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The Hagia Sophia was dedicated as Catherdral Baiscillica in 360 A.D. On 23 February 532, only a few days after the destruction of the second basilica, Emperor Justinian I took the decision to build a third and entirely different basilica, larger and more majestic than its predecessors.

Justinian chose the physicist Isidore of Miletusand the mathematician Anthemius of Tralles as architects;  The construction is described by the Byzantine historian Procopius‘ On Buildings (Peri ktismatōn, Latin:De aedificiis). The emperor had material brought from all over the empire, such as Hellenistic columns from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Large stones were brought from far-away quarries: porphyry from Egypt, green marble from Thessaly, black stone from the Bosporus region, and yellow stone from Syria. More than ten thousand people were employed during this construction. This new church was immediately recognized as a major work of architecture, demonstrating the creative insights of the architects. They may have used the theories of Heron of Alexandria to be able to construct a huge dome over such a large open space. The emperor, together with the patriarch Eutychius, inaugurated the new basilica on 27 December 537 with much pomp. The mosaics inside the church were, however, only completed under the reign of Emperor Justin II (565–578).

Hagia Sophia is one of the greatest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture. Of great artistic value was its decorated interior with mosaics and marble pillars and coverings. The temple itself was so richly and artistically decorated that Justinian proclaimed, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!”

Justinian’s Hagia Sophia is the one that stands today. It is an architectural intelligence and the first masterpiece in Byzantine architecture. It had been the largest cathedral in the world  for more than 1000 years.

The church has a rectangular shape, and the square vast square nave measuring 102ft is covered with a central dome that is carried on four pendentives. The arcade around the dome is unbroken with 91 arched windows to bring the light inside. Excluding the two narthexes and the large atrium, the basilica measures 229 x 245 ft . The atrium measures 157 x 106 ft and the total length of the construction measures 442 ft.

The Hagia Sophia was a church for about 1,000 years, then  a mosque from 1453 t0 1936, and a museum since.

Immediately after the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Hagia Sophia was converted into the Ayasofya Mosque. At that time, the church was very dilapidated. Several of its doors had fallen off. The sultan ordered the immediate cleanup of the church and its conversion to a mosque.

During the reign of Selim II (1566–1577), the building started showing signs of fatigue and was extensively strengthened with the addition of structural supports to its exterior by the great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, who is also considered one of the world’s first earthquake engineers.^[12] In addition to strengthening the historic Byzantine structure, Sinan built the two additional large minarets at the western end of the building, the original sultan’s loge, and the mausoleum of Selim II to the southeast of the building (then a mosque) in 1577.

The dome of Hagia Sophia has spurred particular interest for many art historians, architects and engineers because of the innovative way the original architects envisioned the dome. The dome is supported bypendentives which had never been used before the building of this structure. The pendentive enables the dome to transition gracefully into the square shape of the piers below. The pendentives not only achieve a pleasing aesthetic quality, but they also restrain the lateral forces of the dome and allow the weight of the dome to flow downward.The dome of Hagia Sophia is incredible- about 100 feet in diameter and 160 feet high. Ther Hagia Sophia  was constructed  almost 1,000 years before with the much accalaimed dome engineered by Filippo Brunelleschi for the Duoma in Florence, Italy. This breath taking structure  is one of the real architectural phenomena’s of all time.

Mosiacs

Hagia Sophia was beautifully decorated with mosaics within the centuries during Byzantine period. These mosaics depicted Virgin Mary, Jesus, saints and emperors or empresses. The history of the earliest mosaics is unknown as many of them were destroyed or covered during Iconoclasm. During the fourth crusade in 1204, Latin Crusaders sacked many Byzantine buildings including Hagia Sophia. Many beautiful mosaics were removed and shipped to Venice. After the Ottoman occupation of Constantinople in 1453, with the transition of Hagia Sophia into mosque, the mosaics were covered whitewashed or plastered. With Fosatti brothers’ restoration in 1847, the mosaics got uncovered and were copied for record. But they still remained covered until 1931 when a restoration and recovery program began under the leadership of Thomas Whittemore. In 1934, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ordered that Hagia Sophia would become a museum, the recovery and restoration expanded then. However, many of the great mosaics that Fosatti brothers recorded had disappeared probably with the earthquake in 1894.

