Edward McCrary - Photograph courtesy of HOK

Edward McCrary, who was 77 when he died Thursday of cancer at his home in Hillsborough, was the latter.

Trained as a structural engineer, Mr. McCrary spent decades in the Bay Area working out of the limelight on such high-visibility projects as the Coliseum in Oakland and the International Terminal at San Francisco International Airport. Read more

Why Evidence?
Architecture is grounded in ideas, visions, and a passion for making environments that inspire our senses. This article is about taking that starting point—a formal concept or a statement about the spatial, geometric, and aesthetic context for inhabitation—and expanding the agenda by bringing evidence to the forefront.

The 2002 Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton University psychologist, has studied the concept of expert intuition for decades. He defines expert intuition as the ability to deal swiftly and decisively with difficult circumstances—making a quick chess move, responding to an emergency medical condition, or in our case understanding the complex spatial relationships and configurations of human inhabitation. Many times, under such conditions, the person is not even consciously aware of the decision process that determines the outcome.

This is an exciting time in our profession. New technologies and materials, concern for human performance and experience, and critical agendas like sustainability, energy conservation, globalization, work productivity, healing, and learning are providing important challenges. These challenges are in fact opportunities to refine, expand, and improve our abilities to make places for human experience and add services for our clients.

In this context, understanding the relationship between expert intuition and evidence-based design can be transformative. Such an understanding honors our values and traditions as architects while expanding our capacity to deliver not only inspirational buildings, but ones that increase building performance, enhance human experience, and contribute to making a more sustainable planet. The following set of questions seeks to present the challenges and opportunities in this transformative agenda.

What is Evidence?
During a 2008 interview on National Public Radio, New York Times political commentator David Brooks referred to some of the people being considered as running mates by then President-Elect Barack Obama as being “evidence-based.” This characteristic, according to Brooks, “created potential bridges between Obama and people with sometimes divergent opinions—disciplined consideration of the facts (evidence) would enable them to make reasoned decisions.”

By contrast, when design is cast as an act of expert intuitive creativity, uniquely owned by the designer, it sets a context of ambiguity and uncertainty. Many architects shroud their decisions under a cloak of mystery, inaccessible to their clients, who are expected to approve these decisions through acts of faith. The notion that there is a need to make transparent the basis on which design decisions are made is unsettling to many designers, as it challenges their expert intuition.

Yet every design decision, no matter how small or large, how simple or complex, is grounded in some form of evidence. There is a continuum of evidence found in experience; evidence drawn from expert intuition; evidence grounded in rigorous processes of inquiry; and a mixture of other sources of knowing. The evidence is all around us, but we, as designers, have difficulty acknowledging its importance, it power, its potential for innovation. And we have difficulty making it transparent to others.

This misunderstanding of what practitioners actually do and how they use evidence has generated widespread misunderstanding of the design process and has diminished the perceived value of architects and architecture to society. The public may be enamored by a structural tour de force or a landmark design that captures their spirit, but when they put on their client hat, they know they are responsible for delivering value to their organization, institution, or family. Rarely will the hospital, school, commercial organization, or family judge a building on the basis of aesthetics alone. Rather, it will be judged on its contribution to organizational or individual goals. The fundamental question is, “Do the performance outcomes provide a good return on the resources invested?”

Why Are We Fearful of Evidence?
Most designers, when asked if they use evidence in their design process, will answer, “Of course.” But if you probe a bit deeper, you find concerns about the underlying concept of evidence. There is a belief that evidence binds the designer to a purely rational process of decision-making, limiting the freedom to be creative—to employ expert intuition. Or evidence may expose professional secrets that guide their work and may provide some type of competitive advantage. Much of the reason for this situation comes from our educational and professional training, in which we learn that creativity is supreme and must be protected at any cost.

Another major concern is related to our cultural understanding of the meaning of evidence. Evidence is a legal term, associated with judicial proceedings. That evidence is either true or false, right or wrong. It is about establishing certainty grounded in facts. Yet design challenges typically do not have a right or wrong response; some responses are merely better or more appropriate than others. This creates room for misunderstanding of how best to judge the outcomes of design action.

Designers and clients believe that students learn, patients heal, office workers produce better in certain types of environments; that, in fact, the physical environment can influence human performance and wellbeing. And there is mounting evidence that we can influence organizational performance through design. Yet rarely is this evidence used to ensure those outcomes. Why do we continue to fall back on a model of designing that relies on expert intuition and experience rather than one that melds expert intuition with defensible and transparent evidence?

