Built Environment Matters

The Future of Architecture: Adaptability, AI & Gen Z | Randy Deutsch

• Bryden Wood • Season 1 • Episode 12

Share episode

How is architecture evolving in an era of rapid technological change? In this episode of Built Environment Matters, host Jaimie Johnston MBE speaks with Professor Randy Deutsch about AI’s role in architecture, the adaptability architects need to thrive, and why Gen Z may be the most promising generation for the profession. From career agility to AI-powered design tools, this conversation explores what’s next for the built environment.

00:00 Introduction to Built Environment Matters
00:39 Meet Randy Deutsch: Architect and Playwright
03:19 The Importance of Storytelling in Architecture
09:06 Navigating Economic Downturns in Architecture
17:27 The Role of AI and Generative Design in Architecture
29:46 The Future of Architectural Education
40:15 The Next Generation of Architects
46:13 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Send us a text

To learn more about Bryden Wood's Design to Value philosophy, visit www.brydenwood.com. You can also follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and X.

Credits:

Hello, welcome to Built Environment Matters, a monthly podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood, an international company of technologists, designers, architects, engineers and analysts working for a better built environment. Bryden Wood believe in designed to value to cut carbon, drive efficiency, save time, make beautiful places and build a better future.

Jaimie Johnston:

Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us again, for this episode of Built Environment Matters, the Bryden Wood podcast. My name is Jaimie Johnston, your host. I'm Head of Global Systems here at Bryden Wood. And this month, we're joined by Randy Deutsch, Architecture Professor from the University of Illinois. Hi, Randy.

Randy Deutsch:

Hi Jaimie, fantastic to speak with you today.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. I'm familiar with your work and your books. And we'll we'll get on to that later. But for those who haven't encountered before, can you give us a quick intro about you, your career to date and how you got to where you are and what you've been up to in the last couple of years?

Randy Deutsch:

Absolutely. So I been an architect for 35 years, I started off both as architect and playwright, I think that's important to, for me personally, but maybe to know, because I do a lot of writing now. And it's not in theater. So about 10 years ago, as a 25 year mark of my career, I took my family out, we all celebrated that I had gone 25 years in this field. Without a redundancy, or in the United States without being laid off. And within three days, I was let go from my firm. This was 2008 and during the economic downturn, and yeah, I wasn't sure if perhaps the waiter tipped off the the owners of the firm. I'm not sure exactly how that all transpired. But I found myself in an interesting situation. So 30% of all architects have lost their job after the Great Recession, globally. And I could have trained a little further in Revit. And gotten back into the field, I tell the story, in my most recent book, 'Adapt as an Architect', where I decided to take a different path, it was a little risky. But I decided, as you Jaimie have seen yourself, we need to advance the field. And no one person can do it alone. But each of us needs to participate in that discussion. And so what I decided to do is focus on first, I created five blogs, and then leverage those blogs to get a full time teaching position. leverage that to start writing books, that's natural. I started through those books getting consultancies. So I started consulting not just with architects, engineers and contractors, but with startups, with regulation boards, with universities, and they're all having the same conversation about where we need to go. So that's pretty much what has taken me to where I am today, I spent a lot of my time not only teaching full time at the University of Illinois, just south of Chicago, but also keynoting in speaking globally.

Jaimie Johnston:

There's there's quite a lot to unpack there. I've instantly got loads of questions, which are, first of all, which came first playwright or architect, which did which were you doing before you adopted the other was one as a hobby, or were they can concurrent or I bet that we've never had the playwright on the blog, this is dead interesting.

Randy Deutsch:

So at age five, I met my uncle, who's a lawyer from California, and as a five year old, you know, he had a conversation with me that was very adult, he said that all of his friends were one of two, come from one of two professions, and one were all lawyers, and the other were architects. And he loved both of them. And since he was already a lawyer, and we had a lawyer in the family, I decided at age five, not that I would become an architect, but that I was an architect. And that took a lot of pressure off of me, it was just amazing. If only it was that easy. But basically, what it meant was then I was freed up to actually explore lots of other things. And the first thing I explored was writing plays. Even as a teenager, I was writing plays for my school. And then eventually professionally, getting them produced in the United States, winning awards and such studied rhetoric as a minor in college and although that's not directly related with theatre it is related with public speaking and so on, and has a you know, impact on writing. So there is no you know, in terms of a chicken and egg question, I feel like the two came up simultaneously in my life. Absolutely. S yes, narrative is absolutel

Jaimie Johnston:

