matchmaking by committee Public and institutional project types give architects a chance to lose with their self-esteem intact. In a short-listed RFP process, the competition plays out among equally talented firms and the line between winner and losers is more finely drawn. But in a committee-driven scenario where politics, priorities, and personal chemistries converge, the pressure is on.
As an architectural adviser to the board of trustees at Brown University and a past adviser for Smith College, Halsband understands that when institutions send RFPs to selected participants, it means anyone on the list could do the job. “In the case of a good list, I’ve come to understand that it isn’t so much rejection as the final stage of a matchmaking process,” Halsband says. Then, winning the game often comes down to a stab in the dark. Maybe the site moves you, and you’re able to convey that convincingly. Or maybe the group cares most about the building’s interior and you’ve guessed wrong.
“You can usually tell in an interview whether you’re talking about something that no one else gets—on both sides of the table,” Halsband explains. “We do a lot of college and university buildings and are very interested in history and culture and what people are trying to communicate. We’ll have done a huge amount of research on history, and when we walk in and start talking about it, there might be a donor there who’s only interested in making sure this building reflects the grandness of his generosity. You can tell the minute you walk in whether the audience is with you.”
And there are times when name, pedigree, or stylistic preferences trump even the savviest design ideas. “Sometimes this whole thing is done on paper,” Halsband says. “People look at pictures of your work, and they like it or don’t. The world is a big place. Some people want Frank Gehry, some Robert Stern. There’s nothing you can do to transform yourself into one or the other of those people.”
Given the unpredictability of the group mind-meld, many architects also ask why they got the job. And the answers often surprise them. After winning the commission for a university residence hall, DiMella Shaffer’s Hodges learned that a singular statement flipped the interview in his firm’s favor. The university needed 1,000 beds long-term but in the first phase was only planning for 400. “We made them realize they needed to do some master planning for 1,000 beds and decide which 400 to build,” Hodges says. “They realized they were going off in the wrong direction.”
Genell Anderson, AIA, principal of The AMAR Group, Washington, D.C., regularly solicits feedback. In addition to revealing the firm’s strengths and weaknesses, she says the habit “puts the agencies on notice” that she’s tracking the patterns. After a U.S. Department of Transportation debriefing, she learned that she hadn’t played up her team’s engineering skills. And ever since losing a 15-unit tenant conversion that seemed a sure thing, she always brings her team to presentations. “I went by myself, and being a woman, they thought, ‘Can she really do this?’” Anderson says. “The other person came with 10 people, including consultants, and they looked really big.”
In business 12 years, Sebastopol, Calif., architect Katherine Austin, AIA, says her solid relationships with local planning officials have given her an edge in the mixed-use, affordable, and production housing projects that are her bread and butter. Because she’s a former mayor of Sebastopol, she knows city hall inside and out. “I can push the envelope, but I really know there is an envelope,” says Austin, who also chairs the AIA Housing and Custom Residential Advisory Group. Still, she admits she was “grumpy” about a self-help-build multifamily competition she lost years ago. “My schematic site plan took all the civil engineering and public works issues into consideration, and I drew it as I knew it would be eventually approved,” she says. “The firm who got the job had designed a romantic, rosy picture, but they ended up with something almost identical to what I had done. I have a sardonic sense of humor, and in my mind I said to the client, ‘I told you so.’ But I just take it all in stride. I have plenty of work.”
Like two people on a comfortable first date, sometimes a client-architect connection just clicks. “Sometimes the ease they feel with you is more powerful than just ideas,” says Dallas architect Ron Wommack, FAIA. “Ultimately they want to know you kind of like them, you listen to them and care about their project, and you have the same values.” He recalls recent clients who selected him after conducting three interviews with five architects. He figured the job was a long shot because the couple were friends with some of the other candidates. But the clients simply enjoyed the discussion and wanted to continue the conversation.
Even so, when a former client with whom he’d gotten along well bought a building to renovate as a house and gallery, Wommack didn’t get the repeat business. The reason? The owner wanted to try someone different. “We said, well, darn. Sometimes you think you’re working to create relationships but they just want different kinds of experiences.”
What architects come to realize over time is that rejection occurs on different levels—many of them outside their control. Yet all is not lost, Wommack points out, because once a design idea is born, it continues to exist whether the client chooses it or not. “When you’re younger and someone rejects your idea, you think, ‘You can’t appreciate my great thinking here, so I don’t want to work with you,’” he says. “Now we understand that the idea is still there for our use somewhere else, and the perfect project for it comes along. The idea was a little before its time—a precursor to something else.”
