Of the People: A Culture Speaks

Lest you think you can only change the world as an architect by designing or building something, in week six of the Change the World Novena, I bring you the story of architect as ethnographer. 

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know how important I think it is for buildings to support the social and cultural values and activities of their occupants. My friend and classmate at Carnegie Mellon, Will Riehm and I spoke recently about the fascinating research he has been doing on the study of design as an expression of cultural identity in the Acadian culture. His studies of the blended mix of race and language in pre-Civil War Louisiana led him to apply for and win a Delbert Highland Fellowship to study the culture at its source in western Africa. His six week visit to the Sen Gambia region between Senegal and Gambia provided some eye-opening insights into the past and future of place-making (read all about this on his blog

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What Will had noticed in his previous research was that most of the architectural writing he had encountered on African Colonialism lacked an ethnic content- it was often oversimplified, factually incorrect, and insensitive to the user group due to a need to impose Western theories about building on a non-Western culture. His trip to Africa allowed him to see buildings in ethnographic context, understand how people use them, and discuss thoughts on the building trends he observed. He also took the time to seek out academics at two different schools to talk about the architecture education process in Africa. “I think we do a lot of projection onto Africa based on what we think they should do,” says Will. “We should listen, not impose.” Some things he learned:

A family outside a traditional mud hut
on their compound

Sustainable is a relative term. In the Gambia, it means permanence of structure, the ability for a building to sustain itself. Sustainable technologies refer to building systems that have a lasting aspect to them.

IPD may end up being driven from emerging economies. In African design schools, the focus in on building systems and how they are put together. Students learn from early on how to work as an integrated team with craftsmen and engineers. African design schools believe that the traditional Western model for planning, design and construction is too lengthy, inefficient, and lacking in meaningful user input. “Their need to un-silo the planning, design and construction processes is allowing them to leapfrog us with new issues related to urban development. I don’t think that they’ll end up having ‘architects’ as we understand them,” Will muses. Instead, the traditional focus on specialized craftsmen will expand.

Design should be accessible to the common person. “Everyone knows how to build and what things cost,” he says. People often build their own living structures, or play some part in their construction. There also is a very different attitude toward the realization of a project. The network is more important than the individual, and during what can be a very long process of construction (with stopages as funds run out), a property owner will allow others in his or her village to have access to the land for grazing or planting, use of the building shell during lulls in construction, and even access to land after the home is built and occupied.

Issues based urban design will eclipse traditional planning. In Janjanbureh, a city that was the old colonial capital, there is a web/node organization of streets connecting different types of commodities to markets (nodes). Streets are lined with shops and people live in organic walled compounds. There is no true urban planning, as development outpaces infrastructure. In this environment, the drivers of place are security (including food security as people need to buy non-perishable items at stable prices), access to healthcare (clinics), and roads and infrastructure. Will noted a surprising lack of of reverence for the historic colonial buildings because they were replicas of Western architecture and did not resonate with the population. This was a huge contrast from writing that had linked African colonialism to the Acadian identity.

Materiality is a hierarchy of its own. Traditional structures in this part of Africa are made of Ruhn palm, whose fibrous strands are used as structural members. Bamboo or palmetto fronds are woven and bound to create the fabric for a tensile structure. Sometimes, this is finished off with a mud plaster. However, Will observed an “upgrading” of this process to express sustainability: From the traditional roof framing with central tension ring, people would substitute walls of mud blocks, then concrete blocks, mahogany wood framing and finally, steel and corrugated metal with a concrete block interior finished with cement plaster.

Interestingly, a trip that began with a desire to understand the architecture of identity of African colonialism turned the mirror on Western design practices themselves. The architecture of West Africa is a study in diversity and integration, what best serves the population’s needs in terms of sustainability, accessibility and materiality. This has led Will to hypothesize how the architecture of this culture can lead to a new approach to design in general.

He will be further exploring the concept of “Just in Time Design” with his colleagues in Africa, deriving a rapid delivery prototype based on tradesmen and the way that their skill sets inform how things get built. He is planning to assemble a design lab here in the US that involves hands on construction to encourage students to think differently about the built environment in terms of scale, ease of construction, and purpose. He’s also interested in organizing a research outpost in the Gambia to continue to study ways that this vernacular architecture can inform the practice of architecture. As more and more countries adopt Western design methods, there is a globalization of style that occurs that stamps out local culture. Will believes that his study of ethnographic impacts as a way to gain insight into one of the last vernacular styles of architecture on the planet will eventually help to inform how and why we choose to build at all.

