Because I work largely on my own, together with the client/user group, and many projects are overseas, we usually need executive architects to carry the job to com- pletion. I’m anxious that executive architects don’t perceive the design as ‘my’ design, but as ‘our’ design, so I’m keen that they’re part of the consensus process through which the form incarnates. Herein lies the first problem: who pays for their time? Clients rarely want to pay for two architects where one would do and the executive architect often doesn’t want to spend time without being paid for it. One way round this is for the client to pay a standard fee and the two of us apportion this on a time-record basis.
The alarm bells start however, when (usually at the last minute) the executive architect can’t come. After that the project has – in their eyes – two stages: mine and theirs. One once said to me ‘you inspire them [the client group] then we do the work’. ‘Doing the work’, for designers, normally means putting their own design sig- nature on something. In other words, the early design emerges by consensus – then an outsider architect redesigns it. Yes, this has happened. It’s galling but it’s life! Here it’s useful for me to have been clearly and conventionally appointed so that I have the authority to redirect the design back onto its group-agreed track. But it’s very unfortunate to have to resort to the hierarchical way. In these times we should have grown beyond it.
Then there is the problem of finding where other design-critical specialists, from ecologists to acousticians, come into the process. If engineers are to be more than just calculators of beam sizes they need to be involved with the ongoing design. Likewise environmental consultants concerned with energy conservation and natu- ral ventilation need to feed into the design early on. But when in the process? Who pays for their time in the place-study phase? Can you meaningfully be part of the design stage without involvement in the place-study? By the end of the clay-model stage the design is substantially formed. True, the clay can be remolded – and will inevitably need to be, but the major form issues have been more or less decided. The initial, rough, clay model gives form to the synthesized needs of project, place and people. As we develop it we increasingly concern ourselves with environmental per- formance and quality, also buildabilty. These issues will develop further on paper and with the card model. Consultants may be outsiders to the process, but the point at which the model has been first formed seems the best point at which to first involve such people.
Specialists can bring valuable contributions – but what happens when these haven’t been invited? Not everybody believes in feng shui, earth energies or sacred geometry. Regardless of their relevance, if one person senses these but others don’t, the group can only either accept or reject their recommendations. We can’t share the experience. By appointing specialists, the group has agreed to value what they bring – but with self-appointed specialists it hasn’t. This can cause feelings of unfreedom and rejection, both divisive. Fortunately it doesn’t have to. Just as spirit-of-place is manifest in physical matter, so do even the subtlest of energies have material mani- festations. These physical signs (and movement and mood influences) we can all experience. If we can’t, there’s something not quite whole about the specialist knowledge. If we can, it doesn’t matter whether this has a special name (which implies some people know more about it than others). It’s enough to know it’s true.
This is why the four-layer consensus process, dowsing and feng shui always (in my experience) reach the same conclusions.
There’s also the practical problem of finding enough time to design together. Inevitably, however much we group-design, there comes a time when I have to work things up on my own. As rough drawings get more precise, they invariably need some modification. This especially happens each time we enlarge the scale at which we’re working. As this involves a myriad of small decisions and it often isn’t easy to con- tact everybody rapidly, I usually just keep going, noting down the changes for my client’s approval. Normally this is given, but I have had one client who felt that I was unilaterally changing what had previously been agreed – albeit in rough at a smaller scale. This is the unfortunate price of distance. Whenever we can sit down together, things go smoothly. In this case, the executive architect – sensitive to the design process – could sit with them, explain the reasoning behind these (very minimal) revisions and sort everything out.
Surprisingly, not everyone wants to be part of the design process. They might want to, but have such low confidence that they won’t believe they can do it, so refuse to become empowered. I’ve had one community project cancelled for this reason. Once the group got a grant, they hired another architect to do the whole job for them ‘properly’.3This is extreme, and rare, but the low confidence and low self-esteem it stems from are all too common. Once we get going, however, confidence and self- esteem always grow.
Though avoidable with hindsight, these difficulties aren’t random, but linked to the process. Genuine disadvantages though they are, they’re not so serious as the disadvantages bound to the conventional design process. Not infrequently, that process goes like this: clients have unworkable ideas. Architects have personal, usu- ally stylistic, aspirations. Unworkable ideas and stylistic aspirations don’t match one another – so a process of proposal, rebuff, criticism and new proposal ensues. Clients and architects can become polarized into camps, neither of which respect the other – the ‘difficult client, difficult architect’ mentality. Users don’t get a look in.
132 Making it work
Just as gesturing movement and meetings of forms and spaces helps us experience the flow of ‘chi’, so do leaning trees and animal paths evidence geodetic energies.2Both we feel.
Architects seek to get round clients or win them round, and then engineers, with their over-cautious, over-dimensioned structures, compromise this further. In due course the building contractors compromise the whole lot. And when the buildings are occupied, people don’t use them in the right way – they further compromise the design by the alterations they make. And they even complain that the architect never thought about the way they need to do things! How unappreciative! It may not always happen like this, but I hear enough dissatisfaction stories from clients, build- ing users and even from architects, to infer that non-communication, non-listening, non-respect and frustration are by no means uncommon.
The whole conventional process is one of sequential order. Nothing wrong with that, but the means by which order is established hardens relationships into money- exchanges. It atomizes – even polarizes – the different parties and desiccates the soul out of what gets designed, what gets built. This doesn’t mean nourishing places can’t be achieved by this method, but that they don’t result from the process. They rise
above its limitations.
By contrast, consensus design does not demand exceptional skills, sensitivities and experience. Soul-nourishing and physically practical places are the natural out- come of the process. A much easier starting point from which to raise places to the spirit-transforming level of art.
Notes
What can go wrong? What can go right? 133
1 Forty-seven at the last count. 2 After Guy Underwood (1974).
The Pattern of the Past, Sphere
Books.
3 Later, even this fell through. But so battered was their confidence, they could no longer think of doing the project themselves.