4. Clients in China, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the developing world depend heavily on Western expertise
Answer: True—but not for much longer
They’re not called tiger economies for nothing: In a scant decade or so, China, India, and other developing countries have raced up the learning curve of modern building design and construction. They still lack local architects with experience building on a large scale, so they turn to architects from America. China, looking ahead, requires foreign architects to partner with Chinese design institutes, growing native architectural expertise in the process.
For many of the architects interviewed here, part of the thrill of working in emerging nations is the wider scope of the architect’s role and the clients’ openness to new ideas. Perkins explains, “The client is relying on the design team for much more decision making than is typical in a developed country. We will write the program for them. They trust our expertise and accept it more readily.” Gensler’s MacBean agrees. “Local clients will really listen to the designers. They have a thirst for knowledge.” Programs, he adds, “are a lot of the time not worked out.” Which means architects need to be ready to help the client pin down the program and then roll out a schematic design—and fast, because development in cities like Dubai and Beijing moves “at warp speed,” in Perkins’ words, with planning, programming, and schematic design often compressed into 60 days.
MacBean sees a new trend on the horizon that may tilt the balance of power between architect and client. “Fees are being driven up. It’s a very competitive market,” he says of China. “Clients are now willing to wait for the architect they want.” A maturing market is good for China, bad for the Western architects who go there out of mere opportunism.
5. Female architects have a tough time working in non-Western countries
Answer: False—for the most part
There was a place Mary-Ann Ray worked where the contractors called her “the wife” and snickered. It was her home state of California. “I’ve found it so much better there than here,” she says of being a female practitioner in China versus the U.S. Ray attributes that in part to her academic affiliation: She teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, and professors, she says, are held in very high esteem in China. Likewise, Marilyn Jordan Taylor, an urban design and planning partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), says, “I don’t feel it’s been a disadvantage to be a woman” in her international work, which has spanned many years and countries. She was “pleasantly surprised,” she says, by the Middle East.
However, Taylor points out that “guys sometimes feel more comfortable making contact with guys,” especially in competitive environments—at home and abroad. And abroad, it’s not unheard of for a female architect to hand over a client presentation to a male colleague or for a client to, as Perkins puts it, “want to see the old guys.” The pragmatic Taylor acknowledges that she’s “long had a rule: If it’s clear a client isn’t going to talk to me, you turn it over to someone else.” (She stresses that this has happened to her only “very, very occasionally.”)
Some women architects may not be willing to swallow this kind of compromise; however, it’s unlikely they’ll find themselves in this position often—assuming they do due diligence on countries and clients.
