#519 - Adrian Morris, Co-Founder and Director of Pangea Design Group

The Second Studio Design and Architecture Show

Architect Adrian Morris joins hosts David Lee and Marina Bordereau-René to discuss his unique approach to managing a diverse portfolio of design

Key takeaways

• Adrian Morris distinguishes between 'the business of design' (operational systems) and 'the design of business' (market positioning).
• Pangea Design Group utilizes a 'dark kitchen' model, where specialized studios like retail or hospitality share central administrative and procurement resources.

Main topics

• Architecture business strategy
• Design collectives and studio structures

Notable quotes

The business of design and the design of business, and they interlink, but they're two fundamentally different things.

Conclusion

The episode provides a strategic blueprint for architects looking to s

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This is the second studio hosted by the Architecture and Design Office fame. My name is David Lee and with me is Marina Bordereau-René. The two of us are architects, partners at the office, and of course, hosts of the show. And today our guest is Adrian Morris. Speaker 1 (0:11) Adrian is one of the founders and directors of Pangea Design Group, as well as managing partner of Design Partnership and Morrison Co. in South Africa. Speaker 2 (0:20) Those are three different entities. He's Speaker 1 (0:22) a busy person. Speaker 2 (0:24) As you'll hear, just for some context, Pangea is basically a design collective of a few different practices. And then Adrian, his own businesses are those last two that Marina mentioned. One is a residential shop and one is a commercial shop. Speaker 2 (0:41) It's just interesting. I mean, the idea of collaboration, the idea of working on different types of projects, the idea of diversifying are all themes that come up in a lot of conversations on this podcast. But I think this might be... This is the this is the unique structure and a unique set of suite of businesses and things that I've ever seen From a guest on the show at least so the conversation with Adrian was really interesting of course we hear about how we got into architecture and then what led him to To where he is now with all these different things happening how he manages it how it works his future plans and of course his favorite building Sponsors. Dear architects, design leaders, and founders redefining the industry. If you want to shape not only buildings, but the business behind them, this is your moment. 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Speaker 1 (2:22) I know. That's why ASLAB's Material Hub is a shared material intelligence platform. So architects, contractors, owners, and manufacturers are all working from the same record. There is no emailing PDF back and forth, but it's connected via the same live data. Substitutions, RFIs, submittals, they're all traceable against your original design intent. There is less coordination headache, more actual architecture. And if you're interested, you can learn more by tapping the ASLAB link in our show notes. This Speaker 2 (2:49) is the second studio with myself, Marina, and our guest, Adrian. Here we go. I Speaker 3 (2:52) was born in Johannesburg. I grew up in Johannesburg and started my practice in Johannesburg. And then with regards to how I got in. into architecture so um i went to a government school um pretty middle class family my dad was an aircraft technician my mom had like a secretarial job mostly stay-at-home mom so no real kind of artistic flair in the family if you want to call it that but i always had an interest in drawing and was was always making things drawing things and then um the way the school system here works, when you get to the last three years, you have to pick a few subjects. So I took all the standard stuff, maths, geography, science, et cetera. I decided to take art, not thinking that there would be any kind of career in that, but I just enjoyed it. So I took art and the art teacher at school who ran the three years. that I did it. I mean, besides the enhancing and improving like how you draw and paint, et cetera, they ran like a theory and a history of art and architecture. And the architecture kind of modules went from Gothic all the way over the years, right, ended up with like modern movements. And that really, I mean, I found it like fascinating. Speaker 3 (4:21) and relish the history projects around that and learning about architecture, architects and what shaped all the different movements and how these architectural movements related to culture. So I found it really, really fascinating. So when I got to the end of school, I wasn't 100 % sure what I wanted to do exactly, thought about architecture a bit. you know also had kind of a bit of an interest in in advertising but um at the time in south africa we still had a conscription military conscription so it was only one year at the time it reduced it from two years to one year so i thought i'll just kind of get it out out of the way and you know then i once that's out the way i would decide what i wanted to do and while i was in the military one of the guys in the barracks that i was in i was an architect um and uh He had studied at like a technical college and he said, no, don't