Vitruvius was himself an architect. In Roman times architecture was a broader subject than at present including the modern fields of architecture, construction management, construction engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, military engineering and urban planning.

Palladio said  about the perfect home-” The need for a structure that is magnificent, yet inexpensive; comfortable yet functional.”

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) is widely considered to be one of the most influential people in the history of Western architecture. He became well known after the publication of I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura – The Four Books of Architecture – in 1570. His success and influence were a result of his integration of extraordinary aesthetic quality with expressive characteristics that resonated with his clients’ social aspirations (Palladio online 2007). His integration of architectural beauty and profound meaning is apparent in three major building types: the urban palazzo, the agricultural villa, and the church. Interest in his style was renewed in later generations and became fashionable throughout Europe. Palladio found a powerful expression of the importance of the owner and his social position. His success as an architect was based not only on the beauty of his design, but also on its harmony with the social order and hierarchy of his time. Thus beauty served to illustrate a social order and culture.

The order he gives things – that’s where you see it,” Rogers explains. “For me, it’s the order and rhythm of buildings that is important, rather than specifics. The concept of architecture as frozen music and the recognition of a thoroughness with which everything is done, the idea that architecture has a narrative and a language of its own – I am very interested in these things.

“Scale, proportion, rhythm: these are words that I use a lot, and a great deal of this comes from Palladio.”

As amazing are the Native American ancient Anazii structures built n the 11th Century, here  are incredible  buildings carved into high elevations mountains in the Shanxii region in northwest Chin. These include the highest mountain ranges in China.  These were carved  from about the 5th century on.  Looking at the sheer mountain sides , I wonder how they arrive at these buildings and how the materials arrived at the site.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a a master of self-imagery. His photographs show him as an artist, clad in a cape and beret, as a beloved teacher surrounded by his apprentices,and as a powerful visionary lecturing. In his talks Wright told about his integrity, other architects moronic worship of the past instead of portraying the culture they lived in, and the spirituality of his architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright  architectural career spanned from 1891 to 1959. In the last 16 years of his Wright’s practice, his reputation became magic. Up to then he hardly made a living. Wright and  admirers said that was because  his architecture was so advanced that many prospective clients were afraid to try something so different than what was then being designed. But in these last sixteen years of his practice he received more commissions than in the preceding fifty-two years. There were a few contemporary architects whose work he admired- notably- Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe. He hated the dominant American architecture style- Beau Arts style architecture .. The housing style he abhorred was the box.  In 1948,  the American Institute of Architects (AIA) finally  awarded Wright their Gold Medal.  In his acceptance speech, Wright said he had done every thing possible to eliminate Cape Cod Colonial house style and further since he never  joined the AIA, he consistently maintained his amateur status. Then he and Thomas Jefferson were the only non-members to ever  receive this award. Wright was an avid student of architecture.

Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was an mid- 19th century French architect and theorist, famous for his public discourse on “honesty” in architecture, which eventually transcended all revival styles, to form the emerging spirit of Modernism. Wright advocated what Viollet-le-Duc wrote about many years before.

Here is some of the work of Wright’s final years.

