A Young Architect’s Guide to Building Competitive Advantage

Interview

ASR: RVA functions not just as a firm, but also as a place for continuing education for its many young employees. That makes you not just an employer but also a teacher. As such, do you prefer working with specialists or generalist architects?

RAFAEL: The reason for the average age in my firm being so young has more to do with my own optimism that somehow it is better to have the chance of working with people that are eager to learn and are not overtaken by the frivols and the complexities of the profession. On the other hand that has a counter-side to it, which is that in reality [working in an office] is NOT supposed to be and SHOULD NOT be an educational experience. But the truth is that there is nothing inherently wrong with that. What is wrong, I think, is that people come out of school with a combination of skills which are not really related to the craft and it seems to me that this is something that has been supported by academia for the last fifteen or twenty years, under the big excuse that this is the time for experimentation and research. I think these two things are sort of prototypical in architecture. You would not find anybody in science or in medicine or in any other discipline that would think that because you know nothing you are capable of researching. It is in fact quite the opposite.

This Lack of real, serious interest in the construction and the craft and how the craft is actually performed is also emblematic of the last years of architectural thinking, which has been not really productive. It has really delivered this visual perception of everything being the same. So, I think that education is essentially not delivering people with a minimal level of performance skills to a job-market that is extraordinarily competitive and very badly paid. If you put it really in economical terms, your product is not really helping anybody.

Architecture IS a craft. If you were a pianist and you had to go through six years of conservatory they would not have you talk about the piano. Either you can move your fingers or you are out! And if you are composing or are in any of the other disciplines in which you have accreditation or knowledge, if you do not know the basics, you cannot continue. And the basics ARE basic. It is almost in the way in which a brain actually constitutes itself. And then you must build on these fundamentals. Even if you are in the fashion industry, you need to know how to saw, how to manipulate the fabric, how to draw … there are some basic things that you must learn that are in my view NOT elementary. That is all!

ASR: Do you think that architecture schools are effective enough in terms of teaching students the basics? Regarding M.Arch. programs in particular, do you think a new student that comes from fields irrelevant to architecture will ever have the chance to really acquire these basic skills and cultivate them?

RAFAEL: There are two different kinds of methods of organizing the way people learn something at university level. The European and Latin way of doing that is that first they put you in front of this moment of mortgaging your life with a profession at a young age, which I think is absolutely insane. So, I do think that it is perfectly ok to come into architecture from any field, the same way I feel that it is perfectly all right coming into any field from architecture. The problem is that it requires a certain level of knowing what it takes to do the thing, not at an instrumental level, because by instrumentalizing you become sorry for having to learn and you would feel better if it was given to you as a pill. I think it is exactly the opposite. I think the basics are literally where the stuff is!

Picasso used to say (paraphrasing), “I draw better than Rafael [the painter], so I can do these crazy things that I do!” Everybody else that tried to draw like he drew, without knowing HOW to draw … well … you see what happened! This is a personal view on an orientation on how to organize learning according to what really practice is. What is not really a personal view, but is an across the board realization, is that you come out of school and confront a reality that was not similar twenty five or thirty years ago. Then you had the chance to get a job, and your job was better paid, and you knew how to navigate through it, while learning every single day. Is it not enough to know that there is something that is not quite really working?

The sophistication and emphasis on the philosophical component of architecture is something that people seem to privilege now possibly because it is in fashion, but you know, you have an obligation to be cultivated whether you are an architect or a welder. It is the same as assuming that a certain degree of virtuosity is enough when in reality there is a set of goals that one pursues throughout one’s whole life.

ASR: What would you say is responsible for students choosing to specialize in specific modern design tools instead of creating a strong basis on the real fundamentals of architecture?

RAFAEL: If you look at the way schools are organized you realize that they are competing for bright students and teachers that have a big name. All these things are commendable and great, but they are not a substitute for having a notion of how the hell you are going to teach , and what it is that you are teaching! ¾ of the people that teach have never built in their lives. But, have you ever seen a surgeon that teaches surgery without having ever operated? So, it is a complex set of issues that all converge into what I meant to say when I told you that the system is in crisis from the notion that you are supposed to perform a service in one interpretation or make an artistic contribution in another interpretation, in a climate where unless you sell a label there is no way of verifying whether you know what you are talking about or not.