go to university. It's like all theoretical. It's eerie fairy. Go to a technical college. You'll kind of learn the practical stuff and, you know, and it's shorter. So anyway, I enrolled when I finished and I did a year at what was then called the Wits Technicon. And yeah, it was like, it was a little bit frustrating because it was all just like kind of the technology of. buildings and stuff and they they had like a little design module that we did once and which i really enjoyed and the the guy who ran a few phrases said to me now you you're wasting your time you should you should go to university so he set up an interview with um the guy who ran the first year studio um don tinder and anyway i went to the university it was quite apprehensive Went to kind of meet them and really, really like enjoyed that kind of studio set up there, you know, the models they were building. It just was really like a creative environment. So decided to make the switch and kind of started the degree process. And the way it was then, it was four years to get to what they call the Bachelor of Architecture Studies. You then go out and work for a year, like a practical year, and you come back in New York. your bachelor of architecture. I mean, if you wanted to do, you could do like honors and masters, et cetera. So, yeah. So, I mean, very fortunate with the, the, the lectures that I had, the, the program I thought was really comprehensive. Like you, you, you had like obviously theory of design and history of architecture and all that good stuff, but the design and the construction modules kind of ran in, in parallel. So you would like work on a. on a design project like you do like a timber holiday home and then you'd do the construction in parallel for that or you do like a nursery school design and then you do an aspect of the construction drawings and detailing for that so there's really i thought quite like comprehensive yeah Speaker 2 (7:16) so yeah Speaker 3 (7:16) so that's kind of how i got got started in in in architecture it Speaker 2 (7:22) sounds like the that program was pretty well balanced because one of the common critiques i don't know how um involved you are in academia or aware of it but one of the critiques we hear pretty often especially amongst professionals is that school has been architecture school has become more and more theoretical and kind of gone off to the deep end broadly speaking it varies from institution to institution yes Speaker 3 (7:45) i think well there's there's kind of two two parts to to the to my answer so yes i agree my son's actually just started studying architecture at exactly the same school Speaker 2 (7:55) and Speaker 3 (7:56) kind of watching what he's doing and you know obviously have a keen interest in this look at the design briefs they get and it's a lot more kind of like theoretical a little bit ethereal so yeah i mean i i from the sidelines you know try around i suppose like some of the way he he thinks about things but the other part i think of of architecture schools that that for me has become a like a big drive in the way i've kind of directed my own career path from when I started doing some like practical work working in other practices is that like none of the architecture schools teach like the kind of business of running a practice and it's not to say that you do commercial work that's and you sell your soul for it but like it's got to be a system like it's a practice it's a business like you've and for me it's like one of the things that's like I realized when I got into the working environment. And when I started working in my art, I went to work for a lecturer at first and I could just see that those guys are struggling artists. It's like, it's a road to nowhere. Like, yes, you know, beautiful buildings, but you've got to like be able to sustain yourself. And, you know, and that really got me going down like a whole nother like route that eventually culminates in, you know. the kind of practice that we've built. So I mean, I can kind of elaborate a Speaker 2 (9:27) little Speaker 3 (9:28) bit of how that all kind of like, inspired, but to your question about the kind of like the theoretical side of it, I think there's two parts that it's like, you know, how do you design buildings that are relevant and buildable, like, you know, responsible buildings, and also like, how do you When you go out, everybody wants to ultimately, I guess, have their own studio or practice. And unfortunately, a lot of people who go down that road, it's a road of hard knocks because you don't know what you don't know. You've spent six years learning to design buildings, but the reality is the design and the delivery of buildings. for the most part, operates in a world of commerce. Speaker 2 (10:14) So, Speaker 3 (10:14) you know, so for me, I, you know, I have this little lecture that I give our staff once every two years when we have new people. We have this thing of like the business of design and the design of business and they interlink, but they're two fundamentally different things. It's like the design of, like the business of design is how you how you run a design studio like how you design and run a pro run your processes and your systems that it makes financial sense and and and you you kind of you know we sell time ultimately