Precedents for Evidence-Based Design
Evidence is not new to architects. Throughout history, vernacular building forms have used prototypes to ensure a level of predictability about functional effectiveness. Similarly, structural systems have utilized precedent to predictably improve construction stability.

Codes and standards, a basic set of tools of architecture, are validated by systematic testing and past performance evaluations. ASTM was founded in 1898 to address public railway safety through standards that would decrease rail breakage. The organization claims that the consensus standards it issues are the work of its 30,000 members. What better example of collecting experience and applying it to future decision-making?

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) provides widely accepted guidance for design decisions through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. LEED is an evidence-based tool intended to verify that a building project will be environmentally responsible, profitable, and healthy. Certification through LEED requires a systematic application of performance guidelines that reflect the experience of professionals as well as standards of professional organizations.

ASTM and USGBC are but two of many organizations that seek and use evidence to predictably improve design outcomes. Certainly, both have widespread endorsement by designers. It seems that the use of evidence is well accepted when it relates to building performance as measured by physical testing and building science.

There’s less precedent for the widespread use of evidence to anticipate human performance, but it is there. The Environmental Research and Design Association (EDRA) and others have a long history of seeking linkages between design and behavior. The roots of architectural programming, now a core practice within architecture, can be traced to behavioral design and the application of social science methods to design questions—from which the analysis of user needs evolved into a design strategy. Even so, only a subset of architects uses evidence from the social sciences to make design decisions.

The Need for Confident Closure
In the design world, we tend to focus on artifacts—the building or interior environment that results from the design process. We struggle to define what is an “evidence-based” hospital or school, seeking highly predictive guidelines that can be directly applied to our work and ensure desired outcomes. We struggle to define an evidence-based product.

Perhaps we might look instead toward an evidence-based process. When making design decisions about complex functional and technological environments, we need a more transparent basis for the client and design team to understand and assess choices collaboratively and to reach confident closure. This no longer is just a desire, but has become a requirement on many projects.

In our day-to-day work with our clients, architects and other designers talk about our work in terms of transforming the lives of the people who inhabit the created environments. Too often, however, we lack the evidence to communicate how this is accomplished. Expert intuition suggests that certain design actions will yield a desired response. Do we, however, really know? Do we have the evidence to give confidence to our client? In many case we don’t.

Unlike Barack Obama’s potential teammates in David Brooks’s commentary, architects pervasively lack sufficient evidence about the impacts of design and their decision making process to enable critical assessment by other who participate in that process. Our clients seek to understand how design choices will affect their organizational performance, but we lack the transparent evidence needed for meaningful, critical dialogue. The myth of architecture as a mysterious act of creativity separates the designer from the client. The architect’s expert intuition may inspire, but it cannot by itself create trust.

Evidence Across the Discipline
In recent years, a number of design professionals have embraced the notion of evidence-based design practice, as a model for rigorously seeking or conducting research to predict how well specific design proposals will support desired performance outcomes or, conversely, cause harm. Our profession has tried to learn from similar movements in other professions—medicine, education, engineering—and we’ve explored the relevance of lessons from those fields for the practice of architecture. We’ve challenged both the quality of non-scientific evidence and the applicability of scientific method.

Despite differences of opinion within the profession about the role of evidence and its associated methods, we’ve reached a point of considerable consensus that evidence is a core component of the design process. The health of our profession, measured by the perceived and delivered value of our services, depends on our embracing our clients’ mandates, to provide physical environments that support organizational performance objectives. In this world, the impacts of design on the people who use the environments and the performance of building systems must be anticipated and represented, so that performance outcomes are documented. We must demonstrate in a transparent manner how these performance outcomes are facilitated, so that the proposed design outcomes justify the resources expended.

Many proponents of evidenced-based practice agree that we need to look beyond our individual practices and share what we learn across the profession, just as we have traditionally worked together to create and document technical data in codes and standards that provide performance standards for determining appropriate action. Much can be learned from program analysis, client web surveys, and other techniques that are project-specific, but evidence-based practice must ground itself in broader, deeper data, possible only in a system that enables us to draw evidence from sources beyond the individual project, one that creates an open infrastructure for evidence accessible to everyone involved in the design process.

To be continued . . .

Robert Brandt, Gordon H. Chong, and W. Mike Martin’s Design Informed: Driving Innovation with Evidence-Based Design (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2010) is available here.

There is one certainty with the proposed 2013 Energy Code changes; whether it means revenue gained or lost, all architectural firms will be spending more time providing a rising “standard of care” for Energy Efficiency services to clients. These services will include some form of building science-based thermal modeling analysis, energy efficiency design, detailing, construction and compliance verification / commissioning; or adding a mix of specialty consultants to projects that will provide these services, such as CEA Energy Consultants, Commissioning Professionals, Home Energy Rating System (HERS) II Raters, HERS Compliance Testing, Green Point Raters, and LEED AP Professionals.

