Architecture and the Common Place

Architects design about 65% of commercial buildings and 2% of houses in the U.S.  The 65% is all 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. And that 2% of houses represents the very wealthiest homeowners. All the rest of the buildings in the world are designed by engineers or builders. Nothing against those them, but you shouldn't depend on an engineer or carpenter to design a building any more than they should hire an an Architect to size steel beams or hang a doors. Why don't Architects design more of the buildings?

Many would say that it's due to a certain snottiness found in most Architects.  Fair enough. My own website features a portfolio reel of my work lovingly set to cello music. What's snottier than Bach for cello?  But that's not really it. The problem is that the system for delivering design services is structured around complexity.  The typical Architectural project contains dozens of sheets of drawings, hundreds of pages of specifications and contracts all around that would tranquilize a lawyer. Consequently, the fees and insurance cost are very high. So 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.
 
THESE GUYS NEED AN ARCHITECT
I happened to be in the truck with my buddy Brian when he stopped at a small residential renovation he was doing. Curious, I went inside. From a purely functional standpoint, this house was a hot mess. Doors everywhere, rooms that can’t be furnished. The whole thing gave me the yips. 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. My eyes began to twitch.

​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 spent irresponsibly measuring the room with my shoes because we didn’t have a tape measure. 
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CRAPPY LITTLE DRAWINGS ARE FINE - SEE BELOW

​The drawings were actually a little embarrassing to show, being cartoons. But they worked. 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. 

WHY DIDN'T THESE PEOPLE HIRE AN ARCHITECT?
Money. For Traditional Architectural services, the design fee would have been too high for the Owner and too for the 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 just need good advice and a clear way to communicate it, which is a service we haven't developed a mechanism to provide. But imagine if we did.

​Think of all the houses and warehouses and strip-malls and office buildings that people suffer with, not knowing exactly why things don’t work, why rooms can’t be furnished, why the place seems so small, why spaces aren't enjoyable, why they struggle so much to get things done. There are often simple fixes that could make all of those buildings drastically better, things most experienced Architects would recognize at a glance. If we could get our hands on all of those buildings, we'd change the world a bit.

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