What else other than competition among students would you expect from an approach to building as a cultural phenomenon. What do you expect when an education experience of architecture gets started through reading magazines. This is really like beating a dead horse, but it is also the crux of this thing, as if the visual is the only thing that counts.

When you treat a building by simply laying out a simple organizational function and then loading it up with all these intentions about what is the form that you want to produce, then there is a problem. That is because in the end of the day there is a specificity about what constitutes an architectural idea, which has to do with much more than what it looks like.

This type of crisis is created by the market but it I also created by the market that really drove architecture to take this stand. I do think that in the end of the day, if you could construct a school of this sort, or if you could get more than 3% of the budget of the country in the hands of architects, then all that would be terrific. But to proclaim that while these statistics are not really improving is absolutely suicidal and you keep fostering the thing based on two or three guys that are lucky enough to make it through. In the end of the day we are here for something else other than to pay the rent … right ?

ASR: Should generalist architects avoid developing extensive knowledge in specific areas of the profession?

RAFAEL: The way an architect’s mind works is completely interpretive, which means that you do not know much about anything, but you know sufficiently about almost everything! So, because people have for so long talked about things that are not connected to the practice, other practices take hold in areas, where your performance as an architect is not really satisfactory. In other words you do not know how to put together a financial package, or you do not know how to build a theater, and then the financial and the theater consultants appear. These are people that specialize in these things … but if you scratch the surface, and this might sound a little brutal to say, what they are doing is not really rocket-science. The stuff that these people know is absolutely a piece of cake. It is just that it becomes very difficult to do what you are supposed to do as an architect with these very elementary things when you are not exposed to them, not even slightly and when your brain is not trained to adapt to them as they are and as they change. You cannot take on specialization as a phenomenon outside of market conditions, because I think they are the ones that reveal a crisis of the culture.

ASR: Should architecture schools educate architectural project managers (meaning people with better managerial skills and technical knowledge in the field of architecture), rather than architects?

RAFAEL: The project management of architecture goes back to what the craft is. It is simply the craft. That is the only way you do things. A building is so large and complex and expensive that the minute you reduce it to something you are immediately put in that level of specialization. A project manager is just a bad term. Just call it the Architect. That is what you should know. That is the only integrative part of the profession, which is what makes an architect indispensable.
Three quarters of what you see today as being a royal disaster are functions of breaking down the pie into too many portions and not having a wholistic view of how this thing integrates into the whole system, other than the one that controls it, which is basically the financial component.

ASR: What was the architectural profession like in the good-ole times?

RAFAEL: The good ole times were quiet times, in which the basic desire for notoriety was by far much more subdued, because it was clear that in the rotation of the media since you produced one of these things every five to seven years, you were in a clear disadvantage to a movie star, so nobody really thought that this was going to happen [becoming a star]. Now it does happen. The lack of visibility at that level of intensity I always thought was great. For instance if you are a real mover and shaker on the financial markets then the best thing to happen to you is to be undetected. Nobody wants to show up in every single magazine.

Also, we did not have all those different categories back then. Have you ever seen anything more ridiculous than this category of the design architect versus … another kind of architect? I mean what is an architect other than a designer? If you are not a design architect, you are not an architect, and if you are a design architect you should be able to do everything that is design, from putting together a building, to negotiating, etc. Because otherwise, the financier will ask you “why should I pay you more than for a piece of trace where you put some pastel over”. I am sure in fact that the people in architecture schools know that the entry level salary is less than if you were a maid. You tell me how in the whole world you can be compared with a person that is a paralegal that has an entry level salary of seventy-five thousand dollars a year!

