Going Abroad

You might find yourself with really good craftsmen who don’t have the ability to read drawings or understand a construction sequence. Sometimes, you just don’t have the craftsmanship. European companies will come to Turkey or other countries in the Middle East and bring Western techniques and expertise to a project. But for residents, that’s a big step to take. It adds an immense amount of cost.

What was the biggest surprise of designing a house in Turkey?

It did surprise me that pretty good builders had real difficulty figuring out how to build from our drawings. We had just taken it for granted, right? You produce a set of plans, sections, elevations, a few details, stuff you learned in school, stuff you do day in, day out. The builder gives you a price, puts the building up, might make a few mistakes, but by and large, the project gets built as intended. People are very polite, so they don’t tell you they don’t get it, they just start building it oddly.

You end up having a much more intimate relationship with the builder. And you end up pulling your own drawings apart and re-drawing them a bit more like Ikea assembly drawings or instructions: You start at step one, and at the end of the steps, you have a product. It wasn’t uninteresting. And in the end, we developed architectural drawings to a very high level in a very complicated climate. Turkey is a much simpler climate. The traditions are thousands of years old. And you can build a pretty good house from a sketch as long as it’s out of masonry and it’s rectilinear, so you don’t need the fancy drawings.

What about from a business perspective? Are there benefits or detriments to designing houses abroad?

It’s a little tricky to find a basis for setting fees. In North America, most fees are some percent of construction costs. Not that that’s a good system or that it’s fair, but the system works here because construction costs vary, to some degree: New York is probably two or three times as expensive as parts of New Mexico. You can get a sense of how much work there is likely to be by getting some handle on how much construction will cost. But in the Middle East and other parts of the world, say South America, sometimes construction costs a tenth of what it would here. So if you charge a normal percentage on the construction costs in that country, and still pay your staff and your sellers, your fee is infinitesimally small. But if you use a benchmark of how much the building would cost in North America as a way to calculate fees, it can also be difficult. When we did a clinic in Cambodia, our fees were three times as much as the cost of the building—the building was just so cheap to construct.

I think it’s neither good nor bad business. If the project turns out well, it’s good business. There are many more ways for things to go wrong in foreign countries. People tell stories about problems they’ve encountered in places that they just don’t know very well. That’s an occupational risk. But I also think that’s just common sense.

Can you push the design envelope more in projects abroad or in the U.S?

That’s a question that is less relevant to the country of project than it is to the particular client. We had an ambitious and sophisticated client for this house in Turkey, and we were able to push things pretty far. But it wasn’t because it was Turkey, it was because it was a client who was willing to do that.