Hello How To,

From, Fan of Failsafes

Dear Fan,

The major religions would like a word with you. But if earthly solutions are okay, then social pressure will be your key. Bad behaviour usually happens in secret, so implementing radically transparent structures and processes, like publishing your financial records or regularly doing public audits—at the local bar or library perhaps—will make sure you have enough people to answer to inside and outside of your practice, your friends, and your family. Give as many people as possible the tools to keep you accountable.

Not ready for full financial nudity? Start small. Does everyone in your office know how much their labor costs to clients? Are some employees more expensive than others? Don’t be afraid to have a meeting where you ask the project team to raise their hands if they can afford a unit in the residential scheme they’re working on. The results might be depressing, but it’s a healthy first step. Increasing the financial literacy of your team could be a good first step towards solidifying an internal moral compass.

Deciding to keep your practice small can be transformative, though you will have to constantly resist the urge to grow and probably even turn down some lucrative opportunities—unless, that is, you can find temporary alliances to let you take them on without changing who you are. Growth doesn’t have to come from greed. Many practices grow just trying to find stability. How will you define success? Every practice has its own sweet spot.

Trusts, co-ops, and collective models of decision-making can also help since they instantly increase the number of people who would have to be tempted. Create permanent board seats for local community members. Formal codes of ethics are good but binding, legally-enforceable bylaws are better. You could ban profits, of course: incorporating as a non-profit or charity is supposed to do that. So be strict with yourself. You might enjoy it.

Yours, A Financial Exhibitionist

Dear How To,

From, Questioning Quantification

Dear Questioning,

Good news! You have a conscience. Bad news! Your question has great currency but no established methodology. Yet the subjectivity of ethics can be a productive clash against the false objectivity of our capitalist system.

Time is valuable so make $$$, yes, but how much? Be specific about the who, what, when, where, and why(s) of the impact. Invest where your core values are at. You can’t please everyone. Eternal growth is also a myth. Maybe projects aren’t supposed to be profitable forever. Design a responsible fade-out plan to curb your greed. Also, you said it first: reusing material can be a great way to trace the political economy of space(s) and reveal injustices that trickle up and down the supply chain. It might be even more radical to never build anything new again. Maintenance is a design practice too.

Do not underestimate the power of accumulated evidence. Each new project builds credibility of the model that produced it. Work with friends! Put yourself out there, and let others make decisions about what to value. You care a lot. But care and control are twins, so share the care (and the control).

Start by valuing all forms of labour. The dominant system tells us that everything can be priced, yet people like Jason Moore in Cheap Nature pinpoint the kinds of unpaid and undervalued work done by humans and the environment. Read works by feminist economists like Marilyn Waring and Vandana Shiva. Paying for carbon offsets and green premiums is only the beginning. These begin to compensate the environment for supplying fresh air, sunshine, and water. We may never know how crucial bee pollination is for our lives. Speaking of bees, cash is worth nothing to them. Here’s a revelation: maybe some value systems are incommensurable and that’s okay. Maybe it’s impossible to quantify trust, empathy, and kinship. The gifts of the environment are priceless.

Sincerely, Heterotopia Hippie

(Pair with Cleo Sol’s “Don’t Let It Go To Your Head.”)

So you want to become an architect-developer? A world of self-determination and cradle-to-cradle project control awaits. But first, some training is required to expand your un-hyphenated architectural know-how. Repeat after me: I am no longer a service provider.

The professionals at New-Hyphen-Horizons are here to teach new skills and a new attitude. We are the market leaders in masterclass training for people who want to self-actualize as architect-developers. All seven of our previous customers say:

“Since attending New-Hyphen-Horizons masterclass sessions, I have found a new sense of agency and motivation.”

“Before I did the New-Hyphen-Horizons masterclasses I thought the architect-developer was just a career upgrade but now I realize it’s much more than that; it’s a state of mind. It gave me superpowers I didn’t even know I needed. I can’t wait to go out there and show the world what I can do!”

Dear How To,

Sincerely, Questioning My Value

Dear Questioning,

You’ve probably tried googling it. Didn’t find much? There’s a hidden cost to being known as an architect-developer, a sense that it could exclude your practice from important competitions or anything where the purity of your architectural virtue could be questioned. So most architect-developers are exceedingly modest about it. They’ve got to keep all options open, so they prefer to silently ninja in the shadows.

The good news is that almost all architect-developers will admit what they are if you ask them straight up. The trick is getting them on the phone. So pick a few of your favourite firms and call them up pretending to be a client looking for an investment project. (Can you fake an older voice? Do it. Explain you “don’t understand email.”) Get a partner on the phone and ask them to tell you about their experience managing the development side. Have they ever invested their own capital in a project?

Another sign that a practitioner is potentially an architect-developer is that their practice publishes loads of projects without listing clients. Or, depending on where you are, look for corporate information, which is often published online. If two companies share corporate officers or board members, you might have found a match. A development firm (a numbered corporation will use numbers for a name) that shares the same address as an architecture firm is another obvious hint. Some registries will even let you browse by location or search by address.

Good luck, Hunting

Dear How To,

From, Communist Architect

Dear Communist,

You’re in a bind, comrade. Maybe pinning your political identity to an early twentieth-century concept authored by a member of the West London bourgeoisie is restricting your ability to develop more genuinely disruptive models of architect-developer practice? Could this be a moment to unlearn and consider how you best want to define yourself in the future?