how you watch the hours how you optimize that whilst still trying to deliver great quality work but the business uh the design of business is a completely different thing like how do you what's the structure of your business how are you positioning yourself in the market like like how you how you leveraging like other opportunities that exist around the the kind of like the silos that you're operating or the sectors you you're operating so for me that became like a it's a little bit like outside of the realm i suppose of this conversation but it's really something that's kind of set very central to how we've we've built our business in our studio i Speaker 2 (11:31) love that And I agree completely being our own business owners. It's a really steep learning curve. The first one, two, five, 10 years. The, I was going to ask. So with those, that lecture you give to your office, like once every two years, it's an interesting thing because. You know, I've worked at plenty of architecture offices, and I would say through my experience and my colleagues, it's pretty common for the founders and partners of offices to never talk about the business side of the practice with their employees. And, you know, maybe the upper level staff, sure, the other partners, but everyone else, like they're just focused and they just know about the design part of the work, you know, the actual architecture part of it. And they know nothing about the business side. Speaker 3 (12:22) It Speaker 2 (12:22) seems like that's not your approach. Speaker 3 (12:25) No, we are completely. So we have a thing called, so in South Africa, once a year, the president gives like a speech and it's called the State of the Nation, SONA, S-O-N-A, State of the Nation Address. And we adopted that 10 years ago. And twice a year, we do a SONA in our business and we kind of give people. the kind of lowdown where where we're at like you know what are the opportunities we're chasing what is the work that we've landed that's come in and and we run um we are very uh interior heavy like business and we run separate like silos so we talk about our business as a collection of small studios in a in a bigger in a bigger business so we have in south africa we have about 85 staff and we we run them as small independence literally independent studios so we have like a retail design team a workplace team a hospitality team luxury residential and there's a lot of crossover that happens so that it's like a it's like a dark kitchen a dark kitchen everyone uses the same dark kitchen but there's a different counter and and we market them as like all under the banner but we market workplace team have their kind of own business plan their own marketing plan and and and we and we kind of share the results you know we we have a margin that we chase we track time on projects when when a new project comes in you know or like we all work to the kind of work stages i don't know how it works in the states but we have six work stages and the fees are kind of split along those stages we assign the team we allocate based on the on the fees we take the margin off the top we allocate the the kind of our allowances and and we don't take tutorial about it but there's awareness we've got 300 hours to get this work stage out how are we going to do it we have a saying in our business that um it actually came from einstein if you have an hour to solve a problem you spend the first 55 minutes working on what's the right question to ask Speaker 2 (14:30) to actually work out how are we going to get Speaker 3 (14:32) there we've got 300 hours how are we going to plan it how are we going to get there how do we do it it's like yeah so so that's how we run it we we like yeah we deliver good work i think yeah we fund awards and stuff but we try we always have this tug of war and i think what's interesting in that tug of war is i mean i'm i'm an architect by profession my business partner in south africa he he's like not he's he's a project manager and he runs the back end of the business he runs the finances of the time and and it's a healthy tug of war like you know he's always pushing for better margins more efficient delivery and we always pushing for more time better quality and yeah and it's and and Speaker 2 (15:12) and Speaker 3 (15:12) and it's and it's a healthy kind of it's a healthy tug of war and yeah so we try to balance the quality of the work and then obviously you know it's a business we have to make money so Speaker 1 (15:25) So it's interesting that you say you guys are marketing each of the studio kind of as an independent entity, right? Speaker 3 (15:34) Yeah, under the banner. In Celebricate, it's under design partnership and I'll talk about how the Pangea thing works. But we very much take the approach of being like a diversified practice. But you also don't want to be a jack of all trades. Every sector is quite specialised. So if you design a restaurant, designing a restaurant is very different to designing a workplace environment, or designing an office block is very different to how you think about designing a hotel. So we have these what we call little centres of excellence, and then we will put together a team for a project. We just did a big campus for Amazon in Qatar, and it was the workplace team. all the kind of