William Riehm joined the faculty of  the Interior Design Program of the College of Architecture, Art, and Design at Mississippi State University in 2011 after over 15 years of practicing architecture and planning in New Orleans, Louisiana. He holds degrees in architecture, urban planning, and interior design from Carnegie Mellon, the University of New Orleans, and the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, respectively. His research interests include historic material culture, community development, and issues of professional practice. Most recently, Mr. Riehm was awarded a Delbert C. Highlands Fellowship of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture for travel and study in The Gambia.

The Possibility of Transformation

In the last three weeks of this novena, we will move beyond our exploration of the limitations that are placed on us by others as well as ourselves.  The focus of these last posts will be on transformation and leveraging of strengths. 

As architects we have to believe in the ability of things to be transformed. An empty parcel of land becomes a building, an old building gets a new lease on life, an interior space is remodeled for a whole new use.  What we do is centered around seeing possibilities in existing circumstances and bringing about a change that goes beyond what our clients can imagine.  Tell us something is impossible, and we view it as a challenge to find a solution.  This is an amazing talent.  Too bad we don’t see it that way.  It’s time to start designing your career and bringing to bear all of the same creative skills you would to a creaky old building on a difficult site.  Be your own next project.

The pre-design analysis
Before you begin design, you collect information, determining all of the parameters and possibilities, schedules, budgets, delivery methods.  Take that same analytical view of yourself (see week five post Be your Own Stage Mom, if you don’t know how to get started).  Do your own mini-report that includes:
1. An assessment of your existing conditions, including strengths and weaknesses.  Don’t editorialize, just state the facts. Include a list of opportunities available and required improvements.
2. Benchmark the careers of others you admire in order to collect baseline performance measures
3. A definition of the problem, including goals and objectives.  Note: this is not a proposed solution- just a definition of what you want out of the finished project (your career).  Make your own career space program and schedule so you can begin to understand the magnitude of the task at hand and what things are the main vs. ancillary “spaces”.  Don’t be afraid of making big bold moves or determining that some existing career element just doesn’t work in your new plan and needs to be “demolished.”
4. Make a bubble diagram of your problem so you can start to identify relationships and critical adjacencies related to your program elements.
5. Code check: are there credentials you should be pursuing?
6. A test fit of how your problem, as defined can be addressed. Design options help clients see opportunities and doing the same for your career path helps you see what’s possible as well.

Design build phase
Now that you have your big idea and goals in place as well as a good handle on the parameters in which you will be operating, it’s time to get to work. 
1. Plan. Using all of the elements you identified, create a blueprint of how things will work.  Just as with a building, you will discover ways to combine program elements, circulation routes and guideposts will emerge and you will likely find that you need to add program elements.
2. Visualize in three dimensions. A building shouldn’t be the result of an extruded plan.  Neither should your career.  Allow the particular choices you have made about implementing your goals to add to the richness of your career design, informing you about further opportunities and really giving you the opportunity to create the form that follows the function.
3. Detail.  Embellish your career design with details that support and reinforce it.
4. Monitor implementation. You can get too caught up in the process of implementing your career design and lose sight of the purpose.  Revisit your goals often to make sure that your efforts stay on track.

Post occupancy
Your career is a work in progress.  You will never stop needing upgrades and remodels, even some radical demolition from time to time.
1. Conduct a post-occupancy evaluation.  What’s working and what isn’t?  Survey others to see if they can see your vision.  The best strategies are the ones that are easy to explain and that other people can understand.  Note: this doesn’t mean that you should avoid the unconventional or stop taking risks, just that your strategy is clear and trackable.
2. Measure your performance results every year.  Assess how well you are doing at meeting six month, one year, and five year goals as well as whether you want to add, remove, or change goals.

You can have the career YOU want, you just need to envision, design and implement it.  Thanks to your wicked skillz as an architect, you already know how.  Nothing is impossible.