Principles come at a price. Can you afford yours at this moment in time? Many can’t and instead make decisions based on what is right for their families and their wider communities.

There are models of development that don’t have to be economically extractive. Although it seems like you have no good moves forward, remember that your architectural training, at its best, is a practice of critical proposition. A design tool where you can speculate and then deliver an alternative vision of the future—this is what you should do now. Rather than seeing your work as a personal political project, approach it as a design project instead. If the biggest constraint is your lack of access to capital, which in turn restricts your ability to access land, then maybe owning land is not essential or even desirable for your architect-developer practice. In the longer term you can look at setting up a community-led housing organization. There are many models and forms this might take. Community Land Trusts (CLT) tend to be among the most trusted by public landowners in the UK. Therefore, it’s a good model for opening up more opportunities to access land and funding support. Find key organizations that you can partner with or that you can be supported or mentored by. Start with people that have already achieved what you are setting out to do—they will be generous with their time. Trust in people.

It is understandable that when forming as a group, people connect best to others with similar cultures, ages, and professions. Resist this urge. Commit to making your project as diverse and representative of the local area that you will be building in. More often than not, architect-developer projects locate themselves in new places with lower land values, accelerating gentrification, and cultural extraction. This will no doubt be scary and is not without risk. Document the process rigorously and share as much as you can with the public. It will help you stay motivated and you may even find another new community from it.

From, Providing a Public Service

Can you smell that?

• Where does the garbage and recycling go?
• What is the most common sidewalk planting on your street?
• Which way is north?
• Where does the tap water come from?
• Name five plant and bird species native to the area.
• How deep is your building’s foundation?
• Name five vegetables currently in season.
• Where does your electricity/gas come from?
• What was on your site 50 years ago? 150 years?
• Where is the closest park?

Hello dear friend!

• What are your neighbours’ names?
• How old are the buildings around you?
• What are the demographics of the area? (age, gender, race)
• Which public transport stop (bus, subway, bike share) is used the most? And the least?
• Where is the grocery store? Donation store?
• Where is the public toilet? Public library? Water fountain?
• Who are the closest builders and suppliers?
• Which bar is the local favourite?
• Where can you get a free mask/vaccine/COVID test?

Hold on, I know who to call

• Who are your local political candidates and what is their affiliation?
• Who are your regional/federal representatives?
• Which newspaper subscription is the majority preference?
• What is the local building standard?
• What are the local unions and co-ops?
• Who do you call (because you never call the cops)?

Almighty dollar

• What’s the local property tax?
• What are the highest and lowest ends of the income spectrum in the area?
• What’s the local minimum-wage law?
• How much has average rent increased in the past five years? What does daycare cost?
• What is the student-teacher ratio of the closest public school?
• Where/to whom are your profits going?

Scoring

0-5 You seem a bit lost! Go outside and talk to people. Stop development until you get more in touch. Maybe return to the research phase.

6-10 Getting there, but still a ways away. Pause development until you score higher.

11-15 You know the basics! Delay the development temporarily. Maybe two weeks will do to deepen your engagement with the place.

16-22 Good job, you’re paying attention! Continue development but brush up on questions you couldn’t answer.

23-27 Green light! You really know where you are. Continue development, keep up the work, and stay attentive to any new changes.

28+ Wow! Have you considered taking a trip? Good luck, proceed to your deepest design desire.

Dear How To,

From, Longterm Outlook

Dear Longterm,

You sound like you’re ready for hyphenation. You already see the limitations of evaluating development only in terms of financial returns, but are you truly prepared to compromise your self-interest? Before embarking on this very long-term path, think about the impact on those close to you and discuss it with them. You will have to sacrifice money, time, and energy while watching your peers make easy gains.

Start by rethinking the “them” in your question. After you’ve realized how many allies you will need for a long term approach, reach out to those in your field and outside of it. You might meet smaller investors this way, but in the long run, the community will sustain you and your projects more than capital will.

Traditional financiers may be too fixated on short term gains to provide you with all the money that you’ll need, but that doesn’t mean they can’t help. Approach social enterprises and circular economy funds first, look for government support and other kinds of institutional grants that might take a longer view, and then go back to the banks.

Sincerely, Don’t Get Discouraged

Dear Longterm,

To paraphrase Sara Ahmed: be a killjoy and start complaining. If the system is not working, make your own.

Radicalize the slow-building movement. It’s like slow food or slow fashion, but for buildings. “The most radical thing someone can do these days is to work slowly.” Do you have a friend that’s good at marketing? But not just good, like really good, convincing people they want to take out mortgages for studio condos-good? Get them to make you a campaign for the slow-building movement. Maybe pair it with a certification. It worked for LEED. The WELL certification was created (by an investment banker) less than ten years ago and it has already “certified” more than five million square feet of previously un-well space.

Have you considered alternatives to producing buildings as strategies of long term care? There’s been talk recently about a moratorium on construction as the only truly appropriate response to climate change. Maybe the best thing you could do for the long term is stop building?

Of course, short-term thinking can have its uses, revealing land or existing buildings that aren’t available to buy but could be used for a while. Watch out for focusing so much on the long term that you miss other opportunities around you.

Sincerely, A Slow-Going Go-Getter

I saw the obituary notice on 21 January 2022 and I take issue with the tone. I knew the deceased and remember him fondly. The travesty of Archie’s demise marks the end of an era, one I’m sure we will all greatly miss.

Sincerely, Cyril