The Relationship between the Architect and the Client

1. The Relationship between the Architect and the Client and how the public perceives the role of the Architect

3. "I don't intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build."—Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

4. Frank Lloyd Wright remains the undisputed champion of architectural arrogance, a stature born out by anecdotes aplenty. My favorite involves an enraged client who called Wright to complain that the roof was leaking onto her dinner guest. Wright's response: "Tell him to move his chair.”

5. Le Corbusier espoused radical changes in architecture and planning, based on copious theorizing but only a handful of actual buildings. "I propose one single building for all nations and climates," he proclaimed in 1937.

8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u07J92RN6Po

11. Three years after it opened, MIT filed a negligence suit against Gehry, claiming design flaws in the $300 million building had caused major structural problems. Drainage issues had caused cracks in the walls. Icicle daggers hung pendulously from the roof like deadly sash weights. Mold grew on the building’s brick exterior. 

The school paid more than $1.5 million for repairs. A spokesman for the construction company, Skanska USA Building, claimed the company had tried to warn Gehry of problems with the design on numerous occasions, and had made repeated requests to use more suitable material. "We were told to proceed with the original design," the spokesman said,"It was difficult to make the original design work.

13. In May, for a cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of The Times, interviewed Richard Tuttle and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, an artist and a poet, who complained that the 1,300-square-foot guesthouse Mr. Holl designed for them in New Mexico had cost more than $600,000, twice its original budget, and was, Mr. Tuttle said, “uninhabitable half the time. Tuttle: "The place is uninhabitable half the time. It's too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. With lasers, they devised a footprint, a slab, on site, then when the panels arrived they didn't fit — they had to pull them together with straps, like a corset. Not very bright. Any damn fool knows you don't do these two things separately. I respect Steven. He's an artist. It's not his fault if the whole architecture profession is ego gone wild." He adds: "It turns out that the greatest invention, the one that made civilization possible, is caulking."

15. Rafael Vinoly- Kimmel Center for the Performing ArtsThe organization filed suit against the architect in November 2005, accusing Mr. Viñoly of being “an architect who had a grand vision but was unable to convert that vision into reality, causing the owner to incur significant additional expenses to correct and overcome the architect’s errors and delays.”

17. Architecture is not a private affair; even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life. If a building is to meet the needs of all the people, the architect must look for some common ground of understanding and experience.
John Portman

19. “An ugly room can coagulate any loose suspicions as to the incompleteness of life, while a sun-lit one set with honey-colored limestone tiles can lend support to whatever is most hopeful within us. Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places-and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.” –The Architecture of Happiness