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.
Do you agree? I guess it depends on the school you went to. Mine was IIT and it wasn't very good at the time...
Thats a matter of opinion, I mean isn't placing the blame on a college program kind of a cop out? That a very subjective statement.
He is basically a design builder, and all of those guys are not fond of architects anyway.
When I went to IIT, I thought it was the best experience, i turned down going to other programs uuic., uic, and put off the idea of applying at ivies, I came away with a very solid foundation to stand on, lets just say that while i was in college, I was doing IBC code analysis for my school projects, among other things like structures, and all the other artsy stuff that could make an architectural critic shed some tears of happiness.
Working right out of college, and then having moved on to other offices, it was not uncommon to me for people from other more well known programs like Michigan, Columbia, viginia tech, uuic, uic, to say to me "How do you know all of that stuff" lol
If he's not hiring architects, who is he hiring? Paraprofessionals? I'm sensing a disconnect between rhetoric and actuality here, especially since he seems to think that BIM is not itself also an abstraction?
"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."
ce - you are unique and sounds like you knew what you were after from the start - good for you.
This is the same discussion that we've been going on and on about on here for probably 10 years! The problem is that most schools have profs that are teaching theory and little real world work/experience, they create graduates that enjoy the theory and end up teaching the same bs. Round and round we go.
Also, just a guess, but I doubt any celeb architect cares to teach anything practical (where's the fun in that?).
One of my favorite classes was by Gehry's engineer. It was great seeing 'how' things were done, how integral the process of design was with the 'real' building possibility (far far from the world of Lynn, etc.).
Interesting. I feel more and more sorry for those recently graduated or close to.
i saw a presentation by a senior exec at boeing who was talking about the need for "T" shaped people with respect to their skill set to participate on design and research teams. that is, people who have a broad knowledge of a domain and the nature of the other disciplines with which they'll collaborate when working in that domain --- this is the horizontal bar of the "T" --- and also a deep knowledge specialty that makes them an indispensable asset to the team --- the vertical bar of the "T"
part of this idea is that design and research are complex enough now that it is not possible to cultivate a 'renaissance' person to address such challenges, but we can work in 'renaissance' teams.
What is the concentration of an architect? Quantitative skills? Statistical skills? Programming skills? Artistic skills? Usability? Legal? Entrepreneurial? Code? Construction? Though there is much specialization in architecture, it is not to the same degree as in other fields and it is almost never underpinned by unique, in demand technical or artistic skills.
I think architecture can reclaim ground, but underlying the effort has to be deep, unique knowledge in a particular technical or artistic specialty.
...doing it in an abstraction and then hoping to God that somebody can figure it out.
I'm sorry, but exactly who the fuck actually practices this way?! I don't know a single architect that practices this way! If we're teaching students that this is how practice happens (I'm certainly not, in my limited teaching role), then yes we're screwed.
"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."
he needs to get over himself - every single firm I've worked for has thought about how shit comes together - even the firms that suffered from lack of imagination about how that shit came together, still thought about how shit comes together. it's like he just discovered how all the non-starchitects work.
Prince-Ramus just likes to hear himself talk. This is not the first time that he has made statements that seem only founded on saying something utterly blasphemous to seem edgy. Of course he is a studio instructor because this is exactly the mentality of a studio instructor/reviewer. I can just see him on a review telling a student they should have covered their facade with canary feathers or something bullshitty like that or pulling the old "well you should have done the opposite of whatever you did" review. "Oh, were not hiring 'Architects' because we are so post-architecture." Whatever douche.
"I see the skill set of people with architectural education as increasingly irrelevant, if not detrimental."
To me, it seems a problem that he, as a respected star architect, expects a university to teach "set of skills". Is really a University where to go to learn "skills" which would be anyway changed or updated in a few years?
Rather, shouldn't university teach more fundamental philosophy and architectural discipline if we think Architecture is Art? Shouldn't an office instead of a univeristy train new workers the set of skills that the office needs to utilize?
I think he is reaching a bit further than the surface treatment you all seem to be applying.
