In discussion with local architects and academics Kirsty Volz and John Doyle, American architectural practitioners Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel share insights from studio visits to six Australian practices, revealing a profession navigating structural change across procurement models, labour markets and expanding digitalisation.
This ArchitectureAu Business discussion hears from practitioners on where architects fit in changing delivery models.
By examining the things architects produce, rather than the things they imagine, it becomes possible to trace the shifting contours of a profession under compounding pressures.
Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel did just this when they guest-edited Harvard Design Magazine under the title “Instruments of Service” (no. 52). The issue posed the provocation: what do architects actually make? Framing the research with this question led the editors to a deliberately ethnographic approach, exploring the physical objects and digital outputs within architectural practices. That meant visiting studios in person, sitting with practitioners and looking at what was actually on desks and open on screens, and asking architects to talk through the work in front of them rather than reflect on practice in the abstract.
Together with Australian academics Kirsty Volz and John Doyle, Christoforetti and Reidel applied this research methodology during a recent visit to Australia, where they conducted interviews at the studios of six architectural practices: Lyons (Melbourne), Aileen Sage (Sydney), Kosloff (Melbourne), Group GSA (Brisbane), Kaunitz Yeung (Brisbane), and BVN (Brisbane).
The aim was to speak with a diversity of practices across size, project complexity and location, and in a way that was deliberately open-ended; not with a fixed agenda but with a curiosity about the actual things on desks and servers: drawing sets, BIM (building information models), specification packages, contracts and agreements.
Volz and Doyle interviewed Christoforetti and Reidel on their findings, which paint a rich – and at times, unsettling – portrait of a profession navigating structural change across procurement models, labour markets and expanding digitalisation. A recurring thread across all six conversations was design and construct (D&C) procurement, and what its growing dominance means for the architect’s role in Australia.
Kirsty Volz: Design and construct (D&C) procurement came up, in some form, in every conversation we had – not just as a method of project delivery, but as a structuring force that reshapes the architect’s relationship to documentation, contractors and design authority in quite fundamental ways. What did those conversations reveal about how D&C is operating across Australia?
Jacob Reidel: What came across very clearly is that D&C is a shifting and contested territory. Australia is not unique in this; we see it to degrees in the US as well. But the conversation in Australia highlighted just how live that question is right now. What we kept returning to is this: D&C is seen by many – but not all, and even in our relatively brief survey, it was clear that attitudes varied from state to state – as a diminishment of the architect’s role and level of control.
I see two larger forces at play. The first is the pie getting smaller through the breakdown of older professional structures. That’s largely political and economic, and I think it’s less directly about expertise. The second force is how the pie gets cut up. As projects have become more complex, and as various forms of expertise have been claimed by or offloaded to specialty consultants, the architect’s proportional share of the overall fee has, in many instances, shrunk.
Right now, I’m somewhat agnostic about whether architects should try to recapture all that expertise, or whether we should accept that buildings have become increasingly complex and architects are now one of a number of experts at the table. Of course, it’s unwise to generalise across all markets, building types, etc., and I still believe that even at a table full of different experts, the architect, given their particular set of competencies and skills, more often than not ends up fulfilling a vital, central, synthesising role.
Elizabeth Christoforetti: What struck me most was a stark regional difference. We were already interested in differences across cultures and geographic boundaries, but the contrast within Australia was so pronounced. The architects in Melbourne felt significantly more agency in relation to the contracting process than those in Brisbane. I found myself wondering whether that is connected to the speed of the Brisbane market right now, with Olympics-related construction pressure, versus Melbourne’s market, which is much slower at the moment, or whether there is something more fundamental going on.
The argument in “Instruments of Service” is that as projects become more complex, more expertise is required overall, and the architect has a proportionally smaller share of a more complex whole. D&C adds another layer. To extend Jacob’s metaphor, where there might be a full pie of a building, the architect is now only accessing half a pie, and within that half, their share is smaller still because of project complexity. It’s not diminishing expertise per se, but it is diminishing agency across the total arc of a project.