The fact is that most students are unable to compensate the cost of their own education. Seven years of education and there is absolutely no way one can pay for it. Why is this the case other than because of the status of the whole system of architectural education? But the thing is … can you put a building together after you graduate? No! What your education prepares you for is to maybe write a book, which of course you cannot do either, but the threshold for judging one’s worth is really undeterminable and this is exactly why you are getting paid less.

There is only one verifiable factor: specialization seems like a life-saver in our professional storm, because how the hell are you going to make it otherwise! And I think that is also revealing the same problem, which is that you are not going to make it that way either. Tomorrow you are going to decide that you are only going to do schools that are not more than 25,000 sq ft because you think that is what you are extraordinarily good at! Well … Bullshit, because then, through the filters of checking all these little squares that tell you “yes, I did check the efficiency of this and that and have used a rational structural system and have checked the HVAC too, and have selected healthy materials” and so on, you have a piece of crap anyway! And that is exactly in the crux of the problem, which is that you need an Architect!

ASR: Are there specialists in your office, and if yes, then how do you engage them in the process of architectural design?

RAFAEL: In our office there are some people that have become interested in some parts of the process. Architecture is like tailoring, versus mass-producing suits. You have to be there and custom design the suit for the person in the place at the moment. Also, I feel that you cannot put your name on the door if the designs are not YOUR designs. You cannot have a corporate approach to design.

If you go to a hospital, you know that the hospital has a principal who is a doctor. So much so, that there is no way to leave out that doctor, who has that particular skill inside of one anonymous organization. So, what you get is basically crap, under the big name of X! The truth of course is that does not happen in medicine, but it does happen in architecture. So, you have all these people that could not be any more market oriented, that have expertise or experience. There were experienced people for example that were terrific architects, like Skidmore, Owens and Merrill, who were fabulous architects and long gone, and replaced by another crew that was very good, and then another crew that was not so good and now you have … SOM as we know it!

ASR: Do you think that specializing in a specific type of design, or stylistic approach or even design philosophy that are directly related to the Principal of a firm could be frustrating for its partners after the Principal retires?

RAFAEL: I do not have an intention to know what will happen when I die. As a matter of fact I could not care less. What will happen to the firm is a choice of the associates. IF they have learnt only one thing, then they will have exactly the same kind of crazy operation that happened with Frank Lloyd Wright. None of the people that stayed there were Frank Lloyd Wright, and they kept doing everything the same way, even drawing using similar types of lines and crayons. It is a different problem of course when you are grounded in a particular vision of what is important in architecture. The problem with Gehry’s firm for example, is that is the only thing that is real. And this is all an interesting problem, whether that is an important thing to have or not. Then, you have no other choice but to refer back to the same thing, which is where the market is. And the market is all of those things.

ASR: Do you have any advice for new architecture students or professors at architecture programs?

RAFAEL: I have lots of advice for new students, but advising the professors is a difficult thing. I know that most of these people are extraordinarily devoted and for reasons that have nothing to do with them, they find themselves in situations like this. As a matter of principle I have a lot to say about arrogance, and you know how much of that is around us, so it is hard to really advise these people. But I think that the only real way to give good advice is to act upon it. The craft is not how many programs you know of whether you can tell from afar how much a building weights. The craft is about what you think, and how you construct your system of beliefs, not “A” system of beliefs, but your own, and how important it is, and basically understanding the mechanisms of self criticism, which is the only thing that you people have to do. If you have talent or not is another thing, but to assume that you do not need to nurture talent, or that if you do not have it you are dead, that is idiotic. I would not be able to give advice to any student without trying to correct the system, and that would happen by getting one of these deanships in any of these universities and have ‘card blanche’ and just change everything. And that takes to change the perception of the access to school and have a level of rigor that may sound a little bit exaggerated, but that is how it is in everything else. If you are in a music school there in not such a thing as not finishing a piece if you are in a composition class. Many architecture students never finish anything. And one would argue that a work of art is worked on throughout the artist’s life, but what we are talking about are not works of art, they are training exercises. If you do not finish, you are out. Not because I am a tyrant, but because you yourself should walk out. Is it not a good level of discipline? Do not tell me that we have it, because we do not. Our system is an absolute joke!