Design in the Age of the Prosumer

Ah, the good old days...it seems like there was once a time when clients trusted their architect implicitly and accepted their design and recommendations with little pushback.  It it just you imagination, or have things changed?   If you feel like only a necessary evil on your projects, you're not alone and you're not paranoid either.  Access to information has led to the rise of what has been called prosumerism, a term first introduced by futurist Alvin Toffler that implies that consumers are well informed, experienced and confident enough to challenge the producer of what they consume.  There are many variations on the origins of this word, from professional consumer to producer-consumer.  I like to think of it as proactive consumer,  This merger of professional and consumer roles leads to marginalization of the corporate producer (in our world the architect) and threatens to reduce our services from value-added to commodities. Some prosumer trends that have arisen and thoughts on how to use them to the project's design advantage:

1. Hiring of in-house professionals like registered architects and engineers to oversee and manage the work of the contracted design team for a project.  The in-house professionals often complete smaller projects without seeking to hire outside help.   

TIP: The insider is your friend.  They understand your point of view. Work with them and collaborate on strategies and they will be a trusted advocate at your next meeting with the rest of the team.  Remember, part of their job is to make sure that you are doing yours, so including them in the process allows them to report back favorably while shutting them out leads to critical comments when they review the set at the end of a design phase.

2.  Development of standards for room design and finish types/colors/materials.  These prototypes are the result of considerable time and effort on the part of the owner and changing them is not usually welcomed.

TIP: There is no such thing as one size fits all and every prototype has some capacity for adjustment to project-specific needs.  Having in-depth discussions on the rationale for each element in the prototype or standards can go a long way towards understanding where a proposed change makes sense and where it doesn't. Standards can help a client to establish a brand identity and level of quality without having to go through the process of reinventing the wheel for every project.  Additionally, it can take certain sticky design issues off of the table with user groups.  This is a case where the spirit of the law will trump the letter of the law, so do your homework before presenting different approaches and work within the framework.

3. Requirements that certain criteria or standards be incorporated into the design (like sustainabiity measures) in a defacto manner without acknowledging impacts on schedule, budget or fees.

TIP: For the most part, it's exciting not to have to sell a client on adopting a good practice, but boy are you both about to get some sticker shock if the right approach isn't followed.  You are designing a building, not baking a layer cake.  Before the first design meeting, maybe even in your proposal or the interview, you need to make it clear to your client that the old rules of project management and approach are out the window.  The square peg will not fit in the round hole.  Show them your true level of expertise by discussing precisely why these requirements will lead you to approach the project in a way that is smarter and better.

4. Rise of alternative project delivery methods to get things built faster.

TIP: Many architects bristle at the introduction of more chefs in the kitchen, from the Owner's Representative, to the Design Builder, to the increased legal implications. What actually happens, if you allow the process to work, is that we are making other parties more accountable, which takes some pressure off of us to spell out every little thing on drawings and develop painstaking details for every joint and drain.  Have you ever looked at a set of drawings from 40 years ago and been surprised by how thin the set was?  Go back 80 years and there is even less detailing of the functional stuff.  Those old drawings showed design intent, not how to fasten screws. Means and methods is something that should be the contractor's problem.  We had ourselves painted into a corner of over-detailing to avoid liability.  See this as a liberation.

I think designers can welcome the emerging prosumer in their clients because we can also show them that their patients/users/customers are prosumers too.  Everybody can use some good design to get a competitive edge.

The Design and Construction Game: Whose side are you on?

The built environment has many factions- team Design, team Owner and team Construction.  Recent trends in sustainable design and evidence based design require buy-in from all sides and a cooperative effort to carry concepts through into completion and operation. The rise in popularity of design-build and integrated project delivery attempts to balance responsibility and risk more evenly.  

Can we really transition successfully from an "us vs. them" mentality?  Or are we hardwired to struggle between achieving design goals, achieving profitability goals and achieving operational goals?  We are living through a paradigm shift that is both neutralizing our individual silos and adding responsibility to our effort.  But with this come a greater opportunity to stop competing and start collaborating.  Can we all be on the same team and realize that these goals are mutually dependent, not mutually exclusive? 

Hopefully the real winners are team End Users.