Can an architect who doesn't play basketball design a good court? Has an architect ever been a ballet dancer? How many architects paint, draw or sculpt on a professional level? How many architects have studied topics such as criminal justice, sociology, public administration or urban planning on an academic level?
How many architects have learned volumes of history? Can an architect tell you what Pope Innocent the III or Rodrigo de Borja or Pope Sixtus the V are famous for?
Do architects study cultural and anthropological history-- from topics like busts had pedestals, the significance of the number of handles on urns, reasoning for why doors either open inwards or outwards, the importance of mirrors or the intimate history of gargoyles?
And so on. Many people in the technical world (sciences, mathematics, engineering and so on) immediately write these things off because they're deemed 'unimportant.'
However, things are only needing to be created today because of what happened in the past.
Why hire someone to build cultural institutions or prisons or hospitals or even houses if these people never learned any humanity?
"history, theory, and criticism has nothing to do with anything outside of the 4 walls of academia"
However, even Practicalism is a theory or a philosophy to decide to follow. So, we need to know and learn which philosophy we can follow or generate by oneself, and "the 4 walls of academia" is one of a few places where we can learn those things.
If I hadn't been a naive, ambitious and idealistic student I would have never taken any classes that wouldn't have translated into help with my career.
See, the problem isn't whether knowledge is good. Pretty much all knowledge learned is a good thing, I think we'll all agree on that. BUT, and a HUGE BUT, when it comes to:
1. Paying your school/profs to teach you, the young, naive, idealistic punk, what is going to be helpful and good for your future
and
2. Those classes take time away from what could be spent preparing individuals for, [gasp] a profession
that's when we have a real problem and that's where everything is currently at.
My solution:
1. Undergrad for a Profession
2. Grad for the fluffy stuff that makes you feel good (and only you, as no one else cares "outside the 4 walls of academia")
What a joke. This article is another way for a well-known to say, "I'm older and I know more stuff". I know the type well. I'm highly skeptical Prince-Ramus knew jack squat about building graduating from college, just like most people. He was probably fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of someone wise and prominent in the field that closely mentored him and sheltered him from the consequences of his early mistakes and errors while he learned his craft. He apparently has no ability to self-reflect. Does anybody know if he has any certified specializations in another, any field? If not, maybe he should "unhire" himself.
Jpr is an architect and - despite the snarkiness above - a darn good one. But he also seems to revel in provocative comments that reflect badly on our profession. Maybe he thinks tearing down the profession is a way to elevate himself? I don't know, but I'd prefer he keep doing good work, talk about good work, and maybe engage in criticism specific to making better architecture.
wow, lot of vitriol here! guess that's to be expected from the provocative thread title. jpr was intentionally being polemical and non-pc, but if you strip away the rhetoric, he does have a point. the practice of architecture is moving towards greater specialization. i can see a downward pressure on the number of architects needed to run an office while there is a simultaneous upward pressure on the number of consultants required to complete a project (my last major project had 19 consultants, not including the owner team or the contractor team). i think an architect's network of good consultants is becoming more important than maintaining a large in-house staff. that's being pretty well borne out in this economy.
OK, Cherith this comment made me LOL: "Oh, were not hiring 'Architects' because we are so post-architecture."
But the more I think about it the more I think that's a really provocative and funny way of putting the much more complex question of the relevance of architects' skills and knowledge.
Like won said, the practice of architecture is changing, rapidly. So is being "post-architecture" the way to continue to find success in the design and construction of structures? Most likely.
Or do we have to rally around old-guard notions of the architect as having some elite, special purview, when anyone using SketchUp on their home computer to redesign their kitchen knows that's not the case?
I know this conversation is going on in several places on Archinect right now - we're a profession in turmoil, for sure. And I respect the hell out of JPR as an architect and as a leader in our profession - I'm glad he's raising the topic.
So, question of the day for my firm: if I'm post-architecture, can I stop paying my E&O insurance? That would be nice!
won, that's a good point. but having this kind of structure actually makes more sense for everyone. i'd much rather run my ideas by a group of excellent consultants than depend on the architects in my organization to only do what they know, since any one person (or group of people with the same knowledge base) can only know so much.
