we
routinely acquire more liability. Architecture stands to benefit from
a rigorous reevaluation of its more pernicious theories, techniques,
and technologies.
As the complexity of buildings and practices continues to
increase, so does our inability to know the difficult whole. This is an
intellectually and professionally dubious position. In a radically less-
additive mentality, there are systemic gains for buildings and practices
when we do more with less by orders of magnitude: 40 drawings in
a construction set, not 400, for instance. Practices that do this know
more about what they do and do more of what they know well. Doing
less but better, and in turn achieving more, is consequential progress.
A primary aim of de-escalating technology is an escalation of actual
knowledge about technique, practice, and performance.
Twin Obsolescence
Architecture’s chronically divergent preoccupations with a building’s
image and the inevitable obsolescence of ever-escalating technologies
and systems is not a cogent pathway forward in this century, and
it never was. Rather, consequential progress will emerge only
when architects productively merge architecture’s objecthood and
objectivity; when they grasp that a single-speed bicycle offers a model
of far-higher-performance design than a Toyota Prius, much less a
Formula One race car.
In all aspects of practice, an increasingly interesting question has
arisen: What is the least architects can do and still exuberantly achieve
or exceed the expectations of our discipline? This is not to suggest
laziness, or some trivial minimalism, but rather to invoke a more
mindful engagement with technique—a wholly untaught, unthought
but inordinately consequential concept in architecture in this century.
What the profession needs is more intellectual and disciplinary
agility to finally set our techniques and practices on a course for
meaningful progress. This will emerge from strategic shifts in our
pedagogies and practices. It will not emerge from capitulating to the
demands of software packages, certification checklists, or greenwashed
products. As Lewis Mumford wrote, “The machine itself makes
no demands and holds out no promises.” Progress will not arrive
automatically, but through thoughtful tactics and strategies. Progress
will only be achieved when it is designed. 
TAALKING ABOUT ITSSELF TO ITSELF @JUSTJUDYCREATE BETTER THAN MOST PROFESSIONS
SHHARP PENNCILS @CANALENGINEER
 AMERICANS AGE 65
AND OVER IN 2010

AS AMERICA’S 76 MILLION BABY BOOMERS reach retirement age, what they

need—and want—in their living arrangements will change dramatically.
Some boomers will seek out suburban gated communities such as Leisure
World in Seal Beach, Calif., which explicity excludes primary residents
under the age of 55. Architect Matthias Hollwich is banking on a different
trend—the desire of older Americans to live in diverse, higher-density
communities, with a host of services and activities. And no matter
where the baby boomers choose to retire, Michael Graves wants their
surroundings to be perfectly, universally accessible.
AMERICANS AGE 65
AND OVER IN 2050
150 THE NEXT NORMAL

