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The fifth annual Best of Practice Awards celebrates the companies upholding and elevating the standard of working in the built environment today. In other words, Best of Practice is an award for companies across the AEC industry that considers not only the work and output of each firm, but also the way the company organizes itself, its employees, and processes. Joining the awards jury this yearalongside Antoine Bryant, managing director of Gensler Detroit, Anne Marie Duvall Decker, principal of Duvall Decker, and other peersis Jacob Reidel, assistant professor in practice at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Who better to help analyze Best of Practice submissions than Reidel who studies and teaches practice? Reidels own exploration and courses explore the profession and practice of architecture, considering everything from fees and instruments of service to studies on how effectively architecture can be practiced in remote working environments and turnover rates. For Reidel these models of practice are still relatively new and as such, subject to be rethought. He further explores the potentiality of practice in the print-only architecture journal CLOG which he cofounded, and Harvard Design Magazine 52 : Instruments of Service,which he guest edited.Reidel spoke toAN about what it means to study the practice of architecture, advice to applying to Best of Practice, and his search for critical takes on architectural fees for an upcoming issue of CLOG.Previous covers of CLOG (Courtesy Jacob Reidel)AN:What prompted you to go from practicing architecture in the more traditional sense to studying how we practice?Jacob Reidel (JR):Well, Im part of the generation that graduated from architecture school into the Great Recession in 2008. Remember, between 2008 and 2010 the architecture and engineering fields lost at least 12 percent of their workforce in the United States, and if you were lucky enough to have a job, project cancellations, payment delays, pay cuts, and layoffs were constants. So from the very beginning of my career, it was pretty obvious to me that something about architectural practice wasnt working. And if you read old issues of architectural professional journals like Pencil Points extending back to the 1920swhich is something I started to do out of curiosityit became clear that so many of the issues architects lament todaythe agency of the designer; fraught relationships between clients, contractors, and designers; quality control; low fees and wages; job insecurity and economic precarityhave all been pressing issues for more than a century. So for me at least it was natural to ask: Is there be a better way?For many years I sought to answer this question primarily through my work within design practicesREX, Ennead, WeWorkbut I also began to study practice outside the context of a firm in which I worked leading up to 2014, when I was an Assistant Curator for the U.S. Pavilionnamed OfficeUS at the 2014 Venice Biennale. Our overarching goal with OfficeUS was to examine the export of U.S. architecture abroad since 1914. However, a related question that emerged over the course of the project was how we could understand the architectural workplace itself, given that there is little present-daynot to mention historicalrecord of architects priorities when it comes to day-to-day operations. In other words, how could we uncover architects unpublicized actual priorities over the last one hundred years? The solution we developed was to focus on the office manualthe one document every office has, and which almost no one reads. Our methodology was laborious but ultimately effective: beg, borrow, and steal office manuals going back one hundred years and examine them to determine what, if anything, has changed. The resulting publication, The OfficeUS Manual, took three more years to complete, but when it was finally published in 2017 it was the first publication of its kind. I suppose that project, combined with other publications I was producing, led to the work Ive been doing both through consulting, public programming, and publications at home in New York City and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where, since 2019, my teaching and research through advanced practice-focused courses such as Frameworks of Practice and Is the Grass Any Greener? have allowed me and my students to ask difficult questions about practice today, and to propose alternate futures. AN: Can you tell me more about this field of study?JR: My teaching and research examine the design of practice itself spanning traditional, alternative, and new forms of practice in the United States and abroad. I want my students to understand that nothing about the profession and practice of architecture today is inevitable. So much of what may seem well-establishedincluding fundamentals such as professional status and licensure, school accreditation, instruments of service, fees, architect/owner/contractor relationships, the role of the architect in societywas in fact designed by individuals, in most cases barely more than a century ago. So, any and all of this is open for reconsideration and redesign today. To me, this is why it is important not only to examine new directions and models for contemporary practice, but to teach the history of practice as well.The 52nd issue of Harvard Design Magazine (Kristoffer Li and Alexis Mark)AN: What will you be looking for or interested in seeing in Best of Practice applications?JR:Maybe this should go without saying, but first of all Im interested in the work itself. Is it beautiful? Does it perform well organizationally, operationally, environmentally, socially? Does it make the community a better place? At the same time I care deeply about the people making the work. How does the applicant firm treat its staff, its consultants and collaborators? Frankly, Im not interested in practices that produce beautiful work at the expense of people. Finally, I want to see how the applicant relates to its clients and, ultimately, the end-usersprivate and publicthat will inhabit the building day after day. What is the actual impact of the work on the world?AN: Part of your work is also grounded in the belief of print publications as essential places for design discourse. To that end, can you tell me a little bit about CLOG?JR:CLOG started back in 2011 when a group of friendsArchie Lee Coates IV, Jeff Franklin, Julia van den Hout, Kyle May, Human Wu, and medecided to create an architecture publication that would examine a single topic from as many viewpoints as possible. At the time, online forums like ArchDaily were taking over design discourse, and we felt that the speed at which these sites moved from project to project and topic to topic basically precluded any kind of in-depth, critical discussion. So the idea was to deliberately slow things down with a print-only publication that we funded (through sales), edited, designed, published, and distributed ourselves. The first issue, critically