The Rising Dragon: Design in China

Paul Doherty contributes the following guest blog. Paul is senior vice president of Screampoint, which provides governments, multinationals, and large real estate portfolio companies with visual solutions to manage and maintain their assets.

I am enjoying my adopted home country of the People’s Republic of China. I have settled into having a wonderful family, a growing business, and a feeling that the future is very bright. You take a keen interest in design when you make a place home. Just ask any residential designer about their clients’ interest level of every detail of their home.

I live and work in Shanghai in an area called the French Concession. Shanghai has been a city constantly shaped by its foreign trade, foreign invasions, and foreign occupation. You can see the influence of each era in the different parts of the city: the Bund, the German Concession, the English Concession, the French Concession. Thus, I live in an area that could be picked up and placed in the middle of Paris and not miss a beat.

But what makes a city is not just the vocabulary and context of its buildings. It lies in its smells, sounds and people. What makes Shanghai so wonderful is the variety of its smells, sounds, people … and its neighborhoods that make you feel as if you are in a different city by entering any one of them.

Shanghai is hosting the World’s Expo at the moment. Seventy million people have been to this city already to experience the Expo, with two more months to go. The showcasing of the world’s cultures, foods, and design are making this year’s Expo one of the best. The astonishing architecture and design of the numerous pavilions alone is worth the trip. But with the exposure to the world’s designs at the Expo — and understanding that Shanghai has a past that is shaped by outside design influences and architecture — a sensitive question is beginning to emerge in the design community of Shanghai and throughout China: What is modern Chinese design?

My personal view is that the Chinese are struggling with finding their own design vocabulary when it concerns buildings and the context of urban design. The majority of building design for large-scale development is coming from Western-based design firms. This has created a disturbing array of geometric shapes throughout cities like Shanghai that have not created a design movement, trend, or vernacular that can say to the world, This is a Chinese building.

One trend that is emerging is a movement toward historic preservation, seen in developments like Xintiandi, Tian Xi Fang, and the new Sinan Mansions. Taking its cue from the past, the rehabilitation of older Chinese structures and repositioning them for modern functions has rekindled an interest in older Chinese design forms, culture, and meaning. This combination of learning from the past to define the future could be giving rise to a new generation of Chinese designers who will define this century’s design in China.

One can only hope that in their home, a true design emerges that helps better define a city, a culture, and its people.

When “The Boss” Exemplified Civility

I love baseball, but in all honesty, I never thought much of George Steinbrenner. His leadership style was flawed. While Yogi Berra was quirky and quotable, Steinbrenner was most memorable for being pushy, tempestuous, and arrogant. I doubt that we’ll remember many leadership lessons from his tenure despite the success of the oft World Series champions.

But I do have a fond memory and a management lesson from Steinbrenner. A couple of years ago when leading a firm retreat at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, I met “The Boss” in the hallway. We were on the same schedule leaving our rooms and heading for the elevators to the hotel lobby. He said first, “Good morning” energetically and insisted on holding the elevator door for me. When we arrived at the lobby level, I held the door and said, “After you.” He then said, “No, after you!” We exchanged once again but I succumbed first as he boldly insisted.

That day I decided I liked the man more than I thought. And I even began to like the Yankees — just a little.

Fee Trends Not Always What You Think

“Recent interviews and fee negotiations have convinced me that it is a race to the bottom on fees,” a client just told me during a phone conversation. I know this is a very real feeling among many in the design professions. The truth is that it is increasingly common for professional practices to lower their fees to get scarce work. While it is a legitimate business model used to survive the economy, it is not fun. It is often not sustainable, either.

Regrettable quality problems often follow these hastily put together fee models. There are limits to how low fees can go and still serve clients’ needs responsibly. The good news is that there are tools and attitudes to adopt when you find yourself in this situation.

One of the DesignIntelligence benchmarks in real-time productivity, for example, measures best practice revenues per full-time staff. It is currently in the $172,000 range. But some firms are getting that number today. Others are still hovering around $100,000. The difference is in categorical commodity services provided by firms that range from high to low.

Those at the lower ends are feeling more squeezed and threatened. They know that it is difficult to deliver quality results to clients without resources. Moreover, it is common for firm partners to settle on low fees before negotiating tangible benefits to clients. There is measurable value in such overt services as schedule acceleration and reduced risk of project delay, optimal construction sequencing, and reduction in errors resulting in unbudgeted change costs.

