Everyday Possibilities

I have attempted to describe what happens in an architectural practice as faithfully as possible. Focusing on the transformations that take place from an idea, to a design, to a set of plans, and then to a building, my aim has been to show the complexity, difficulty, and interest of this endeavor. I hope these descriptions suggest parallels and differences: with other people, other places, other processes. I do not offer any ultimate answer to the question of how designs, ideas, inspiration, buildings, or for that matter architects are produced. There is no proposal for how architecture might be done better or differently. I want instead to highlight that even as these architects’ themselves acknowledge the problems inherent in the professional contexts they face, there are also possibilities. Focusing on these everyday practical entanglements makes this evident in ways that are less obvious in generalized accounts of the profession and discipline....

Reflection: Making Things as They are

Architects are constantly moving toward something that does not as yet exist.37 The reality of the building comes after the fact of a plan. At one level the plan and the reality are obviously unalike; yet at another level the relationship between these must be a literal one. In the process of building, some elements are kept constant, while others transform out of all recognition. Radical shifts in scale and material substance take place, as proportions and forms are exactly preserved....

Time Frame

Contracts specify what must happen but also when. Architects must coordinate things in time as well as in space, making sure buildings are constructed “as planned” and “on time.”32 Each project is made up of a series of phases. The completion of phases is linked to the payment of fees. Intervals are prescribed in advance, limited by a fee proposal through which costs are fixed. Projects anticipate a series of known future outcomes that are worked toward: the definition of a brief; the development of a design; the detailed development of plans for planning permission and then for tendering; and the construction of the building. The time of the project is linear and sequential: each phase follows the next, one after the other. Keeping things “on time” is an important but difficult accomplishment....

Listen: Cost and Design

How is cost linked to design? Megan, Phil, and Rob wonder together. MEGAN: Often you’re in a hurry. You’ve got six days to do that work, so you’re getting your costs for your materials straightaway, and you’re like, “oh, that’s ridiculous, it’s not going to work!” [her voice rises in exasperation] and then you just go back to the drawing board before you go any further. Cost is part of your design straightaway. I mean, yes, we might have a quantity surveyor [QS] involved, but the QS is another abstract entity. So you sort of do your detailing up to a certain point, then you go to a QS, and then it comes back and they will say, “Well, it’s over budget.” We say, “Well, we’ve done our work.” Are we going to redo it? And then there’s an ambiguity there....

Digital Romantics

In the office, computers are central to a range of tasks. The architects’ days are mostly spent at screens: checking and responding to e-mail, finding “precedent” images that provide the inspiration for design, researching building materials and new technologies, and most centrally of all using one of a range of computer-aided design packages. Watching them at work, I observe screens flicking perpetually between these programs and tasks. Observing their movements, I find it clear that these architects are thoroughly digital humans, their capacities of thought and action indissoluble from digital technologies that saturate this working environment....

Site Stories

Architects’ responses to place are framed by the actions of other people, and by the legislative contexts in which they operate. Building professionals, clients, planners, and consultants are often met on-site. Tom explains some of the background of a possible new project on the drive over. He had a call the preceding week from Michael, the father of an old school friend. They had a chat about a couple of building projects. Both sounded interesting, though it is still unclear what they would entail and whether they were likely to be feasible. There is no brief. Depending on today’s visit, there may even be no project....

Sites of Design

Another site visit illuminates how this happens. Roisin is accompanied by Rob, one of the more senior architects in the practice. The plot has an extensive garden, originally part of the grounds of a bigger Victorian mansion. There is already a house, built in the 1980s. The clients, a middle-aged couple with two children, have acquired the site with a view to demolishing the house and rebuilding. Roisin has been working on initial ideas prior to the site visit. The project is being overseen by Rob. Originally a product designer, he changed direction and retrained as an architect in his late twenties. Though he is deferential to Roisin and respectful of her work, his pronouncements seem subtly to carry more weight. This may partly be an artifact of his greater experience but also manifests itself as a form of distancing from the details of the project: he has oversight in the sense of seeing more through seeing less of these distractions. Both have surveyed maps. Rob remarks on notable trees, conscious there may be tree preservation orders. He is using his phone, held outstretched, to take pictures. He observes the site through its screen, his engagement with the site literally framed by the camera and the photographic conventions that govern its architectural use. “You can never take too many,” he observes, joking that however many pictures you take, the crucial view is always missing when you get back to the office. As much as these are personal aide-mémoires, they are also intended to convey the site to others in the office....

Designing and Making

The office bears the trace of other times and places. As I experienced it in 2014, the room contained ten architects, then involved in the construction of four buildings, with numerous other design projects at various stages of completion. When I visited two years previously, there were still only six architects, working in an office in the house of Tomas’s codirector, Tom, in an extension he had himself designed. The practice had moved there a couple of years before, having outgrown an adapted garden shed at the end of Tomas’s rented cottage. Freezing in winter and too hot in summer, the shed was where they first set up office and where they subsequently took on their first employee. These details are themselves part of a story I hear recounted on a number of occasions. They are factually correct but convey a narrative truth beyond this: of sacrifice, and of rapid change from humble beginnings that is a source collective pride. Alongside this are ambivalences, anxieties that the progress won through hard work has nonetheless been accompanied by changes about which they are more ambivalent....