...and this pretty much goes back to working in abstraction. i don't find that to be as offensive as the rest of you. i'm not talking about pie-in-the-sky idiocy here, but if one assumes that an architect is intelligent and knows how to draw upon the skills of his/her associates and consultants well, what's wrong with coming up with ideas that may require some stretching of these skills?
i'm so sick of jpr's obnoxious posturing. he's talented, sure, but so are a lot of people. it's the corrosive, systematic dismantling of this profession by an opportunist who is always concerned with how to best position himself advantageously. if i'm going to let someone make me feel insecure about my skills, it's probably not going to be someone who has built exactly one building without the support and resources of a larger, established firm.
He runs his own firm. He manages to get impressive projects and contracts. If having an architecture firm full of non-architects is helping him stay successful... isn't that not mildly humorous?
A pretty large part of architecture (and by extension construction) has proven that it is incapable of staying solvent or making a profit. All of these non-functional architects all have two things in common: they're all filled full of people who went to architecture school and they all have curmudgeonly management.
it's just a provocative way of implying that he's doing something different. won is right about the consultants, but one other condition born out of this economy is to not deal with consultants at all. i currently work for an architect who refuses to ever hire a consultant, even for structural. we do it all in house. obviously, our projects are pretty small, but this cuts down significantly on our overhead. so i think it could be said that the smaller and less specialized a project is, the more it's okay or even advantageous to be a generalist. BIM is less useful for smaller projects too, and thus are BIM specialists. i know that scale of project isn't really a part of this conversation but i believe it's a huge consideration in how a functioning practice works. larger practices often can't even take on small projects.
what exactly makes rex a successful firm? what impressive projects and contracts have they gotten? they do mostly competitions, for which they probably get shortlisted using their oma projects as qualifications.
looking at their website, i see maybe 2 actual non-competition projects that do not date from the oma days. one is the building in istanbul (which i think was begun before the recession) and a master plan/res highrise in korea.
it's way more than i've got, true, but i'm not sure i'd consider it 'successful'. jpr is a master of working the publicity machine.
"it's just a provocative way of implying that he's doing something different."
I think that's pretty much all there is to this story.
For some reason work by REX (and OMA by extension) is extremely respected in our community. I think I am in a clear minority to consider their work one of the most aesthetically unappealing architectural styles since Michael Graves used to walk among us.
what bothers me is this sort of 'experience inflation' that's rampant among younger architects...everyone with an ivy degree has some sort of fake 'research' practice and everyone blows up whatever experience they do have into something 10 times greater.
to a certain extent i understand why this happens...everyone's trying to get work that's bigger and better than what they already have. but i think it's really bad for the profession in many ways. as students you look at a practice like rex and think it's successful and aspire to something similar. then you get older and realize practices like that often don't pay for themselves, are funded by unpaid labor or a principal's academic positions or worse, a trust fund.
then you realize what you've really gotten yourself into, and it's scary.....
as far as experience inflation is concerned, it becomes blatantly obvious very quickly if someone doesn't know what they are doing. it might get you a foot in the door, but if that's somewhere you really don't belong you'll be out as soon as you got there.
not if the trust fund/parents/academic positions keep paying the bills...you just keep getting competition entries published in glossies and hitting the lecture circuit.
won - most firms I've worked for are actively looking to cut down on consultants on all projects. Unless you've tried to do many of these things in house you really have no idea if what the consultants do is actually really easy (i.e. intern or lower-level staff can be trained to do it) or if it's something that requires a certain level of expertise.