The irony here is that fee trends are not always led by clients. Too often it is the practice leaders who panic and forget the value of their services, their brand, and their long-term measurable benefit.

Think Differently About Change

Climate change comes bearing gifts. While not welcomed offerings, these changes demand a vastly different approach in the way architects and designers think about their professional practices. Something big is happening.

Moreover, architectural careers have quit working like they used to. Climate change will affect the economy and the underlying tenets of roles and responsibilities in the making of buildings – and urban environments. The challenges brought about by climate change create new puzzles to solve. We can meet these challenges. There are many approaches.

The Design Futures Council will be hosting our 9th Leadership Summit on Sustainable Design Oct. 5-7 in Atlanta. Again this year we will bring together 100 delegates to share case studies, present deep understandings and practical experiences, and chart the future. Invitations were mailed last week to members and fellows of the Design Futures Council.

To be considered for one of the delegate positions, e-mail me at jcramer@di.net or Mary Pereboom at mpereboom@di.net. We are seeking thought leadership and a diversity of talents.

All of us need to catch on to what’s happening. We need to seize the opportunities brought about by change.

Clarifying the Stats

The editors of DesignIntelligence received an e-mail this week that illuminates a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency statistic reported in our article “Design Leadership and the Environment.”

Edward Mazria, founder and chief executive officer of Architecture 2030, notes:

“I wanted to clarify a statistic you cite in the article: ‘Our buildings account for 39 percent of the country’s total energy use.’ This percentage is for residential and commercial building operations only. It does not include industrial building operations, i.e. HVAC and lighting (about 2 percent), and the annual embodied energy of building materials and building construction (about 8 percent). The total U.S. energy consumption attributed to the building sector is currently at 51 percent. I say this because the design of industrial buildings, building systems and the specification of materials is also our responsibility. Understanding the entire magnitude of our designs and decisions makes the ‘call to faster and wiser actions on the part of the design and construction community’ that much more urgent.

“And I am only talking here about architecture and buildings. If we add in the other design disciplines — planning, landscape architecture, interior design, industrial design, textile, communication, and fashion design — the call is not only urgent, it becomes critical.”

Let’s hope designers of all variety take note.

Nominate Emerging Leaders

The Design Futures Council seeks nominations for its annual class of Emerging Leaders. Winning nominees will receive registration scholarships to attend the 9th Annual Leadership Summit on Sustainable Design in Atlanta, Oct. 5 – 7. The DFC seeks to identify and recognize emerging leaders who are having – and will increasingly have – a profound impact on design practices, the profession, and the community.

Successful candidates will represent the future of practice in terms of its broadening scope, service to society, sustainable design, technological innovation, or other areas deemed relevant by the nominator.

Nomination criteria:

• Nominees must be within their first 10 years of professional practice.
• They may come from any area of the design professions.
• They must be playing a role in designing a more sustainable future.
• The nominator must be a member of the Design Futures Council or past Summit attendee.

Six candidates will be chosen by a distinguished jury of past Summit delegates to receive a full scholarship, which includes registration and participation in all Summit events. Chosen candidates or their employers will be expected to furnish travel and accommodation expenses to and from the Summit. Some travel assistance may be provided on a case-by-case basis.

To nominate a candidate, download and complete the nomination form by July 1. Nominees and nominators will be notified in July. Any questions about the Emerging Leaders Program should be directed to John Cary via email - johncary [at] mac [dot]com

Nomination Form - Word Format

Nomination Form - PDF

Is the Profession of Architecture Corrupt?

The following guest blog is from Victoria Beach, an independent architect and former lecturer in architecture at the Harvard School of Design.

Is the profession of architecture corrupt? According to the definition of “institutional corruption” currently in use at the Center for Ethics at Harvard University, yes.

The Center’s new director, renowned attorney Lawrence Lessig, has defined as “corrupt” organizations that have tragic structural flaws that undermine their own purposes for being. He has recently re-focused the Center’s resources on studying these ineffectual institutions and their corrosive effects.

Now, apply this descriptive framework to the architectural profession. Its purpose for being is to create architecture — that is, to make art out of the science of building. The purpose of this art, if there is one, is often debated but most agree it should engage, if not uplift, the individual mind and body as well as human culture as a whole. What kinds of structural features might be holding back the profession from consistently achieving these results?

Here are some possibilities.