Considering the changing profile of architectural firms in California (mega vs. petite firms, with not much in between) the simplest option is to add the mix of specialty consultants to a project and pass these fees on to the client; that is, if the project can afford it. The downside of this option is the architect continues to lose credibility and design influence over their projects, not to mention potential billable services. As the CEC’s Zero Net Energy goals for non-residential construction are targeted for 2030, and large scale Applied Building Science is in its infancy, it is understandable why the large commercial architecture firms would see no urgency.

On the other hand, as Applied Building Science is booming in the small building sector (residential and small commercial) and as California’s Zero Net Energy goals for residential construction are targeted for 2020, the petite architectural firms in California do have something to worry about, are interested, and have been listening. Simply put, their livelihood may depend on it. When considered, it becomes obvious that adding energy modeling and applied building science services puts a petite architectural practice back in the energy efficiency game, exactly where an architect should be.

The architectural community needs to begin a dialogue on California’s Energy Efficiency Plan, and if it means starting only with those who are listening, then let’s start. It is too late for the AIACC to meaningfully participate in the 2013 code cycle, but not too late to become informed and prepared to assist and debate the technical realities of California’s long range energy efficiency goals.

So, did you know:

• The AIA has not had a working relationship with the California Energy Commission for thirty years.
• The CEC and the California Public Utilities Commission consider practicing architects lacking in energy efficiency knowledge and skills.
• PG&E is creating an extensive energy efficiency training program for architects, because of the insufficient energy efficiency education provided to students in all California NCARB accredited institutions.
• Architects are not included among the approved professionals in the statewide Energy Upgrade California program.
• The Savings By Design Energy Efficiency Integration Awards, given independently of but in parallel with the annual AIACC Design Awards, challenge the absence of such criteria in the AIACC awards.
• The general public believes that LEED certification ensures energy efficiency, yet the first LEED for Homes Platinum House in Berkeley and has proven, in an LBNL Deep Energy Retrofit Study, to be a poor example of energy efficient design.

To initiate a dialogue on energy efficiency in California, the following discussion points are offered:

• Do architects really think the Zero Net Energy (ZNE) ambitions of the State are realistic?
• Who is responsible for the energy efficiency of the buildings architects design; the architect or the energy consultant?
• Is energy efficiency a Health, Safety & Welfare (HSW) issue tied to architectural licensure?
• Will California establish a licensing procedure for energy efficiency consultants, and will architects lose their current responsibility for energy efficiency HSW?
• Will the California Architectural Board start requiring energy efficiency continuing education for architects?
• Will the CEC establish a certification process for a Building Performance Architect, as they have for a Building Performance Contractor?
• If architects lose the HSW responsibility for energy efficiency, will the exterior appearance of buildings become the purview of a new energy efficiency engineering profession?

Thank you for your interest; we look forward to your comments.

Thank you

Daniel Shirk (third from right) of MCM Group International joins NSAD Mock Firm team members Lam Thanh Nguyen, Wilfred Briones, Monika Banakaite, Carlos Sandoval and Brandon Nash to present the MCM Group Mock Firms International Skyscraper Award in Chicago. MCM sponsored the winning team’s $1,000 prize.

A NewSchool of Architecture and Design (NSAD) team won the MCM Group Mock Firms International Skyscraper Award, the highest honor in the international 2012 Mock Firms Competition collegiate division held in Chicago May 3–4. The undergraduate team, which also won the titles of Top Sustainable Mock Firm and Top Architecture Mock Firm, was among six finalist teams in the competition’s college division, formally called the International Skyscraper division. The finalists also included a second NSAD team composed of graduate students.

Three members of the winning NSAD team prepare their model at the 2012 Mock Firms Competition, held by Chicago Architecture Today

The winning team members, who named their mock firm Capsule Architecture Lab, are all undergraduate students in NSAD’s Bachelor of Architecture program: Monika Banakaite, Wilfred Briones, Brandon Nash, Lam Thanh Nguyen and Carlos Sandoval. The group’s NSAD faculty mentor was Raul Diaz, an associate with Roesling Nakamura Terada Architects. As the overall winner of the competition, the student team receives a $1,000 prize sponsored by the MCM Group International, an award-winning studio of planners and architects that has developed more than 2,000 projects around the world. Their primary practice areas include sustainable design, leisure and tourism and cultural and heritage projects.

