Every Monday morning, team members in the Philadelphia and Princeton offices gather together via video-conference to discuss firm news and upcoming events and projects. Since 2003, founding partner Allan Kehrt, FAIA, has delivered his Monday Morning Musings, weekly slices of personal insight into the design profession, to the firm. To comment on any of his posts, send an email to us. We look forward to hearing from you. |
| September 24, 2007 Timeless
Michael Graves and Alan Chimacoff had a conversation the other day on stage at the AIANJ Design Conference. It commenced with the inside cover of a recent Harvard GSD publication showing digital models of large office buildings/hotels of a type generally associated with the Middle East, Dubai perhaps. All were done as student projects. It made for a scary future if this is what we are going to build. Their conversation concerned the projects' lack of scale, lack of response to context, and the "look at me" mentality evident in all. There used to be a complement given to architects when they designed a particularly elegant building. The building was said to be "timeless"; it was a building that had about it qualities that tied it to no period and every period, of an excellence that removed it from the norm; the Kimball Art Museum, the Pantheon... clarity, composition, materiality, formality, scale. The examples the GSD put forward as examples of their work perhaps questions whether timelessness as a goal of design is dead?
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| September 17, 2007 Pictures (again) There is a continual question concerning the amount of information we have the responsibility to communicate to a client concerning our design and how that information should be transmitted. Because we now have the ability to image the entire project, we often spend excessive project time putting together sophisticated presentations, and still additional time in the presentations themselves. It is necessary to inform the client, but the idea that we actually stop work to prepare for a presentation seems contradictory to an efficient process. We have been spending weeks and months on a design, so the information we are developing within the office for ourselves should be sufficient to do the job. It seems if we take the time to produce visually viable information along the way as an integral part of our design process, it can be assembled at an appropriate time and presented with perhaps only minimum additional polishing. Presentation materials should be the by-products of a disciplined, orderly, and rational process of design that produces items of worth along the way. It's easy to say, but not as easy to do. |
| September 10, 2007 Pictures We have the ability with digital imaging to show the designs we have created in such detail that little of what we are proposing will be left to post construction surprise. There was a time not to long ago when the thought of this was both a technological and economic impossibility. This is no longer true; because of this technology we spend time and effort exploring for ourselves the reality of our designs to ensure the decisions we make are sound. And we redesign continually because of the feedback these tools give us. What responsibility do we have as a result of this technology to make sure that the client is exposed to the entirety of our work before it is built? What level of information is an appropriate amount to convey so that the client is comfortable with what we are proposing, and how should this information be conveyed? There are two types of information that must be conveyed; first the client must hear a clear explanation of what we are proposing and why. And second, they must be presented with enough visual support to back up our arguments so that they come away with a level of comfort with the design. The visual information presented must therefore be tied closely to the arguments we wish to make orally. But even more important the presentation must be closely tied to the client and their ability to understand and process what is being presented. An accurate assessment of this ability prior to starting is perhaps the most significant part of a presentation. |
| September 3, 2007 Time Professionals of all types have only their talents and time to sell. We base our economic livelihood on being able to provide our clients with the benefits of a body of knowledge that is specialized and of such value that they are willing to compensate us for it. We have a number of responsibilities that go along with being in this position; a responsibility to our clients and one to ourselves. The duty we have to our clients is professional in nature; it is to ensure that the information we provide and use on their behalf is accurate and of considerable value. The responsibility to ourselves is economic in nature; it is to accurately account for the time we spend in providing these services and to make sure that we are justly compensated for it. The implications to the firm are accordingly twofold as well. We must guarantee the professional service we provide is of the highest value by educating ourselves continually, and we must accurately monitor the time we spend on the tasks we perform to ensure we recognize an economic return for our work. |