The Guggenheim Museum is Wright’s most famous work. The commission came in 1943 from Solomon Guggenheim. Guggenheim was a great admirer of Wright’s work, but he died while the drawings of the Museum were being prepared . After his death, the trustees of the estate were against the Museum  by Wright. Wright prepared seven complete different sets of working drawings. Finally, thirteen years after Wright received this commission,  construction began. The Museum was completed after Wright had passed on.  The sixteen years Wright worked on the Museum required the most time Wright had spent on any commission. The  Museum was a spiral, continuos ramp.  After the construction started, Wright had criticism of his design. The complaints were similar to the criticism that Frank Gerhy received for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain. The building is a wrk of art that everything else is diminished including the Art work. Wright replied to these critics- “it will make the building and the paintings an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before”

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK CITY

Kenneth Laurent House-1948

Kenneth Laurent, a wheelchair bound  paraplegic, asked Frank Lloyd Wright design a house for him. The plan of the house as the first in a series of “football” designs by Wright. Two curves that meet at the ends. One curve is the outside terrace. The other forms a long gallery that connects the living room at end to the master bedroom at the other end of the house. This is among Wright’s finest residential designs

Laurent House, Rockford, Illinois

Unitarian Church in Madison, Wisconsin

Frank LLoyd Wright came from a family of Unitarian ministers. When Wright received this commission, his wife, Olgivanna, made one suggestion that he make the roof represent hands held together in prayer.  The building had a very limited budget. Before the building was completed the church was over budget. The future of the unfinished building was very bleak. The very real prospect was that the church would never be finished. Wright recruited his own apprentices to work until late in the evening plastering, paining and doing the finish work on the exteriors. The church opened with a sermon by Frank Lloyd Wright and a concert by the Taliesin Fellowship.

This a different church design- no steeple, no facade , no relationship to churches of bygone days

First Unitarian Meeting House- Madison

Palmer House

The Palmer House is based on a triangular unit system . Six triangles were combined to form a hexagon. The clients were devotees of classical music. Wright, a perfectionist,

created a home for great acoustics.

Palmer House, Ann Arbor Michigan

H.C. Price Company Tower

The tower for the H.C. Price Company was based on a 1929 design for the St. Mark’s Church in New York City. This commission was a victim of the 1929 stock market crash. The Price Company wanted a three story with a parking lot for cars and their pipeline trucks. The preliminary design Frank Lloyd Wright presented Price was a 22 story office building and ten duplex apartments. Wright was a great salesman. The compromise was 19 stories. After the tower opened , Wright wrote a book titled “The Story of the Tower- the Tree that Escaped the Crowded Forest”. He wrote” The skyscraper, planned to stand free in an open park and thus more fit for human occupancy, is as nearly organic as in tension and concrete in compression can make it: doing for the tall building what Lidgerwood made steel do for the long ship. The had its keel: this concrete building has its steel core. A composite shaft of concrete rises through the floors, each slab engaging the floors at nineteen levels. Each floor proceeds outward from the shaft as a cantilever slab extended from the shaft, similar to the branch of a tree from its trunk.  The slab, thick at the shaft,  grows thinner as it grows thinner as it goes outwards in overlapping scale pattern  in concrete until at the final outer  leap to the screen wall it is no more than 3 inches thick. The outer enclosing screens o0f g;ass and copper are pendant from the edge of the cantilever slabs. …… this idea had to wait twenty-five years for full realization. This is the logical development of the idea of a tall building in the age of steel and glass; as logical engineering as the Brooklyn Bridge or an ocean liner. But the benefits of modernity such as this are not merely economic. There is greater privacy,safety, and beauty for human lives within it than is possible in any other type building…….. Individuality should be no less appropriate to American business , be even more appropriate than to other facets of American life. ….Witness this release of the skyscraper from the slavery of commercial bondage to the human freedom prophesied  by our Declaration of Independence. Democracy builds.

Interior of Beth Sholom, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania

Marin County Civic Center

This is the only public commission Frank Lloyd Wright ever received. After Wright received this commission, many residents of Marin County objected to the choice of Wright as the architect. The Marin County Board of Supervisors stood by their choice of architect despite the clamor against Wright. For many years we resided  in Marin County, Califormia and every time I drove passed the Marin County Civic Center I was in awe of its beauty. It is an awesome sight. The entire length of the building has a glass skylight that fills the main corridor with light. The Civic Center arises form the land. This Civic Center best illustrates what Wright had in mind when he wrote, “ When organic architecture is properly carried out no landscape is ever outrages by it but is always developed by it. The good building makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built”.