ASSUME
THEY WANT
TO HAVE FUN

A BELOVEDD GRANDMOTHERR’S DEATHH TRANNSFORMMED 39-YEEAR-OLD ARCCHITTECTT MATTTHIASS HOLLLW WICH
INTO AN UNLIKELY, PASSIOONATE ADDVOCATTE OF ARCHITTECTUREE ANDD PLANNNINGG FOOR THE AGGING.
BY HIS OWN DEFINITION, German architect
Matthias Hollwich is old. He certainly doesn’t
look it. Tall, and muscularly filling out a black
T-shirt, he’s got the kind of youthful energy
you see in athletes and workaholics. There’s no
gray in his goatee, and while his hair is cropped
short, he’s still got most of it. So I’m taken
aback when he answers a query about his age.
“I’m 50 percent of my life,” Hollwich states
with a glint in his eye. “The average German
reaches 78, and I’m 39. I have passed 50 percent
of my life expectancy, so I’m officially old.”
Standing on the threshold of middle age,
Hollwich is on a mission to change how society
as a whole—and, specifically, the architecture
profession—thinks about aging. It begins
with a counterintuitive position. In a culture
obsessed with preserving the luster of youth
for as long as possible, with a whole host of
methods from the surface to the structure
(Botox, little blue pills, artificial organs),
Hollwich believes we ought to call ourselves
old earlier. Doing so will change the way we
look at older people and, eventually, how
people will look at us.
By acknowledging the aging process and
integrating it into daily life, he argues, we’re
better able to prepare for the inevitable end-
of-life changes that, at present, we keep grimly
hidden away in assisted-living facilities and
nursing homes.
Hollwich has dubbed this critical
perspective “New Aging,” and for the past three
years, he’s conducted workshops, seminars, and
research studios on the subject—first at the
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Germany and
then at the University of Pennsylvania, where
he teaches. (He routinely takes his students
into nursing homes to see existing conditions
firsthand.)
This past fall, he organized “New Aging:
An International Conference on Aging and
Architecture” at Penn’s School of Design. The
conference brought together a diverse group
of designers, academics, and scientists, from
architect and gerontologist Victor Regnier to
the controversial British antiaging researcher
Aubrey de Grey.
But Hollwich is far from a cloistered
academic. As a principal of the New York–
based practice Hollwich Kushner (or HWKN)
and co-founder of the architectural social
networking site Architizer, he’s in a position
to pursue and promote design projects that
rethink what it means to be old. However, his
qualifications don’t explain why a decidedly
hip architect (with an Office for Metropolitan
Architecture pedigree, no less) would choose
to align himself with the Golden Girls set.
“My grandmother died next to me in a
room. We were living for years in the same
house, and my mother was her caretaker,”
Hollwich recalls. “I was the last one to talk to
her. I felt it when she died. It was not scary.
It was very beautiful that I was so close to
her.” He was living with his family in Munich
at the time.
“For her,” he continues, “she was looking
forward to it [her death], because she didn’t
feel so well anymore. And she felt she
could hand over her life now to the next
generation. But there was, I think, a moment of
confrontation with death. Denial is the worst
thing we can do. Most people deny that they’re
going to die or they’re going to get frail or that
they’re going to need to move into a nursing
home … or even that they have to give up the
car, the driving license.”
Multigenerational living and a clear-eyed
reckoning with the limits of independence are
at the root of Hollwich’s New Aging. Together,
they suggest increasingly popular architectural
and urban planning solutions such as walkable
communities in urban areas, with close-
at-hand amenities such as grocery stores,
pharmacies, and public transit, or housing
developments that entice active sexagenarians
with rock walls and shopping malls, but also
incorporate what Hollwich calls “stealth
care”—home nursing services that operate as
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 151
invisibly as infrastructure—to serve the elderly.
“By bringing aging closer to home, you make it
less scary,” he says.
Currently, HWKN is at work on just this
kind of development in Palm Springs, Calif.
It’s geared to the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender) community, a group usually
invisible in discussions of aging, even though it
represents an increasing elderly population.
Called Boom, the project is banking on the
combination of high design and a wide range
of facilities—spa, boutique hotel, medical care,
active but wheelchair-accessible landscapes—
as a signature draw. HWKN has enlisted 10
firms on the project, including such notables
as J. Mayer H., Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and
Lot-Ek. Bruce Mau Design is creating Boom’s
visual identity.
Still, it’s hard to imagine a vibrant
65-year-old, fit enough to go shopping and
play tennis daily, who would want to move to
a community full of old people. And I say as
much to Hollwich.
“If we don’t like how we’re … going to live
when we’re 80, then we need to re-engineer
what will happen,” he replies. He envisions
older people living in both stand-alone
developments and facilities mixed into the
existing urban fabric: In Geropolis, a study he
worked on in Dessau, the team developed a
series of community typologies for aging, some
modeled on college campuses and shopping
malls, and with spiritual retreats and wellness
hubs. “These spaces are not just for the elderly,”
he maintains. “I mean, when you look at what’s
good for our pioneers, it’s good for everyone:
mixed-use buildings, mixed generations,
reduced need for mobility and transportation.”
Pioneers? I ask, and he says of the boomers
and Gen-Xers who will redefine old age, “I call
them pioneers because they [will] go to a point
in life that nobody has ever been.” 
TEXT BY MIMI ZEIGER
PHOTO BY NOAH KALINA
152 THE NEXT NORMAL
AN ABSURDLY FRRUSTRATING ATTEMPT AT SHAVINNG IN HIS HOOSPITAAL ROOMM MOTTIVAATEDD MICH
TO BECOME A CHAMPION OF UNIVEERSALL DESIIGN— —IN HEALTHCARRE, ANDD EVVERRYWWHEEREE.
IT’S EARLY AFTERNOON when my taxi pulls up
in front of a boxy clapboard building in
Princeton, N.J. Michael Graves, FAIA, keeps a
number of studios on this tree-lined street.
I worry that I haven’t made it to the right
one, especially when I’m welcomed by three
wooden steps leading to a small porch. As
far as I can tell, there’s no accessible ramp or
lift, and I can’t ascertain how Graves—who’s
used a wheelchair since 2003, when a spinal
infection left him paralyzed from the chest
down—gets to work.
Only later, once I am seated in a room
filled by a huge Graves-designed conference
table, do I learn how the architect reaches the
front door: via a ramp concealed by a row of
carefully pruned hedges. Graves isn’t hiding
his disability; it’s the ramp that’s hiding in
plain sight. The design is a straightforward
example of integrated accessibility. For Graves,
accessibility is a daily experience composed of
dozens of challenges unimaginable for able-
bodied designers.
Case in point: While I am seated at the
conference table—a glass-topped affair with a
sculptural white base that draws whimsically
on the architect’s love of classical forms—
Graves is parked sideways at the narrow end.
Designed before his disability, the table is too
low for his knees and motorized wheelchair to
slip under.
Graves is soft-spoken. He tells long stories
that are at once personal and political—one
is infused with just-barely-concealed rage
against the former Bush administration’s
policy on stem cell research (which might
yield treatments to help his condition). Graves
was in and out of eight hospitals during
the year and a half after his illness, and a
narrative about that time soon spins into an
architectural moral.
“My first day in my wheelchair, I thought,
‘Oh, good, today finally I can shave,’ ” he begins.
“So, I took myself into the bathroom—I was
very proud of myself, by the way—and I
HAEEL GRRAVVESS
reached for the hot water [tap], and I couldn’t
reach it. And so I thought, ‘Well, that’s not such
a big deal. I can ask somebody to bring me my
electric razor.’ And then I looked around where
I would plug in the electric razor, and the outlet
was on the wall next to the floor.”
Unable to see his face in the mirror and
increasingly frustrated, he asked his doctor to
sit in a wheelchair and go through the same
tasks, with similarly obstructed results.
For several years, Graves has consulted
on hospital facilities and durable medical
goods—the kind of products used both at home
and institutionally. Healthcare has become
as important a part of his work (with both
Michael Graves Design Group, his product
and graphic design firm, and Michael Graves
& Associates, his architecture firm) as hotel
complexes and housewares for Target. In 2009,
Graves partnered with medical equipment
manufacturer Stryker to create a collection
of hospital-room furniture geared to address
the needs of both patient and caregiver. The
designs draw on his own experiences, as well
as behavioral research and interviews with
medical administrators, doctors, nurses, and
disabled and elderly users.
Graves is frustrated by the lack of good,
affordable, mass-produced healthcare products,
especially as baby boomers reach the precipice
of old age. “I used to say that we are in ‘the
new normal.’ And it got to be a phrase. There
are now—I’ve forgotten how many millions
of boomers there are. But if you sprained your
ankle today and you needed to get a pair of
crutches, where would you go?”
I have no idea, I tell him. “They aren’t
immediately available all around town,” he
agrees. “I say that because there’s not much
competition. And the people who buy those
things are generally elderly, on fixed income,
and they’re not going to spend the most.”
Graves directs me to sit on a terra-cotta-red
armchair with a rounded back and bulbous
arms that recall the Mickey Mouse–ears
teakettle he produced for Disney. We’re in his
product design studio, surrounded by young
employees and prototypes for stereos, bathtub
safety bars, and kitchen utensils. He tells me
to pretend that I am elderly and to try to lift
myself out of the chair.
“One of the things we understood was that
people have to get to the front edge of the chair
before they can get up,” Graves explains. “And
when they get there, then it’s the big push.
My grandmother wouldn’t have made it. She
would do that two or three times before she
was able to get up.”
I grip the shepherd’s-crook-like arms, tilt
forward (“Nose over toes,” Graves instructs),
and easily lift myself into a vertical position.
The rounded arms that seemed originally like
a flight of design fancy actually provide me
2 extra inches of leverage.
Once standing, I walk and Graves rolls to
his workspace in the office. Tubes of paint are
scattered on his desk, and several canvases are
in the works. Rome is Graves’ favorite place, but
he has not been there since his paralysis. It’s an
impossible terrain for wheelchairs, even high-
tech ones. In ochre, brick-red, and olive-green
paint, you can see his longing to return.
Each painting is an abstracted vision of
the Italian landscape; a few of them were
commissioned by a local hospital. But another
small canvas catches my eye. It depicts a
light-filled hospital room. The red Stryker
chair, two tables, and a bed are rendered in the
same Mediterranean hues as the landscapes—
Graves’ dream of a more humane healthcare
environment.
“Even though I was one of the originators
of Postmodernism, I don’t think in terms of
style at all. I never have,” he says. “I was simply
trying to humanize Modernism. I was simply
trying to find a way to make an architecture
that didn’t leave me cold.” 
TEXT BY MIMI ZEIGER
PHOTO BY NOAH KALINA
 ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 153