The problem is that nobody knows how difficult architecture is. It is very difficult in more than just an internal process level. How do you think about whether you are right or wrong? Usually arrogance helps you in that direction and hurts you in another, but there is a system through which you can tell yourself that what you are trying to push all these people to do is correct. The other thing is that you have to know how to do it, because it changes as you do it.

This whole crisis about the question of theory and other sources of inspiration is just because these people are completely at a loss relatively to the importance of architectural knowledge. You do not need to apply psychoanalysis to a building or study the vibration of practice X. It sounds interesting, but it is pitiful. It is completely insane!

ASR: Do you think that in the end it is lack of creativity that causes all these problems in the field of architecture?

RAFAEL: It is the lack of knowledge of what the hell you are doing! Because If you told me that you are a pottery maker, and you have never seen clay in your life, then you can talk about it all you want, but you are NOT a pottery maker! Te craft is hard to understand and painful to grasp. So many people replace it with this easy-to-grasp, unverifiable stuff. I taught at Yale, and I had not one, but two students that were telling me they were doing fractals … they have no idea what fractals are!

ASR: What do you think the reactions of other disciplines, like engineers, would be to this attitude of architects?

RAFAEL: They laugh at it! But the thing is cyclical and completely incestuous because nobody asks, because if you ask you have to go and cover yourself under the bed! It is the most embarrassing thing in the world. This is my own personal vision of how the situation is. The truth is that the people who are at the forefront of that line are people of  my age, who have never built anything in their lives.

To make it simple, specialization is a reactive answer to a problem that is somewhere else. The last thing you want is you to become a sports architect or a specialized architect. There is not such a thing because the whole subject is to be critical about. If you are critical, you have to be a thinker. You have to be able to interpret these things and be open to learning and have the skills to learn them fast.

When we started designing labs, they had for 30 years been the sole complete sub-market of a group of firms you have never heard of in your lives. These spaces, which to me are some of the most completely interesting spaces today, is where something really interesting is happening. Where else? Certainly not in museums by the way! Today you hear all these firms designing labs, and that is because that is the only thing that is being funded. Where does the money come from? It comes from all the people that have someone in their family with a medical condition that needs research and know that these guys can cure it. This is now! Ten or fifteen years ago, I had no idea what they were talking about. In that case what you do is walk in the room and you say ” I do not understand the first thing about this, would you please explain this to me? “And they kick you out of the room or you learn it, and when you learn it you realize it is the simplest thing in the world. In the end of the day in fact, if you go back and look at the evolution of laboratory design, the only thing that has always been there as a matter of real knowledge was one dimension and one idea of the complexity of coordination. The dimension was 11.46′, and the complexity is that you cannot juxtapose tightly structure with HVAC systems. That’s it! When you do that, then you do exactly what everybody else does, which is that you start asking the real people, who are the scientists, who are completely underrepresented and are suffering there buildings forever, until you start doing things that are empowering and derive from listening to these people. The only person that can do this thing is an architect and the best thing that can happen to you is to know nothing, because then you can see what is really behind the problem.

Anyway, in the end, have you seen an environment more competitive for essentially nothing? Because if you told me that the salaries were $300,000 a year I would say ok! Power? What power? In the end it is all very lamentable I think, because it is not that this stuff is unsubstantial. For example if you are a specialist in tap-dancing and tap-dancing does down the tubes, it is not that terrible, because you can avoid it by not going to the theater. But our thing, you cannot avoid … It is all around you!

Interview

ASR: Today all architecture schools are advertising their specialized programs in architecture. Is this a calculated attempt to get the best students and funds, and if this is a reality then how do you think it will affect the practice of architecture eventually?