Yes, I've never actually thought about these incredibly important tellin stories. I'm not a natura terms, but it's one of the things we talk a lot about on storyteller, but thinking i terms of your audience, we al this podcast is that most of the battle at least half the battle we're having is not really technical. It's the kind of do that. It's something that w leverage and learn from othe cultural, it's the kind of getting getting people on side. industries. It's one of thos remarkable things, we all have But actually now I think about looking back on my architectural tendency, I think, i architecture to, you know, t education, the kind of storytelling aspect of when you almost think like engineers which isn't necessarily a ba present your work doing crits, like, if you're presenting a thing, we're given a problem we're looking for a solution concept, you are explaining a narrative explaining the, you And in architecture, we've go this one impediment, or this i know, the thinking process, hadn't really thought about it between step. And that's the Bi Idea. And in order to get fro before, but actually, yeah, being able to communicate or tell a story or you know, bring people on a journey actually is the problem to the solution b by means of that Big Idea, w a vitally important part of the role of being an architect, you don't just tell them a set of drawings people go on looks need to take people down a path And we need to help them t like, looks like a building. So yeah, that's quite a fascinating aspect that I guess you're really starting to lean into understand sometimes the bes way to do that, as an architec is to zoom out, look at th whole Gestalt or the large now. And I guess no one else does that in quite the same way. There must be quite a sort of a willing a massive willingness of context. Think about wher they're coming from us people to go Ah, yeah, of course, an opportunity to sort metaphors. So people who don' necessarily understand ou of engage in a conversation rather than other forms of specific words, can understan them in their own terms. A lo communication. So that Yeah, perhaps can talk a bit more about that, because that sounds fascinating, and the audience of people that you're now getting in front of to bring with you. of things I find myself doing a a professor today, with student who don't necessarily have a architectural background is t with, you know, without bein too verbose, try to sa everything two or thre different ways. And sometime I'll look out at the audience you know, in the lecture hall and see nodding heads after th second example, or maybe th third if I'm lucky. But a lot o times, if you just say thing one way, it's really no understood. So all of this i there's no question. It' benefited me. At the same tim as a playwright, not t overcomplicate things. I was cartoonist or professiona cartoonist while I was studyin architecture. And every day, use, you know, 35 years hence, use things I've learned as playwright, things I learned a a cartoonist without necessaril doing cartoons or writing play anymore Yeah, again, it makes me think there's a real, certainly a culture in Bryden Wood of using analogies, like certain people are really good at analogies. And you go, Oh, my God, that's really great. explained the thing quite clearly. So yeah, again, hadn't really thought of it previously. But a lot of the time when we're explaining things to people, it's not explaining the thing. It's explaining an analogy that gets them to a place. So yeah, you sort of I don't, you don't think about it front and centre. But the sort of communication tools and how you communicate and things is absolutely in...

Randy Deutsch:

Jaimie, I've heard you speak before where you're about to liken a b ilding to a car, for example, u ing the car analogy, you know, b ildings come together like c rs and you've stopped yourself, o use one that's perhaps more ore persuasive for the audience ou're talking to maybe it's an udience that's heard that nalogy too many times. And hat's a really, you know, that ind of self editing we do, opefully, fairly quickly, as we peak is incredibly important. t's a, it's, it's all about eing empathetic for your udience. I used to tell myself s a playwright, I really only ant you if I looked through the urtain and saw two people in he audience get a joke and augh. I didn't care about the est of them. We don't have that uxury in architecture, of ourse, right? People have to ive with our buildings. We on't get to select who they're oing to be. But it's incredibly mportant to think in terms of he audience, and I know that's omething that you do. Yeah, eah.

Jaimie Johnston:

I'm going back a step. One thing. You said that resonated, you mentioned, it was the kind of big crash of 2008/9 was sort of a turning point in your career. I was writing something recently, and we I was looking back at the as I came out of college, it was we had this sort of, you know, previous like really big recession. And it completely changed. It was the sort of, you know, the end of the kind of standard RIBA fee scales. It was the start of the kind of race to the bottom of that was a massive tipping point in I think, sort of, you know, the the architectural role at what it meant the level of control you had over building so it feels like, you know, the architectural role is a sort of, yeah, even in my career, the tipping points have all been this sort of big global recessions. Can you talk a bit about how it might have been different in the US compared to what he what he saw US or the UK, late 90s, early 2000s. But obviously, the role of the architects changed, dramatically in last 25 years, can you maybe describe what you've seen in that theory as, you've been doing this for longer than I have it would be interesting to sort of compare notes and see whether we've seen some of the same changes in you know, the role, the level of power or the level of control what it means to be an architect, all those sorts of things.

