Your Architecture Firm is Leaking Money: How to Identify Losses and Plug the Holes
Architizer is thrilled to announce the next webinar in our live series about how to run a successful architecture business — and you’re invited! We’ll be joined by Steven Burns, FAIA, Chief Creative Officer at BQE Software, as he reveals the many ways in which architecture firms tend to let money “slip through the cracks”, and provide some valuable techniques for how to maximize the profitability of your practice.
Architects can receive 1 AIA Continuing Education Credit for this event, courtesy of BQE! Hit the button below to register for the talk, which will take place at 1pm EST on Wednesday, June 8th:
Most firms look at profitability as a bottom-line metric. They use this as a gauge to determine if the firm is financially healthy. However, every firm is composed of countless independent elements: employees, clients, projects, phases, consultants, and a myriad of expenses.
What does a firm do when they aren’t achieving the profit margins they desire or experiencing losses? Knowing the answer to this question is the purpose of this webinar.
In this webinar, we will explore:
- The best practices for monitoring the various profit-centers of your firm.
- The means and methods that will not only alert you to problems but discuss how to resolve them.
Most architecture and engineering firms don’t apply the same rigor, discipline, and consistency that they use when executing their projects. We will show how easy it is for your firm to be well-organized, efficient, and profitable by applying best practices and utilizing modern, effortless, affordable computing technologies.
Join Steven as he shares lessons learned over 35 years working with over 1,000 A&E firms!
Learning Objectives
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:
- Explain the importance and informativeness of a perfectly organized Chart of Accounts
- Identify each of your firm’s profit centers and the KPIs that measure their performance
- Determine which technology plays an integral role in every healthy firm
- Assess how simple it can be to turn your firm into a profitable, elegant enterprise
About Steve
Steven Burns is a member of the College of Fellows of the AIA and Chief Creative Officer of BQE Software. After receiving his Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Steve spent 7 years at SOM – working in Chicago, London, and Berlin before founding his own firm, BBA Architects in 1993. In 2007, Steve sold BBA to pursue his passion for business management software — starting with his creation of ArchiOffice. Steve is now focused on the product development of BQE CORE ARCHITECT, a fully-integrated, cloud-based firm management platform that includes time billing, invoicing, accounting, and project management for firms of all sizes. Steven is a global speaker and thought leader on topics related to firm management and emerging technologies.
About Paul
Paul Keskeys is Editor in Chief at Architizer. Paul graduated from UCL and the University of Edinburgh, gaining an MArch in Architectural Design with distinction. Paul has spoken about the art of architecture and storytelling at many national industry events, including AIANY, NeoCon, KBIS, the Future NOW Symposium, the Young Architect Conference and NYCxDesign. As well as hundreds of editorial publications on Architizer, Paul has also had features published in Architectural Digest, PIN—UP Magazine, Archinect, Aesthetica Magazine and PUBLIC Journal.
In her preface, Kloter highlights a key disparity in numbers: “In its 2020 annual report, the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) revealed that 50% of the 26,977 students enrolled in NAAB-accredited architecture programs – B. Arch, M. Arch, and D. Arch– were female. This is a number that has been improving since the 1970s, yet the percentage of women who obtained their architect license, achieve upper management positions, become partners and own architectural firms have not increased at the same rate as men have. To date, data from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) 2021 NCARB by the Numbers report shows that only 24% of the 121,997 registered architects in the United States are female.”
Kloter’s book contains a wealth of practical advice to balance home and work life, as well as powerful motivational tools to instill belief in women, encouraging them to embrace their capabilities to be renowned architects and incredible mothers. The following quotes provide a teaser for the words of wisdom that you can find throughout the book:
The Binhai Science Museum was designed to showcase artifacts from Tianjin’s industrial past through large-scale contemporary technology, including spectacular rockets for space research. The project is part of the city’s Binhai Cultural Center and contains facilities for cultural events and exhibitions as well as galleries, offices, and restaurant and retail spaces. The project was made to relate to the rich industrial history of the area, the site of high-volume manufacturing and research. A series of large-scale cones create major rooms throughout the museum. The central cone, lit from above, connects all three levels of the building.
