Designing Relationships: The Art of Collaboration in Architecture

Andrew Pressman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317918431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In today's dynamic practice environment, collaboration and teamwork skills are increasingly critical to the successful completion of building projects. Indeed, it is the careful nurturing of comradeship among complementary but distinctive egos that drives creativity underlying the hi-tech algorithms that help shape complex projects.

Designing Relationships: The Art of Collaboration in Architecture focuses on the skill set necessary to facilitate effective teamwork and collaboration among all stakeholders no matter what project delivery mode or technology is deployed. This book provides valuable guidance on how to design and construct buildings in a team context from inception to completion. It is the less tangible elements of collaboration and teamwork that provide the magic that transforms the most challenging projects into great works of architecture, and it is these more nuanced and subtle skills which the book brings to the fore. Showing examples of best and worst practice to illustrate the principles with real-life situations, this book presents the reader with an approach that is flexible and applicable to their everyday working life.

1
INTRODUCTION TO COLLABORATION

No matter how you look at it, architecture—as manifest in a building—is a collaborative effort. It may not be a great collaborative effort but it is almost invariably the result of constructors, clients, consulting engineers, and the architect working together in some way. This collective effort ought to be acknowledged, supported, and celebrated in an effort to strive for and reinforce excellence in the work. Some architects who receive media accolades as stars and as sole authors of buildings are really not accurately portrayed. It takes a team to realize projects of scale or complexity. There may be a prominent and aggressive project leader, but it does indeed “take a village.”

COLLABORATION DEFINED

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Collaboration is a collective intellectual function that can be a force multiplier in an effort to reach an intended objective. In a general sense, collaboration represents a device for leveraging resources. Collaboration requires efficient communication channels between all levels, dimensions, and distances for those striving toward an objective in synergistic fashion. Collaboration requires well-defined process, rigorous discipline, and critical reflection throughout time.

Creating a work of architecture is a collaborative effort. No doubt about it. As I have noted, it takes architects, engineers, clients, product manufacturers, cost estimators, and constructors to create a building. Someone has to assemble the collaborators, lead the effort and ensure that the overarching idea for the building is supported—and built upon—every step of the way, and that it is not compromised by the team effort. And the primary way for the team to remain focused, inspired, and effectively collaborating is to sustain a structure for the collaborative effort.

There is a spectrum of collaborative activities and styles. Collaboration can range from a casual comment in the midst of a phone conversation or as a result of a napkin sketch that triggers new ideas, or during a work session that includes well-choreographed brainstorming toward creation of various alternative solutions to vexing problems.

Critiquing each other’s work is a form of simple collaboration. Everyone benefits from bouncing ideas off someone else, talking to just one other person can clarify a proposition or perhaps suggest an alternative path of investigation, or even modify a good idea to make it better—that’s the most basic form of collaboration. Even if the other person says nothing, the simple act of talking out loud can spur the elaboration of an idea or, similarly, an individual’s comments can elicit a new idea or approach from someone else.

John Cleese of Monty Python fame captured the essence of a collaborative process in the following vignette.

The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.¹

It is implicit in this funny account that knowledge is freely exchanged, can be misinterpreted, but somehow becomes synergistic. The serious and sometimes accidental business of generating a good idea is enjoyable for a skilled yet diverse team.

Another example of collaboration in action is a songwriting session with Adele, the British soul singer, and Paul Epworth, a songwriter and producer. This is a universal experience and could just as well be a brainstorming session in any number of disciplines. Mr. Epworth describes it as follows.

A good musical collaboration is like a Jackson Pollock of musical paint, where everyone’s throwing ideas at a canvas and some of them stick and some of them don’t, and the final picture you end up with is a combination. She’d come forth with an idea, and I’d say, “How about this,” and it develops and hybridizes on its own into something.²

Incorporation of critical comments almost always translates to an opportunity to make the work even more potent. Change does not have to be viewed as compromise, rather it is something that can potentially make a project more responsive to a client requirement, an aesthetic priority, a technical issue, site circumstance, and so on.

Conversations and critiques can serve to question the status quo, the preconceptions and automatic design responses to what may appear to be typical problems. Conversations and critiques, then, can be considered a fundamental type of collaboration. A great example of this was the Works in Progress program of the Boston Society of Architects. An architect would present a project in process, and chapter members—and occasionally others from allied disciplines such as artists, landscape architects, or planners—would assemble to constructively critique the design work of one of their colleagues. This happened out of the office context and away from the pressures of a business environment. There is great benefit to this type of external, collaborative review. Fresh eyes, unimpeded by explicit or implicit agendas, can be focused on design quality and introduce new perspectives. The more exposure there is to diversity in points of view, the more possibilities become evident. Benefits also accrue to the reviewers. Experience in evaluating the work of others will improve collaborative and interpersonal skills, and will also contribute to more objective and effective self-criticism.