During the 1920′s Frank Lloyd Wright received many valuable  commissions, but almost all of these were terminated after the Stock Market crash in 1929.  Things started to change, when in 1933 Edgar J. Kaufmann, son of the owner of the Kaufmann Department Store in Pittsburg. became  fellow of the Taliesin Foundation.  When young Mr. Kaufmann was part of the team developing the Broadacre City, he was successful in getting his father to fund of the model for a nationwide tour. Soon the parents of Edgar and the Wrights became good friends.  The Kaufmanns had a summer cabin near a stream south of Pittsburg that had badly deteriorated and they wanted to replace their   Wright designed a home over the stream. This was to be one of the greatest homes in American architectural history.

There are many stories told by Wright’s apprentices of designs appearing fully formed in the first drawing . Wright drew the Fallingwater design from scratch in the two hours it took the Kaufmanns to drive to Taliesin, and the finished home is virtually identical to these initial sketches.

Fallingwater

The beauty and drama of Fallingwater’s streamline design has earned a place in architectural history. In 1991, members of the American Institute of Architects named the house the “best all-time work of American architecture”. The real accomplishment of Fallingwater is the simple, quiet way, and yet magical way in which the the building sets man in nature  Wright wrote to the Taliesin Foundation: “Fallingwater is a great blessing- one of the greatest blessings to be experienced on earth”

In Wright’ wrote in the “Essential Frank Lloyd Wright:” about Fallingwater:

” This building is a late example of the inspiration of the site, the cooperation of an intelligent, appreciative client and the use of entirely masonry materials —–The grammar of the slabs at their eaves is best shown by a detail. But the roof water is caught by a lead strip built into the concrete above near the beginnings of the curve so that water dripping by gravity at the bottom of the curve – as it does- does not very much stain the curves. It is not the deluge of water in a storm that hurts a building : it is ooze and drip of dirty water in thawing and freezing, increased by slight showers. The cantilever slabs here carry parapets and the beams. This may be seen clutching big boulders. But next time, I believe. parapets will carry the floors- or better still we will make will know enough to make the two work together………The effects you see in this house are not superficial effects.”

The Johnson Wax Administration Building

After Fallingwater , “the sky was dark at Taliesin”. Out of nowhere, an important commercial project came to Wright, The Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin. Racine was close to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. Wright compared this commission to the Larkin Building in Buffalo. Both were located in unattractive environments. The architecture was turned inwards. The Johnson Wax Building has no windows. Light pours down from the roof. All support for the roof is carried on mushroom shaped columns.  The State of Wisconsin refused to issue a building permit for this building. The columns were designed to carry 12 tons. The Wisconsin building experts ruled in refusing the permit that columns would only bear a maximum of 5 tons. Wright challenged this finding. Wright had a column built on site . As the State officials watched ,tons of cement bags were placed on the mushroom shaped column. After 60 tons had been placed on the Column without any cracking, the State agreed to issue the permit. These columns were called dendriform shafts. Wright wrote about the Johnson Wax Administration Building:

“Organic architecture designed this great building to be an inspiring a place to work in as any cathedral ever was in which to worship. It was meant to be a socio-architectural interpretation of modern business at its top and best.The building was laid out upon a horizontal unit system twenty feet on centers both ways, rising into the air on a vertical units system of three and and a half inches: one especially large brick course. Glass was not used as bricks in this structure. Bricks were bricks. The building itself  became- by way of long glass tubing- crystal where crystal either transparent or translucent was felt to be more appropriate.  In oder to make the structure monolithic the exterior exterior enclosing wall material appeared inside wherever it was sensible for it to do so.

The  main feature of construction was the simple repetition slender hollow monolithic dendriform shafts or stems-the stems standing tip-toe in small brass shoes bedded at the floor level.

