A room full of architects, developers, technologists, and public officials gathered in a revitalized industrial warehouse in Detroit to ask why the sector that builds our futures is so bad at imagining its own.
The built environment is often pinned with hopes for a better future. I’m as guilty as anyone. As an optimist who has dedicated a career to this field, I often find myself feeling aspirational about what buildings and cities can do to improve communities – and I know they can do more.
The built environment is ripe with opportunity, in fact. New construction methods might cut the time and cost of delivering housing; new materials can enable “circular” end-of-life reclamation when a building reaches its expiry date; by prioritizing conversion, new investment models can push the building’s expiry date back by decades; new engagement methods can bring more voices into the design process seamlessly and joyfully.
These stand to deliver radically better outcomes – but are they really possible?
See, the problem isn’t as simple as creating new technologies, services, algorithms, or platforms. The architecture, engineering, construction, and operations sector (AECO) has an adoption problem. Think of a construction site. Think of a permitting official. Think of an title and escrow company. None of these is biased toward innovation, and as a whole, the machinery that produces buildings is slow to change.
The challenge of innovation in AECO isn’t just coming up with something new, but also addressing the systemic context around it. How might we prepare the next generation of built environment professionals to create and deliver new approaches?
Last month, Jonathan Massey, Bryan Boyer, and the team at Taubman College convened a room full of architects, developers, technologists, and public officials to ask tough questions about the future of AECO – and inform the design of a Masters of Urban Technology that will be launched at University of Michigan Center for Innovation (UMCI) in 2027. The degree will be the first-of-its-kind, building on UM’s Bachelor of Science in Urban Tech).
A few ideas that have stuck with me.
MEASURE TO LEARN. If we want new outputs, we need new inputs (and we need to measure outputs, too). Society needs us, the AECO sector, to do better. Buildings can be more adaptable, healthier, more equitable – but the information that goes into the design process is thin and static. Post-occupancy analysis is rare. It is nearly impossible to say, with any confidence, that a building delivered a year ago is successful, beyond lease-up numbers and energy data. That means there is no objective loop – there is no feedback mechanism, and a system without feedback cannot learn. In short, the value of architecture is justified on charisma and aesthetics alone.
CHAIN DRAIN. Knowledge leaks at every interface in the value chain, and the chain is long (this is attributed to Bryan Boyer, whose brilliant piece on Chain Drain you can read here). Hundreds of individuals are involved in the value chain of a single building, from initial site selection and project financing, through design, engineering, construction, and operations. Because each actor uses their own software, has unique expertise, and carries specific liabilities, knowledge escapes at each interface, or “handoff.” Decisions upstream constrain the option space downstream – and, because incentives of different actors are misaligned, there is seldom coordination. The result is a value chain optimized for cost and risk reduction, with each stage blind to the implications their choices carry for others. This jeopardizes building quality and long-term performance that owners and communities actually care about, and it short circuits recursive improvement loops.
“Handoffs between the firms involved in delivering a building or public space also chop up the feedback loop between design intent and actual lived outcomes… Think of this as chain drain: each link in the supply chain creates an opportunity for optimizing the cost but comes at the expense of learning.” — Bryan Boyer, “Beware of Chain Drain” at Urban Technology at University of Michigan on Substack
REVISE THE STANDARD, don’t dilute the project to meet outdated requirements. We often try to regulate or support new technologies with existing policies and regulations – even if they are an awkward fit (when dockless scooters arrived onto city sidewalks, Montreal used a food truck policy to regulate them, while Boston reached for a rule that was developed for group Segway tours decades ago). That means innovative ideas get sanded down to satisfy outdated rules. We need to continually ask what the policy is actually producing or precluding, and what its intent is. Then look at what is repeatedly falling on the cutting-room floor because it didn’t comply. Should the rule change? Could new constraints create pressure to innovate? Urban technology could have a design review process that learns from its own rejections and variances.
REIMAGINE BUILDINGS, in every way: from program to ownership to finance. The session was graciously hosted by Synecdoche Architects and the community at The Vander – a reimagined warehouse in Detroit’s Milwaukee Junction neighborhood. It is a surprising building, surrounded by vacant buildings, empty lots, and a construction site. I thought I was in the wrong place right up until I opened the door. Inside I was met with an exquisite gathering space, creative design studios, storefronts, and a woodshop where people were working in full swing. But none of these caused my surprise, really; it was only later, when I heard Lisa Sauvé describe the financing and operations model of the Vander – built on a rare mix of solidarity, distributed ownership, and sheer creativity – that I was truly blown away. She has fundamentally rethought the inputs and outputs of architecture. It is so successful that Sauvé and her firm Synecdoche are replicating it in nearby buildings, while fielding interest from other neighborhoods and other cities. The Vander proves that conventional debt, revenue, and return models aren’t the only way of making a building work.
The AECO industry cannot deliver adaptive places until it becomes adaptive itself – until it learns to sense, measure, and revise cooperatively between the public and private sectors. Buildings will be designed and operated in the image of the inputs we give them, and the outputs we gather should inform the next generation of projects. I’m excited to see how the new UMCI Masters of Urban Technology degree program will transform the sector.
Your insights are so powerful, and aligned with what needs to be done.