The other NSAD finalist team, SALT (Sustainable: Architecture: Landscape: Technology), was made up of graduate students in the Master of Architecture program: Ann Capinguian, Kevin Colbert, Daniel Kwak and Rodrigo Villalon. The group’s NSAD faculty mentor was Daniela Deutsch of the architecture firm exitecture.

Read more . . .

Katherine Austin, AIA, Steve Kwok, AIA, State Senator Noreen Evans, Michael Ross, AIA, Julia Donoho, AIA, Don Tomasi, AIA

The AIACC-sponsored legislation to provide some relief to the “duty-to-defend” obligation design professionals face was dropped before its first hearing in response to very strong and united opposition from public agencies and after we learned that the State Senator who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it was referred for its hearing, was inclined to vote against our bill. Without the Chair’s support, our bill would have failed in Committee.

The bill, SB 1276, would have affected only contracts for public works and would have required any obligation to defend to be expressly stated in the contract. Currently, this uninsurable risk is included with any contractual obligation to indemnify unless expressly excluded.

Even though this bill would not have prevented an obligation to defend — it would have only required that obligation to be clearly and expressly stated in the contract — public agencies lined up in opposition. Those agencies included the League of California Cities, California State Association of Counties, Los Angeles Unified School District, California State University system, Regional Council of Rural Counties, Association of California Healthcare Districts, Coalition for Adequate School Housing, California Special Districts Association, and many other public associations and agencies.
The opposition coalition argued SB 1276 “eliminates a public agency’s right to invoke defense obligations from consultants … who design … our infrastructure projects” and allows design professionals to “shift up-front defense costs to the public agency, even in situations where the design professional is 100% responsible.”

Our lobbyists and attorneys Gilson Riecken, AIA, Esq. (Morris Polich & Purdy) and Steve Sharafian, Esq. (Long & Levit) met with many representatives from the opposition a few weeks ago to talk about the threat that the duty-to-defend obligation presents to design professionals, chiefly that it is an uninsurable risk to design professionals absent a finding of negligence. Unfortunately, that meeting produced no results that would remove their opposition.

The Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, State Senator Noreen Evans, acknowledged there is a problem that deserves attention, but she believed our SB 1276 was not the solution. Last Friday, she met with some of her constituent architects from the AIA Redwood Empire in her Santa Rosa office. Her constituent architects explained that the problem is real and is a great threat to the health of the profession in California. Senator Evans agrees the problem needs to be looked at and agreed to work with her constituent architects, the AIACC, and all interested parties to try to find a solution that does not expose architects to an uninsurable risk.

The AIACC will work with Senator Evans and the author of SB 1276, Senator Mark Wyland, this summer and fall in our ongoing effort to resolve the uninsurable risk the profession faces with the duty-to-defend obligation.

AB 1963, the legislation to impose a sales tax on many services, including architectural services, has been amended by the author in response to overwhelming opposition into a study bill on a sales tax on services.

The AIACC was a part of the opposition coalition and is pleased with this outcome.

Every few years, there is a proposal to extend the sales tax to services, as that is seen as the remaining activity not taxed (this view overlooks income and business taxes paid by service providers and, for architects at least, the sales tax that is generated as a result of the services provided). The proposal usually is presented as an opportunity to tax an untaxed entity, to lower the overall sales tax rate, and to bring greater stability to the amount of tax revenues received (although architects will be first in line to say service providers are not immune to recessions).

AB 1963 now requires the Legislative Analyst’s Office to study a sales tax on services and report recommendations to the Legislature. Several similar studies have been conducted in the past, often recommending some type of a tax on services. The former opposition coalition is asking that the study also include a look at any negative impacts a sales tax on services would have on the economy.
The amendment to AB 1963 is a positive development, but it is certain that this issue will come up again another year.

Wurster’s sentiments encouraged a view of post-war, mid-century architecture away from being solely about abstract time and space, objects and monuments, to addressing concerns of place and occasion, locale and human experience. This was, after all, a time of renewed human values and the building visions that accompanied them. Just as notions of “social art,” democracy, and freedom are timelessly meaningful, so is the Wurster anthem, as memorialized through his legacy and the recent volume, The Houses of William Wurster, Frames for Living, by Richard Peters, FAIA, and Caitlin Lempres Brostrom, AIA. The challenge today may be how Wurster’s sensibility can be brought into practice beyond the realm of the single-family, detached dwelling.

What Wurster’s remark continues to inspire is a vision of architectural practice that values and reflects the lives and freedom of the people who ultimately inhabit, use, and experience the buildings and dwellings we make. This is a design intention that suggests an obligation to the inhabitants of a place and their freedom to affect their immediate environment, to make it theirs, as opposed to adapting to the totality of design.

