Making Good Architecture Commonplace

​Architecture enjoys a well–earned reputation for snobbiness.  In fact, my own website features a portfolio reel of my work lovingly set to cello music.  It’s hard to get snobbier than Bach for cello.  But this hoity-toitiness isn’t just because Architects are especially snobby by nature, it's also because our services are, and have always been, exclusively for the rich.
 
It’s estimated that Architects design about 65% of commercial buildings and 2% of houses in the U.S.  That 2% represents the very wealthiest homeowners.  The 65% is the hospitals, museums, universities and corporations whose building types require that they employ Architects both by law and by the sheer complexity of the work.  But industrial, residential and small commercial buildings are often designed by engineers or builders.  Nothing against those venerable trades, but nobody should depend on an engineer or carpenter to design a building any more than they should hire an an Architect to size steel beams or hanging doors.
 
The reason humbler buildings don’t get Architectural services is that the profession is structured for complexity, making design services too expensive for most building owners and/or too unprofitable for Architects.  The result is that commonplace buildings often suffer from poor design.  And, as the word implies, commonplace buildings are the most common places, so we have the least design where we spend the most time, places like our homes and offices and restaurants and stores.  I saw it in action last week.
 
My buddy Brian is a builder and he was stopping by a very small residential job.  I happened to be in the truck with him, so I went in to have a look.  The house is a disaster from a functional standpoint.  Doors everywhere, rooms that can’t be furnished.  It actually made me very uncomfortable to be inside of it.  But at issue this day was the kitchen, which, among other problems, had no cabinets.  It also had weirdly shallow countertops, leaving the sides of the appliances exposed and providing no place to cook.  There was an island too close to the stove and, above it, the area’s lone cabinet, a ceiling-mounted unit open on both sides.  It was empty, they said, because when you put things in one side, you invariably shoved something out the other side.  As they tried to sort it out, I listened and watched and squirmed until I just couldn’t take it.  They couldn’t decide where to put things in their kitchen, I blurted out, because they didn’t have a kitchen. And they didn’t have a kitchen because they didn’t have a wall. I begged them to let me do some sketches. 
 
I went back to my office and sketched up the least special, least design-y, least expensive kitchen ever committed to paper.  The ‘drawing set’ consisted of a few little cartoony hand sketches on trace paper just to show them how easy this would be to fix. ​I spent a total of four hours on it, including the time spend irresponsibly measuring the room with my shoes because we didn’t have a tape measure. 
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​It was actually a little embarrassing to show.  But one week later, for the price of four linear feet of interior wall and some very nice used cabinets, they have a kitchen.  They’re thrilled.  And the only reason they had an Architect involved was because one happened to be standing there.  Because these nice people, who are as deserving as everyone else of good design, would never have hired an Architect.  And I don't blame them. Traditional Architectural services would have been too expensive to justify and they likely would have had a tough time getting anyone to take the job.  Which is not really the fault of Architects.  Any traditional practice that took on this job would surely have lost money.  Micro-projects don't require - and can't support - an Architect. This is because the profession has based its fees entirely around the production of drawings, not the delivery of design.  In a traditional contract, 40% of the fee goes to detailed construction drawings.  This is perfect for a high-rise, but excludes everyone who doesn't require a full drawing set and a twenty-five page contract.  Many people simply need good advice and a clear way to communicate it, which is a service we haven't developed a mechanism to provide. 
 
I wonder how many people have businesses and houses that they suffer with, not knowing exactly why things don’t work, why rooms can’t be furnished or used efficiently, why spaces aren't enjoyable, why their wait stuff struggles so much to provide good service, and what simple things could be done to fix them.  I wonder, too, if there could be a way for Architects to bring our wealth of experience and practice to the design of common places.  Imagine if we could get our hands on, say, 4% of houses instead of 2%...

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