The great structure throughout is light and plastic- an open glass-filled rift is up there where the cornice might have been. Reinforcing used was mostly cold-drawn steel mesh-welded. The entire steel-reinforced structure stands there earthquake-proof,. fireproof, soundproof, and vermin-proof. Almost fool-proof but alas, no. Simplicity is never fool-proof nor is it ever for fools”

The Interior of the Johnson Wax Administration Building

Exterior of Johnson Wax Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin

These two buildings brought great fame to Wright. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City had a very well attended architectural exhibit of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. During the last 16 years of his life, Wright received 50% of the total architectural commissions of his entire career. For Frank Lloyd Wright life began at 76.

Next time we will explore this very creative period of Wright’s career.

Hollyhock House- a genius architect vs. a headstrong client

During the time Frank Lloyd Wright was continually traveling to Japan for the Imperial Hotel, one of Wright’s most prominent commissions came from oil heiress, Aline Barnsdall. Wright was asked to design the Hollyhock House, other residences and two theaters. Barnsdall envisioned  a cultural center in Los Angeles.

Barnsdall v urged Wright to stretch his imagination to the limit. She wrote Frank Lloyd Wright, “ You will put your freest dreams into it. For I believe so firmly in your genius that I want to make it the keynote of my work” Is it any wonder that Wright reportedly said,” When you are a genius, it is hard to be modest”.

While Wright was planning her commission, Barnsdall was constantly traveling throughout the world. At the same time, Wright made at least ten ship voyages to Tokyo for the Imperial Hotel. They communicated by letter and telegram.  Wright wrote in his Autobiography on page 227: ”

“We went to work- or I did. My client, I soon found out, had ideas and wanted yours but never worked much for long at a time, being possessed by incorrigible wanderlust that made me wonder, sometimes, what she wanted a beautiful home for, anyhow, anywhere………she would drop suggestions as a war plane drops bombs and sail away into the blue. One never knew where or from where the bombs would drop – but they dropped…… Now, with a radical client like Aline Barnsdall , a site like Olive Hill, a climate like California, an architect head on for freedom, something had to happen even by proxy. This Romanza of  California had to come out on Olive Hill.”

Frank Lloyd Wright saw a great opportunity for his architectural practice in Los Angeles. Wright detested the pseudo-Spanish architecture and the representations of Italian “Renaissance” architect. Wright thought that California should have an architecture that was free of European influence.  Wright believed that pre-Columbian architecture-Mayan best represented what Wright imagined as the architecture of southern California. Few houses have had the monumental devotion that Wright gave to Hollyhock House.

Wright  forbid Barnsdall v from making changes during construction. Autobiography, p.229.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about Barnsdall and her house. “Herself a pioneer, this daughter of the pioneer lived up to integral romance when all about her was ill with pseudo-romantic in terms of neo-Spanish, lingering along as quasi-Italian, stale with Renaissance, dying or dead English half-timber and Colonial” . Wright was the American advocate for a more modern architecture.

I

Quarter of Broadacre City model compared to a one mile grid composed of 640 (broad) acres at 264 x 165 feet (approx. 80 x 50 m) each.

Usonian House

In the designing the Usonian House , Frank Lloyd Wright completely revised the conception of the ideal domestic environment. The objective of the Usonian houses was to create affordable housing. Eliminating of anything unnecessary was Wright’s answer. The defining features of Wright’s design were: radiant floor heating,a single story with a flat roof and widely cantilevered eaves, floor-to-ceiling windows and doors opening to a garden with patio, a kitchen-bathroom unit slightly elevated above roof line, a bedroom zone, a kitchen-dining-living zone semi-divided by function, prefabricated walls, built-in closets, street facing clerestory windows and a carport( a term Wright invented). Wright eliminated air conditioning and as much finish work as possible. The first Usonian house was the Jacobs house in Madison,Wisconsin where the winters are cold and the summers humid.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect for 73 year.  Not withstanding the length of his career,  Wright’s accomplishments are truly awesome.