Attitude is important. Everyone on a team has an obligation to strive for the group’s success. Roger Goldstein, FAIA,³ Principal at Goody Clancy, believes that attitude has more to do with building rapport than anything else. He says, “Being respectful of peoples’ contributions, even if you disagree or think some ideas are not worthwhile, helps on the trust dimension,” and inevitably will reinforce the habit of vocal contribution.

Scott Simpson, FAIA,⁴ Principal and Senior Director at the Cambridge, MA, office of KlingStubbins, elaborates on attitude:

Collaboration is an attitude more than a process. Participants assume that each member of the team has something valuable to offer, and that by using many brains synergistically rather than working in “silos,” overall outcomes will be dramatically improved. In a collaborative effort, it is understood that different points of view add richness and depth to the project, but this means that ego must take a back seat.

I hasten to qualify Simpson’s point; opposing viewpoints may also slow progress and create impasse. This is where a team leader must intervene and keep the effort moving ahead. There is a delicate balance between promoting discussion of conflicting ideas that may lead to innovation and knowing when to advance the work.

RATIONALE FOR COLLABORATING

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The ability to work effectively in teams has become increasingly important because of the complexity of projects requiring expertise from a variety of specialties and demands from clients for better building performance. Collaboration is a meaningful response to the ongoing marketplace mandate for buildings that are faster to design and construct and at lower cost than those built in the past. And, perhaps most important, it could be argued that the final outcome—the design work—is actually better. Michael Schrage⁵ takes it one step further: “Collaboration does not curtail the architect’s overarching vision. Collaboration becomes a medium that makes the vision possible.” There could be no better time for seizing the opportunity to establish and fine-tune the notion of team practice and collaboration.

The following list underscores the urgency and need for multidisciplinary collaboration in creating architectural designs.

■ The requirement for environmentally sensitive and sustainable architecture. The conventional wisdom is that multidisciplinary collaboration must occur at project inception—and conception—if sustainable or environmentally sensitive outcomes are to be successful.

■ Unstable and recessionary economic trends. Especially during these times, clients require the assurance of an optimal cost-effective and efficient process with reliable quality in outcomes.

■ Innovations in technology. This includes integrated project delivery (IPD) and building information modeling (BIM). By definition, these models of practice, which are increasingly required by clients, are inherently collaborative. See Chapter 4 for a detailed discussion on this topic.

■ Globalization of architecture. Culturally, environmentally, and economically sensitive design is at a premium. Collaboration provides a means to deliver appropriate architectural services internationally.

■ Contractual and liability issues. These concerns have heretofore impeded the best possible collaborative environment for multidisciplinary participants, and are starting to be addressed by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in the second iteration of contract documents, by sophisticated clients and firms who are advocating risk-sharing and risk-allocation provisions in alliancing contracts, by professional liability insurance carriers, and by the participants themselves.

■ Competitive advantage can be achieved through strategic collaborations. The caveats, of course, are that everyone must embrace their respective roles and work together well.

The inefficiencies inherent in the process of design and construction are necessitating a shift to greater multidisciplinary collaboration and information sharing among project team members. In our current practice environment, as the list above suggests, it is simply no longer sufficient to execute projects on time and within budget while maintaining the status quo.

WHY HAVE ARCHITECTS BEEN INHERENTLY NONCOLLABORATIVE?

There are many forces that collectively and progressively have tended to make architects work in isolation and that must be unlearned or overcome in order to be successful at collaborating. Here are some examples of those forces; acknowledging and recognizing them may help to actively surmount the problems.

■ Architects learned the habit of designing only by themselves in architecture school. Many academic programs still implicitly celebrate a subculture in which graduates spend their careers working as heroic, solitary, isolated designers. This attitude has been represented and perpetuated by the Howard Roark character in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead,⁶ which remains a best-selling novel even today. Roark summarized the point: “No great work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought.” But integrated project delivery—and all the reasons why collaboration is necessary in today’s practice environment—is fueling a rethinking of that exclusive notion.

■ In design–bid–build, the conventional form of procuring architectural and construction services, the architect and contractor are natural adversaries. The tension that exists between the parties is intended to be part of a system of checks and balances for the good of the project. The architect typically advocates for quality and delight—a better product—while the contractor’s interest in the project is usually economic. This tension has, in the past, generally resulted in successful...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION TO COLLABORATION
• 2 ALTERNATIVE COLLABORATION MODELS FOR ARCHITECTURE
• 3 TRADITIONAL COLLABORATION IN PRACTICE
• 4 COLLABORATION AND TECHNOLOGY
• 5 SNAPSHOTS OF EFFECTIVE AND INEFFECTIVE COLLABORATION
• Figure Credits
• Index