Randy Deutsch:

Sure. So I love architectural history. And without getting too much into the weeds. I know the French encyclopedias of architecture came about when work slowed down, during certain slow periods throughout history. And I've learned that as a student, and that tipped me off, to recognize, first of all, that architecture historically has always been cyclical, we're not going to remain unless you lived in Australia, for the last 25 years, where they avoided an economic downturn on a regular basis. And again, based on the sector that you happen to be in, you're in several, so you may be able to map overlapping charts. But there are times in my career where I was working in hospitality, on spas and hotels, and you know, it was seven years to the hour, you can basically schedule your vacation based on working that industry. And it's different for, you know, if you're working in schools, or infrastructure, and so on. But somewhere between seven and nine years, generally speaking, we've had ups and downs, we try to prepare accordingly. Now, the one difference I've had personally is that while like, almost every architect, I worked too much, as an architect, I, you know, would work 80 hour weeks or sometimes during my career, unfortunately, for my family, 100 100 hour weeks there, what I found is, and this is something I talked about, at length, in my book, my fourth book, Superusers, which is you can actually keep taking on more work. And the reason for that is is if you're busy, chances are you're somebody who's a go-to person within an organization that has capacity, and finds ways to create capacity instead of working long, you end up working smart. And that's something we've learned from big tech in other industries. And so what I found is, I can maintain two jobs at all times. This is something I talked about in a TEDx talk, called The Seven Year Career, where I'm in full belief that everyone should have two concurrent careers. You can think of it as a main course of a meal and a side course. And that every seven years you ought to change your side course. I met many architects throughout my career that would change their side course every four years or every two years. I happen to be every seven years, and I've met others that have hit that same mark. And it's not really related to economic upturns and downturns. The advantage of doing something like that is when there is an economic downturn, you found that for the preceding years, you had been focusing not just in that project that happened to be on your computer monitor, you were focusing on multiple things, and you've remained flexible, that way your brain is made remained agile, you've kept your deep interest in multiple things. And so when the economic downturn does hit, you have options available to you. And so again, in 2008, or 2010, it occurred to me I had options. I hadn't written a blog before, my wife had pointed out to me, I only had one person in my Rolodex or my contact, and that was her. And I needed to build that up. I know you use the word platform, you know, extensively within a Bryden Wood. And what I needed to do in 2008 2010, was build an online platform, I knew that was the very first thing to do. And it was very counterintuitive in a way because it did not necessarily advance me or make me any money, you know, within the first year or two. But by building an online platform, that gave me freedom, then to try multiple different things that I had explored in previous economic downturns, like potentially one day writing a book or teaching. I taught as a adjunct, but then I could teach full time, because then I realized I had an audience and connections in the academic world and so on. So I realize this is a wandering type of response to the question, but I found that keeping your hands into multiple things, your mind engaged in multiple areas throughout one's career, basically just means when there is an economic downturn, you have options available to you.

Jaimie Johnston:

So, which is your sort of current main professional, which is your side course then, do you consider yourself a practicing architect and a professor or vice versa or an author? Or what's the current mix of them? What's on the table at the moment?

Randy Deutsch:

Yeah, because I limit myself to seven years. That means every seven years I've had to give something up. So going back 40 to 43 years. Yes, I started off as a cartoonist the next seven years as a practicing playwright. But then, more recently, after being a licensed architect, I was an urban designer, urban planner for seven years. A public speaker, keynote speaker, even though I do that to this day. Next week, I'll be keynoting in Chile, well, that doesn't really change, I need to find another focus. And the thing is, is I don't proactively pick the side course. You have to be patient and it will come to you. I know that sounds a little touchy feely, I remember telling my students last year, it was the end of my 42nd year, and that's a multiple of seven, the 43rd year was about to start and I had run out of side dishes or side careers. And I didn't know what the next one would be. And they get harder as you get older. And it just fell into my lap, I was included on a team, I wasn't really aware of this to do Artificial Intelligence research, through a National Science Foundation grant, with a Discovery Partners Institute seed funding to do workshops. And in two weeks, we're doing our AI in design workshop. It's our second workshop with this funded group of academics from the University of Illinois, my university as well as Carnegie Mellon. And we're trying to create an institute for AI in architecture. So yes, you go from playwriting, cartoonists to AI researcher, how likely is that it doesn't matter, because it keeps me engaged. I'm thinking about it all the time, participating and contributing, doing a deep dive into a neural networks and AI right now, trying to figure out where that's going to go. And I know, this is something that you and your research have touched on, and your computational designers in your technology group, or you've got 20 or so folks, right, in that group is just fantastic. I follow what they do. And a lot of the generative tools are, are things that are going to help designers, you know, if this was a run on sentence, and I get to add one more clause to it, it would be this opportunity that we have to bridge design and construction, leveraging these generative and AI tools, that's what I'm really hoping will happen.

