Creativity, Structure, and the Fall of the Large Architectural Offices*
In its ideal form, architectural design is a matter of creativity and creation, and the architect is expected to imagine well, to articulate that imagination with precision, to communicate it effectively, and ultimately to possess the skill and capacity to nurture and develop it. Imagination, to varying degrees, belongs to all human beings: some give it free rein, others keep it caged. But a good, creative idea usually flashes like lightning in a spring storm — it must be caught before it vanishes. To extend the hunting metaphor:1 once caught, the quarry must be skinned, prepared, and cooked. The architectural work is most often a building, and a building must have structural integrity and functional efficiency, and must provide comfort for its occupants according to assumptions appropriate to its nature. The consequence is that in the process of architectural design — in the steps that follow the catching of the idea, the skinning and preparing and cooking — other disciplines must enter the field, at minimum, in the simplest buildings, structure and mechanical engineering. The number of these disciplines may grow, and particularly in buildings with specialized functions — factories, airports, ports, railway stations, hotels, hospitals, and so on — the involvement of additional specialists in the design process becomes necessary. According to the planning organization's definitions for designing a building from zero to the submission of construction drawings, Phase One covers study and schematic design, while Phase Two covers the preparation of drawings and execution details — both across all required disciplines. Based on the fees prescribed for each phase, it is evident that the assumption has been that the bulk of the design work occurs in Phase Two, since its fee is twice that of Phase One — which encompasses all preliminary studies, initial ideas, and schematic design. Yet despite this assumption, repeated experience has shown that in the design process, any building that is not routine or repetitive — any building that has even the smallest new thing to say — demands the greatest intellectual labor and the greatest pain of giving birth to the idea precisely in
Phase One. It is in this phase that the idea is formed, matured, and ultimately cast into the geometry and dimensions that make it ready for construction drawings. Because creative work — new ideas and the finding of novel solutions — is neither predictable nor schedulable, this is the phase in which the lead architect and the specialists of the other disciplines must all enter the ring together, working side by side, breathing in unison, advancing the design and refining it as one. And as experience has shown again and again and again, the prevailing current approach — by which one person produces a scheme, someone else drops a structure onto it, and subsequent team members layer a series of half-baked, repetitive diagrams labeled "mechanical" and "electrical" drawings on top of that, with a mass of construction drawings finally produced on the basis of the planning organization's standard details — invariably produces results that are uncontrolled and uniformly poor. Over roughly the past two decades, the general prevailing current (setting aside exceptions) has been such that most large architectural offices (large in the sense implied by the article's title) have clearly moved toward decline and dissolution. Small offices, meanwhile, have either remained small or have effectively ceased operations, retaining only their legal entity. The cause of this decline is certainly not a shortage of work: construction volume in the country remains high, and many large projects continue to be defined and executed — and in most of them, the marginal role of creative architecture and proper engineering is plainly visible. It is true that over approximately the past twenty years the architectural community of this country has made remarkable progress, freeing itself to a considerable extent from the grip of mediocrity and moving forward along a natural and logical path of improvement — as evidenced by the fact that in most architectural competitions, younger individuals and offices produce work that is far better and superior to many established offices. But the practical results of this progress are visible mainly in small and personal projects. When work moves to large-scale national projects, large companies — whether state-owned, private, or quasi-governmental — enter the picture: entities that are merely large in scale but incapable of design, which under headings such as "general contractor" or "outsourcing" effectively farm the project out to a number of small offices at fees far below any reasonable standard; and of course these large entities themselves have no capacity to exercise any effective management or oversight over the work as a whole. Even if these small offices, by some near-impossible assumption, were to set aside the inadequacy of their fees and strive with all their capacity to deliver better work, because they hold little authority or oversight over the project, most of the results of their effort will be wasted.
Suntory Museum, Osaka — City of Music, Paris — Forum, Tokyo
Presumably it is the extremely long duration of large public-sector projects that has driven these companies toward such a practice — to reduce the erosive effects of time. And on the other side, small offices accept these arrangements to escape the bureaucratic obstacles and bottlenecks they face; for otherwise they would have to abandon design and engineering altogether and spend most of their time and energy running from one government office to another. Efficient engineering consultancies have neither machinery nor land, nor capital in the stock market; the only thing they possess is their organization, their accumulated experience, and their design and engineering expertise — all of which generally develop over time. Pushing them toward dissolution is, in the words of Hossein Sheykh Zein al-Din, like planting a bomb in a coral reef that took a very long time to form. Why the country's planning and executive system has in practice moved to diminish the role of creativity, thought, and knowledge in large projects may come down to managers who very much want to pierce the sky but have no new design whatsoever in their quiver. The practical result has been longer project timelines, costs inflated to several times a reasonable level, large numbers of unresolved problems, recourse to makeshift solutions, and — most typically — spaces that, even when they started with a good initial idea, have ultimately suffered severely from failure of expression and spatial incoherence. Many who have taught architecture in recent years, whenever they have tried to introduce students to a number of noteworthy buildings in Iran — so that students might have useful spatial experiences — have found themselves in the bind of not knowing what list to give them that would be reasonably current yet would not, for example, include the Museum of Contemporary Art. This, while in recent years the number of creative, searching, and work-hungry architects has grown many times over compared to the 1970s.
* By "large" is meant not the physical size of the office, but rather that the office possesses — or can create within itself when necessary — the organization, human resources, and means to carry a project from start to finish, whatever the project's scale, in such a way that it can advance every project with full command and oversight of all its aspects.
Footnote: 1 The metaphors of lightning and hunting imagination are drawn from Hossein Sheykh Zein al-Din.
Kansai Airport, Osaka
St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican — Kiasma Museum, Helsinki — Grundtvig's Church, Copenhagen
Museum of Literature, Himeji — Inverted Louvre model, study of the interaction of form and dead loads — Sagrada Familia, Barcelona