I mean, who actually hires LEED consultants anymore?
not my experience at all, toaster. i've had a leed consultant on every leed project i've worked on. it's often required by the owner. same with ada. same with life safety. same with kitchens. the list goes on. and to be honest, i'm glad to have all of these consultants cause i sure as heck don't know how to layout a kitchen and i seriously doubt anyone else in-house can either. it's also a symptom of the cya nature of the building profession. if you have a life safety consultant, there is someone specifically liable for any problems that may arise, same for ada, etc. architects like to think they can handle all these specialized aspects of design, but few if any can do it with sufficient expertise. who has time to learn all these specialties anyway? furthermore who has money to hire these specialties in house?
that's interesting mr. williams, although it is the exact opposite of my experience. i've done kitchens for restaurants, sized mechanical systems and make up air systems, sized beams, designed plumbing risers, drawn electrical risers and laid out panel schedules, ada and ansi requirements, done cost estimating etc. i understand the philosophy of dealing with consultants, and i have worked in offices that function that way, but often a phone call or a bit more code research can solve pretty much any problem. in cities that have larger building departments, often they have the expertise to walk you through a problem, and they will have specific requirements on how they want something detailed anyway. i'm talking about small projects here, you should note. but your last question, in my current case it would be the opposite: who has the money to hire consultants at all? we get a low fee for every project, but that's how we've kept the doors open.
I thought REX basically went out of business? Shows what I know.
I'm sure JPR is pretty elite, came up through the ranks at OMA, hobnobbed in the corridors of power that Rem and his ilk seem so comfortable in, then somehow managed to take one of Rem's more prominent offices and make it his own without massive quantites of drama (at least very little was made public) so the man is definitely qualified to make his statement.
However, his statement smacks of the elitism and defeatism that plagues this profession, especially at his level, and truly shows how little he and his kind understand about "the other half" of the profession. For every Columbia or AA grad pumping Grasshopper for Zaha and her kind, there are at least ten State U grads pumping CAD for small firms whose livelyhood depends on our ability to design buildings that work for our clients with a minimal amount of input from conslutants and you simply can't do that unless you know the nominal dimensions of a brick, how a steel floor joist meets a support column, etc. etc. etc. Many of these things I learned at my college, so maybe JPR needs to hire from somewhere else besides theory-intensive M. Arch programs before writing off the rest of us as unemployable.
won, I think toaster and you may be working on completely different sizes of projects. DIY everything is the best approach for a capable designer working on a small project.
A project can be considered 'large' once it becomes impossible for any single person to still have a full grasp of the overall scope.
That's when you start partitioning the project into more manageable chunks. External consultants become time savers. Curtainwall, or a vertical transportation consultant is worth their money. I've written specs for curtainwalls and elevators, but only up to a certain size. An experienced consultant will save you money in the long run.
Large projects have an entire ecosystem of checks and balances. A capable network of consultants will provide you with a great peer-review QC.
The reason I say REX is successful is that their office's specific project portfolio is near the billion dollar range over the last 5 years. And they can't be a very large office.
At $200 million a year and even with a 2% project cost, that puts them within the realm of $4,000,000 a year revenue.
Given a staff of 20 and a New York office ($1,600,000 staff costs and $240,000 yearly rent), that still gives them around $2,160,000 a year in other revenue and "play money." Even if JPR drives a Ferrari and wears a new Burberry suit every week, there's still enough money for them to stay well above solvency.
And that's a tremendous feat for a start up firm with youngish owners.
And that's a tremendous feat for a start up firm with youngish owners.
REX isn't a start-up firm Uxbridge. The office is an OMA spin-off, and the vast majority of their projects are carry-overs from the OMA days. It's not like JPR built the firm from the ground up to make it what it is today. Also, I heard when they lost the big project in KY due to the economy collapsing, most of the office lost their jobs.
REX, perhaps more than any other OMA spin-off, is built firmly on Rem's coattails...not that there's anything wrong with that...
people with architectural education [are]... increasingly irrelevant, if not detrimental
Prince-Ramus in Architect magazine:
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.
Do you agree? I guess it depends on the school you went to. Mine was IIT and it wasn't very good at the time...
(And I am sure that I am partly to blame as well.)
Thats a matter of opinion, I mean isn't placing the blame on a college program kind of a cop out? That a very subjective statement.
He is basically a design builder, and all of those guys are not fond of architects anyway.
When I went to IIT, I thought it was the best experience, i turned down going to other programs uuic., uic, and put off the idea of applying at ivies, I came away with a very solid foundation to stand on, lets just say that while i was in college, I was doing IBC code analysis for my school projects, among other things like structures, and all the other artsy stuff that could make an architectural critic shed some tears of happiness.
