Fabricating Income

FABRICATING INCOME

prospects and possibilities

By: Jeff Hudak

The architectural profession has suffered as a whole with the recent economic downturn. Developers are halting or completely scrapping projects that have been in the works for years. New home buyers are much more scarce than they were even four years ago. People are pinching pennies and skimping on design where they can. What does this mean for the Architectural profession?

Large corporate architectural firms, whose staff number in the hundreds, took action by promptly evaluating their staff and making sweeping layoffs. Interns and Senior staff alike were shown the door when work began to run low and economic numbers started to plummet. In December 2008, Crain's Chicago Business reported that some Chicago-area firms were laying off 10 percent to 30 percent of staff, with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) cutting more than 100 people from its Chicago office.

Architecture firms who regularly employ twenty to eighty staff and architects were also forced to take action. Some firms took the route of layoffs while others, intent on keeping their employees, asked employees to take pay cuts, shortened work weeks, and instituted mandatory furloughs. Some firms have been able to remain relatively busy by aggressively going after project types outside their office’s normal scope and experience.

The practice of design-fabricate takes the mentality of design-build and allows architects and designers to have full control over the final product. No change orders, bidding process, labor strikes, substituted materials, or any of the other issues that cause architects to pull at their hair. A weld was poorly finished on a railing? Take it to the shop and refinish the piece yourself. Decide that a room should be a few feet longer? Move the wall. This approach to architecture obviously lends itself to smaller projects, not likely larger than a residence or a small commercial building. A construction knowledgebase, skill in many trades, and the desire to construct is required for this venture. This fact alone tends to keep many people from taking this route. However, this does allow an office to provide design services that are more in-depth and personalized for specific situations. So what firms are taking this approach and succeeding? The following five firms are taking the leap and swinging the hammer.

SHoP

With the economic crunch the design-build office model has become an increasingly viable business option. Having the ability to manage costs more directly for clients has made design-build firms even more attractive in the recent years. Some firms such as SHoP Architects have embraced this approach since their more recent beginning. The staff of architects, designers, and construction management professionals allows SHoP to provide quality buildings with controlled costs while reducing, if not eliminating, the dreadful value engineering cutbacks. The office of SHoP includes both a professional office setting and a workspace for ful scale mock-ups and fabrication. The firm’s philosophy is obvious with a quick visit to their website where large text immediately announces that, “Building buildings is better than talking about buildings” and, “How it’s built doesn’t matter except when it’s the only thing that matters.” With a staff that has grown to more than sixty people in the recent years, this firm’s approach to design and building has afforded them many jobs even in the current market.

REPP Design + Construction

Repp design is a small architectural design firm located in Tucson, AZ. As a firm of seven people they have taken large steps towards becoming a design-fabricate office. Currently three carpenters and a mason work for the firm, some shifting between drafting and hammer swinging. Repp’s simplified material pallet on projects has allowed them to minimize the amount of subcontracting required on each job. A regionalistic approach is strictly adhered to in all projects that are undertaken by this firm. They commonly use industrial materials, with high thermal mass, to create a thermal buffer for the hot climate while providing a structure that will easily last the next 50 years.

El Dorado Architects

El Dorado Architects embodies large amounts of the fabrication that is required for many of their projects which regularly involve custom steel and wood fabrication. Based in Kansas City, MO the office of eleven employees spends half their time in the office and half of the time in the shop/field. With steel being the primary structural component in Kansas City much of El Dorado’s projects include hours spent at the welder and grinding stations fabricating primary components for their structures. Since they have their own fabrication shop projects of all sizes coexist regularly. The firm culture is one of adapting constantly and not being branded as a certain primary typology. According to their website they have no mission statement as they feel this would limit them. A diverse pallet of projects including residential, multi-family, studio additions, retail, professional offices, restaurants, public signage, and lighting exhibits are all projects that they have taken on. This willingness to be flexible, alert, and adaptive has proved to be a good way for an office to get through difficult economic times. While not adhering to a certain typology, a clean modern elegance can be seen in all projects designed and fabricated by El Dorado.

Face Design + Fabrication

Face design is a small design build firm with six to eight employees in Brooklyn, NY. Their primarily focus is residential design elements including lighting fixtures, stairways, overall space design, and even a few homes. They also have worked in the public realm as they consulted for and fabricated Shephen Holl’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City. The project replaced the existing building facade with a series of twelve panels that pivot vertically or horizontally to open the entire length of the gallery directly onto the street. Remaining flexible is the key to the small fabrication/design facility. Taking on projects of all scales and end users has kept Face fresh and wanted in NYC.

Freecell

Freecell is a design and fabrication practice specializing in small-scale comissions in NYC and in select locations nationwide. Founded in 1999, have designed and built over 30 projects including private residences, office spaces, and retail stores. They offer services that include schematic design, construction drawings, project administration, and in-house fabrication. We are committed to providing innovative design on time and on budget. Principal Lauren Crahan, who has worked at Rafael Viioly Architects and Weiss/Manfredi, explained that “it makes the firm integrate it's thinking about structure, material, and form in a way that would otherwise be difficult: On big projects, the process was typically linearrfrom schematics to design development, then all right, time to detail it. This approach is more of a stew, in which you have to consider all the pieces at once.” “Fabricating also makes sense on a practical level. You can solve problems in a way that you just can't on a computer. Besides, at the end of the day AutoCad just can't satisfy your curiosity.” By considering themselves a “fabrication” practice Freecell has been commissioned projects that are not the typical project for architects. Moistscape is an example of their “outside architecture” projects which was installed at the Henry Urbach Gallery, New York NY in 2004. The project was designed “As an opportunity to explore the play of the natural within the artificial, we constructed a three-dimensional steel matrix inset with panels of living mosses and enclosed within by translucent volume.” Visitors are provided a space to explore where “the underside is as telling as the topside. Moistscape allows visitors to experience the play in scale from the miniature of the floating mossy landscape to the actual one of the installation as a whole.” By combining art, architecture, and fabrication Freecell has found a constant stream of work over the past few years and seems to only be gaining momentum.

Photography Credit: Ron Amstutz

One can imagine that some day some of these design / build / deliver firms may feel held back by their shop, forcing them to design only what they know they can fabricate. However, for the time being many of these young workshop-oriented design firms are raising expectations by deploying detail oriented one-off designs into the public and private realms. With each new project constructed, they are helping to rid us of the drab, catalog picked, building accessories that have taken over architecture.