ASSUME
THEY WANT
YOUR HELP
NOBODY BECOMES AN ARCHITECT because of a love for business. But recessions have
strange effects. Architects who typically appraise their work based on its artistic,
social, or environmental value are suddenly acting like MBAs. They’re looking for
quantitative ways to prove to clients that an investment in design is worthwhile.
They’re testing the efficiencies of building information modeling. And they’re
watching and worrying about firms in Asia emerging as potential competitors.
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT
OF THE U.S. IN 2009

VALUE OF CONSTRUCTION PUT

IN PLACE IN THE U.S. IN 2009
156 THE NEXT NORMAL

2 3

PROVE YOUR
DESIGN
HAS VALUE
THERE CAAN BEE MAANY MOTTIVESS FOOR THE COONSTTRUCCTIOON OFF A NEW
BUILDDINGG, AND MANY MEAASURRES OFF ITTS ULTIMMATEE SUCCESSS OR FAAILURRE.
THREE TOOP CLLIENNTS OFFEER THHEIRR OW
WN DEEFINITION OFF
A GOOOD RETTURRN ON THEIR IN NVESTM MEN NT IN
N DEESIGGN.
1 California Academy of Sciences •
Alison Brown, Chief of Staff and
chief financial officer
The California Academy of Sciences spent a
reported $488 million on its LEED-Platinum
building, designed by Renzo Piano, Hon. FAIA,
in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A big
return on this big investment is important
to the institution, and CFO Alison Brown
uses visitorship and membership as primary
measurement tools.
The museum projected that first-year
attendance in the new building, which opened
in 2008, would be about 1.6 million. Instead,
it drew 2.3 million. And at the time that the
academy moved into the new building, Brown
says, “We were at about 15,000 member
households.” The opening year peak was closer
TOP: TIM GRIFFITH; BOTTOM LEFT: ART GRAY; BOTTOM RIGHT: GARY LEONARD
to 115,000. “We think our steady state is closer
to 60,000 member households,” she says, still
above the projected 40,000.
Brown also uses another, softer metric:
multiple engagements with people,
especially what she calls the “doughnut hole”
demographic of teenagers and young adults
without children. According to the Morey
Group, a consultancy, 60 percent of groups
visiting cultural institutions include children.
At the academy, the figure is 40 percent. “We’re
drawing a lot more adults,” Brown says. It’s
hard to quantify the reason why, but she
credits Piano’s design. The old building, Brown
says, “looked like a chemical factory.”
W
2 Chickasaw Nation Medical Center • Bill
Anoatubby, Governor of the Chickasaw Nation
The old medical center serving the Chickasaw
Nation in Ada, Okla., was designed to cover
20,500 annual patient visits, less than one-
tenth of the actual number of visits. The new
PageSoutherlandPage-designed center, which
opened in 2010, is three times the size and
cost $148 million. To determine the benefit of
the Chickasaw Nation’s investment in design,
Gov. Bill Anoatubby looks at financial return,
community response, and user satisfaction.
Anoatubby credits the design with helping
to secure a spot in the 2007 Indian Health
Service Joint Venture program, which provides
“up to $25 million per year [for the next 20
years] in additional funds for staffing and
operation costs,” he says. The Chickasaw was
one of two tribes selected out of a pool of 71.
To build community support, lead designer
Lawrence W. Speck, FAIA, met with tribal
elders “to ensure that the design incorporated
all the cultural elements important to our
community,” Anoatubby says. He adds that
patients and caregivers say the “design creates
an environment that is conducive to healing.”
Though some benefits of the design are
hard to quantify, the numbers of patient
beds, dental chairs, doctors, and services are
more concrete, and they have all increased.
“We think the facility will have a significant
positive impact on the overall quality of care
and health outcomes,” he says.
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 157
3 Los Angeles Trade-Technical College •
Roland Chapdelaine, president
Los Angeles Trade-Technical College is located
in an inner-city neighborhood that president
Roland Chapdelaine characterizes as “probably
the most economically challenged community
not only in the city, but the country.” So when
planning the first new campus buildings in 45
years, it was “critical that we demonstrate to
our community that we are willing to provide
them the best,” he says.
MDA Johnson Favaro came on board to
develop a master plan and then to design new
student services and technology buildings.
Funded as part of a $3.5 billion bond measure—
split among nine community colleges—the
new structures opened in January 2010.
The expected surge in admissions during
the financial crisis, coupled with the recent
completion date, make it difficult to quantify a
return on investment. But softer metrics speak
plainly enough. “Since we are a downtown
inner city, graffiti is a challenge for us. And I
can say that with these new buildings, it has
been absolutely minimal,” Chapdelaine says,
“which I think is a powerful statement about
how the community looks at these buildings.”
The first facilities survey isn’t until spring, but
anecdotal evidence suggests the students, also,
are “really pleased,” he says. 
TEXT BY KATIE GERFEN
158 THE NEXT NORMAL