Working right out of college, and then having moved on to other offices, it was not uncommon to me for people from other more well known programs like Michigan, Columbia, viginia tech, uuic, uic, to say to me "How do you know all of that stuff" lol
If he's not hiring architects, who is he hiring? Paraprofessionals? I'm sensing a disconnect between rhetoric and actuality here, especially since he seems to think that BIM is not itself also an abstraction?
"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."
wholeheartedly agree!
ce - you are unique and sounds like you knew what you were after from the start - good for you.
This is the same discussion that we've been going on and on about on here for probably 10 years! The problem is that most schools have profs that are teaching theory and little real world work/experience, they create graduates that enjoy the theory and end up teaching the same bs. Round and round we go.
Also, just a guess, but I doubt any celeb architect cares to teach anything practical (where's the fun in that?).
One of my favorite classes was by Gehry's engineer. It was great seeing 'how' things were done, how integral the process of design was with the 'real' building possibility (far far from the world of Lynn, etc.).
Interesting. I feel more and more sorry for those recently graduated or close to.
"As someone who teaches", isn't he partly responsible for any issues he has with the kids coming out of school with an architectural education?
i saw a presentation by a senior exec at boeing who was talking about the need for "T" shaped people with respect to their skill set to participate on design and research teams. that is, people who have a broad knowledge of a domain and the nature of the other disciplines with which they'll collaborate when working in that domain --- this is the horizontal bar of the "T" --- and also a deep knowledge specialty that makes them an indispensable asset to the team --- the vertical bar of the "T"
part of this idea is that design and research are complex enough now that it is not possible to cultivate a 'renaissance' person to address such challenges, but we can work in 'renaissance' teams.
What is the concentration of an architect? Quantitative skills? Statistical skills? Programming skills? Artistic skills? Usability? Legal? Entrepreneurial? Code? Construction? Though there is much specialization in architecture, it is not to the same degree as in other fields and it is almost never underpinned by unique, in demand technical or artistic skills.
I think architecture can reclaim ground, but underlying the effort has to be deep, unique knowledge in a particular technical or artistic specialty.
manta - exactly - if he's teaching he can teach the skills he thinks are important. that's why you teach.
I'm sorry, but exactly who the fuck actually practices this way?! I don't know a single architect that practices this way! If we're teaching students that this is how practice happens (I'm certainly not, in my limited teaching role), then yes we're screwed.
Nice post, jmanganelli.
he needs to get over himself - every single firm I've worked for has thought about how shit comes together - even the firms that suffered from lack of imagination about how that shit came together, still thought about how shit comes together. it's like he just discovered how all the non-starchitects work.
Exactly, toaster! (That's the second time I've said that to you today!)
Prince-Ramus just likes to hear himself talk. This is not the first time that he has made statements that seem only founded on saying something utterly blasphemous to seem edgy. Of course he is a studio instructor because this is exactly the mentality of a studio instructor/reviewer. I can just see him on a review telling a student they should have covered their facade with canary feathers or something bullshitty like that or pulling the old "well you should have done the opposite of whatever you did" review. "Oh, were not hiring 'Architects' because we are so post-architecture." Whatever douche.
the relevance of REX from about four years and ten thousand comments ago.
"I see the skill set of people with architectural education as increasingly irrelevant, if not detrimental."
To me, it seems a problem that he, as a respected star architect, expects a university to teach "set of skills". Is really a University where to go to learn "skills" which would be anyway changed or updated in a few years?
Rather, shouldn't university teach more fundamental philosophy and architectural discipline if we think Architecture is Art? Shouldn't an office instead of a univeristy train new workers the set of skills that the office needs to utilize?
The guy is another Rem koolhass arbitrary notions architect, ill take his opinion and place in the irrelevant dumpster.
I think he is reaching a bit further than the surface treatment you all seem to be applying.
Can an architect who doesn't play basketball design a good court? Has an architect ever been a ballet dancer? How many architects paint, draw or sculpt on a professional level? How many architects have studied topics such as criminal justice, sociology, public administration or urban planning on an academic level?