• Though the situation varies from school to school, the design academy tends to attract narrowly educated technicians, often without college degrees or any experience in the humanities, and proceeds to advance that narrow focus. This may be a distant residue of an ancient need for draftsmen and laborers, which is rapidly being made obsolete by computer technology. This vestigial practice can prevent  architects from understanding and engaging their work in the larger social questions and from collaborating with their broadly educated peers in law, medicine, and the like.

• The internship that the architectural profession requires for licensure takes place in un-accredited, un-monitored, private offices across the country. Because this three-year period is mandatory, offices have an incentive to exploit intern labor, using it for self-serving rather than educational ends. Interns have no leverage to change these conditions and thereby further their training. Often they work for little or no pay, in violation of national labor laws, which virtually ensures their permanent economic dependency on this flawed system.

• The examination for architectural licensure does not test for architectural acumen. It is primarily an engineering exam that does not capture qualitative aspects of humane design. The legal title “architect,” on which laypeople rely to find qualified assistance, therefore does not actually ensure any architectural ability.

• The ethical codes that the profession enforces have been diluted over the years to minimal standards of basic citizenship. They no longer require, and often don’t even describe, the actions that would produce architecture. Neither laypeople nor architects could easily discern from these codes what distinct values architects are meant to uphold and what purposes they are meant to serve.

• The primary professional society for architecture, the American Institute of Architects, mainly promotes, as its name suggests, architects rather than architecture. It is organized under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code, which means it is a “business league,” “promoting the common economic interests of … a trade.” The general public can therefore be excused for interpreting this technicality exactly the way the government does: Architects are businesspeople first and professionals or artists second, if at all.

• The building industry has detected, enhanced, and leveraged the public’s confusion over what architects do. As architects surrender their leadership positions, the odds that buildings might serve interests beyond those of their developers worsen. Many architects now sit in the back offices of these developers and are economically dependent upon them – a circumstance that was ethically prohibited a century ago.

• But even without the influences of the building industry, architects are faced with the same ethical conundrums of “agency” that all professionals are. When lawyers are put in the compromising position of knowing information that might clarify the truth of a matter but condemn their own clients, they struggle (one hopes). But at least with the legal system, the zealous advocacy model was designed to provide representatives on more than one side of an issue. Architects, on the other hand, are charged with representing the needs of their paying clients as well as the often contradictory needs of the non-paying users and the non-paying public. There is no other designated agent for these unorganized interest groups.

These seven structural features may indeed be corrupting in Lessig’s sense of undermining the profession’s ability to serve its defining ethical goals. Furthermore, many even stickier ethical conundrums are posed by the very existence of an artistic pursuit structured as a professional and commercial enterprise.

These issues, among many others, have been under intense scrutiny through the ethical research and teaching of professor Carl Sapers and others at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. On April 26, the Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice Fund, was established at Harvard to continue and enhance this work. This presents a unique opportunity to raise the discourse of architectural ethics and to address these many challenges.

Iceberg Logic

Like buildings, icebergs come in all shapes and sizes. They can be beautiful and also a little mysterious. On average, only about 12 percent of an iceberg’s volume sits above the water line. What’s visible is quite small compared to the whole. The part that really matters, the part that provides buoyancy, is hidden from view, though we can sense its presence.

This is not a bad analogy for how design is often perceived. Architects tend to focus most on form and aesthetics — what you see is what you get. But a building is so much more than that. It’s impossible to tell just by looking at a building what it cost to construct or how much it takes to operate or how efficient it might be in terms of space utilization. Unlike cars, buildings don’t come with dashboards that provide real-time feedback about speed, fuel consumption, oil pressure, and so forth. But perhaps they should.

Studies have shown that over a building’s useful life, the original capital cost accounts for only about 12 percent of the total — just like an iceberg. The true cost (and the real value proposition) lies below the waterline  — out of sight and out of mind. It’s territory worth exploring.

Capital cost matters a great deal, of course, because it’s most often the gating issue that determines whether or not a project gets built in the first place. But it’s only a small part of the overall picture and, considered by itself, tells us relatively little. Capital expenditure reflects market dynamics at a given point in time. The cost of labor and materials can vary significantly over a relatively short period. To be meaningful, first cost must be measured against something. When considering the location, size, and program of a building, savvy owners understand that it’s not what you spend up front, it’s what you get back that counts. That’s why building lots in prime locations cost more and why zoning regulations matter so much. The largest possible structure built on the best available site will naturally generate the most cash flow and hence create the highest value. It will also consume more energy to operate and cost more in staffing, taxes, and maintenance. All these factors and more go into calculating the underlying value stream of a project. And it’s this underlying value — the part below the waterline — that provides the buoyancy needed to float the project.