When you visit the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, you can see Wright’s genius in his designed houses. All these Wright homes are over 100 years old. Today, these Wright houses look like contemporary home

Prairie Homes

The W.W. Willits house- first Prairie House- 1902

Wright created the prairie house with a horizontal line, meant to blend with the flat midwestern landscape. Wright designed broad, open spaces instead of strictly defined rooms of the Victorian era. He said ” the reality of a building is not the container but the space within”

The W.W. Willits house, built in Highland Park, Illinois in 1902, was the first house that embodied all the elements of the prairie style. His masterpiece of the prairie style is the Robie House, built in Chicago in 1909. The Robie House is considered one of the most important buildings in American architecture- a forerunner of modernism in architecture. Tours of the Robie House attracts visitors year round.

Robie House – designated by the American Institute of Architects as one of five greatest American houses.

Wright did not aspire simply to design a house, but to create a complete environment, and he often dictated the details of the interior. He designed stained glass, fabrics, furniture, carpet and the accessories of the house. Legend has it that, in at least one case, he even designed the gowns of his client’s wife.The controlling factor was seldom the wishes of the individual client, but Wright’s belief that buildings stongly influence the people who inhabit them. He believed that “the architect is a molder of men, whether or not he consciously assumes the responsibility .

The name prairie house is derived from a 1901 story, A home in a Prairie Town, that appeared  in the Ladies Home Journal about the house Wright designed for the magazine. After the magazine was published, Wright became the toast of Europe. He traveled to Germany where a best selling book of his drawings was published. Although Wright became a celebrity architect in Europe, in the United States, the architectural establishment was very critical of his work.

Larkin Building

Larkin Building

Wright’s practice was not only houses. In Buffalo Wright designed the Larkin Building. Larkin Company administration building, the first entirely air-conditioned modern office building on record.  It is block like and extremely simple in its forms, and has very little ornamentation….the Larkin building was decisively vertical…Indeed, it was the first consciously architectural expression of the kind of American structure which Europeans were beginning to discover to their delight: the great clusters of grain silos and similar industrial monuments that men like Corbu and Gropius found so exciting in the early 1920s.

“I think I first consciously began to try to beat the box in the Larkin building [Wright said years later]. I found a natural opening to the liberation I sought when [after a great struggle] I finally pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building, made them into freestanding, individual features.”  — Frank Lloyd Wright.

Unity Temple- a Unitarian Church

Unity Temple

The architecture of Unity Temple represents a dramatic departure from customary design for a house of worship, even by modern standards. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this structure over 100 years ago specifically to “not merely create a religious structure, but one that fitly embodies the principles of liberal religion for which this church stands… unity, truth, beauty, simplicity, freedom and reason.”

There are very specific reasons why the building was designed and constructed in such a unique manner.  This is a cubist structure of poured concrete- one of the first of poured concrete buildings.

Unity Temple is considered to be one of Wright’s most important structures dating from the first decade of the twentieth century. Because of its consolidation of aesthetic intent and structure through use of a single material, reinforced concrete, Unity Temple is considered by many architects to be the first modern building in the world. This idea became of central importance to the modern architects who followed Wright, such as Mies Van Der Rohe, and even the post-modernists, such as Frank Gehry.

right had long been intrigued by Japanese culture (he was an avid collector of Japanese prints), so when the opportunity came to build a project in Tokyo, the Imperial Hotel he lobbied for the project. Commissioned in 1916, the hotel was to represent the emergence of Japan as a modern nation and symbolize Japan’s relation to the West. To that end, Wright designed the building as a hybrid of Japanese and Western architecture.

The overall U.S. unemployment rate is 10%. For professionals, this rate  was 4.4%. For architects 20%. The construction industry is also 20%. This rate varies by states and communities. For example,  Minnesota architects, according to the local chapter of the AIA, the rate is over 40%.  It is no coincidence that multi-family starts are the lowest in 40 years.  Much risk must be taken out of the development process to give the lenders the confidence to finance real estate development.

