Above Average: Understanding the Breadth of an Architect’s Capital
Just as 80% of people think they are smarter than average, most architects feel they are far more unique than they are. They just need to rethink what makes them unique.
OMA’s programmatic diagram of its China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters (2012) in Beijing is useful for my argument as an analogy to the 8 kinds of capital an architecture firm needs to quantify and track. Similar to the various kinds of capital that define a singular firm, this diagram illustrates how various elements need to come together and form a singular piece of architecture.
I find myself wondering what the equivalent number is in Canadian architecture. If you polled every registered practitioner in this country and asked them to honestly rate their firm’s design intelligence against their peers, the result would, I suspect, be similarly absurd. Eighty percent above average sounds about right. Possibly higher. We are, after all, a profession trained to inflate our egos.
Every architecture firm believes it is unique. This is, statistically, not possible. They may produce competent work. Some may produce excellent work. A genuinely small number produce work that is identifiably distinctive — work that could not have come from anywhere else. Or, simply put, work that shifts our understanding of architecture. But “unique” is a claim almost no one can substantiate, and yet almost everyone makes.
The problem starts with the language. “Unique value proposition” is the phrase the industry has settled on, and it deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Is what we sell truly unique? Often, the services of an architecture firm overlap considerably with those of the other three firms on a project's shortlist. And is an architect’s work truly valuable? Sometimes, but the claim of value is difficult to define. A valuable service might be a “good deal” to a client, especially if a firm low-balled their bid to get the job. On the other hand, isn’t a firm that charges an above-average fee really marketing itself as something “better” than the industry norm? A principal of a firm can convince herself that her fees are worth it because of the care and thought that goes into the design of the project. I’m sympathetic to that situation. I’m also sympathetic to a firm that complains about fees not being high enough, because if they somehow ran a leaner architecture firm, they would conceivably lack the technical, design, and political savvy to operate at the highest and most competitive levels. Ultimately, it just takes a lot of effort to be smart in architecture. It is also humbling to realize that being really smart is just the cost of keeping up. Staying ahead of everyone else is even harder.
I have spent the last several months building a framework that takes this gap seriously. I’m calling it Standing. Adapted from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the various forms of capital — and extended to suit the realities of Canadian public-sector procurement. This fascination of mine is a little tongue-in-cheek? After all, we were intellectually bathing in Bourdieu back in architecture school! But Bourdieu is an interesting inspiration for his work, which emphasizes how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, might preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth — or even outright lie — that our contemporary post-industrial, late-stage capitalist society actually has us believe that equality of opportunity and high social mobility is actually achieved through formal education. So much for that RAIC Gold Medal you might have won upon graduation at the University of Waterloo.
As for my own examination of how to score a firm’s overall “capital” (social and otherwise), I have begun developing a process to assess a firm’s capital across eight dimensions: economic, cultural, social, symbolic, technical, political, cultural acuity, and narrative. Eight capitals, each with its own sources of legitimacy, each with its own method of compilation. If you’re still with me, think back again to architecture school when you had classmates who were really good at design, but the design lacked context — or even buildability. Other students excelled at technical competencies, even though their designs lacked vision — and most annoyingly, they rarely pulled an all-nighter before a crit. There were also the students who understood programming, or the ability to relate their work to a cultural zeitgeist. When running a contemporary practice, we need all of these people in an office. That, in effect, is why we also need to track eight dimensions of a firm’s overall “capital.”
The point of the exercise is not to flatter. It is to disaggregate. A firm that describes itself as “design-led, community-rooted, and sustainability-focused” describes, in some permutation, every architect’s website. Plus, they are making an undefended claim. The eight capitals split the claim. Where, exactly, is the design legitimacy? In what awards, in which publications, on which juries? Where is the community track record? Which First Nations benefitted, which equity-deserving partners were served, and over how many years? Where is the technical depth? In which certified buildings, with which post-occupancy data, with which embodied-carbon receipts?
It can be a frightening experience for most firms to undergo this process. It is not a traumatic experience for most firms to discover they are not unique, but it is quite a challenge for them to realize they are coherent in some areas of practice and incoherent in others. They are strong in technical capital and thin in narrative. Or rich in social capital and underdeveloped in the symbolic. Or — and this is the most common finding — entirely respectable across six of the eight capitals and unable to produce a single piece of evidence in the remaining two. This is normal! This is not only part of being human, but evolving as a firm.
Ironically, this process is actually what defines the uniqueness of each and every firm. This is not a failure. It is a portrait. And this is a far more useful structural process to build than what a firm’s marketing team can come up with because it tells the principal something actionable: not “are we unique” (almost certainly not) but “what kind of firm are we, and what kind of firm would we like to become?” The eight capitals also have the virtue of being testable and quantifiable. Awards are public. Project credits are public. Publications are searchable. Relationships, capabilities, and engagements can be inventoried. The only capital that resists external scrutiny is the “symbolic” — the capital your firm’s name signals to the outside world.
I suspect the resistance to this kind of audit will come from the firms that need it most. Practices with genuine distinction tend to be relaxed about evidence; their evidence speaks for itself. It is the firms living off rhetoric who object to having the rhetoric examined. I have a saying for this. I call the rims who live off rhetoric the “B-plus divas” for they are the firms that demand media and the world pay attention to their unique brilliance, whereas the firms that operate at the “A-level” are more readily understood for their uniqueness, their capital, for that matter, and even, dare I say, their “unique value proposition.”
OK. So, for argument’s sake, 80% of Canadian architects, on present trends, will continue to believe they are above average. That is human, and probably permanent. The value of a framework I like to use with my clients to understand the extent of their capital is the willingness to look at one’s own practice and ask: capital by capital, where is the proof, what can we improve upon, and what kind of firm do we wish to be?
The answer, in my experience, is almost always more interesting than the wish!
In the News…
Chodikoff & Ideas: Architecture firms that communicate clearly win more work. For more than 25 years, Ian Chodikoff has helped architecture and real estate firms find the words — and the strategy — to make their work matter to the people who need to hear it. I bring editorial acuity, institutional knowledge, and lateral thinking to every engagement. Whether you are a mid-sized firm trying to differentiate in a crowded market or a startup working to align climate-positive innovations with policy conversations, reach out to me so that I can help you communicate with precision and purpose.
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