How many architects have learned volumes of history? Can an architect tell you what Pope Innocent the III or Rodrigo de Borja or Pope Sixtus the V are famous for?
Do architects study cultural and anthropological history-- from topics like busts had pedestals, the significance of the number of handles on urns, reasoning for why doors either open inwards or outwards, the importance of mirrors or the intimate history of gargoyles?
And so on. Many people in the technical world (sciences, mathematics, engineering and so on) immediately write these things off because they're deemed 'unimportant.'
However, things are only needing to be created today because of what happened in the past.
Why hire someone to build cultural institutions or prisons or hospitals or even houses if these people never learned any humanity?
history, theory, and criticism has nothing to do with anything outside of the 4 walls of academia
"history, theory, and criticism has nothing to do with anything outside of the 4 walls of academia"
However, even Practicalism is a theory or a philosophy to decide to follow. So, we need to know and learn which philosophy we can follow or generate by oneself, and "the 4 walls of academia" is one of a few places where we can learn those things.
the question becomes..."why?"
If I hadn't been a naive, ambitious and idealistic student I would have never taken any classes that wouldn't have translated into help with my career.
See, the problem isn't whether knowledge is good. Pretty much all knowledge learned is a good thing, I think we'll all agree on that. BUT, and a HUGE BUT, when it comes to:
1. Paying your school/profs to teach you, the young, naive, idealistic punk, what is going to be helpful and good for your future
and
2. Those classes take time away from what could be spent preparing individuals for, [gasp] a profession
that's when we have a real problem and that's where everything is currently at.
My solution:
1. Undergrad for a Profession
2. Grad for the fluffy stuff that makes you feel good (and only you, as no one else cares "outside the 4 walls of academia")
Architects? We don't need no stinking architects.
We pile on world trade center on top of port authority building on top an IRS office park and call it a day.
Like this:
What a joke. This article is another way for a well-known to say, "I'm older and I know more stuff". I know the type well. I'm highly skeptical Prince-Ramus knew jack squat about building graduating from college, just like most people. He was probably fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of someone wise and prominent in the field that closely mentored him and sheltered him from the consequences of his early mistakes and errors while he learned his craft. He apparently has no ability to self-reflect. Does anybody know if he has any certified specializations in another, any field? If not, maybe he should "unhire" himself.
Jpr is an architect and - despite the snarkiness above - a darn good one. But he also seems to revel in provocative comments that reflect badly on our profession. Maybe he thinks tearing down the profession is a way to elevate himself? I don't know, but I'd prefer he keep doing good work, talk about good work, and maybe engage in criticism specific to making better architecture.
wow, lot of vitriol here! guess that's to be expected from the provocative thread title. jpr was intentionally being polemical and non-pc, but if you strip away the rhetoric, he does have a point. the practice of architecture is moving towards greater specialization. i can see a downward pressure on the number of architects needed to run an office while there is a simultaneous upward pressure on the number of consultants required to complete a project (my last major project had 19 consultants, not including the owner team or the contractor team). i think an architect's network of good consultants is becoming more important than maintaining a large in-house staff. that's being pretty well borne out in this economy.
OK, Cherith this comment made me LOL: "Oh, were not hiring 'Architects' because we are so post-architecture."
But the more I think about it the more I think that's a really provocative and funny way of putting the much more complex question of the relevance of architects' skills and knowledge.
Like won said, the practice of architecture is changing, rapidly. So is being "post-architecture" the way to continue to find success in the design and construction of structures? Most likely.
Or do we have to rally around old-guard notions of the architect as having some elite, special purview, when anyone using SketchUp on their home computer to redesign their kitchen knows that's not the case?
I know this conversation is going on in several places on Archinect right now - we're a profession in turmoil, for sure. And I respect the hell out of JPR as an architect and as a leader in our profession - I'm glad he's raising the topic.
