Redefining the Design Team, 1995

Collaboration

The kernel of creative collaboration contains several crucial ingredients:

• Each must take time to listen to the other, and suspend prejudices. Not only does this allow mutual respect to grow, but without it, the synergy of mutual creativity cannot flourish. The process is like brainstorming, in which nobody can quite remember where the solution came from.
• The commonality of aims is usefully complemented by a diversity of expertise.
• No barriers = no defences. There are those who feel threatened when another profession speaks their language and questions their assumption. [It is a shame we have these languages and hide behind them at times.] This is inhibiting to any free exchange.

These principles of collaboration apply at all stages of a project; initially with a client and consultants, and later with a builder or fabricator. Differences of orientation can generate conflict, or can be harnessed creatively. The trick to helping this process to move in a constructive direction is often found by sticking rigorously to an open-minded approach where everyone’s preconceptions – especially our own – are questioned, and we demonstrate a willingness to receive other’s ideas and modify our own, whilst at the same time refusing to compromise our design principles and values. Those ideas that survive this process of challenge are the stronger for having stood up to scrutiny, and the process is exciting.

“After all, we all agree on that [collaboration]….. But talking about it doesn’t seem to have had much effect. One must somehow create the conditions which will allow such collaboration to take place, and one must educate members of the building team to see their own contribution not as an end in itself, but as a part of a common endeavour to create comprehensive, total architecture.” [Ove Arup 26/10/72ICE]

Ten Commandments for Collaboration

1. There has to be a moral commitment.
2. There should be no preconceived idea and collaborators should be open to almost anything.
3. Learn to really listen and to interrupt, and be ready to be interrupted.
4. Ideas are shared – no one can claim them afterwards.
5. Be altruistic, not competitive.
6. Respect the minds of your collaborators, their individual skills will become valuable later.
7. There is time together – synthetic time, and time alone – reflective time.
8. All participants are equal, there are no bosses.
9. You have to respect the common concept as being more important than what you could have conceived by yourself.
10. Be prepared to improvise.

All of our work has a public content, whether the entire building or just its facades. We rarely, if ever, construct with our own money for ourselves. We act as the group between the public and the client and together we have an obligation to both. When we work together and collaborate, some degree of friction always arises, whether it is over the money, the design or the morals, and has to be resolved in the end by the project itself. It is recognising the project as mediator which helps to solve them.

The collective idea which emerges is the first and most important thing. It is vital that all who are to collaborate on the design of a project come together at the beginning.

All design work is political in the ultimate sense in that we are trying to produce a world that is better to live in, where people understand more, where people are less oppressed and people live less dreary lives, where they have more control over their environment: this is the glue that brings us together.

The person who first receives a call from a client has to decide very quickly how and with whom they will work. It is often an architect or an engineer. That person makes up their mind, but they also have some obligation as soon as they set up this wheel of collaboration, to inform the client. The defining of issues between collaborators such as the nature of the contract, fee split, joint or separate insurance and responsibilities are very important to pin down early. Collaboration doesn’t really mean anything until it is defined.

Some of the best concepts have come from people who are not “recognised designers”, yet who are as concerned about our future environment as architects, engineers and landscape designers. These include geographers, urban planners, archaeologists, anthropologists, artists and poets. These people understand how environments work as well as architects.

For me, open collaboration where individual egos work together in the interest of the project and beyond, are those which are the most enjoyable.

Shotgun weddings are very difficult to manage.

I have tried to outline above a methodology, a way of working which can engage different kinds of people. I think the world of tomorrow will have problems that are more complex. Architects, engineers, designers and artists will have to find new ways of solving them with their clients.

We will all have to learn new kinds of methodologies to solve problems.

We approach each project with fresh eyes and minds to seek, with the client the best way to achieve the desired end result. Traditional forms of engagement, of construction contract, of collaboration are constantly being questioned by us.