Jaimie Johnston:

But I was gonna get on to that anyway. So that's a great segue, quite a range of sort of side projects, but they all seem to be I mean, we've talked about how, you know, being a playwright actually relates to the role of an architect, you know, the all of those sorts of things seem to be somehow linked. The AI one sort of incredibly pertinent, I guess, because yeah, as you know, we talk an awful lot an awful lot about this topic, it is gonna sort of dramatically change the way we think about the the industry and what the role of a designer is, perhaps you can sort of talk a bit more about your views I think people have heard us talk about or me talk about, you know, what I think these things will lead to the role of the architect, but it would be good to get it from your perspective and either maybe validate some of the things we're thinking of, or maybe you're closer to some of the cutting edge. And you might have some different thoughts on where this is also heading in terms of the use of AI and generative design and what that's going to mean in the future.

Randy Deutsch:

Yeah, absolutely. And nobody, even when I consult, nobody really knows. And even if the people at the cutting edge or the forefront, cannot say 100%. with conviction, we're all working it out in real time, which is part of the excitement of being at the edge. That said, I think it's a waste of time of talking about general AI for the next decade. These diatribes and essays I read all the time saying AI is not coming to the architecture, engineering construction industry anytime soon. A lot of times when you read between the lines, or sometimes even directly or vertically, they're talking about general AI. And we're not we're not, we don't need that it's not even necessary. So it's not something we even need to be talking about, we're not gonna be losing our jobs to AI anytime soon. That said, narrow AI is incredibly important. In my take on it in one that I'm currently doing research with a professor in Brussels, trying to identify exactly how architects are trained and how they will leverage computational tools, but also generative tools and AI in the near future, what kind of training they're getting. And what we're seeing is still very early in this research, both for the institute that I'm working on right now the planning of and the other researcher too, as an academic on the side, it's all preliminary. That said, what we need to do is leverage generative tools in AI to augment who we are as designers, we need to be who we are. We need to be in the conversation with AI. We need to leverage it to do what it does incredibly well. I wish I could get you know 20 years ago, the other day here in downtown Chicago I was looking at a high rise that I worked on the design of several years ago and I remember the three or four months out of my life when my children were very young, where I was working 60/70/80 hour weeks working on units in this high end residential high rise and these were not going to be units that anyone would ever live in, because we were designing them to get a building permit. And then once you get the building permit, people will build out these units and do them any way they want. We just have to make sure they met code, and you know, met the square footage requirements and so on. Now, in AI, there's a grad there was a grad student recently at Harvard, GSD. Stanislaus Chaillou, who graduated from GSD. And now works for Spacemaker AI that was bought up by Autodesk not too long ago. But as a grad student, he came up with a program that created those units within either a pre existing building, or a new building, high end historical modern, didn't really matter, hundreds of 1000s of them in a fraction of a second, I want those months of my life back. So if I could have worked side by side with those generative tools 33 uh 20 years ago, for three or four months, I absolutely would have, and that would not have put me out of a job. What it would have done is freed me up to work on my core competency. The reason I went into architecture to begin with, here's an opportunity I think for a lot of times we talk about optimizing ourselves where we almost sound like robots ourselves. And I don't think that's necessarily the right thing. I don't think the right thing is to leverage AI tools, as we're going to let them augment who we are as architects and designers in the near future. In order to make us be higher level architects, I hear that phrase sometimes use from time to time, but instead to remind ourselves why we went into this field to begin with, and what is it that we're not doing, there's something called the Peter Principle where we all rise within hierarchy within our organization, to eventually we get man, you know, we get promoted out of whatever it is that we do really well. And Jamiie, I know for a fact that you happen to continue to design, within your hubs, in plat, platforms, and so on. And that's fantastic. Because it means you, you keep a hand on an interest in things, you're not just going from conference rooms to conference room, getting work for others to do you actually get involved with it, which is great. It's how we stay agile and young, you know, throughout what's going to be a very, very long career. And as we expect in architecture. So again, a long winded way of saying that AI is something that's going to augment what we do, we need to recognize what it does well, we need to continue not only to recognize what we as human beings do well, but to actually prop up that side of us that's continually getting weaker. And that's the mindsets and soft skills and attitudes. That you know, most people feel that if you were raised well that you have, but that you probably are not learning at the university. And so those are things we all need to work on to keep up with the AI.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, well, it...It made me think...so one of the things that we've been talking about lots of this podcast, and certainly living day to day is that the language around Modern Methods of Construction is really getting in the way. So a few years ago, I mean, we've said it before, on the analogy thing, it's like the difference in true true north and magnetic north, when you're 1000s of miles away makes very little difference. As you get closer, it starts become more important. But yes, interesting. We're finding moment now, people use a lot of these terms, prefabrication off site, MMC, DfMA, platforms interchangeably. And again, no, no, they're really not they mean, quite specific things. Do you think we should, you know, the next one I can see happening is that, you know, people say AI, but they actually mean machine learning, or algorithmic design or computational design or genetic algorithms. There's a whole sort of raft of techniques and terminology that's getting mixed in the same bag. It feels that we need to sort of drive to go actually, before we get there on before it becomes a problem, we should start to say quite specifically what these things do and what the use cases might be. Because I think you're right and we've talked about it before that you know, we're miles were years off AI because no one's got a clear enough data set in construction to do anything useful with but you know, algorithm design, computational design is right here. It's happening right now. And I think people either assume it's already too late or they assume it'll never happen to go It's neither of those is true. So maybe we should have a drive to say here's what these all mean. And here's what they all mean to architecture specifically under the construction industry more generally. And maybe that's the sort of piece we should be working on before it gets too confusing. Because it's always the same the semantics start to become really important and then you get people talking across purposes and you get locked it's been with losing time here while we just work out what we all mean collectively.

