Chuck Thomsen, FAIA, FCMAA

Past Chairman, 3D/I International

4th August 2017

You remain an inspiration at 86. You're still posting articles, consulting, taking time to talk to guys like me; you and your wife just took your new boat from Boston to Houston. How was it?

Thomsen: We had a grand time, from Boston to Houston, in four legs starting in July. Loved it. The secret to old age is to try new things.

“The secret to old age is to try new things.”

The Harvard Medical Journal and my doctor say if you're good at crosswords, that's good, but you gotta do new things to keep your brain active: learn to navigate a boat or learn to play a piano, things like that.

So, my first reaction to your book's topic is that design is really hard to manage…

It's an oxymoron, virtually impossible.

Thomsen: We were at a meeting at 3D/I years ago, and our lead designer got up and drew a Gantt chart–looking thing with bars on the whiteboard and said, “You guys in the construction management world, you've got a dance card with bars and precedent relationships on it, and you know it takes so many days to build a brick wall and that you can increase the number of masons and shorten the days.” It's engineering, calculable, that sort of thing. Design isn't like that. Then he drew a squiggly line that doubled back on itself. [See the diagram in the foreword.]

“My first reaction is that design is really hard to manage.”

In design, there's nothing you can't spend more time on and make better. And you can have an epiphany and go back to start it all over again. I can work on a door detail and the site plan in the same day or discover an aspect – or develop a concept – that will change it all. I can switch back and forth. The process isn't the same at all. Maybe there's some logic to it, but I don't know what it is. The best designers care a lot about their work. You can always spend more time on something to make it better. That's why so many architects work all night before a deadline to do that.

If you're really looking for creative design, it's a great mistake to overmanage it. Or to try to manage design as you would a construction process: with steps along the way progressing in a logical sequence. Designers, as they work on the problem, become more acquainted with it and are inclined to go back and make changes. It's easy to do on paper, hard to do with concrete in the field.

True. Other interviewees describe that aspect.

Thomsen: You can build a continuum, with one extreme being the design that finds its inspiration in the requirements of the program, owner, and project realities. The concept comes from the needs of an owner. At the other end is the architect who develops an aesthetic signature – a style that he or she is known for. With the latter, the form is a given and the function fits within to make a notable piece of architecture (or perhaps a flop).

“It's a great mistake to overmanage it, if you're really looking for creative design.”

I was on Ellerbe's board for a while, and of course, 18 years at CRS, and 24 at 3D/I. Those companies owed their remarkable success to their ability to learn the realities of a building type and their clients. Tom Ellerbe took over his dad's firm when he was, I think, about 28. He had a project with a country doctor named Charles Mayo. I met Tom when he was 96. I asked him what he did to keep a client for 75 years. He said: “Well, we never would have become what we did without the Mayos. We never stopped paying attention to them.” He had to figure out what a hospital was. And it turned Ellerbe into one of the best hospital firms in America.

Do you know the story of the Squatter Sessions at CRS?

Yes, I love them, but don't know the history.

“It was the client intimacy that made them.”

Thomsen: Bill Caudill and John Rowlett were on the faculty at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas. They opened a firm over a grocery store. Bill had done his Master's thesis at MIT on school design, and the young firm won a school project in Blackwell, Oklahoma. They designed a scheme for the owner, who didn't like it. They designed it again and the owner didn't like that one either. So, Bill said, “We're going to go out of business if we don't get this right. So, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take our drawing boards and T-squares and drive to Blackwell and work in their conference room. We're gonna meet with them every two hours until we get it right.” They had a student, Wally Scott. Wally had a car, so he was a necessary part of the team. (And that's where Caudill Rowlett Scott, at one point the largest AE company in the country, got its name.) But the lesson is that they got close to their client – like Tom and the Mayos. Since the project was in Oklahoma, they called the process of working in the client's office a “squatter” and they did it for every project. Their clients really educated them on school design.