The exterior of the museum is covered with aluminum rain screen over a sealed aluminum surface, giving the building a unified presence despite its large size and the disparate elements of the structure. Approximately 3,600 copper-colored panels in two sizes (4×7 ft and 4×11.5 ft) make up the flat portions of the building’s façade. The perforated metal panels also help reduce heat gain. The design team developed 52 different sizes of panels with each row of the cones corresponding to a unique width. Each panel is backed by two aluminum U-channels located between the perforations.
Completed in 2017, Brock Commons Tallwood House is an 18-story, LEED Gold certified, 404-bed student residence building located at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. It was the world’s tallest mass wood tower at the time of its completion. The timber structure and prefabricated facade also went up in only 66 days.
A CLT canopy runs the length of a curtain wall base, which reveals the warm wood finishes of amenity spaces within. Elevator lobbies are clad with the same material as the exterior. Hallway finishes include natural wood doors and a palette of rich umber and ochre accent finishes. Living unit interiors are bright white, spare and simple.
The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center is the academic hub of the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. With the goal of becoming a net zero building, The Bloomberg Center forms the heart of the campus, bridging academia and industry while pioneering new standards in environmental sustainability through state-of-the-art design. T
Designed as a rain screen system, the outermost layer of the façade is composed of aluminum panels surfaced in an iridescent, PPG polymer coating. Designed in collaboration with Zahner, an architectural metal fabricator, the façade utilizes Zahner’s Louvered ZIRA™ system to create the image patterning.
Perched on an island’s edge in Georgian Bay, Ontario, the Grotto Sauna is a feat of old-world craftsmanship and new world sustainability made possible by cutting-edge software and fabrication technology. The selected concept for the Grotto prescribed a solid, simple presence on the exterior, while the interior followed dynamic air movements in curvature forms; requiring design solutions.
Partisans collaborated directly with their fabrication partner, MCM Inc., to develop new prototyping methods and with engineers and develop novel software patches for the toolpaths. The latter enabled the fabricators to override the automated limitations of the CNC machinery and ultimately use it as a sculpting tool to achieve the aesthetic vision, all the while maximizing the available wood and milling along the grain so that the pieces would match one another. The successful production of the panels also had to anticipate the method by which they would be sequentially assembled. This required the team to develop a sophisticated installation plan in tandem with the fabrication process.
When Bjarke Ingels Group and JDS Architects set out to create The Mountain residential project, it was the 2nd generation of the VM Houses: same client, same size and same street. The program, however, is 2/3 parking and 1/3 living. What if the parking area became the base upon which to place terraced housing, like a concrete hillside covered by a thin layer of housing cascading from the 11th floor to the street edge? Rather than doing two separate buildings next to each other — a parking and a housing block — the team decided to merge the two functions into a symbiotic relationship.
The parking floors are covered with a continuous perforated aluminum surface, folding into four parts from the southern to the eastern facades. This controls sunlight and air circulation. The folded surface makes reference to the name of the project, displaying a realistic image of Mount Everest.
“Depicted in this image is my hometown Wuppertal. The world famous Schwebebahn, which was build over one hundred years ago as a result of advancements in steel production and metal fabrication, still remains to awe visitors when it meanders through narrow streets above the river Wupper. Shown here is a speculative redesign of the city in the spirit of the early Schwebebahn designs and its historic “Kaiserwagen”.
“Memories and dreams sometimes go hand in hand. The combination of reality and fantasy is an intrinsic force that supplies the creative portfolio of an artistic mind with endless possibilities. Nevertheless, even with all the infinite pieces put together sometimes one can’t help but look into triggers of certain spaces that take you back into specific moments of life. This particular studio is a combination of said moments in time; clutter in respective areas, materiality, scale, objects and the conglomeration of mechanical pieces grounds the imagery, which brings a sense of character that many people resonate with. It’s a sense of remembering a space that does not exist. A remembrance.”
“On December 21, 1848, a white plantation owner, traveling with his enslaved servant, passed through the Central of Georgia Railroad terminal in Savannah, seeking medical care in Boston.
“The First Settlement on Mars.