BIM WELL
WITH
OTHERS
THHE BENNEFITTS OF BUILDDING INNFORMMATIONN MODDELIINGG ARE
MORE PROM MISE THAN REAALITYY. JAMMES P.. BARRRETT,
NAATIONAL DIRRECTOOR OF INTEGGRATEED BUILLDINGG SOOLUUTIONSS
ATT TURNNER CONSTRRUCTION COO., AND JOSSHUA PRINNCE-RAMMUS
OFF REX DELIBBERATE THEE PROSS AND CONS.
INTERVIEW BY ERNEST BECK
PHOTOS BY NOAH KALINA

How has BIM changed the way you work?
Joshua Prince-Ramus: I personally believe it is the future. But at our
practice, which is probably not radically different from most practices,
BIM hasn’t yet lived up to its potential—not due to any failure on its
part, but because of the failure of the team as a whole: the triad of
owner, architect, and general contractor.
Jim, how has BIM changed the construction industry?
James P. Barrett: We’ve got 200 BIM projects now worth about $30
billion, and it’s growing. It’s pretty much a mandate. As it is now,
we’re in the same boat as Joshua—we’ve essentially looked at BIM as
a sustaining innovation that allows us to do what we’ve always done,
just better.

What do you mean by failure?
Prince-Ramus: BIM has the potential to facilitate incredible design team
collaboration from start to finish, to have everyone collaborate with a 3D
model. It’s just that we are still operating with a traditional contractual
apparatus, and BIM requires something new that doesn’t yet exist. So
to use BIM to its real potential with an old contract is [like playing]
roulette. We use BIM and our partner contractors use BIM, but as the
saying goes, it’s like driving a Ferrari to get groceries.
Better, faster, easier, and more cost-effective?
Barrett: Yes. The tools allow us to do trade coordination better than
we did before, and in some cases significantly better. And there are by-
products that come of that where we’ve got better work quality in the
field. But you could argue we’re still doing what we’ve always done. In
fact, the sequence of coordination is pretty much the same. And so the
conscious choice now is, we recognize that we have this tool. What else
can you do with it? What else does it enable you to do?
 ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 159

“The conscious choice now is, we recognize that we have this

tool. What else can you do with it? What else
does it enable you to do?” —James P. Barrett
160 THE NEXT NORMAL

“I keep thinking, why don’t we have the same relationship with

contractors as we do with our engineers? We have a core team of
consultants who we like to work with on almost
every job, so why aren’t we building up those kinds
of relationships between contractor and architect?”
—Joshua Prince-Ramus