When CRS started doing schools in the late 1950s, the baby boomers were reaching school age. CRS's practice boomed with that demographic surge. They figured out how to collaborate with their clients. Client intimacy that made them the country's leading school firm.

Great expression.

Thomsen: That's not mine, it's Tom Peters's. He fell in love with CRS's Squatter process.

Tom Peters exemplifies how the design profession needs to get out of its comfort zone. You said it at the start: try new things!

Thomsen: That concept, developing a trusting relationship with a client, made CRS, Ellerbe, and 3D/I. Ellerbe developed it with the Mayos and it made Tom's firm. CRS did it with the Squatters design process. Soon after Vic Neuhaus started his firm, Neuhaus and Taylor (3D/I's predecessor), a friend, Gerry Hines, said he wanted to get in the development business and build warehouses. Vic designed it and everything else Gerry did for years. They figured out what a good office building was. Their collaboration was critical to 3D/I's future and their dominance of office building design in the '70s.

Part of managing design is finding a way to truly understand a client's business, like Ellerbe, CRS, and 3D/I. To do it is difficult. You look at a market and figure out how you're gonna learn it. Recognizing demographic shifts and getting to know your client are key.

Those ideas are still so valid. We're doing that at Holder with data centers – a building type developed recently – and we're leading the way in learning that business and how it's different for each client. Someone else will come along with the next shift, building, or client type, and blaze a trail. Maybe it's repurposing buildings or shopping malls…

“Writing it down made the design team understand.”

Thomsen: When Lean construction emerged, those ideas were already embedded in CRS's processes. Remember the A3 sheets? A Lean construction concept is that every issue and solution should be condensed to one A3 sheet. Make it simple. We used “Snow Cards.” During a squatter session, the client or someone else would say something important, and instead of burying it in a report it was written on a 5x7 card with a magic marker and pinned on the wall. The joke was you “snowed” the client by making them feel like you understood their need by feeding back what they said. But the reality was writing it down made the design team understand. It was one way that Bill Caudill managed design.

It showed you heard them.

Thomsen: Right. The squatter sessions made sense because the process always had a deadline. You could always work on something longer, but it set a limit. I wrote a report – more like a diary – on a week-long squatter session once. They always started on Monday morning, but by Wednesday, it was a complete breakdown – a train wreck. On Monday, we started out with a lovely meeting, everybody's friends, we set goals. On Tuesday, we're underway. By Wednesday night, a design concept emerged, and we're way over budget! By Thursday, somebody was saying we need to put off the presentation. But instead, we work all night and meet the deadline, and everybody is in love again. Both the client and the team feel like veterans from the same war.

I've done “wallpaper jobs” – filling the walls with information – and used the cards. George Heery called those sessions Pre-Design Project Analyses. I still preach them and do them whenever I can. As CMs, sometimes we think a good kickoff meeting is: “Hi, I'm Chad your project manager. We need to buy precast next month, so we need your drawings next week.” What happened to: Who are you? Our common goals? Our mission? How to communicate and work together? A plan?

“That sounds ‘goody-goody,’ but it's true.”

Thomsen: You're so right. My son is a contractor, a grandson is in real estate development, another a contractor. Contractors see their work as manageable, “time-able.” And design isn't that at all. But design has to support it. When Total Quality Management emerged, everybody said quality was doing everything once. Well, that's bullshit! Design is looking at 15 variations. You have to know you can say, “All those are rotten. Let's do 15 more.”

I like to be the contrarian and say we need to do things “many times ‘wrong,’” adding certainty as we know more.

“Projects that have a good project definition cost 17% less than the average. Those that don't cost 20% more.”

Thomsen: You have to know every process is different and help each other as best you can. Ed Merrow's firm, Independent Project Analysis in Vienna, Virginia, maintains a large database. Ed told me projects that have a good project definition cost 17% less than the average. Those that don't cost 20% more. I repeated that every time I made a presentation to construction professionals. I asked: “Do you believe it?” People nodded. CII, the industry's leading research organization, created the Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI.) Clear understanding before you start is important to get good results. Although the PDRI should be redesigned for each project. The concept is good.

