This is my summary, interpretation and extrapolation, of a session of A Question of Practice held on 25 June 2022. In attendance were Sarah Hobday-North, Thomas Rivard, Harry Hamor, with special guest Linus Tan.
We spent the hour interrogating questions around the communication, definition and understanding of the value that architects bring to their clients. Whilst exploring how value defines and shapes the form of architectural practice and visa versa. In a conversation inspired by Sarah’s Architect-GP model,
“Get advice from an architect about your home as easily as getting advice from a doctor about your health.”
Sarah Hobday-North
From experience, the majority of clients do not appreciate, understand or know about the process of delivering a building. Nor do they appreciate the architect’s role in all of this. Their vision is firmly focussed on their completed home, or other building. Notably for this they do not need an architect.
We may not all need a medical specialist, but we do all need a GP for basic healthcare. A similar model could easily be adopted in architectural practice. A model that is about smaller moves assisting clients, showing how they might fix their building. Rather than bigger moves and holding their hand through to completion.
“The future of the profession is not going to be around extracting resources and building more stuff. It’s going to be about fixing the things that we have.”
Thomas Rivard
Architectural practices are established and marketed on the basis of what architects value. This value is encapsulated within the completed project. Evidenced by architects demonstrating the value of architecture and their services by presenting and describing the completed builds. Yet architects know that what they do and are paid for, is so much more than design. Many fail to identify and communicate the value they bring in the entire process. More fail to recognise or embrace opportunities extrinsic to traditional services.
There is work for architects in diagnosis, knowledge transfer and preventative care. It’s analogous to Medicare, or the public health system. A model of Archi-Care could include short consultations, preventative care through to detailed services. Where it’s not so much about the architecture as the care, ie services and advice given.
A new question, do the clients value this knowledge and care? It’s difficult in an environment where real estate aspiration reigns. The challenge is to communicate these services, process and knowledge to the potential clients in a way that aligns with what they might value. With the services and forms of architectural practice in turn responding to client values. “…bringing confidence and certainty to client’s process are tangible values” – Sarah Hobday-North.
Raising a counterpoint to this position, Linus asked whether the public want to be educated about architectural practice and architecture. Maybe clients really do just want a completed building, irrespective of aspiration. Maybe they don’t want to know or engage in more about the process, which might include the additional value architects bring. We might then surmise from this that the clients only seek trust in a process delivering the building they were seeking, not the detail.
Would the profession be better served by focussing on building their client’s knowledge following engagement rather than prior? It’s often argued architects must better educate the public, yet there’s ample information available on making a building. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge comes with experience. Experience should also build trust. Which raises an intriguing question, should the profession’s overtures to the public not be focussed on education but on developing trust – like the trust placed in a GP? How might trust that define the form of communication and practice?
There is a broader spectrum of clients than the profession acknowledges and speaks to. Those that want a finely wrought works of architecture – they’re the clients many architects chase and aspire to. Then those that the profession doesn’t tend to speak to, who just want a house, or other building, that works and that they can afford. Not wanting more, even suspicious or fearful of more. It’s the market less sought by the majority of the profession. This is the disconnect in what is valued by potential clients and architects. Yet this is also how practice might be shaped or reshaped by a better understanding of what their potential clients value.
There’s no refined and complete answers that came out of the discussion. There’s more questions. How might architects listen better to the public in order to understand what they value? How might architects let that shape a redesigned form of practice? What is the uncaptured value that architects might utilise and bring to practice?
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