1st ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design
Job No: PD0710-67/4028Chapter 3 final (3.1)_.qxd:layouts to chapter one 7/24/10 9:19 AM Page 70
The design projectClients, users and briefWhen you are developing the brief with clients would you
call it collaboration, consultation, negotiation?
Judith Lösing
We use ‘consultation’ but it feels as if: ‘we’ve designed
something and are you happy with that?’ which is not how
we want to work. Collaboration doesn’t feel quite right
because that implies that clients and users have an equal
role to us and in the end we want to keep hold of the design.
So maybe it is a ‘negotiation’. We are setting ourselves in
the position to understand everybody’s agenda and then
we bring forward proposals that hopefully can be negotiated
between a number of different parties. ‘Involvement’ is nice,
it feels more active and propositional.
Dann Jessen
Some architects are OK with presenting different options
and then roughly go with the consensus. We tend to find that
there aren’t that many good options so we would rather try
to work with people and enable them to have a conversation
about materials or colour or texture.
Judith Lösing
There’s also distrust about the consensus that tends to
happen on one day where people put up Post-It notes or if
one person brings lots of their friends. It’s very important that
we feel that the proposition is right and that we are creating
a meaningful discussion.
Dann Jessen
There’s always a skills transfer thing going on in the
beginning, because people are not necessarily educated to
be able to discuss the design. What really impresses me is
how a few hours into a workshop a resident will suddenly
start talking about the importance of the texture of the
brick, because she will have thought about that forever and
enjoyed it forever. She will just never actually have expressed
this, have had the words or somebody listening to it. It is
impressive how many observations you can get out of people
very quickly by valuing the situation that you are in.Text
1st ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design
Job No: PD0710-67/4028Chapter 3 final (3.1)_.qxd:layouts to chapter one 7/24/10 9:20 AM Page 70