Randy Deutsch:

Well Jaimie, you could take a vacation because you, I know you're using the Royal we when you say we but I have often thought when listening to you whether on podcasts or presentations or reading your essays that I could probably put together a hot book, I mean, a top selling book in our industry, based on the definitions you've given for each of those things. You're done. You don't need to do any more work. But there are competing. There are competing allegiances, but also goals that we have certainly as firm leaders, and one is to differentiate ourselves. So when I first heard the term platform, the way that your firm uses it, it occurred to me that Oh, no, there's another term and other firms are using other terms. Other clients are using different terms. And I vaguely remembered I may be wrong about this, but I believe maybe it was a contractor or potential client who one time said to you, oh, yeah, Bryden Wood, you guys are the off site, guys. And I was thinking off site guys is probably where the most important thing you can say about yourself, even if it's not 100% accurate. And so I think words are incredibly important. I'll just give one real quick example. Just completed reading, not writing, but really a memoir by Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. And it's called A Synthesizing Mind. And as an architect, we all are very familiar and comfortable with analysis, but also with synthesis. And in this book, he tells the story, so Howard Gardner's well known for coming up with these multiple intelligences in his time, 30 or 40 years ago, moving away from IQ as the termination of intelligence to recognizing that we've spatial intelligence and music intelligence and, and language and so on. Math. At that time, that was a revelation. I think that was just this remarkable thing. Now, in the 30 or so books that he wrote, 29 of them while all very good and engaging. None of them had the readership that his book on multiple intelligences had. And in his memoir, he tells how and this is why, as a poet and a playwright and as a writer, words are incredibly important. He recognizes had he called it Multiple Capabilities, or Multiple Minds or Mindsets. Nobody would have read the book. He's certain of it. He didn't do focus groups to come up with that. He recognizes that once he changed the phraseology to Multiple Intelligences, he was a rock star, invited all over the globe and so on. So what I'm getting at is this that, yes, I deal with architects through consultancies that are doing DfMA, who are, you know, working on off site, who are, you know, I could go on and, you know, pre construction, so on everything, on and on and on. And yes, each has their own definition. But, again, through this idea of soft skills, sometimes we need to take a step back. And we need to recognize, I know what they mean, they're using the wrong term, maybe this isn't the right time to correct them. Certainly, if it's a client, I'm not going to necessarily correct them. But I think getting at the heart of what it is they're trying to say is much more important at that moment, than to try to differentiate ourselves. It's a real balancing act, it is walking a tight rope wire every single day that we wake up when we deal with language like this. But I think it's incredibly important that we recognize it and do it. So similarly. That's why I'm not going back to AI. I've not snapped at anyone that's talked at length about general AI and how it's never going to happen, we're not going to lose jobs, to robots and so on. That said, I think it is incredibly important for us to recognize that you know, what a generative tool in architecture does and what it potentially can do, where in the design process, it could work for us and where it would not necessarily have any use. So that's, that's my take on it is it's important to understand the meanings of these terms, maybe to communicate them to my students, but much more important to understand between the lines, just like we do with clients, sometimes they may be saying one thing, but we can tell from their body language, they mean something not comfortable with whatever it is, we need to be looking at several languages at the same time are seven, several levels of understanding and be attuned to it. We need to eat our Wheaties we need to do our meditation in the morning and be mindful. So that way when we're up against these different uses of language, body language and direct language, we're able to recognize what is really being said and then what needs to be heard in exchange.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, right. I think you're right. Going back to talking about your students. And whether by the time the students hit you they know so much more about some of these topics than the professors or the teachers do that you go actually arci- architectural education is already behind the students already ahead before they before they hit you. Let alone before. So how do you deal with that? And what are you seeing in terms of sort of the education process for architects? And how is it adapting to all of these sort of big changes that are happening around the profession at the moment?