Could you be more specific?
Barrett: Pre-construction is far more difficult, but working in BIM
has been, I would argue, more fruitful for us, because it’s forcing us to
address fundamental issues of how we work with design teams and
what the product is that we need to make BIM useful for our purposes.
Prince-Ramus: The ideal scenario would be, you create a form and you
essentially say to the computer, “Give me a price.” And then you say,
“Now rationalize it, but using 20 pieces,” and then I get a new price.
And I say, “OK, well, that’s too much. Now give it to me in 14 pieces.”
Barrett: We’re all sort of saying, “We’ll show you what we’ve done in
3D,” but that’s still missing a huge next step, which is optimization. That
thought process isn’t really happening, not on any significant level.
Prince-Ramus: And for us that is actually the most exciting potential of
BIM. That’s how we like to work. We want to know, how are they going
to build it, and what are the limiting factors in the design approach we
are trying? You are going to have to say, “OK, we’ve got budget X; we
want to make the most of whatever it is for the money and to know that
we’re spending the money wisely.”
With BIM, are construction companies making more design decisions?
Barrett: We’re trying to keep a strong line between that. We make it a
more information-rich environment to make better decisions that’ll
have long-term impact. We have enough problems without taking on
design liabilities.
Prince-Ramus: The problem is, there is often a void left by the architect
not controlling these processes, and often the contractor fills that void.
So the first problem is the failure of the architect, and the second is the
contractor essentially assuming architectural duties that they don’t have
the legal liability to do.
Barrett: We have had the opposite, which is interesting, when the
architect takes the model too far.
Prince-Ramus: Everything that you have described, how to build a model
and things like that, there is always a learning curve. And so I keep
thinking, why don’t we have the same relationship with contractors
as we do with our engineers? We have a core team of consultants who
we like to work with on almost every job, so why aren’t we building up
those kinds of relationships between contractor and architect?
Does BIM help to achieve, or facilitate, that collaborative effort?
Prince-Ramus: It doesn’t necessarily demand BIM. But BIM is a powerful
tool, and if you get into that territory you’d be remiss not to use it.
Barrett: Mistakes in BIM are inevitable with the combination of
imperfect people working with an equally imperfect nascent technology.
A necessary precondition of BIM is a protective environment that allows
sharing and collaboration among the parties without fear of finger
pointing and blame. We take the Las Vegas approach to BIM, which is:
What happens in BIM stays in BIM.
Control of intellectual property rights is also an issue with BIM. How do
you deal with this?
Prince-Ramus: My observation is that when people start worrying
about IP, it’s because they don’t understand how to use BIM. We own the
drawings, the specifications, and the performance specifications. When
WHEN PEOPLE LEARN I’M AN ARCHITECT, THEY ALWAYS SAY T HE INFORMAATION KIND OR THHE REE AL KIND? @LIVLAB
I WANTEED TO BE AN ARCHHITECC T, BUT I WAA SN’T GOOD AT MATH @JOHNCLUVER
ARCHITECT JANUARY 2011 161
you do a performance specification, what you’re saying is, “We insert
your proprietary information. You own that, you keep it. We own the
performance specification.”
So is ownership of the BIM model really a question?
Prince-Ramus: The question of ownership is naïve. It’s exactly what
would happen in a 2D physical drawing situation. That is, we don’t own
the proprietary details, yet we will take our stuff and leave if the client
terminates us for convenience. We retain ownership of what we created.
How about in the construction industry?
Barrett: It’s not an issue for us whatsoever. We make no claims ourselves
for IP other than a proprietary system through our trade contractors. But
otherwise it has never come up as an issue.
Is BIM changing your hiring and recruitment strategies?
Barrett: We’re hiring more architects. Unlike with the design community,
there’s no history for us with BIM. Because our use of BIM is accelerating,
we are moving beyond a coordination tool to more for pre-construction.
That’s where we need people with different perspectives that are not
bound by tradition. We’ve become more like problem-solvers.
Prince-Ramus: We’re starting to hire nonarchitects.
Barrett: We are apparently hiring Joshua’s castoffs.
Is this shift BIM- or technology-related?
Prince-Ramus: It’s an architectural education issue. It’s not that I’m not
hiring architects. But as someone who teaches and has a practice and
has real projects, I see the skill set of people with architectural education
as increasingly irrelevant, if not detrimental.
*
As the use of BIM becomes more widespread, what does the future hold?
How will you be designing and building?
Barrett: We’re seeing a strong movement toward engagement. We’re
encouraging it with the design team and owners and trade contractors
early in the process. We are going to see that totally accelerate. I also see
the development of a network of alliances. BIM can enable that because
you have a better tool to coordinate the players and their work product.
Prince-Ramus: Once engaged it takes a mental shift for architects to
start saying, “If I do my job really well I should be able to come up with
something remarkable by using the things at hand as opposed to doing
it in an abstraction and then hoping to God that somebody can figure it
out.” Is that where we’ll be in five or 10 years? Unfortunately, no. I think
that’s where we should be now. 
*Apologies to Paul Rand
CAN YOUU DESIGN MY BASEMENT REMODEL FOR FREE?? @GEISVIZ
LIKEE ART VANDELAY? @ABIGREDAPE
162 THE NEXT NORMAL
WATCH
YOUR BACK
OUUR STUUFF MAYY BE MADE INN CHINA, BUTT WHENN IT COOMESS TO IDEAAS, THEE UNITEED STAATES ISS STILL ON TOOP.
PRROFESSSIONALL SERVIICES, INCLUDDING ARCHITEECTURRE, CONNSTITUTE ROUUGHLYY A THIRD OF AMERICCA’S EXPORTTS.
BUUT BE WARNEED: DESSIGN FIRMSS IN ASIA ARE CAATCHHING UP.
AGER GROUP / SHANGHAI
The United States imported more than four times as many goods from
China as we exported there in 2010, but our trade imbalance with China
has gone the other way when it comes to professional services. The
American architecture profession has been part of that export growth.
Many major American architecture firms now have offices in the largest
Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, as well as second-tier cities
like Tianjin. But trade, by its very nature, goes both ways, and some
Chinese firms have begun to open offices in the U.S.
The Ager Group, a China-based architecture, landscape architecture,