So, question of the day for my firm: if I'm post-architecture, can I stop paying my E&O insurance? That would be nice!
won, that's a good point. but having this kind of structure actually makes more sense for everyone. i'd much rather run my ideas by a group of excellent consultants than depend on the architects in my organization to only do what they know, since any one person (or group of people with the same knowledge base) can only know so much.
...and this pretty much goes back to working in abstraction. i don't find that to be as offensive as the rest of you. i'm not talking about pie-in-the-sky idiocy here, but if one assumes that an architect is intelligent and knows how to draw upon the skills of his/her associates and consultants well, what's wrong with coming up with ideas that may require some stretching of these skills?
i'm so sick of jpr's obnoxious posturing. he's talented, sure, but so are a lot of people. it's the corrosive, systematic dismantling of this profession by an opportunist who is always concerned with how to best position himself advantageously. if i'm going to let someone make me feel insecure about my skills, it's probably not going to be someone who has built exactly one building without the support and resources of a larger, established firm.
The better question is "So what?"
He runs his own firm. He manages to get impressive projects and contracts. If having an architecture firm full of non-architects is helping him stay successful... isn't that not mildly humorous?
A pretty large part of architecture (and by extension construction) has proven that it is incapable of staying solvent or making a profit. All of these non-functional architects all have two things in common: they're all filled full of people who went to architecture school and they all have curmudgeonly management.
it's just a provocative way of implying that he's doing something different. won is right about the consultants, but one other condition born out of this economy is to not deal with consultants at all. i currently work for an architect who refuses to ever hire a consultant, even for structural. we do it all in house. obviously, our projects are pretty small, but this cuts down significantly on our overhead. so i think it could be said that the smaller and less specialized a project is, the more it's okay or even advantageous to be a generalist. BIM is less useful for smaller projects too, and thus are BIM specialists. i know that scale of project isn't really a part of this conversation but i believe it's a huge consideration in how a functioning practice works. larger practices often can't even take on small projects.
what exactly makes rex a successful firm? what impressive projects and contracts have they gotten? they do mostly competitions, for which they probably get shortlisted using their oma projects as qualifications.
looking at their website, i see maybe 2 actual non-competition projects that do not date from the oma days. one is the building in istanbul (which i think was begun before the recession) and a master plan/res highrise in korea.
it's way more than i've got, true, but i'm not sure i'd consider it 'successful'. jpr is a master of working the publicity machine.
I think that's pretty much all there is to this story.
For some reason work by REX (and OMA by extension) is extremely respected in our community. I think I am in a clear minority to consider their work one of the most aesthetically unappealing architectural styles since Michael Graves used to walk among us.
what bothers me is this sort of 'experience inflation' that's rampant among younger architects...everyone with an ivy degree has some sort of fake 'research' practice and everyone blows up whatever experience they do have into something 10 times greater.
to a certain extent i understand why this happens...everyone's trying to get work that's bigger and better than what they already have. but i think it's really bad for the profession in many ways. as students you look at a practice like rex and think it's successful and aspire to something similar. then you get older and realize practices like that often don't pay for themselves, are funded by unpaid labor or a principal's academic positions or worse, a trust fund.
then you realize what you've really gotten yourself into, and it's scary.....
**guess a practice can't be 'funded' by unpaid labor, but you know what i mean...
as far as experience inflation is concerned, it becomes blatantly obvious very quickly if someone doesn't know what they are doing. it might get you a foot in the door, but if that's somewhere you really don't belong you'll be out as soon as you got there.
not if the trust fund/parents/academic positions keep paying the bills...you just keep getting competition entries published in glossies and hitting the lecture circuit.
oh, and making 'provocative' statements in interviews.
won - most firms I've worked for are actively looking to cut down on consultants on all projects. Unless you've tried to do many of these things in house you really have no idea if what the consultants do is actually really easy (i.e. intern or lower-level staff can be trained to do it) or if it's something that requires a certain level of expertise.