Randy Deutsch:

Yeah, it is not easy because there's, you know, you can say something in a lecture, you can say something in front of a seminar group of students, and they'll take their phone out. And they can easily respond or correct you, put, you know, contextualize whatever it is, you say, and have a great comeback, which is fantastic. So Google is very much a reality. And not just within the classroom, of course, but as digital natives, the current cohort, not everybody that believes or follows the demographics, but the current graduates from a university are the Gen Z's. And in my mind, they're the ideal demographic, it may be unpopular right now to even think in terms of labeling whole generations anymore than going to a Chinese restaurant and finding out you were born in the Year of the Ox, and that everybody born your year has the same characteristics. Some people don't completely follow this. But this is something for about 20 years that I followed. And the Gen Z's are really remarkable because they have the best characteristics of every preceding demographic, and None. None of the liabilities, none of the none of the things that maybe you know, present company excluded Millennials and Boomers and such. They have wonderful characteristics. They're loyal, they're going to when they come out of school, they're going to work and be dedicated, for the first five to seven years. Now I bring this up, in part because I would say the one thing that they know, yes, they come in with a strong interest in saving the world and knowing that their parents generation didn't treat the world very well. And they've inherited that from us. So there's some concern, but there's also some anger associated with that. And they've done their homework. And they ask a lot of really smart questions. They're doing their homework having to do with technology. And they, you know, don't come up with generic questions like what's the best laptop to buy? They come in with if I want to use TestFit or Hypar in the studio? What What is, you know, the best, should it be a PC or a Mac, and how much power should I have, and so on? Yes, they are very engaged, but they're also very knowledgeable. And so we need to speak to that. We're not going to outsmart them as professors, we cannot use our yellowed notes. My wife's goal for me as a professor. So when I first met her 30 years ago, she did not want me teaching right away, not because you don't make a lot of money as a professor, but she was a firm believer, and she was it turned out to be right, that you need to work for a while, so you have something to teach. And so I didn't teach for the first 10 years. And then her goal when she saw how little that professors make, after the first couple of years of my teaching w s for me to use yellowed note, not to reinvent the wheel wi h every lecture, or every year r every cohort of students. A d the danger is, is that if y u use yellowed notes, some thin s you can say, won't chan e structure, it's been around a long time, it's not going o change very much. But t e reality is it does, it do s change, right, you've talk d about this yourself about t e rise of CLT and timber n construction. And while it m y not be take, you know, on t e uptake as much in the UK, th n it is in other parts of t e world, due to availability f forests, and so on. It is ye, if I would just talk exclusive y about steel, wood and concre e right now didn't acknowledge t e effect that concrete has n terms of carbon, then I would e using old information th t students would actually be ahe d of me. So it keeps you on yo r toes, it keeps you young. And I see it as a gift. But it s incredibly challengin

Jaimie Johnston:

One of the things that I thought was particularly enjoyable about the architectural education I got was that this sort of teaching you the how to think as much as you know, they're not just is not learning by rote and saying, well, that you know, these things work. It's it's, it's understanding the process of critical thinking, or it's learning how to think laterally and learning how to think around a problem to go Actually, that's quite valuable. Because even if the materials change, and some of the context changes, and the role changes, and all the rest of it, there's a sort of core functionality of how to think how to address problems. I know that's a sort of, you know, something you're very interested in, perhaps you can talk a bit more about that and the role that plays in architectural education, it feels like that's the kind of bedrock or the foundation on which you can build lots of other things. And all of these are fairly interchangeable, but that felt like I didn't recognize at the time but after the fact again, now they were doing something quite crafty there. One of our professors particularly got a reading all the Edward de Bono books, for instance, all of those kinds of things to say, Well, actually, there's a way of thinking, which is applicable in any situation. Perhaps you can talk about a bit about that because I'm sure you've got some some thoughts around that.