SANTOS: Well, I think you are generalizing, which is not quite accurate because the specialization in this particular university and the way it is configured is highly unusual. I mean if you go to Penn, UC Berkeley and other places you will not find this separation out into disciplined groups in the manner that you have here. It is quite different there. I think in most schools the focus is on bringing students into the Master of Architecture program and give them much more of a general education. In other words, you start right from the beginning integrating all these subjects as part of design, because they are not separate, and the idea then is that you are, in a way, dealing with a kind of general education in architecture that touches on all the foundational issues that we all believe in. The specialization tends to happen at a post-graduate level. So, people coming in with a professional degree, might choose, because they have already had that general background, to specialize in building technology or what have you.
I think the drift of it in architecture schools in general is to give a very balanced education where design is actually focused.

ASR: Don’t you think, however, that even M.Arch students trap themselves in these fields due to a very competitive job-market that would pay more attention to a person with highly specialized technical skills?

SANTOS: No, I think this is actually rather overblown as an issue. I think that when you leave school and go to an office they are going to ask you some very specific things. They will look at your portfolio and see if you can design at all. They are certainly going to ask about your computer skills and which programs you know. And I think that people may choose to specialize later because of their interest. I mean somebody going into HTC, for example, is likely to want to teach one day. People who want to go further in building technology, probably want to seek out firms later where there is a different and more technological emphasis. But I do not think it is a marketing deal. For example, urban design would be something that a number of schools have. And somebody who has gone through architecture and wants to know more about the city because that is their passion, will go to Harvard or us, or UPenn or UCBerkeley, to “specialize” in that. I started in architecture and I got my Master of Architecture and went on to Harvard to do urban design because I hadn’t had enough of it, and then I went to Penn and did City Planning. So I was accumulating degrees, but it was a very specific strategy to add to my architecture diploma.

ASR: How were things different in the seventies when you started practicing on your own and when the norm was generalist architects ?

SANTOS: Well, there was a big change in architectural education when in the United States the Master of Architecture degree became the first professional degree. Before that it was B.Arch. I have a B.Arch. The extent to which it is fit to practice, I do not think it has to do with the educational institutions as much as with the change of practice itself, because I think practice has changed a lot. The client groups have changed a lot also. We were dealing with individuals more and now we are dealing with committees. If you are in the public sector you also have to deal with the public process. So the nature of practice has changed a lot and has become international, national, etc. People do not practice in the locale. You could be anywhere. And then once you deal with computerization and all the change of that, then we do not even have to be in the same place to practice together.
Scale has changed, the complexity of projects, the palettes of materials and methods available, the way teams are composed, for example, now there are more offices that agree to collaborate to do a job, so that you do not have to be the hundred person firm in order to do a big job. You can be a four person firm that teams regularly with an eight person firm. So there are clusters formed and I think this is very different.

ASR: Is the architect of today still a generalist?

SANTOS: I think you start by being a generalist and you add on skill sets. That is what people, for example, will get people to do in their office.

ASR: But should the architect’s generalist education change into something more specific as the game of the field changes? Should the architect be able to acquire more competitive skills in project management, economics or negotiation instead of as much theory and design?

SANTOS: If you go to any office, you sort out the skill set and there are people that just inherently are talented in design sets, other people are naturally talented technologically. Unfortunately, there are not so many of those. Some people have management skills. I think for us to be training managers in architecture schools is just a waste of time because we have got so much to teach. And, indeed, there are more things to learn now and we have less time to teach them. Instead of six years we have three and a half. So, we keep leaving things out of the curriculum, which is scary. For example, students graduate these days with very little knowledge of the history of architecture. All that stuff just kind of gets dropped out. It seems like a luxury to put the time into that, but that’s ridiculous.

ASR: Have you noticed that at MIT?

SANTOS: I haven’t looked at it enough, but I have been told that you do not have enough of it. And it’s amazing, how can we be dealing with a design language without understanding the history that led us to where we are. I don’t think we deal with contemporary history, by the way.

ASR: Do you think that three and a half years is too short?

SANTOS: Well, yes, it is too short and we are longer than most programs in the country. The question really is …”is our teaching methodology correct? Because I suspect not! We do not teach in a way that is really well calibrated with what we are trying to impart.

ASR: Do you think that students, especially some M.Arch’s here at MIT, lack basic architectural skills, not just when they enter but also when they graduate from the school?