John Doyle: The practices we visited are already navigating increasing digitalisation: BIM models handed directly to contractors, offshore documentation teams working in real time, early questions about artificial intelligence and the specification process. What did those conversations tell you about how prepared the profession in Australia is for a shift that, by your account, is no longer hypothetical?
EC: The premise behind the migration from digitisation to digitalisation is that it’s about systems-level change – that the structuring and automation of analog information into digital form is enabling a reorganisation of labor, relationships and professional roles.
What I find really interesting is that the way BIM and level of detail are handled in Australia is quite a bit more fluid than in the US. In the US, contractors are now taking the drawings architects produce and converting them into their own digital twin for construction, and then licensing that twin back to the client. But Australian firms already seem to be very fluidly integrating with contractors at that level. The logical extension of that is that might be that the Australian context is actually far more prepared for digitalisation in some ways, because your regulatory environment allows for different things. That also puts Australia potentially at the leading edge of what that shift means for architectural agency. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for the world that agency is shifting and labour is transforming, but it does seem like it is happening faster here.
JR: In the US, the more sophisticated contractors have what are called VDC – virtual design and construction – groups, which are growing and hire a lot of architects. What many of those groups do is take whatever the architect produced and essentially rebuild it from scratch to their own specifications. One major driver of that is liability. The US is a far more litigious environment, and that drives a strong defensiveness around whose instruments you’re actually building from.
The promise of BIM was always seamless integration – one model, everyone working on it from design through construction. That hasn’t really been realised in the US yet. It doesn’t seem like it’s fully actualised in Australia yet either, but in our conversations, we did see a notable willingness from Australian architects to share BIM models with contractors and fabricators. One thing I’d be curious to look at more closely is how robust the disclaimers are that accompany those shared models. That would tell you a great deal about the nature of the sharing and whether it is substantively different from what happens in the US.
KV: The six practices we visited occupy very different positions in the professional landscape. What do these different practice models tell you about where architectural agency is most alive in Australia today, and where it is most at risk?
EC: One thing that struck me was the difference in how scale maps onto delivery models. In the US, we would expect to see an architecture firm take a project from conceptual design through construction administration regardless of the scale of the firm. What I found fascinating here was that the smaller firms really focus on traditional delivery and that felt like an act of activism. It was only as we interviewed more practices that I understood traditional procurement simply mapped to smaller-scale projects. The larger and faster the project, the more likely you are to be in a D&C scenario. If you are doing the biggest and fastest work right now, you are also most likely to be doing only a portion of the building.
JR: I don’t think you see that same, nearly total bifurcation in delivery model by project scale to the same degree yet in the US. In the US, design-bid-build (DBB) [what is referred to in Australia as the “traditional model”] – has been losing ground to approaches that share similarities to D&C, such as design-build and construction management at risk (CMAR), and there have also been experiments with integrated project delivery (IPD), but you still see large scale public, institutional, and cultural projects delivered via DBB. This didn’t seem to be the case based on what we saw in Australia, where nearly every large recent project we encountered was D&C. Perhaps this is a harbinger of what’s coming to the US…
There’s also an idea in these conversations that I think you would find anywhere in the world: practices have a natural lifespan arc. You have the younger, emerging practices looking for opportunities wherever they can find them and willing to work in any way; the mid-stage practices, no longer young and emerging but not yet fully settled, feeling new pressures, anxious about their futures and interested in new approaches but still gravitating to what got them to where they are; and then there’s the well-established practices that have figured out, or think they’ve figured out, how to do what they do and plan to stay the course as long as they can. All this is to say, some of the attitudes and concerns we uncovered may be tied to simply the age and stage of the practices with which we met.
Christoforetti and Reidel’s travels were funded by Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Engineering International Mobilisation Grant and the Brisbane Economic Development Agency.
ArchitectureAu Business brings together leading practitioners to share their insights on navigating the contemporary challenges of architectural practice and business. Stay tuned for the next roundtable on the architectural business models for everyday housing, with Shaun Carter, Milly Gamlin and Oscar Stanley.
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