Randy Deutsch:

Sure. Jaimie, you're the rare student or former student to recognize that that's really what an architectural education is that it teaches you how to learn. And that may be a cliche now, but it teaches you how to think on your own. So a couple, you know, takeaways from that one major one is, you know, yeah, I see academic colleagues or professors elsewhere, maybe a class is interrupted, due to a fire alarm, or maybe there's going to be a field trip that wasn't really scheduled, and they're going to miss a lecture. And the professor's very concerned, because they're going to miss, you know, the years 1260 to 1280, in terms of what was being built, at that time, and so on, and the student will be scarred or marred forever. Yeah, so I have no delusions about any specific information. In fact, it's one of the more heartbreaking things as a professor that I not only have the entire sophomore second year class, when I teach a sequence of construction courses, but then I have them in as students junior year, the next third year or fourth year in studio. And I know and recognize they have evidence, and I've actually done research papers based on this evidence that they know more in the second year than they do in the fourth, if you just had to base it on content. It Yeah, knowledge does not accrue the way we would like it to, you know, when you and I, Jaimie remember being educated in, e before you, we remember, you h d to build on what came befor, before moving on in terms f subject matter. And things a e not looked on in that linear w y at all today. And so the re l important takeaway are the e different types of thinkin, yes, creative thinkin, collaborative thinking. And mo t important of all, is critic l thinking, when doing resear h and the words of Dean's, r directors of universities in t e UK. And the United Stat s critical thinking is the numb r one takeaway, if there's o e thing they want their studen s to know, in many cases, the o e attribute when they are ask d questions along the lines f what do you look for from a hi h school or a pre college stude t that they have coming into yo r school, it is critical thinki g and then quickly behind that s his creative thinkin. incredibly important things. W're in New York City in the Un ted States, we have these pe cil towers are super talls goin up right now that defy co mon sense. they defy crit cal thinking. Nobody lives in t em, right? They're there for re ure real estate purposes, you k ow, oligarchs and others who ive outside of New York, buy hem and then flip them or sell t em. So all of this is well kn wn. But then you look at the sky ine of New York, as well as im ges that I show in some o my lectures on the proposed sky ine in New York. And the take way is, is just because we ca do something just becaus we learned something in coll ge, and now we have the superp wer of being able to leverage i in our career, it doesn't mean hat we should do it. And ag in, that's where, where I was talking before about attitu es, and mindsets and soft skill, I would add to that, recogni ing our own biases and ethics As designers, we constantly... o one's going to remind us about ethics, we need to remind oursel es that becoming professionals, we sign an ethical oath, we're ot just representing the paid client, but the non paying cli nt. And of course, I don't mean by that the client that doesn't pay us, I mean, the public at la ge. And that includes the neigh ors and the users and the visi ors, in this case to New York, ut also future generations tha aren't born now, in all f these things, I try to teach even in our construction course try to do so in a way that's there's some levity, you k ow, the undergrads are our sec nd year students tend to apprec ate you don't come down too hard on those topics. But you k ow, the grad students, as a segue between academia and p actice, when I teach prof ssional practice to final year raduate students, it's in redibly important to remind t em, you know, ha

Jaimie Johnston:

that resonates with them. We talk a lot about this Design to Value sort of proposition we have, which is saying to clients, look, what's the most important thing, what's the most valuable thing we can do for you? But yeah, we often ask that question to ourselves is, you know, not just, you know, can we do a thing, but should we do a thing? So even building a building the right thing to do? Is there some other way we can achieve the same outcome without having to build it? Yeah, I'm fascinated by your comments about the the golden generation that's coming out of college, the moment I'm sort of intrigued to know, we always ask our guests where they think the next 10 years is heading. There's certainly a certainly in the UK there's a shift when you hear you know, government talking about say, not procuring for lowers capital cost, but procuring for value And that means social value, sustainability and job creation and productivity and all these other things. Obviously, as you've really well articulated this climate crisis generation knows that it's down to them to start making some some big impacts. Do you think that if you take the kind of that current climate, combined it with the golden generation that's coming out that we might see a, you know, a real shift in how we think about our built environment and have the people who are they're able to design it and able to implement these things, it feels like that's the missing link of you know, everyone knows there's a problem. The tools are all available, the kind of stage is set for someone to come in and do this thing. Do you think we've got the generation of young architects now that are also going to be the ones that fundamentally transform the world? I certainly hope so. But I think what, what are your thoughts?