As our profession works through our current economic fog, searching for a renewed vitality and societal relevancy, these notions ring less about theory, and more about a profession fostering life-sustaining practices (not “sustainability” checklists).

The “Open Building” movement, based on the work of N. John Habraken, fosters inquiry into an architectural practice of similar humanistic sensibility: “How do we design the built environment to support both stability – in respect to long term community interests—and change—in respect to individual preferences? How, in other words, do we plan and implement a regenerative built environment?”(http://open-building.org/)

The emergence of organizations such as Public Architecture and Design Corps and conceptual models such as Spatial Agency propose further alternative modes and models of practice and environmental design intervention wedding good design to social relevance, inclusivity, and active participation.

Can architecture set the stage and “frame” the “difficult whole” (to use Robert Venturi’s term) to provide a more permanent organizing environmental structure while also welcoming incremental change and allowing opportunities for residents and home owners to form their own dwelling place around their needs and even tastes? Furthermore, can we explore this notion realistically in today’s devastated realm of unit-ownership, multi-family development?

One exemplar suggested here is the “Tila” housing block located in the Arabianranta district of Helsinki, Finland, by the architect Pia Ilonen and her architecture and design firm, Talli. The project is modeled after the partí of the unfinished loft warehouse type, along with an “Open Building” / DIY (do-it-yourself) organizational philosophy, allowing individual unit owners to build out the interior volume of their apartment on their own.

The five-story, concrete and steel frame project is comprised of 39 units ranging in base floor areas of 540 square feet (50 square meters) to 1080 square feet (100 square meters). The unit ceiling height of 16’-4” (5 meters) allows for the substantial increase of these base areas with the permitted building of loft/second floor levels within the unit. Upon purchase, the only permanent built-in room elements are the bathrooms. Every dwelling unit has a full height and width window wall, opening on to a private exterior terrace. The ground floor includes storage rooms for each unit, laundry, and trash. The top floor includes a community room, sauna suite, and terrace. The guardrail lighting along the exterior corridor was designed to follow the movement of people across the space.

Upon purchase, the apartment units, although bare, are considered permitted for occupancy by the authorities having jurisdiction, and interior alterations are the responsibility of the homeowner and the Homeowners’ Association. Second levels and resulting structural, plumbing, electrical work need to comply with all prevailing codes. However, each unit is accompanied with a detailed informational booklet of guidelines and requirements developed by the architect in close collaboration with the building and planning department to guide the homeowner through the process of build-out.

Since the completion of the shell building in 2009, owner-initiated construction was ongoing until early 2011, when the initial owners completed their build-out.

The floor plans illustrated here delineate, in red, the range of spatial interior arrangements undertaken by the inhabitants. In 2010, the project was visited by John Habraken, who considered it a successful example of his philosophy and a welcomed alternative to more prevalent prefab housing experiments, which leave inhabitants with a completed consumer product. According to the architect Ilonen, the affordability of the project combined with the unique nature of the units attracted a wait list of nearly 2,000 prospective owners for the project. The resulting building population, as described by the architect, is diverse, and noticeable are young families with children.

Ilonen concisely describes the understated architectural form as being ”distinguished by open-air access balconies, a rational and pointedly-visible structural frame, and exterior shafts for linking building services. The top floor terraces and redbrick facade keep the building in harmony with the neighborhood plan.” (Arkkitehti/Finnish Architectural Review, April 2011).

This is a nice little story, with some real life substance behind it. Where can we take it? Before we start computing our plan check comment list, dear regulators, let’s daydream a bit about those old-day now-day values. What if and why not? What can we put forward now for owner-occupied affordable housing? “Same-old” is not “penciling-out.” Prefab, the go-to modernist solution, still barely nascent, remains cloudy. Will we get a Volkswagen or Tesla from the factory, and to what extent can inhabitants make it their own?

So, when we dream about “machines for living” and our simplistic savior in the form of “building technology,” maybe we shouldn’t get so hung up on that sublimely seductive prefab “unit” that Le Corbusier is inserting into a crude preliminary model of the Marseille Block, but rather pay attention to what is all around it, the frame.

Maybe our “works of architecture” can be simply wonderfully beautiful frames for life.

___________

Project: Tila Housing Company
Architect: Arkkitehtuuri-ja muotoilutoimisto Talli Oy / Talli Ltd
Photos: Kuvio, Stefan Bremer
Drawings: Courtesy of the Architect
Le Corbusier Graphic: Author
Thanks to Professor Peters for reminding us.

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