California Science Center, Exposition Park, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, photo by Timothy Hursley.Ken Sanders is a partner at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership, a 340-person architecture, interiors and planning practice with offices in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle and Washington, D.C. He has taken a leading role in the integration of technology into all facets of the firm’s practice. His 1996 book, The Digital Architect, remains a primer for understanding the options available to architects. Sanders spoke to me about some of the key issues a national firm like ZGF faces today when considering the use of technology.
Process still reigns in the design profession. This is an important concept now that a plethora of devices (in reach of practically every architect) allows a range of systems for interacting with clients. Like many large practices. ZGF has employed e-mail, project Web sites and video conferencing in various ways on a variety of commercial and institutional projects. The successful application of technology, Sanders emphasizes, is where the tools are designed to complement and reinforce the process, not drive it.
Desired reach usually dictates whether a Web site, e-mail or a mixture of the two is the best method for communication. If a Web site is deemed optimal for project outreach, ZGF uses a template, or standard tool kit, that can be customized. For the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (in association with FKP Architects), the Web site is a repository of the work done to date: meeting notes, agendas, program documents and design schemes. In this case it functions as an on-line reference library; physical meetings, phone and e-mail are still the primary forms of contact.
Sanders favors a project Web site for getting general project information to a large participating audience and for gathering survey-type data from a hard-to-reach user group. In ZGF’s recent work with Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the programming and master-planning effort involved not only staff, students and faculty, but also Art Center’s 15.000 alumni throughout the world. A Web site was designed to bring in participants who could not be present for on-campus workshops. Through a series of questions seeking each participant’s vision for Art Center, the larger community became informed about what was under way, and interested people were able to participate from afar. Similarly, for the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, a project database was designed to display, through a browser, thousands of pre-evaluated user comments.
ZGF establishes Web sites specifically for the construction phase of some projects. For the Portland International Airport expansion, requests for information are displayed as an open book, where architect, client, contractor and consultants can see who has responded when, raising everyone’s accountability and awareness of response.
Typically, project Web sites are accessible from any location via the Internet but protected from public access by user names and passwords. Approximately 30 vendors offer the software; several give installation assistance. Even when short-lived (or when the initial excitement wanes and project team members end up relying on e-mail, as sometimes happens), websites provide options for firms that in-house resources cannot.
ZGF also utilizes video conferencing for both company and client meetings. While not a replacement for in-person gatherings, video conferencing, Sanders points out, is superior in one way: with the camera focused on the model or drawing being discussed. everyone has the same vantage point.
With instant communication an expectation of clients and the technology now at everyone’s fingertips, Ken Sanders offers a last piece of advice. The client’s objectives and technological comfort level-and the tools that promote the most effective process incorporating that-should be the starting point from which any project system is designed.
Originally published in early 2000, in arcCA 00.1, “Zoning Time.”
