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Develop
When an architect looks at a property, she thinks “How can this space be transformed into its optimal condition? How can I improve this property and its surroundings.”
When a developer looks at a property, she thinks “How can I extract the maximum revenue from this site? At what price can I buy it, and how many doors do I have to build on it to satisfy the return required by my capital?”
Architects often work with developers. The relationship starts very amicably, as improving the space can often be reconciled in both partys’ minds as searching for the highest best use for the property. Insofar as the market can recognize that the optimal form of the project happens to maximize buildable floor area ratio, the relationship continues peaceably. If markets are your thing.
Eventual sacrifices are made—formal sacrifices, not proforma sacrifices—but the architect soldiers on, reassuring herself that if she doesn’t attempt to maximize the architecture in light of her client’s market sensibilities, someone else will build something truly ghastly.
When a sop is made to form by the developer, it is often to appease a bureaucratic requirement: bylawed landscape ratios, required LEED credit, public art quotas. The architect scrabbles desperately for these morsels. Form without net present value! My Precious!
If it should ever come to a difference in dollars—by malevolence, indifference, error or fate—the developer invariable holds the trump card. She saw the development in those terms all along, while the architect busied herself with fripperies like massing and shadow studies, remaining blind to the fiscal certitude that would once again cost her dearly by project’s end. What the developer pads, the architect writes off.
The semiotics prove this out. The architect refers to the work as the development, granting primacy to the developer by naming it for her. The developer would never be so mis-oriented as to refer to the project as the architecture. Own goal!
An architect can clad her services in the language of the developer, or she can spend her days searching for a developer who sees in architectural terms. Both are possible, but both mediate her craft through the lens of another profession.
Semiotics matter. Your doctor doesn’t communicate with you via dentistry. Why must architects communicate to their clients—the buildings’ inhabitants, the casual observing public—via development?
The profession is flawed. Architects seek to maximize their own capital through the application of their capabilities. They depend on, and are subordinate to, the capital of others.
Architects must become wells of capital—capital behaves like gravity—so they can begin to exercise their discipline in it service.
The degree to which architects fail to commit their capital to development their craft is the degree to which our cities and towns are deficit of architecture.
Il Pelicano
November 20, 2007
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