“Located near a highway between two major cities in the north of Mexico, Monterrey and Saltillo, the site generates from the hillside of the mountain chain. A ring with an inner radius of 47m, a section of 18m and an outer radius of 65m. Embedded in the ground giving the appearance of rising or detaching from it. The intention of the project is to guide the farewell process of a loved one through the natural and architectural environment. HALO Funeral Center stands out for its morphology and relationship with the context that generates a farewell process for both the bereaved and the deceased. In this way achieving a liberation and a healthy duel.”
“People is what gives architecture life. With all their different lights and colors, they make the spaces alive. When designing a façade, a lot of effort is put into the relation with the exterior environment. With this rendering I wanted to focus on the role that the interior spaces play in a façade. Each of these windows have a story to tell, a feeling to show, a thought going on.
“A boundless generative study for a spatial understanding of an infinite archive dedicated to letters and stamps in the context of Campo Marzio. Inspired by “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borgestry, the drawing tries to incorporate the idea of sauntering and browsing through ramps. It explores the layers beneath the Campo Marzio in relation to the accumulation of historical letters and records. This is a result of moving upward and downward into the layers of Campo Marzio imagined by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720- 1778).”
“Overlooking the sky, the water,the mountains and the small houses, they form a long picture that is deeply touching. The combination of a long time and strong strength reveals a solemn scene and makes people linger and forget to return. I suddenly had a strong desire and shouted at the mountain opposite. Bursts of pleasant echoes reverberated in my young heart, and my heart suddenly gushed a kind of magnanimity I had never had before. I felt that I had melted into the mountain.”
“The illustration explores a future in which architectural forms grasp to reach beyond Earth’s gravity. Density and population lead some to choose a nomadic life-style, free to roam the open plains below…”
“What are memories if not frozen fragments of time?
“Faced with the cruel reality everybody witnessed on TV in 2021, we were moved and felt responsible to act.
“Churches are sacred spaces where people unite spiritually with a higher power. We enter churches when faced by pure and meaningful emotions like true love. Churches are therefore unique types of architecture where humans can express their deepest feelings through prayers influencing their psychology, philosophy and lifestyle. Love at first sight usually culminates in a church during the wedding ceremony.
“The sun is warming the air as the market is closing now. My shirt is already sticking to my skin. They advised to avoid going out, but I feel good, I’m only coughing. Uncle Alisha is saying he got sick because it’s not air anymore, he says that before we used to see the sky and it was blue. But I don’t know; maybe he’s just getting old, he’s already 37. The Stack is constantly growing as new people are moving in. Are they coming from Above?”
“Cheese factory. A place that is sure to please guests, especially fans of healthy eating preservation of national traditions, local cuisine. The landscapes there are also quite beautiful – the peaks of the Carpathians are clearly visible. Shepherds work here from spring to autumn. During this time, many sheep can be seen on the slopes. Various cheeses, Budz, Bryndza, Vurda are prepared on the fire. You can see with your own eyes a difficult but pleasant process, the preparation of Hutsul cheeses.
“I dreamed of a circle room with countless thin arkd who fall in the center. At first, I tried to make a subtile natural light like a overcast sky. I worked shaders of walls and arks with dressed stone for remind stuctures like abbayes and churchs. After that I really wanted to make a old dark wood floor with a lot of wear but in the same time I want to make it elegant with strong reflections. I choose a dark Floor because this helped me contrast the image, the room is globally dark except for the center of the image. I placed a tree with a soft shape to stay close to the arks shape. After that I added few artificial lights with warm color to have more reflections on the floor. I tried to make a place which is perceived like sacred and silent.”
“My story depicts a dystopia that is mostly driven by the cold and insensitive brutalism of Orwell’s 1984 novel and the post-soviet era in Middle-Eastern Europe. These types of buildings are called “panel houses” in Hungary, which means houses made of reinforced concrete blocks. Most of these were built right after World War II, when suddenly many people had to be accommodated.
“Day 1947
“This is the story of an old industrial building with a new form of life. One idea was popping in my mind to take the most industrial function and to make it not only a practical source of energy, but also architecturally and publicly friendly. Looking over different dams around the world I realized that’s the perfect ground for the imagination. Brutalist aesthetics, and the almost military look of the dams, made me overthink their use.
“Growing up in urban South-East Asia, I’ve found there’s nothing in comparison to the chaotically beautiful sensory overload.