and planning firm of more than 110 people with offices in Shanghai and
Beijing, opened a Boston office in 2007. If this is symbolic of both China’s
emergence as the world’s second-largest economy and America’s loss
of hegemony, it also isn’t all bad. The Chinese opening of branch offices
in the U.S. reflects, in part, Chinese respect for the quality of American
professionals, evident in the career of Ager’s founder and president,
Xiaowei Ma.
An alumnus of the Beijing Forestry University, Ma came to the U.S. to
receive a graduate degree in landscape architecture from the University
of Minnesota, after which he worked for Sasaki Associates and other U.S.
firms before returning to China to set up his own office in 2001.
His respect for American practice came through in a conversation I
had with Ma recently in his Shanghai office. He notes that Ager sends its
Chinese employees to the Boston office for periods of time, “to open up
their minds and renew their design thinking.” Ma doesn’t see Ager as a
Chinese firm with an American branch. Indeed, in a 2008 interview in
World Architecture Review, Ma responded to the opposite perception in
China. Ager “is not a purely foreign design firm that simply imposes the
western design process and design philosophy on Chinese culture,” he
said. As one of the firm’s principals in Boston, Jessica Leete, puts it, “That
Ager is China-based rather than U.S.-based really only has to do with
where the current majority of the work is.”
Ager’s 12 principals represent multiple nationalities—Chinese,
Philippine, and American among them—and almost all have
international education or work experiences, creating a diversity
that Ma sees as essential in today’s global practice. “The world is
flat, without borders,” Ma says, “making nationality just a person’s
background.” That observation applies as much to clients as it does to
design professionals. “Ager is based in Shanghai,” Ma adds, “but the
client might come from the United States, [while] in the United States,
the client might come from China. … The market is cross-national.
 Our talents and thoughts are also cross-national.”
That cross-nationalism leads to some practices that may become
common in architectural firms with offices around the globe. Ager
employs full-time Chinese-English translators, for example. The firm’s
“strategic choice required that our company have a very international
atmosphere, with bilingual communication,” Ma says. Since its first
year, Ager has also organized study trips for staff across offices to other
countries, so they can experience as many cultures as possible.
All of this suggests that the very notion of a headquarters and
branch office may have become irrelevant. What matters, according to
Ma, is a firm’s “continuity of brand”—an idea that is, itself, an American
export to the rest of the world. THOMAS FISHER, ASSOC. AIA
URBANUS / SHENZHEN
In the Nanshan District in the western part of Shenzhen, the heady
density of the city is far from view. Here, on the OCT Loft campus—a
series of renovated warehouse buildings clustered in a dense office
parklike setting—the feeling isn’t of industry but commerce of a cultural
kind, like an edgy art school. The scene is downright serene compared
with the crowded city center of Shenzhen, which has sprung up as
an icon of China’s rapid rush to modernization and urbanization: In
30 years, the population has exploded from 30,000 to 9 million.
Designed by Urbanus, a Chinese architecture firm founded in 1999,
the OCT Loft campus was one of the first major urban regeneration
projects undertaken by the firm, and for the past few years, it has
also been the office of the architecture practice. “It’s a unique place,
programmed and designed by us,” explains Urbanus partner Wang Hui,
“a living case to test our ideas.”
Currently employing 85 staff between the office in Shenzhen and an
outpost in Beijing, the firm has come a long way since it was founded by
Wang, Liu Xiaodu, and Meng Yan. (A fourth partner, Zhu Pei, split off in
2004 and currently runs a successful practice of his own.) Collectively,
the founding members of Urbanus were educated at China’s Tsinghua
University and did graduate study in the U.S., then spent their formative
years at firms such as Kohn Pedersen Fox and Gensler. In 2004, the
firm scored its biggest victory, winning a competition to design the
communications center for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Urbanus has completed projects across a wide spectrum of type and
scale. The Greater China Oriental New World, a 1.6-million-square-foot
mixed-use high-rise in Shenzhen, for example, minimizes the severity of
the building mass with towers of vertical folds. The Dafen Museum is a
critically acclaimed art institution built into the side of a hill. Urbanus’
most thought-provoking work may be its Tulou housing in Guangzhou.
Financed by China Vanke Co., one of China’s largest and richest
developers, it was one of the rare high-quality, low-income housing
projects in China and was included in an exhibition at the Cooper-
Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.
The partners are quick to note that their country has experienced
a total shift in architecture over the past 10 years. There were two
watersheds: the Olympics and Expo 2010 Shanghai, both magnets of
“The world is flat, without borders,” Xiaowei Ma says, “making
nationality just a person’s background.” That observation applies
as much to clients as it does
to design professionals. architectural experimentation and
urban transformation. Change has
largely been good, the partners believe. “This phenomenon has the
benefit of making modern architectural styles the norm in China,” Liu
notes. The downside: “There are many projects being done by architects
who neither understand modernist principles, nor have the design
ability to create new ideas and images,” Liu says. “The result is … lousy
redesign of Western examples.”
Urbanus will do what it can to counter that problem. Just last year,
it won the competition to design Shenzhen Crystal Island, a 99-acre
transport hub and cultural center, in collaboration with the Office for
Metropolitan Architecture. Also last year, at a much smaller scale, the
firm completed the Jade Bamboo Garden in Shenzhen, a patch of green
space over a parking lot which connects two residential areas.
The project, paid for by a private developer as a concession to the
local community, was a triumph for both the environment and local
urban policy. Says Wang: “Our design is based on reality, as well as a
dynamic knowledge pool, and this gives us endless inspiration and
nutrition.” ANDREW YANG
MORPHOGENESIS / NEW DELHI
When Manit and Sonali Rastogi started Morphogenesis in New Delhi
in 1996, the couple—who met as undergraduates at New Delhi’s School
of Planning and Architecture and were fresh from graduate school