“We need to do things ‘many times, wrong’ with increasing certainty, until we know more.”

I've pushed something I call “ScopeDoc ” to define project scope. PDRI covers everything: services, roles, responsibilities, and project. ScopeDoc focuses only on scope of work. I was at CIFE in Stanford a few years back. An industrial-systems engineer described design as “isolating the variables and using repeat processes.” I said, “Design's not like that.” He argued, “Every building has a roof, doesn't it? Footings? Floors? Walls?” He was trying to get us to use checklists. I agreed. Designers do too much intuitively. We get sets of drawings with no mention of half the scope or systems. “We're only in SD or DD,” they say. “Fine, but if you can't tell me what kind of roof you're thinking about, how can I estimate it?” I'm a proponent of industry checklists, like CSI, not to constrain creativity, but to augment our brains for the rote parts, and add rigor.

Thomsen: Yes. Suddenly, there are so many people. Literally thousands that create little bits of information or service – users, owners, subconsultants. We had 35 subconsultants on one project and the contractor had 75 subcontractors. You've got to get the goals clear, so everybody knows what to do, and contribute at the right time. And guess what? As the future unfolds, the process is going to get even bigger and more complicated!

When I presented at the AIA's “Future of Practice” conference in Washington D.C., the prevailing mantra was: “We architects must return to being the master builders!” I stood up and said: “That's crazy. No one knows that much. It takes teams. We don't care who's in charge, or who works for whom.” Despite the grousing and griping, no one's willing to change. If you started a project or firm tomorrow, what would you change to make it a success?

“If I had it all to do over again, I'd spend more time on that.”

Thomsen: The “soft stuff” of management is important. We saw the extreme in new project delivery strategies going from Design/Bid/Build to CM, Design/Build to IPD, and Qualifications-based. All these are trying to create new relationships between architects and contractors. That's the soft stuff. It's more a social construct. I'd work to build those relationships in a culture where no one can be allowed to fail. That sounds “goody-goody,” but it's true.

Ann Lamott ’s book Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy is about letting your guard down, thanking and being nice to others, maybe even when they don't deserve it, because you probably had moments when someone did that for you. We've tried the adversarial thing. It hasn't worked.

Thomsen: Right! Believe it or not, we had a really hard time knowing if we were doing a good job. Here we were, the CEOs, COOs, CFOs, the C-suite, the top of the company, and we couldn't figure out if we were doing a good job. Our clients didn't tell us we weren't performing. They didn't want to alienate our people they were working with. Our project team wasn't inclined to tell us if we were screwing up either. We couldn't measure the quality of our performance accurately. I finally figured out how: I'd simply ask our project manager if he liked our client. Feelings are so reciprocal. If our PM says: “Our client is difficult, I can't get him to respond,” or something else critical, we knew we were in trouble. If our PM says something positive like, “He's a good person,” I know I'll get a similar response from our client. It's amazingly consistent.

If you create a collaborative relationship, where it's a cultural standard to befriend and help everyone, and be trustworthy, you've created the atmosphere that produces successful projects. But who talks about these things? Who teaches those skills? If I had it all to do over again, I'd spend more time on that.

Most of us didn't get into design and construction because we were psychologists, but it's much of what we do. Your perspective is invaluable. The principles you share were applicable 30 years ago and still are. I think they will be 30 years from now.

Thomsen: I'm delighted to hear that. I'm happy to talk to you anytime.

INTERVIEW

21st September 2017

We're talking about extremes. On one hand there's the iterative, messy, process that erodes confidence in designers meeting schedules and budgets. At the other extreme are those who embrace rigor, and things like BIM. What has your approach to managing design been?

