How Many Architects Does it Take to Develop a Building?

The most invigorating clients for some of today’s most intriguing architects are themselves.

Russell Katz in Washington, StudioMDA and Della Valle Bernheimer in New York, and several other young firms around the country are making the developer-architect more plausible than the actor-singer or the player-manager. These firms are using what their principals learned in school about engineering to make buildings that manage heat and cold without using lots of energy. And they’re trying, by applying what they’ve learned about the value of competent project management, to play the real estate game without inflating land prices or stretching out construction schedules.

To be frank, none of these firms has produced buildings whose financial performance constitutes a clear success. All their projects are relatively small and/or still in development. And architects who know development can make a fustercluck of both: American downtowns are still recovering from the onslaught of anti-urban galleria hotels that John Portman designed and financed all over the place in the 1970s. But firms like Della Valle Bernheimer, which is working with Architecture Research Office to design a low-price house in Syracuse that will consume a sliver of its neighbors’ fossil-fuel budget, are setting a new template. They propose that architects should make their ultimate clients healthier and safer. And that architects’ ultimate clients are the people who will use, walk by, build near, and eventually dismantle a building. Or share a planet with it.

(Now. Lots of the people I’ve mentioned have been faithful sources in my reporting over the past several years, treating me nicely and putting up with borderline-irrelevant anecdotes about my family.  StudioMDA chief Markus Dochantschi once drove me home from New Haven. Architecture Research Office principal Adam Yarinsky is a member of my temple. But I have no stake in their companies and no inside knowledge of their finances.)

More civic-minded, energy-smart product from architect-developers could advance the vital cause of demystifying architecture for the millions of people who will never commission a proposal or sit through a “crit.” Architects like to speak in mystic tones about how many people they gather at their weekly design review meetings- 15 consultants! 20 subconsultants!- which makes their work (and contributions) less transparent. Putting architects and developers in the same financial slot can help to define the market value of sound engineering and efficient design.

It can also reduce the blister of squabbles between architect and client- or at least make those squabbles less costly.