at London’s Architectural Association (AA)—confronted a sluggish
economy and architecture market. The liberalization of the nation’s
economy in 1991 had yet to impact development, but it turns out their
timing could not have been better. As many young architects do, they
entered a competition—to design a corporate headquarters for the
Apollo Tyres Group, in Gurgaon, Haryana—which they won. The project
was completed in 2000 and went on to win several awards.
“From there, we never looked back,” says Manit, who acknowledges
that the firm, now 93 strong and led by the Rastogis as well as Sanjay
Bhardwaj and Vijay Dahiya, is in the fortunate position of being able to
pick and choose its projects.
Ten of the top 30 fastest-growing urban areas in the world are in
India, and 700 million people are estimated to move to its cities by 2050.
Multinational corporations are flocking to the country to tap into its
vast, resource-rich, labor- and consumer-abundant market. The world’s
corporate architecture firms have been swift to move in too. (“Oh, they’re
all here,” Manit laughs.) Over its 15-year existence, Morphogenesis
has completed close to 30 projects, including corporate headquarters
for Ernst & Young, commercial office buildings, factories, a shopping
mall, and several interiors and high-end residences, as well as an entire
residential subdivision.
But rather than settle into the niche of go-to firm for high-design
symbols of the new capitalism, Morphogenesis has grander ambitions.
“One important thing we are bringing back from the AA is how to
think about architecture as a process,” Manit says. The firm indulges
in lengthy research phases, giving its work the cultural depth and
technological sophistication that has been earning them accolades.
The award-winning Pearl Academy of Fashion in Jaipur (completed
in 2008) exemplifies this approach: Utterly contemporary, the building
features several clever takes on traditional techniques. Lifted on piloti,
it has a central void or underbelly with a deep pool fed by recycled and
rainwater, which evaporates and cools the building. The idea is based on
the baoli, or stepwell, seen in ancient Indian architecture.
At this pivotal moment in India’s development, Morphogenesis’
principals realize the urgency to get involved. This might explain why
the firm is investing so much energy in a plan to transform the city’s
extensive network of nullahs (canals) from unhygienic sewage drains to
a green network of pedestrian and cycling paths and new social spaces.
Perhaps most ambitiously, in 2009, Manit took the helm of the Sushant
School of Art and Architecture and launched a School of Design. “Pure
frustration,” Manit explains as his motivation.
The number of architecture schools in India has jumped from 25 to
135 in the past 20 years, but this expansion, the Rastogis say, hasn’t done
much to improve the quality of young architects’ training. The nation
clearly has a great many needs at the moment, and Morphogenesis
seems determined to fill as many as they can. CATHY LANG HO
RECENTLY, I MADE AN IMPROMPTU VISIT TO HARVARD to visit my
old friend and long-term collaborator, Sanford Kwinter. He in-
vited me to present to his class at the GSD, and opened it up to
the broader Harvard community. We talked about the work that
I am focused on these days, launching a new educational project
committed to providing the tools of innovation and design think-
ing to the broadest, most inclusive audience possible. Our discus-
sion was animated and exciting—because it was troublesome
and even alarming to some of the students. One brave student
was willing to complain out loud: “I’m not comfortable with your
‘corporatist’ language and your obsession with getting to scale. Is
it really necessary?” My response was brutal: “I don’t care about
your problems, because they are not real problems. They are lux-
ury problems. You have the luxury of cynicism. The people in Ma-
lawi suffering and dying from infections that could be prevented
have never heard the word ‘corporatist.’ They have real problems,
and they know one thing: They need solutions now. At scale.”
The cynicism and navel-gazing that infect the field of architecture at
this moment—the whining malaise and never-ending complaints of pow-
erlessness and economic hardship and marginalization and irrelevance and
on, and on, and on—set me on fire. Not because some of this is not true. Not
because I don’t share the difficulties we are all grappling with to build and
maintain a business during the most challenging economic conditions in
living memory. Not because I don’t appreciate and support the dreams and
ambitions and authentically good citizenship that form the cultural founda-
tion of the architectural life. I am infuriated for two reasons: First, there is
simply no basis in historical fact that could possibly support a complaint
about being an architect—of any kind, in any form—at this moment in his-
tory. Second, to the degree that there are problems in architectural practice
in America, they are self-inflicted. Architecture is largely irrelevant to the
great mass of the world’s population because architects have chosen to be.
Is it really difficult being an architect in America? It’s difficult to be a
female intellectual in Kandahar. It’s difficult to raise a family living on
waste products in the garbage dumps of China. It’s difficult to find your way
as a child in Malawi, where the infection rate of HIV/AIDS is 17 percent,
having already wiped out a generation of mothers and fathers. It’s diffi-
cult to overcome drug addiction from the quicksand of poverty and incar-
ceration in America’s overpopulated prisons. These conditions are difficult.
Being an architect is not difficult.
So, really, are we going to listen to another gripe about how difficult it
is to be an architect today? No, we are not. If you are a student at Harvard,
or a practicing architect, you are the privileged 1 percent. That’s right—
1 percent. I’m not talking about 1 percent of college graduates, but 1 percent
of humanity. Less than 1 percent of the world has experienced the power
of higher education. Look at what we have accomplished with less than
1 percent, the revolution of possibility that we have collectively created:
access to food and water and healthcare and energy and knowledge and
connection and mobility for billions of people. With less than 1 percent
we have created Massive Change. Imagine if we could reach just one more
percent. Imagine if 2 percent had access to the educational tools that we take
for granted. And that is my point: Architects take for granted the extraor-
dinary powers they have to shape the world, to create beauty, to produce
wealth, to reach people with new ideas.
If you are an architect and are thinking any thought other than, “Hey,
this is awesome! This is the craziest, coolest, most beau-
