“After a comprehensive evaluation of the responses we received and based on our needs, the evaluation committee has decided not to forward your firm to the next level for consideration, we hope you will consider responding to future requests and thank you for your interest.” The evaluation committee for the engagement to which this letter refers, a campus master plan for a local college, included a director of facilities, maintenance and operations, a vice president for business and administrative services, a college services supervisor, an administrative assistant, student services assistant, instructional laboratory technician, instructor, counselor, another instructor, an associated student vice president, and a director of general services. The letter was signed by the college’s “purchasing specialist” to whom we are a “vendor” like the copy machine maintenance technician or the office supplies provider.
While perhaps not experienced or literate in matters of planning and design, these are not unintelligent people. And yet, just as we would not feel qualified in our ability to evaluate the suitability of a candidate for the position of college vice-president of business and administrative services, we would not expect such a person to feel adequate to the job of selecting an architect, especially for such a complex and nuanced undertaking as a campus plan. Still, these are indeed those who do select architects for projects like this, projects that guide how taxpayer dollars are spent on some of the largest capital investments on their campus in their lifetime.
Unlike universities, colleges and school districts who engage in capital investments on a fairly continuous basis, municipalities do so only sporadically. How often is it that a city builds a city hall, library or community center? On those occasions when a city does, there is even less expertise in house that would inform how to hire an architect. There are two kinds of evidence that guide selection committees, both of them circumstantial: One is a record of the architect having completed several of the same kind of building at the same size and cost; the other, the architect’s reputation. The limitations of the first are an inclination toward firms who on paper can show the experience without questioning whether the personnel with the experience could profitably apply it or are even still there. The firm that completed a city hall thirty years ago is not the same firm today and it is not unusual to compete with firms named after dead people. The limitations of the latter are a reliance on third party validation, a vague sense that well-known means good; hence, the manic and time-consuming drive by architects to build a reputation (fame being ideal) however flimsy the foundation upon which it is built, often even before having experienced anything at all.
Perhaps most confusing is a misunderstanding of what experience is. We are not a city manager who knows how to run a city hall, or librarian who knows how to operate a library or a parks and recreation director who can manage a community center, just as none of those people would know how to design a city hall, library or community center. But they want you to speak their language in the belief that unless you know their job you cannot do yours. There is a grain of truth in this but only a grain. Our experiences are tangentially related to building operations and entirely related to building configurations. We configure buildings by drawing them. We are generalists, our real qualification being how well we draw. To evaluate such a qualification, selectors would want to understand and speak our language, the language of planning and design, a visual language, one principally expressed in drawings and models.
Ours is not a culture in which we easily think visually or long term. Often our selectors are mostly thinking about personnel matters, operating budgets and the state of their office supplies. Our recourse (and our obligation) is to meet our selectors where they are, appeal to their intelligence, and from the first encounter (a submittal, an interview) employ the right language, get them use to the language, those tools with which we advance ideas in support of the goals of any design effort in which we hope to play a part. The more we can sooner than later in earnest and without cynicism introduce to a receptive audience ideas through drawings, illustrations of what’s possible, how we would think through a design with them, the better chances there are for opening a mind, prompting curiosity, cultivating the desire and the confidence to try something new: This sounds right to me-- I don’t understand it, I’m not even sure I am, uh, well, qualified, to understand it-- but something is telling me there is something to it.
It rarely works. Our success rate may be 1 in 10 or less, and still it is the only way we know to advance not only our prospects but that of the profession. When we have the confidence that there is no planning or design endeavor for which we are not qualified, that our real goal is to qualify our selectors, to cultivate in them the understanding—or at the very least appreciation—for what their real needs are, then we will know that in so doing, whatever the outcome, we will have done our job.