The discussion about this article in another thread got me thinking... why does almost every mass market article or book about a modern piece of architecture (including half the things written about FLW) seem to follow the same basic outline:
- client hires starchitect
- client asks starchitect to design a modest, traditional house (though the architect in question has never designed anything close to a modest, traditional house before in his life).
- architect designs a bigger, more expensive, and more modern house than the client claims to have wanted but the house is built anyway.
- client claims to hate the house from a pragmatic standpoint but love it for its artistic value.
- "experts" are brought in to talk about how impractical or unlivable the house is.
I hate how these articles make it seem like the client is somehow the hapless victim of the egomaniacal architect. They're written as if the client is completely powerless between the initial design consultation and the date construction is finished. Ultimately, though, the client's the one signing on the dotted line.
I tend to be of the "where there's smoke, there's fire" school !
But, any way you look at it, architects don't get good PR ... we can whine about it, or we can start trying to change the way we're perceived by the marketplace and by the public. Railing at the wind here on archinect won't get it done.
Clients need good tools to evaluate architecture practices- right now they are limited to competing with their neighbors for the biggest 'name' or hiring the local joe down the street.
Inside Arch does a great job rating firms for job seekers, but there few sources for clients to search for a firm other then long lists of names that provide no criteria for selecting one firm over another....
an architect must start every project by asking the client two questions:
a) what do you hope to accomplish with this project ? and
b) what are you prepared to invest in order to achieve that goal ?
when, on the basis of professional experience, the architect cannot reconcile the answers to those two questions, the architect has a professional obligation to be candid with the client and reach an agreement about what's going to be required ... reading the Holl article referenced above, it's reasonably clear to me the client and the architect never fully communicated on those two propositions ... I blame Hull.
when the balance of knowledge is skewed in the direction of the architect, it's the architect's obligation to head off problems of the sort described in the article ... Hull should have known (or made it his business to know) that the client's expectations could not be met anywhere close to the amount of money they were prepared to spend.
because of their visibility, stories of this sort give us all a black-eye and make the average client afraid of working with an architect who has strong design aspirations.
i would proffer that holl DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE as to how much that house would actually cost, but also that NOBODY could possibly have predicted how much it would cost. it's so...unique. who knows--if a contractor had done preliminary pricing it may have come in at $1.2 million.
hapless victims? for every house client that gets a gold-leaf igloo when they asked for an ice-colored one...there are ten residential clients that ask for the look of gold leaf, expect the cost of ice, and then bitch when the thing melts.
as for PR, i would proffer that the myriad home-improvement and remodeling shows and magazines are what clients are watching and reading, and that professionals are portrayed very well in these media. the story about the holl house was more like entertainment than infotainment.
sorry, i used the word "proffer" twice...it's like i was studying for the SAT or something
moreover: there are many stories about conflict between the architect and the client, and we do get somewhat of a rep for it, but what always comes across is that the architect IS trying to do something great for and with (and sometimes despite) the client. i mean, FLLW wasn't mailing it in, he was striving as was/is holl.
i think all this frustration about our image is a little misguided. i mean, when people are polled as to which professions they respect, architects are always very high on the list. people respect what architects do, and i've never heard someone say "you know, i always DREAMED of being a tax lawyer, i just wasn't good at math."
we should just try to do our jobs better. rather than talking about how injurious this article is to our image, we should (as many who have posted above have done) look to see what lessons we can learn from it.
Holl's crime is his failure to create a green building when this was a stated premise of the client's. HOW DARE THEY mislead a client into believing that they can create a building that would meet high performance criteria. It is obvious that Holl Associates are technically incompent and lack even the basic knowledge of climate appropriate materials and of common sustainable practices. A house with moisture problems is a mold lawsuit waiting to happen - and the architect can't shirk responsibility in this case!
My angst is that architects need to be leaders in dealing with global warming. Having a soapbox like mr. Holl, makes it ethically imperative that his practice performs at the highest level of the profession.
Creating innovative forms for it's own sake is so 1994 or should I say 2004?
while i agree that creating environmentally sensitive buildings is becoming one of the ethical obligations of our profession, i don't agree that every architect must be an innovator in green design to fulfill that obligation.
another ethical obligation of our profession (and arguably the most important) is providing fire & life safety in our buildings yet few of us would be considered innovators in that arena. as important as life safety is, most architects find it too boring, too technically complicated, and/or too limiting to their creativity to be truly passionate about it. i think this is where a lot of architects are with green design right now. it's a good argument for why green performance standards should be written into the codes, just like lafe safety.
maybe the nature of architecture means that somebody who is passionate about it wants freedom over constraints...
as soon as green becomes the code, we will see groundbreaking green solutions... until then, green doesn't have the horsepower... alot of architects given constraints seek to turn them upside down, or be creative in how they engage them... so constraints can be drivers for innovation.
maybe clients are just another set of constraints? and an architect's natural instinct, rather than to fit neatly into constraints (depending on the architect) is to push the constraints to the limit.
Is green design an ethical responsibility as Bill MacDonough says, a luxury feature, a moral issue per Al Gore, or a code subject per the state of CA (title 24)?
Life with out constraints would be paralyzing with too many choices- bring them on! for every constraint there is a new opportunity.
The best buildings seem to have the widest range of constraints (political, social, philosophical, environmental, budget, et cetera), while the worst (think tilt-slab werehouses and stripmalls) have the least (only lowest possible budget and minimum conformity to the minimum codes)
Jul 7, 06 4:35 pm ·
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Egomaniacal architect vs. helpless client
The discussion about this article in another thread got me thinking... why does almost every mass market article or book about a modern piece of architecture (including half the things written about FLW) seem to follow the same basic outline:
- client hires starchitect
- client asks starchitect to design a modest, traditional house (though the architect in question has never designed anything close to a modest, traditional house before in his life).