tiful time in human history to be alive and working;” if
you aren’t saying, “Wow! I get to constantly learn new
things, and everything is uncertain. I want everyone
on the planet to get in on the action and be part of this
new world of invention and beauty!”—I don’t want to
hear it. If you are thinking a complaint, just stop. If your
thought sounds whiny or rhymes with “woe is me” or
has a mildly racist undertone about people “over there”
taking “our” jobs—I don’t want to hear it. If you can’t
tell the difference between
critical and negative, and have
conflated the two and built a
practice around “challenging”
this or that, and are wondering
why people aren’t interested—
don’t come crying to me.
However, if you have wo-
ken up and realized that the
internal monologue and obses-
sion with policing the boundary
of “big A” licensed Architecture
means that architects could
lose the thread of the most im-
portant movement in history,
the movement to redesign the
world and everything we do to sustainably meet the needs of the 4.5 billion
children who will be born before midcentury, then do something about it.
If you realize your colleagues have been so busy policing the fence of exclu-
sivity that they forgot to open the door of possibility, then get in the game.
If you understand that the practice of architecture—the practice of syn-
thesis that generates coherent unity from massively complex and diverse
inputs—just might be the operating system that we need to solve the
challenges that we face in meeting the needs of the next generation,
then join the movement. If you get the fact that architecture, and the
design methodologies at its core, could be central to the future of cities,
governments, ecologies, and businesses, then please raise your voice in
the chorus of potential. Get into the discussion and leave your worries
about the fence that separates you from the rest of the world behind you.
Stop the complaining—and join the revolution of possibility.
TEXT BY BRUCE MAU
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BIG
THANKS
A COLLABORATION BETWEEN ARCHITECT AND BRUCE MAU DESIGN (BMD), The
Next Normal evolved through countless e-mails, conference calls,
and Skype discussions between staff at the magazine in Washington,
D.C.—especially art directors Aubrey Altmann and Marcy Ryan—and at
BMD’s office in Toronto, where Blair Johnsrude took the creative lead on
the project, with support from associate creative director Laura Stein and
project coordinator Julie Netley.
Altmann and Ryan traveled to Toronto to brainstorm with BMD
designers (luckily, Altmann’s passport came through just in time). “The
project really caught fire when Aubrey and Marcy came up for a classic
BMD creative workshop,” Johnsrude says. “We camped out in our studio
library for a day, and used every Post-it note in the studio to fill up the
project boards with all kinds of impossibly outrageous ideas.” Many of
those were eventually ruled out for practical considerations. “But it was
important to put all our psychedelic visions on the table, to discover the
essential spirit of what we were trying to do.”
Altmann and Johnsrude were in constant communication as they
laid out the pages. When Dutch design firm Catalogtree came on board
to create infographics, “it was only natural to hold our three-country
meetings on Skype—often at midnight, Dutch time,” Johnsrude
remembers. “It was a way to stretch the energy of our brainstorming
session through the entire project.”
The Next Normal was edited by Ned Cramer, Katie Gerfen, and
Amanda Kolson Hurley. Greig O’Brien calmly directed traff ic and made
sure the pages got to the printers on time. Lindsey M. Roberts finessed
the copy and helped us get our facts straight. Articles, photographs, and
illustrations were contributed by a crack team from the U.S. and beyond:
KERMIT BAKER, Hon. AIA, is the chief economist for the American Institute
of Architects. He is also the project director of the Remodeling Futures
Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
ERNEST BECK, an ARCHITECT contributing editor, is a New York–based
freelance writer. He focuses on architecture, design, innovation, and
business.
CATALOGTREE, an ARCHITECT contributing artist, is a multidisciplinary
design studio in the Netherlands founded by Daniel Gross and Joris
Maltha. Work includes typography, generative graphic design, and the
visualization of quantitative data.
THOMAS FISHER, Assoc. AIA, is the dean of the College of Design at the
University of Minnesota and an ARCHITECT contributing editor.
DATA SOURCES FOR PROVOCATIONS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR; U.S. CENSUS BUREAU; U.S. CENSUS BUREAU; WORLD BANK; WORLD BANK;
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PALEONTOLOGY; CORNELL UNIVERSITY STUDY BY RICH HOLIHAN, DAN KEELEY, DANIEL LEE, POWEN TU, AND ERIC YANG
VERONIQUE GREENWOOD is a New York–based writer whose work has
appeared in Scientific American and Seed and on TheAtlantic.com.
CATHY LANG HO is an independent writer and editor in New York and an
ARCHITECT contributing editor. She was the founding editor of The
Architect’s Newspaper and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
NOAH KALINA is an ARCHITECT contributing artist and a photographer based
in Brooklyn, N.Y. His work has appeared in I.D., Nylon, Blender, The New
York Times Magazine, and other publications.
EDWARD KEEGAN, AIA, is a Chicago architect who complements his
independent practice by writing, broadcasting, and teaching on
architectural subjects. He is an ARCHITECT editor-at-large.
MARK LAMSTER is at work on a biography of the late architect Philip
Johnson, to be published by Little, Brown. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
DIANA LIND is the former editor-in-chief of Next American City. She is
currently program director of the Geneva-based New Cities Foundation.
KIEL MOE, AIA, is an assistant professor of design and building
technologies at Northeastern University. His most recent book is
Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture.
PAUL W. NAKAZAWA, AIA, is a business adviser to firms in the fields of
architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and engineering.
He is on the faculty of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
JAMESON SIMPSON is an illustrator in California. His illustrations have
appeared in such magazines as Popular Science and Wired.
ANDREW YANG is the managing director of Roll & Hill, a contemporary
lighting company. For the past decade, Yang has been a design journalist,
writing for design publications as well as The New York Times and
The Wall Street Journal.
MIMI ZEIGER, an ARCHITECT contributing editor, writes for publications
including The New York Times, Dwell, and Wallpaper. Her third book,
Micro Green, will be published by Rizzoli in April.