SANTOS: I have argued that this is actually extremely unfair for students to come in without the basic skills to allow them to be effective. If you don’t know how to draw and see and do all sorts of things, that puts you at a disadvantage immediately, so at Penn we had a crash course during the summer that was really important. If you did not have the skills you had to take this intensive course, it would take a lot of time to catch up. I think it takes a good semester or two to catch up. And that is wasting time. So, if we do three and a half years we have to be better at teaching what we need students to know in a more effective fashion. I mean the other thing I always complain about, and have not had the chance to look at here, is that you have to pick the right vehicle to do the job, so you are trying to teach contextualism or whatever. Pick a problem that is not so complicated that you end up doing all kinds of stuff, which interferes with the real focus of what you are really trying to teach. We tend to overcomplicate things, when we can get the message across very simply. And I think that a lot of information can be recorded and replayed, so students can digest it and so that we don’t spend our time in the lecture room giving all the facts. It should be to discuss the implications of issues. There are ways of changing our teaching.

ASR: What would be a good way to improve basic skills?

SANTOS: What I did at the University of San Diego was that Fridays was the skill-set day, and we had tutors. The faculty was available but it was all scheduled for the tutors to deal with computer skills, model-making skills, woodworking skills, and whatever else possible, and people could actually do this. Some of them were not about improving skill sets, but more about learning to do fantastic perspectives, or fly-throughs. So, by the end of the fifth semester, everybody was at the same level and quite sophisticated because they had their Friday tutors taking them through this.

ASR: Are MIT students ready for the profession of architecture after three and a half years?

SANTOS: No, the time here is short, but I am mostly interested in training students on how to think and problem-solve because you are never going to have all the knowledge. But, if you have a way of approaching information and problem-sets, then the knowledge comes through the process of discovering. But you can certainly put it into a conceptual framework that everybody going out would know how to approach a series of issues, particularly on a technical level. That, in a way, is sort of on the job training and you sit down in an office and work with someone who is superior in knowledge to you, but you at least need to know how to tackle the issues that all sorts of specialists will bring to the table [engineers, etc.]. I think that we need to figure out what we really need to teach immediately, which is why the idea of management would be silly for us to do because not everybody is going to be a manager anyway. Maybe one in ten will have the temperament to deal with this aspect of the profession, so, why go through that? We must touch on the basics through the lens of architectural design because this is the moment we can do that. Once you go into an office, you are on your own.

ASR: Would you consider that design is the core around which everything else revolves?

SANTOS: No, and that is the part that needs to be strengthened. If that is really strong, and to be strong, in my opinion, it has to be larger. You cannot bring in 12 students, for example. You should allow 24 students to enter. Then you get four faculty teaching them and you get a much richer education, and then the following semester you bring in the two and a half year students. Once you get to the elective studios, you have more choices. If you only have the choices of two things it’s not good enough. You need more choices. You need a better exposure to a world of ideas and then you work your way through it. So, I think if the core of our program is really strong, then all the surrounding elements that appear to be satellites right not, are integrated into it because this core is the focal piece, and what holds everything together. When it is too small, it appears to be not important as there is more faculty surrounding this than there are in the middle. As a diagram, it simply does not work.

ASR: What type of firm would you suggest would be more beneficial for a young architectural professional to work for in order to develop as an architect?

SANTOS: I look at each student individually. Some people would flourish at a large firm, and some would get lost there and they would be making tea and coffee. I think it has a lot to do with the personality. The really talented people in terms of design usually want to go into a smaller firm that is known for design because they want to identify with that firm and its belief system. Of course, it is difficult to get into one of these firms unless you are extremely talented and you have a fabulous portfolio and there are people who want to work with you. I think that in terms of a large firm you can get incredibly good training if you just deal with it for a year or two. Go in there and learn the technical stuff that you did not learn at school, understand the process of an office, and be alert to learning. The main thing is that you have just begun a lifetime of learning. Hopefully we have set in place a way of thinking about architecture that is a healthy and good one and then when you go out you can work and aggressively try to learn as much as you can wherever you are! Pick it all up!