- architect designs a bigger, more expensive, and more modern house than the client claims to have wanted but the house is built anyway.
- client claims to hate the house from a pragmatic standpoint but love it for its artistic value.
- "experts" are brought in to talk about how impractical or unlivable the house is.
I hate how these articles make it seem like the client is somehow the hapless victim of the egomaniacal architect. They're written as if the client is completely powerless between the initial design consultation and the date construction is finished. Ultimately, though, the client's the one signing on the dotted line.
See also: What's our REAL Purpose ? which tackles essentially same issue from another perspective.
I tend to be of the "where there's smoke, there's fire" school !
But, any way you look at it, architects don't get good PR ... we can whine about it, or we can start trying to change the way we're perceived by the marketplace and by the public. Railing at the wind here on archinect won't get it done.
Clients need good tools to evaluate architecture practices- right now they are limited to competing with their neighbors for the biggest 'name' or hiring the local joe down the street.
Inside Arch does a great job rating firms for job seekers, but there few sources for clients to search for a firm other then long lists of names that provide no criteria for selecting one firm over another....
sounds like there is enough blame to go around for both sides.
an architect must start every project by asking the client two questions:
a) what do you hope to accomplish with this project ? and
b) what are you prepared to invest in order to achieve that goal ?
when, on the basis of professional experience, the architect cannot reconcile the answers to those two questions, the architect has a professional obligation to be candid with the client and reach an agreement about what's going to be required ... reading the Holl article referenced above, it's reasonably clear to me the client and the architect never fully communicated on those two propositions ... I blame Hull.
when the balance of knowledge is skewed in the direction of the architect, it's the architect's obligation to head off problems of the sort described in the article ... Hull should have known (or made it his business to know) that the client's expectations could not be met anywhere close to the amount of money they were prepared to spend.
because of their visibility, stories of this sort give us all a black-eye and make the average client afraid of working with an architect who has strong design aspirations.
i would proffer that holl DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE as to how much that house would actually cost, but also that NOBODY could possibly have predicted how much it would cost. it's so...unique. who knows--if a contractor had done preliminary pricing it may have come in at $1.2 million.
hapless victims? for every house client that gets a gold-leaf igloo when they asked for an ice-colored one...there are ten residential clients that ask for the look of gold leaf, expect the cost of ice, and then bitch when the thing melts.
as for PR, i would proffer that the myriad home-improvement and remodeling shows and magazines are what clients are watching and reading, and that professionals are portrayed very well in these media. the story about the holl house was more like entertainment than infotainment.
sorry, i used the word "proffer" twice...it's like i was studying for the SAT or something
moreover: there are many stories about conflict between the architect and the client, and we do get somewhat of a rep for it, but what always comes across is that the architect IS trying to do something great for and with (and sometimes despite) the client. i mean, FLLW wasn't mailing it in, he was striving as was/is holl.
i think all this frustration about our image is a little misguided. i mean, when people are polled as to which professions they respect, architects are always very high on the list. people respect what architects do, and i've never heard someone say "you know, i always DREAMED of being a tax lawyer, i just wasn't good at math."
we should just try to do our jobs better. rather than talking about how injurious this article is to our image, we should (as many who have posted above have done) look to see what lessons we can learn from it.
Be green. Be very, very green!
Holl's crime is his failure to create a green building when this was a stated premise of the client's. HOW DARE THEY mislead a client into believing that they can create a building that would meet high performance criteria. It is obvious that Holl Associates are technically incompent and lack even the basic knowledge of climate appropriate materials and of common sustainable practices. A house with moisture problems is a mold lawsuit waiting to happen - and the architect can't shirk responsibility in this case!
My angst is that architects need to be leaders in dealing with global warming. Having a soapbox like mr. Holl, makes it ethically imperative that his practice performs at the highest level of the profession.
Creating innovative forms for it's own sake is so 1994 or should I say 2004?
innovative? haha.
Which Holl is you talkin bout bro?
treekiller:
while i agree that creating environmentally sensitive buildings is becoming one of the ethical obligations of our profession, i don't agree that every architect must be an innovator in green design to fulfill that obligation.
another ethical obligation of our profession (and arguably the most important) is providing fire & life safety in our buildings yet few of us would be considered innovators in that arena. as important as life safety is, most architects find it too boring, too technically complicated, and/or too limiting to their creativity to be truly passionate about it. i think this is where a lot of architects are with green design right now. it's a good argument for why green performance standards should be written into the codes, just like lafe safety.
maybe the nature of architecture means that somebody who is passionate about it wants freedom over constraints...
as soon as green becomes the code, we will see groundbreaking green solutions... until then, green doesn't have the horsepower... alot of architects given constraints seek to turn them upside down, or be creative in how they engage them... so constraints can be drivers for innovation.
maybe clients are just another set of constraints? and an architect's natural instinct, rather than to fit neatly into constraints (depending on the architect) is to push the constraints to the limit.
Is green design an ethical responsibility as Bill MacDonough says, a luxury feature, a moral issue per Al Gore, or a code subject per the state of CA (title 24)?
Life with out constraints would be paralyzing with too many choices- bring them on! for every constraint there is a new opportunity.
The best buildings seem to have the widest range of constraints (political, social, philosophical, environmental, budget, et cetera), while the worst (think tilt-slab werehouses and stripmalls) have the least (only lowest possible budget and minimum conformity to the minimum codes)
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