examining Bjarke Ingels Group at the moment when that practice was first becoming established in the United States, was a steep learning curve for us, but the second issue, the first publication to exhaustively study the architectural impact of Apple, sold incredibly well and proved that we were on to something. Over the next few years we forced ourselves to put out a new issue every three months (which seems crazy now given that we all had other full-time jobs) and we soon had developed a pretty tight format and process. While each issue addresses a different topic (and in recent years weve allowed ourselves to explore non-architectural themes as well) and the editorial and design team has evolved, a few key things have remained constant over the years: every CLOG author must express a clear, critical viewpoint; every contributor is capped at 500 words and a single spread; and every piece must be accessible to a general readership. These constraints are important to us, especially the length and accessibility requirements, as our intent from the very beginning has been for CLOG to attract contributions, and readers, from the widest possible array of backgrounds: not only folks who identify as writers and critics but also architects, designers, artists, and more. Weve never been very interested in preaching to the choirif youre truly committed to shaping and improving the built environment, you cant only be talking to architects and designers, and with CLOG one of my favorite things is when Im in a bookstore and I see someone pick up a CLOG and start paging through it clearly not realizing its an architecture journal. We sometimes joke that CLOG is a gateway drug to architecture. AN: What can you tell us about the upcoming issue?JR:The next issue about to hit the shelves focuses on the architectural impact of WeWork. As many know, WeWorks rise, failed IPO, and subsequent ousting of its CEO have been thoroughly documented in countless articles, podcasts, books, and television series. Less widely understood, however, is the extent to which WeWork challengedand changedthe way spaces are designed, delivered, and operated. At its peak, many of WeWorks most senior executives, including its cofounder, have been trained as architects, and the company employed a design, engineering, procurement, and construction team numbering nearly 1,800 people that designed and delivered more than 44.8 million square feet of space globally. These professionals worked together in a vertically integrated context arguably unlike any other spatial design practice that had existed before: an ambitious, if ultimately short-lived, new form of multidisciplinary practice organized around the delivery of spatial products as opposed to professional services. Architects, interior designers, engineers, workplace strategists, graphic designers, construction managers, technologists, fabricators, cost estimators, procurement specialists, real estate specialists, security specialists, business strategists, community managers, facilities managers, marketing professionalsall worked side-by-side in the numerous WeWork headquarters distributed throughout the world. The result has not only been 700+ built (and many more unbuilt) projects, but a global network of ex-WeWork employees that are changing the AEC, workplace, and real estate industries, both by bringing unorthodox ways of doing things to established companies and organizations and by forming new enterprises that entirely rethink old disciplinary boundaries. As this WeWork Effect spreads, we decided that now was the time for CLOG to examine the impact WeWork has had on the way we create and experience the built environment. And now that CLOG : WEWORK is about to begin distribution, were beginning work on the following issue, CLOG : FEES, which is going to really bring things back to architectural practice and tackle head-on questions such as: What is the value of the architect? How has the changing role of the profession affected fees? What must architects do to get a bigger piece of the pie? If anyone out there has a critical take on these questions that theyre dying to express in 500 words or less, let us know!Student research work from the Frameworks of Practice course (Su In Kim, Yun Ki Cheung, Pedro Rodrguez-Parets)AN:You also guest edited the most recent issue of Harvard Design Magazine, titled Instruments of Service. Can you tell me about the explorations in that issue? What are you particularly excited about within it?JR:Harvard Design Magazine 52: Instruments of Service illustrates how the discipline, profession, and practice of architecture are changing by examining how the things architects actually maketheir instruments of serviceare changing. Instruments of service are the instruction manuals that architects make so that others can make something. As such, they define the architects relationships with labor, construction, clients, and society. And these relationships, along with the agency of architectural practice, are changing as a mounting number of external pressures force instruments of service to change. In addition to commissioned essays, interviews, and moderated roundtables we organized that examine drawings, specifications, contracts, codes, tools, roles, professional status, and more. HDM 52 also includes original research pieces we conducted examining topics from the evolution of contracts and drawing sets in the United States over the years to a comparative analysis of typical baseboard details around the world, viewing this seemingly unremarkable drawing as a revealing index of relationships between architect and contractor, and how these relationships vary from country to country. It was interestingand tellingthat when it came to this baseboard detail research piece we conducted, many architects we reached out to around the world had a hard time understanding why we were interested in this drawing in particular. In a number of cases we encountered strong resistance to publishing these types of drawings and even got many outright refusals. I think this says a lot about how architects view, and perhaps neglect to think critically about, the artifacts we produce day-to-day and the specific contexts in which we operate.I should add that theres another reading of instruments of service that we deploy throughout the issue too, in that architects can also be seen as instruments of service to society, responsible to a continually shifting set of values. Ultimately, the designers job is to imagine and articulate a better future. And in a time of crisis and competing value systemsmarket returns, cultural relevance, environmental response, social equity, automationthe role of the architect in society is ever more important and increasingly accountable to divergent interests that call into question the purpose of architectural practice itself. In the end, what we make is inextricably tied to why and for whom we make it.Best of Practice is open for submissions now until March 28, 2025. Learn more about eligibility and apply here.
