The influence of built environment on people’s well-being, their happiness and productivity, has been tremendously underestimated over the past decades. One of the reasons for such ignorance is a steep decline in architect’s profession and its role in modern space creation.
The architectural profession is inherently very broad, it embraces and fuses elements of art, science, history, philosophy, and anthropology… However, today its unique complexity has fallen apart into multiple fragments, each being highly specialized: interior design, landscape design, spatial navigation, etc. Architects find it hard to thrive in their profession, when being judged from utility and return on investment perspectives, but this is what reality dictates.
Development process of a modern office building would normally be comprised of the following steps. First, lawyers confirm project’s compliance with municipal guidelines, and get the green light to launch the construction. Then investors and lenders put in the capital, and the process takes off. Engineers do the construction work, interior designers work on common spaces. At some stage, a branding agency is asked to come up with a meaningful name for the project. Next, property managers come on stage. Their job now is to identify potential tenants, put together a compelling marketing strategy and start filling the building.
In a development process like this, the architectural profession simply does not find any meaningful application. An architect’s mission is to convey a message, to embed an emotion into a physical structure, harmonizing it with surrounding landscape and spirit of the local community. Unfortunately, all of that is hard to translate into a viable return on investments case.
From a property managers’ or investors’ perspective, an ideal tenant’s profile would be an S&P 500 company, willing to sign a 10 years lease contract, take over their new office space at the “shell & core” stage, and take care of planning layout, interior design and furnishing. An office building filled with such tenants is a sweet darling for both – property investors and facility managers. No wonder why such buildings have spread all over the world. Today, visiting a regional office of some global corporation in Shanghai, New York or Lagos, one would not find much difference in how they look.
Concepts such as “product design,” “user experience,” and “customer journey” are more conventional and applicable in today’s reality, but in a way, they are still rooted into holistic nature of architecture. Those concepts have been widely adopted across B2C industries, but commercial real estate did not happen to be among those adopters.
Perhaps, part of the problem lays in the CRE industry’s twofold nature: office spaces are being rented by companies, therefore the sales process is taking place within the B2B domain. However, the final users are the employees, who typically do not get engaged in decision making process when it comes to renting an office space. No wonder, that employees do not have any kind of connection or admiration for their workplace. They see their office as a work process tool, where their desks and computers are installed, where they need to arrive at a certain time, check in, do what is needed, check out and leave. The bar of people’s expectations from their office space is so low, that office buildings became a commoditized product with a very primitive “dollar per square foot” pricing model.
COVID-19 crisis has put us into the midst of a perfect storm, when many conventional frameworks got destroyed in a matter of days. Who could have foreseen that a virus could cause so much turbulence and so dramatically destroy value of the “most secure” asset class – office real estate. Speaking about invisible power of a virus, it’s very visible effects in the built environment, and the role of an architect in all of this, a curious analogy pops up.
“Deconstructivism” is a movement in architecture, which emerged in the end of 20th century. Its approach to designing a building or a space is in disassembling a conventional physical form and reassembling the fragments in a new way, which makes the new structure look chaotic, asymmetric, and unorthodox. One’s aesthetic sense and habitual perception of a physical space are challenged. New ways to explore, understand, and utilize the space present themselves.
Architectural Deconstructivism was inspired by the theory of Deconstruction, developed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In a very simple form, his core thesis is the following: the way in which a certain object is constructed derives from a series of precedent events, and is not defined by our present need. In other words, there is no “true essence” in a building in its current form; this is only a concept of a building, which we inherited and follow unconsciously. Therefore, any object can be traced back to its modules and submodules, deconstructed and then put back together into an object with a very different look, characteristics and applications.
Derrida himself called deconstruction “a virus” in architecture, the sole purpose of which was to attack existing order of things, destroy conventional organization and release the natural chaos of processes, so that they could be reorganized in new ways, less rigid, more dynamic and embracing complexity.
Watching how the Novel corona virus has triggered fundamental changes in all spheres of our lives (built environment being just one of them), wouldn’t one draw parallels with Derrida’s vision of how a virus attack can reshuffle pieces of physical world puzzle and out them back together, creating something completely new? And if so, it would be very interesting to see, whether real estate development business would finally turn an eye on architectural profession and recognize its value in creating the unique immersive experience – elevated “user experience.” After all, talented architects, who remain truly devoted to their profession, are the ones who can save the day for commercial property owners. They are the ones who can breathe new life into dead spaces, reinvent them, make them appealing to human feelings, trigger people’s emotional attachment to the space, making them come back again and again. And hopefully, this inspirational input to people’s wellbeing will soon convert into high occupancy rates and attractive yields for investors.
Photo in the header by Paul Gaudriault on Unsplash