Randy Deutsch:

Sure, it's going to take a step back just for one second and say, when I do public speaking, or when I consult with a firm, the first question I ask them is, do you want to know the truth? Or do you want, Are you inviting a provocateur in. I remember recently, at a conference as a keynote being asked, tell us about the firm of the future. And they had told me several days earlier, they wanted a provocateur, and I said, Who says there will be firms, you know, that's the kind of response, right, thats what everyone's paying you for. But in this case, I'm here to say that in the next five to seven years, what I see and again, as a full time academic, nobody pays me to look into a crystal ball. You know, it's it's all the scientific method that we have to base everything on. But I have practiced for the last 10 or 11 years since that Great Recession, and trying to anticipate the next five to 10 years. And what I am seeing is with this current cohort of Gen Z's who are coming out of school into practice, is that we're going to have a renaissance for the next five to seven years. Now I know this, you know, this recording, this podcast will be out there, anyone can turn to it during that time, send me an email if I get this wrong, but I have full confidence the next five to seven years, they are going to turn what they've learned and who they are. The questions that they ask, are incisive and important questions. They'll light a fire between the you know, underneath the feet of their firm leaders, without making without any of the entitlement of previous generations, they will do so because they know we are short of time and they're short of time. Why do I say five to seven years because they are the first generation in years to be loyal, they're going to dedicate themselves to wherever they are, the focus is of the organization that they join, they're not going to try to change the organization, you know, from the bottom up or anything like that. The danger is, is because they are by and large, entrepreneurial, very few of them see themselves joining what we call in the States, the C suite, becoming the CIO and so on. They don't necessarily want to become a firm leader within that organization. They certainly don't want to belong to one organization the rest of their career. So after for those five to seven years, they're going to either create a startup more than likely I'm here to tell you most of my students already have startups. So likely they'll create a startup during that time, or they'll get together with friends and have a startup. It's one of the reasons in my fourth book Superusers I invited Ian Keough, it's a it's sort of this team of rivals approach. I invited him to write the preface to the book. And he made it really clear before he writes the preface to Superusers. He's 100%, essentially against what I'm proposing in the book, having read a draft of the book, and he takes completely the other side. And so that's why I'm inviting you. So needless to say, Ian Keough, the father of Dynamo, a computational tool, the co founder of Hypar, now a generative tool. He takes the stand that we're going to be losing this generation from the architecture, engineering, construction and owner side to the startup side. And so it's we're just wasting our time even having a discussion about the working within our field. I don't see that to be the case at all, in part because it's a weakness of mine. I'm an optimist. You have to be to be an architect, right? And so I actually do see them wanting to pay their dues. wanting to learn in the field, they certainly value real learning in an organization much more than the examples I gave a moment ago, then the learning that they do in school. Part of the takeaway is this in the research I've done, I talked about this in my most recent book Adapter as an Architect, that after five years in the field, most architects don't use anything they learned in school. Nothing. You know, as a full time academic, you know, that's that's an Ouch. But I was well prepared knowing that my seniors didn't know what they knew when they were sophomores. So I, you can see that coming. But the beautiful thing is, is at the five year mark, they'll know everything that you as their employer taught them. And the people within the organization as well, the danger is going to be that that seven year mark, how to keep them if you want to keep them, if you want to let them go, I'm not even sure that's our choice as employers to keep them as clients. That wouldn't be a bad idea. So stay in very good terms with them, recognise that they come to your organization just for a short time, just like a good parent will recognize their kids will always be their children, that you'll always be their parent, but they're meant for the world. It's not a bad attitude to have with our employees, especially with this upcoming generation.

Jaimie Johnston:

That's brilliant. So we got we got five to seven years to to win all these about No, that's incredible. That's a really, yes. a different take to anything we've heard from anyone on the podcast, but it does really resonate with something intuitive in what we've been thinking about. So yeah, that's fantastic. So yeah, that was I mean, we could talk for a lot longer, but mindful of everyone's time, so I guess we'll have to park it there. But yeah, that was fantastic. Really, really interesting. And yeah, quite a different take than we've had on the podcast before but really, really valuable. So thanks ever so much for joining us.

Randy Deutsch:

Absolutely. It's fantastic to talk with you, Jaimie. Appreciate it.

Jaimie Johnston:

So thanks, everyone for listening. Please do join us next month for more Built Environment Matters.

Credits:

Thank you for listening to Built Environment Matters. A podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And you can follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and Twitter.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jaimie Johnston MBE

Host