Presentation - Collaborating for Success

World Architecture Festival Podcast

In this World Architecture Festival podcast episode, Patrick Fejér, CEO of B+H Architects, delivers a presentation on the critical role of collaboration in modern architectural practice. He argues that complex global challenges like

Key takeaways

• Patrick Fejér (B+H Architects) emphasizes shifting architectural effort upstream to pre-design, where value creation is highest but often underfunded by clients focused on production drawings.
• The speaker references Adam Tooze's term 'poly-crisis' to describe the overlapping urgency of climate change, affordability, and AI deployment in design.

Main topics

• Transdisciplinary collaboration
• Biomimicry and nature-based design

Notable quotes

"AI won't take your job, it is somebody using AI that will take your job."

Conclusion

The episode provides a practical framework for architects to navigate complex

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) you Speaker 2 (0:04) Welcome to the World Architecture Festival podcast, featuring recordings from WEF 2023 in Singapore. Hear from architects and commentators discussing the latest innovations and challenges within the industry. Speaker 2 (0:22) WEF 2024 will take place in Singapore from 6 to 8 November. Speaker 2 (0:28) Subscribe to receive the latest episodes and follow us on Instagram at worldarchfest. Speaker 1 (0:44) Well, welcome to this pre-lunch session. And it's about the subject, which I think is of increasing interest, not just to architects, but everybody in the design team, which is the question of collaboration. Now, yesterday on this stage, we heard an extraordinary example of international collaboration. in the post-earthquake situation in Turkey, where they've got a group of international architects, including Fosters and BIG, working with local practices to work out how to restore the... Yeah, restore, I think, or rebuild destroyed towns and communities. in that sorry area of Turkey that's been devastated by earthquake. I think we're on more positive discussion today in the sense that it's not about disaster relief, but more about the general question about collaborative processes and outcomes. And to talk to us, we have Patrick Faye, who... Works out of Canada, but is part of the Sabana Jerome group which is headquartered here in Singapore really significant Collaborative venture in its own own right but Patrick over to you welcome. Speaker 3 (2:12) Oh, well, thank you Thank you, Paul. Speaker 3 (2:17) Well, it's a pleasure to be here today and the theme for today or in terms of collaboration is what does collaboration mean in this day and age where we have kind of some pretty apocalyptic like challenges from Um... you know, a series of Speaker 3 (2:42) Everything from affordability to climate change to... um the rapid deployment of AI, these are quite complex problems. And when we look at these problems internally, they're almost wicked-like problems. Wicked in the sense that they're ambiguous, they're catastrophic in scale and have a heightened sense of urgency. And what we're experiencing is almost the poly-crisis that we've heard actually Adam Tooze coined that term in the 1970s. Speaker 2 (3:18) And as a Speaker 3 (3:19) result, this idea that we have to change the way that we think and the way that we work to really make impactful change. So change is exponential in terms of societal, technological, environmental and cultural shifts that occur so quickly that there's a new dynamic in terms of that complexity. And when we talk about resilience, These wicked problems are forcing most of us to rethink how we design. And so when we think of how we've approached problems in the past, you know, by working in isolation with a team of experts, often trying to fight nature to maintain predictability, control and certainty, we're beginning to really see how it's expensive to fight nature. So in this... kind of time of exponential change, you know, how do we move forward and how do we do things differently? And actually, how do we be open to kind of a multiplicity of possibilities and perspectives? So, a couple of things. One, in terms of using Earth as a stakeholder. We heard quite a bit from Mario's talk yesterday about bio-inspiration. But how if we are going to build in harmony we must kind of understand how how nature works and by nature based principles We found that to be kind of we'll go through one project in particular where that took place Another sort of challenge that we have is machine versus human obviously with the onset of AI How do we harness that technology? How do we use it? as a blend of human experiences, how do we rapid prototype, how do we test? And of course it was Richard Baldwin that said it's really, you know, AI won't take your job, it is somebody using AI that will take your job. So how do we harness that opposed to fearing of what that could actually be? These imageries done by Midjourney have actually, that we've tested, have evolved from sort of the... Speaker 3 (5:35) more mythical landscapes into something that is actually more applicable. And then also it's about the crafted artifice and how do we build our spaces and it's a new attention in terms of materiality, modularity, typologies. We saw some of the 3D printing out of Earth yesterday as well. This particular image is a competition entry for... a pavilion using cellular microcellular like structures as a form of inspiration sandwiched between a series of timber layers. But really in order to have that kind of let's say that positive impact as architects, as designers We've got to look at our process in how we work. We obviously all know the phases of how the design process is broken down from more of the upfront conceptual stages to the more production and construction-like phases. Relatively, they all have a series of months associated with them, timelines, depending on complexity and scale. But when we start to map our effort in terms of our value, the cost within that, we notice that on this graph, a lot of our effort are in the production stages, getting ready for construction. But that also, when we put the overlay in terms of machine learning, impact of AI, that's also what probably is at most risk for us as architects in terms of what is that sort of scope. And that really, when we plot a trajectory of value and map our proprietary ideas, our intellectual capital, It's really about how do we move forward to the upfront stages of the of the project and how do we bring a diversity in perspective? So it's actually this area that seems to be the most valued and if actually we take one step further Before we're actually dealing with the concepts and we start to look at You know even before a program and what we typically called pre-design which was something that we sort of overlooked in order to you know get going with the process and this is actually a snapshot from our workplace strategists in terms of what they would do up front but it really had us look at things like engagement. How do we engage with city planners, stakeholders, user groups, the journey mapping in terms of user shadowing. application of new technologies again consideration to modular and mass timber this is sort of where those discussions happen in order for us as those trusted advisors to the client to be able to entertain those ideas but this is also a part where we have real estate advisors project managers and other consultants that take a certain scope away from from us as architects and obviously hitting these major questions in terms of vision feasibility and vitality, that trifecta, if we're not given that opportunity to have that discussion, we're usually given something that is pretty baked, prescriptive, and something that we have to follow through the design process. So when we look at this kind of iceberg diagram, there's the problem that we typically see, but then there's all the baggage, the larger issues that happen from within. So in terms of... Speaker 3 (9:18) patterns, trends, precedents. This is sort of what we bring to the table and sort of resist the opportunity to lead us to think about different types of perspectives. So one of the things is, you