Willis: I started my career long before BIM. My firm was the very first to use the computer to do in-house programming, creating software we called CARLA, Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis. That was 1971, before the desktop computer, Microsoft, Apple, or Google. In the '70s, as part of our programming efforts, we had to become knowledgeable about systems analysis, which was new, and preceded coding. Coding was a more European approach. But what systems did for us, all stages of our work, was allow us to analyze the process and create matrix forms that could be filled out. This was useful for cost estimating, schedule, controls, and that sort of thing. But on a bigger level, since even before I started practice in 1966, the design, engineering, and construction world has changed dramatically.

“BIM, from my standpoint, is a bit old fashioned.”

When I started, projects were relatively small. A 12-story building was considered a high-rise. The architect did design, cost estimating, construction supervision, and construction management – the old-fashioned idea of the architect as the “master builder.” Over the years, my projects have grown increasingly until today, they're mammoth, in terms of size and the teams – the architects, engineers, and constructors it takes to deal with them. In that process, the architectural community has become increasingly specialized, giving tasks to specialists in cost estimating, environmental analysis, and other specialties. The architect's role, as I see it, has increasingly become one of organization, planning, and conceptual design, because even some large, well-known, so-called “expert” firms can do schematic design, but not the detailed drawings. That's usually farmed out to a young, high-tech firm that can apply all sorts of computer analysis.

BIM, from my standpoint, is a bit old-fashioned, because the prevailing software today is essentially using the intranet, where the global firms can work 24/7, day and night, simultaneously, and the consultants can too, simultaneously. That model developed on the intranet can drive production in the factory, cutting steel or stone, so the accuracy is incredible. That's where we are in meeting the large project challenges that take a variety of talents and firms to execute them.

“To be successful you need a wide range of knowledge.”

You suggest an increasing need for management in the architect's role, if nothing more than in organization, choreography, and conducting larger, more complex teams.

Willis: I want to emphasize the planning. Somebody has to develop a program and lay it out. That is the work of the architect. The first step on any project. Know the objectives, the people they serve, and how that flows together. That's a challenge if you're trying to do it without a leader. From there, you have the plan and can assess the budget and make management decisions. When you have a relationship with a client and can say you meet their objectives, then you can begin to do design.

Early feasibility testing, and project definition as design management starting points. What advice would you give aspiring architects entering the profession today?

“We have to deal with the results of that research by a whole range of disciplines. Architects making their mark today are the ones who have knowledge about the specialties, the new materials …”

“We were really sort of a ‘post-and-beam’ crowd. It's a different world today.”

Willis: To be successful, you need a wide range of knowledge. More than what you'll get in a typical design education. You have to understand business, development, and different aspects. In my case, because we pioneered a system for environmental assessment, we had to learn about biology, flora, fauna, and a different range of issues not normally considered architectural design. For example, a firm came up with the idea that instead of spending millions to clean up the Hudson River, just toss in a lot of oysters, and they'll clean it up. The relationship between biology and architecture came up with a better – a cheaper – solution for environmental work. We're at a point in history where the research of all sorts of disciplines is coming to a single point, and we deal with the results of that whole range.

Architects making their mark today know the specialties, new materials, how to use structure in a different way, how to use the natural environment, and weave it into architecture. That's where it's going. As a young person in school today, you need to understand how biology, architecture, and chemically based materials interweave. It's an expansion of knowledge in architecture and engineering we didn't see in my day. We were really sort of a “post-and-beam” crowd. It's a different world today.

Fewer things can be done intuitively, based on what an individual can know. You're saying there's room for those who go beyond boundaries and create value and expertise, and for organizers, planners, and generalists. Designers can't do it all themselves anymore; they need specialists.

Willis: It's like the conductor leading the orchestra. In my day, it was still the conductor leading the orchestra, but today the conductor has a far more complex music to conduct.

And a larger orchestra, with more tools, complexity, pressure – and less-prepared clients, and always less time.

Willis: Exactly.