Our abilities as architects are equal to our skills. Our capabilities are equal to our opportunities to ply those skills. I promise you, this isn’t double-talk. If you put them together, your abilities and your capabilities create a space for architecture to intersect with business. A space where creativity meets profitability. It’s the place where I can thrive as a small business owner, along with my wife and partner, Sharon. But, it also must be the place where I can be the kind of architect I want to be.
When I hear the term “firm resilience,” then, I think beyond meeting my expenses and realizing a profit. I consider the engine of design that drives me to do my best thinking and drives our clients to engage us, time and again. In this sense, design is not a byproduct of my business. It is not an exception to some standard product I make. Design is an expectation that I create and my clients share. This isn’t a convenient rhetorical argument, either. It’s my observation after several decades in practice. It has been the through-line for my firm, recession or not: Every single one of our clients share how they are moved by the impact of design on their project.
What does that mean? Perhaps they were moved to realize what design signifies—the accommodation of needs through an affordable investment. But I think it’s more about what design ultimately means—a real understanding between client and architect. They thought they were doing something exceptional by hiring a firm called Architecture is Fun, but in the end they were realizing their right to inspiring and healthy spaces.
Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, and Ed Mazria, FAIA, the two most recent AIA Gold Medalists, have staked their careers on this right to good design that’s inspiring and healthy, too. What they’ve done individually has always been prescient, even if it’s not always been popular, and it has all been done in small, resourceful shops like my own. I am not immodestly placing myself in their company, but I am candidly saying that design is a right we—you, me, Marlon, and Ed—can all deliver, and design is the expectation we can all set. Theirs are small practices, just like a majority of AIA member firms. Theirs are resilient firms, too, just like yours if you’re reading this in the few minutes between calls and CAD layers, and actively drumming up business for the quarter ahead.
Thriving in a competitive business climate is hard on a good day, never mind during a recession or the period of limbo we seem to find ourselves in now. We all must chart a way forward in spite of uncertainty and the still-deadly pandemic. But, as long as we remember that design is the expectation, not the exception, there will always be work—and rewards—for architects committed to finding capabilities for their ample abilities.