“The project is an anti-surveillance monastery in the mountains of China named the ‘Blind Spot’. Located more specifically in Fengdu ghost city, Chongqing, the Blind Spot is a retreat/sanctuary where you can escape the pressures of a heavily surveilled society. It is temporary living off the grid and houses sleeping chambers, meditation rooms, learning centres, and is influenced by the design of Buddhist monasteries.
“Saigon has evolved from the ’70s-nowhere else in Vietnam can one experience the quickly changing cultural and economic shift that takes place before our eyes. The 10+ million inhabitants seem to be constantly moving…Locals and foreigners, looks, sounds, smells, tastes all mix, and create something so eclectic and excitingly new that is impossible to capture in words. The city’s constantly buzzing. Moving. People yearn to break the shackles of the past, the shackles of society’s expectations. Poverty, traditional values, and collectivism are quickly shifting to consumerism and individualism.
“We heard the thump of music. A door swung open, LED lights bleeding into the night. The space was packed but it felt familiar, like being reunited for the first time with people you didn’t really know. Some whose first names you know but whose numbers are not in your phone. You have no idea what they do for a living, or where they are from, or how old they are. You see them on the dance floor, where you have been hanging out for years.
“City life can be vibrant, diverse, and dynamic. But it can also be crowded, polluted, and noisy; It is overstimulating which can make people feel stressed and overwhelmed. So the question is what’s the antidote to modern life stress? That is why we in the DD Studio decided to design a cabin in the woods in our style with minimum interference with nature as a building and maximum view. In this image, we are trying to show the communication between nature and humans and how the cabin sits in context.”
“Along the Passaic River from Port Newark through Jersey Turnpike, air pollution caused by toxic factories and transportation leads to increased health concerns and affects families’ health and vulnerable communities in Newark and the entire New York Metropolitan area.
“In 2012, Japanese architect Katsuhiro Miyamoto made the extraordinary proposition to erect giant Shrine-style roofs over the ruined reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 nuclear disaster. The conceptual idea of using the roofs to signify the presence of a powerful force on site extends to a workable proposition, based on the Japanese culture where shrines are rebuilt every 20 years to ensure that traditional building techniques are passed on generations. Likewise, the upkeep of the reactors’ decommissioning will extend in centuries, therefore the construction of these roofs is chosen as a form of preservation, to transmit the knowledge of Nuclear Waste management to future generations.
Späckhuggaren / House for a drummer by Bornstein Lyckefors Arkitekter, Kärna, Sweden
Tower on the Ting by Wingårdh Arkitektkontor AB, Örnsköldsvik, Sweden
Moderna Museet Malmö by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter, Malmö, Sweden
Fire House by Ulf Mejergren Architects (UMA), Stockholm, Sweden
Designed by PTW Architects, the National Swimming Centre in Beijing, also called Water Cube, has an iconic “bubbling” façade made of ETFE. To achieve this appearance, ETFE films are first welded together, then installed onto the steel frames and lastly filled with inert gases using the piped embedded in the steel frames to form cushions. The swimming pool is lit by natural light during the daytime and very little artificial lighting is needed, thanks to the transparency of ETFE.
While Water Cube employs ETFE cushions for their environmental performance, the Serpentine Pavilion 2015 designed by SelgasCano plays with the material’s transparency. Using colored and color-diffusing ETFE films, joined by colored ribbons, the design team created a surreally colorful spatial experience. ETFE films and ribbons of different shades are attached to the steel skeleton, forming a double skin system where shades overlay building new shades and forms penetrate forming dreamy shadows. The lightness of the material allowed all skin sections to be installed by hand.
The Ice Stadium Schierker Feuerstein-Arena designed by GRAFT stands out in the competition to renovate the stadium for its unique roof. The roof of over 29,000 square feet (2, 700 sq. m) spans across the ice rink, meeting the ground at its two ends. The lightweight yet strong PTFE membrane rests on a net of steel ropes which is then fixed to the outer steel frame. The structure bears wind, rain and snow and sheltered the stadium from direct sunlight by diffusing it. During the night, the reflectivity of the material spreads lights across the whole roof, multiplying the artificial lighting.