A TRIPLE WHAMMY

Most architects work is provided by public bodies or building developers. With most State and local governments suffering huge deficits, there is a scarcity of public work. Because  developers are starved for available financing for private real estate development, there is a scarcity of private work. The Stimulus Program was Congress and the Administration’s answer to this horrible economic collapse. This much heralded Federal Stimulus Funds were scheduled for developments that were “shovel ready”. This law was passed and funded a year ago. Based on the present unemployment rates for architects and construction workers, it would appear that the stimulus funds have not impacted these fields.  I  would guess that most of the stimulus funds spent to date went for operational costs not capital costs. To pay for operational deficits of state and local governments, not the building of “shovel ready” developments. What will happen next with the remaining stimulus funds is everybody’s guess.

HELP FOR THE DESIGN AND BUILDING PROCESS

New BIM (building information modeling) technologies have begun to replace traditional drafting with three-dimensional modeling. With the development of the Building Information Modeling (BIM), the increasing role of contractors, material suppliers, and owners will have a larger impact on a building’s evolution.  Will this lower the importance of architects in the design of buildings?  This is heralded as a saver of development time and cost. To take advantage of this new technology, everybody in the development process must be skilled in this BIM process.  Getting up to speed presents a major obstacle, as software and training can be prohibitively expensive. There must be a massive program to bring the development community up to speed on BIM at an affordable cost. The community benefit of developing  better designed and less costly buildings will be getting our economy up to speed.

Architecture — and design in general — is about problem-solving.  There may be a  tremendous opportunity in pushing “a more holistic view of design,” in solving a broader pool of problems that might expand the client base beyond building developers.  It’s not necessarily just designing things that are physical. It’s designing programs, solutions that can be social or environmental. For example, a community program can he developed in that focuses on reducing energy consumption. As architects learn to more broadly apply their trade, new economic opportunities will emerge.

In an earlier edition of this blog, I told about the warning to architects in Progressive Architecture written some 40 years ago. This concerned construction managers replacing architects as the “master builder”. How many “clerk of the works” do you see on construction jobs today? The role of the clerk of the works is primarily to represent the interests of the owner in regard to ensuring that the quality of both materials and workmanship are in accordance with the design information such as plans, specification and engineering drawings, in addition to enforcing quality standards. This was done by the clerk of the works for over 600 years. The only group that has liability for not attaining these goals is the architect. These substitutes for the architect in representing the owner’s interest during the construction only add an additional layer of bureaucracy. This wastes time and money with no added responsibility.  Put this role where the liability is and where the best knowledge of the plans and specifications are- with the architect.

A building is an economic entity whose goals are to take care of unmet user’s need, provide a public benefit, and meet the economic goals of the lenders and investors.

1. To meet the user’s needs. the quality and quantity of the space must adhere to the plans and specs.

2. To meet the public need , the buildings must adhere to all zoning and building codes.

3, The lenders and investors goals are the building is constructed  for the budget within the scheduled time.

The standard construction contract published by the AIA makes the architect the determiner of #1.

The local authority provides for With  #2.

The contractor signs a contract for #3. By virtue of this contract, the contractor can ask for a change order because of unforeseen events, inconsistencies between inn the plans, spec or between the two. The BIM shall eliminate many of these.  With the BIM, much improved early estimates of job cost, will have more buildings built within budget.

The architect designs the development based on the economic goals developed by the developer. What is the best answer to have the development these goals.?

Through an integrated project delivery method, owners, designers, and builders can move toward unified models and improved design, construction, and operations processes.  In response to increasing owner demand, architects, engineers, construction managers, contractors, and specialty disciplines are forming strategic alliances and working in new and innovative ways.  The use of integrated project delivery and Building Information Modeling (BIM) will advance integration of the design and construction processes, allowing greater predictability of project outcomes.