Design matters, and of course this includes form, function, and aesthetics. But there’s more to it than that. For too many years, true value creation has not been part of the design dialogue between owners and architects. Remember that design can be both a verb and a noun — a process as well as a thing. The how is often just as powerful as the what. Great designers are always on the lookout for hidden meanings and new ways to inject something extra into the equation. For example:

• For a new office building, an architect managed to design a floor plate that was 90 percent efficient compared to the expected 84 percent, delivering more useful area (and resulting revenue) per square foot.
• For a new dormitory, an architect managed to include one additional floor while still respecting the height limit imposed by zoning. This created space for 50 additional beds, making it possible to finance the project.
• For a new hospital, design for nursing unit that required fewer staff to run efficiently saved $1 million in staffing and operational costs annually while still improving overall outcomes for patients.
• For a new hotel, compelling design helped raise the average occupancy from the normal 75 percent to nearly 85 percent. This increased sales in the restaurant, lobby bar, and shops.
• For a multi-tenant research lab, sophisticated metering systems allowed the tenants to monitor their individual energy use, saving more than 10 percent each year.

You get the idea. These are all real stories from real projects that have won multiple design awards. They were successful in unexpected ways because the design teams took pains to truly understand the owner’s underlying value proposition and roll it into their design approach. By considering all these factors, they were able to create more thoughtful, sophisticated solutions.

The lesson is clear: Focusing only on form, function, and aesthetics is forgetting the 88 percent of the iceberg that sits below the waterline. Ignore it at your peril.

Supreme Makeover

We’re really excited about the January/February issue of DesignIntelligence, which debuts the new four-color cover design. What do you think?

The Design Decade

We seem to have a habit of thinking in 10-year cycles. The 1970s are remembered for the oil crisis and stagflation, the ’80s brought us Reagan tax cuts and the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the ’90s saw the invention of the Internet (which we called the “information highway” back in the day) with the resulting dot-com boom (and bust). But what of the first decade of the 21st century? There does not seem to be a convenient nickname for it. The zeros? The aughts? The Os?

Endings are also beginnings. As the inaugural decade of the 21st century is closed out, the curtain rises on the next. A lot of people are relieved to see this one recede into the rear view mirror, as it was difficult on many fronts.  We started off with a crisis that failed to materialize: Y2K, which predicted the world-wide crash of computer systems. This was followed in short order by a real but unexpected disaster on Sept. 11, 2001, that marked the beginning of an era in which world-wide terrorism became an undeniable fact of life. Two wars and unprecedented prosperity followed. Then the Great Recession, which, in addition to wiping out homes, jobs, and 401(k)s, shook our collective sense of self confidence to the bone. And let’s not forget the tsunami in Sri Lanka, reminding us all of nature’s incredible destructive power.

Yet despite it all, we are still substantially better off than we were 10 years ago.

Looking back, it seems that the first decade of the 21st century will be remembered most for establishing global connectivity. We now understand that a coal-burning power plant in Shanghai not only pollutes China but also Canada, and it’s painfully clear that a bunch of unpaid mortgages in Detroit and Phoenix can tank a pension fund in Ireland. Cell phones have become ubiquitous and can be loaded with hundreds of “apps,” including cameras, games, texting, twittering, and GPS (allowing us no excuse to get lost anymore).  With Google we can find out just about anything we want at any time. And as Tiger Woods knows all too well, real privacy has ceased to exist. All this has happened in an astonishingly short time.

So while life is more complicated, challenging, and dangerous, we can be comforted by the fact that we are all in it together, for good or for ill, which in turn creates a huge incentive for mutual cooperation.

Global connectivity also alters our sense of scale, as things that once seemed far away and relatively unimportant, like a hurricane in Louisiana, now really hit home. Everyone everywhere has become our neighbor, and that may be the biggest revelation of all.

Global connectivity has tremendous implications for the A/E/C industry. The buildings we produce consume huge amounts of natural resources to construct and maintain, and they are responsible for nearly half of all carbon emissions — far more than any other source, including transportation. Wise use of our natural resources is essential if future generations are to survive and thrive.

It’s clear that design is not just about creating objects but also processes. More than ever, society can benefit by adopting the designer’s problem-solving mindset when grappling with issues, be they in health care, education, the economy, or even politics.

This first decade was difficult in many ways, but it also opened new doors.  For designers everywhere, it’s a profound leadership opportunity.