I mean, who actually hires LEED consultants anymore?
not my experience at all, toaster. i've had a leed consultant on every leed project i've worked on. it's often required by the owner. same with ada. same with life safety. same with kitchens. the list goes on. and to be honest, i'm glad to have all of these consultants cause i sure as heck don't know how to layout a kitchen and i seriously doubt anyone else in-house can either. it's also a symptom of the cya nature of the building profession. if you have a life safety consultant, there is someone specifically liable for any problems that may arise, same for ada, etc. architects like to think they can handle all these specialized aspects of design, but few if any can do it with sufficient expertise. who has time to learn all these specialties anyway? furthermore who has money to hire these specialties in house?
anyway... sorry to go off that tangent.
that's interesting mr. williams, although it is the exact opposite of my experience. i've done kitchens for restaurants, sized mechanical systems and make up air systems, sized beams, designed plumbing risers, drawn electrical risers and laid out panel schedules, ada and ansi requirements, done cost estimating etc. i understand the philosophy of dealing with consultants, and i have worked in offices that function that way, but often a phone call or a bit more code research can solve pretty much any problem. in cities that have larger building departments, often they have the expertise to walk you through a problem, and they will have specific requirements on how they want something detailed anyway. i'm talking about small projects here, you should note. but your last question, in my current case it would be the opposite: who has the money to hire consultants at all? we get a low fee for every project, but that's how we've kept the doors open.
i just dragged us farther off...
I thought REX basically went out of business? Shows what I know.
I'm sure JPR is pretty elite, came up through the ranks at OMA, hobnobbed in the corridors of power that Rem and his ilk seem so comfortable in, then somehow managed to take one of Rem's more prominent offices and make it his own without massive quantites of drama (at least very little was made public) so the man is definitely qualified to make his statement.
However, his statement smacks of the elitism and defeatism that plagues this profession, especially at his level, and truly shows how little he and his kind understand about "the other half" of the profession. For every Columbia or AA grad pumping Grasshopper for Zaha and her kind, there are at least ten State U grads pumping CAD for small firms whose livelyhood depends on our ability to design buildings that work for our clients with a minimal amount of input from conslutants and you simply can't do that unless you know the nominal dimensions of a brick, how a steel floor joist meets a support column, etc. etc. etc. Many of these things I learned at my college, so maybe JPR needs to hire from somewhere else besides theory-intensive M. Arch programs before writing off the rest of us as unemployable.
won, I think toaster and you may be working on completely different sizes of projects. DIY everything is the best approach for a capable designer working on a small project.
A project can be considered 'large' once it becomes impossible for any single person to still have a full grasp of the overall scope.
That's when you start partitioning the project into more manageable chunks. External consultants become time savers. Curtainwall, or a vertical transportation consultant is worth their money. I've written specs for curtainwalls and elevators, but only up to a certain size. An experienced consultant will save you money in the long run.
Large projects have an entire ecosystem of checks and balances. A capable network of consultants will provide you with a great peer-review QC.
Yep, that's the state of mind of a typical architect, for sure.
Yep, that's the state of mind of a typical architect, for sure."
You sound defeatist.
Stop being elitist towards defeatists.
Or am I just being defeatist towards elitism?
You sound fat.
HAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH. Fair enough response.
The reason I say REX is successful is that their office's specific project portfolio is near the billion dollar range over the last 5 years. And they can't be a very large office.
At $200 million a year and even with a 2% project cost, that puts them within the realm of $4,000,000 a year revenue.
Given a staff of 20 and a New York office ($1,600,000 staff costs and $240,000 yearly rent), that still gives them around $2,160,000 a year in other revenue and "play money." Even if JPR drives a Ferrari and wears a new Burberry suit every week, there's still enough money for them to stay well above solvency.
And that's a tremendous feat for a start up firm with youngish owners.
REX isn't a start-up firm Uxbridge. The office is an OMA spin-off, and the vast majority of their projects are carry-overs from the OMA days. It's not like JPR built the firm from the ground up to make it what it is today. Also, I heard when they lost the big project in KY due to the economy collapsing, most of the office lost their jobs.
REX, perhaps more than any other OMA spin-off, is built firmly on Rem's coattails...not that there's anything wrong with that...
...that project in KY being half of that billion you're talking about....
no one on here woks/worked there? i'm curious to know how many paid f/t staff members they have.
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