Architect 2016-01

January 2016 AIAFeature 50 AIAPractice 54 AIAKnowledge 57 AIAPerspective 58
AIA Architect
AIAVoices
PHOTOGRAPHY: PORTER GIFFORD
People Person
The humanity of design thinking.
Michael Murphy is the executive director of
Boston-based MASS Design Group, where
he leads design and research programs in
several countries. Murphy advocates for “lofab”
design, which combines local labor and
economical prefabrication—“not to fetishize
‘the local,’ but to exhume the commodity of
labor,” he says. “We need to be asking about
the human handprints in the built environment,
which is a thing made by people that includes
materials extracted by people, and is ultimately
used by people.”
As told to William Richards
It’s important that we, as architects, care
about words like “context,” “dignity,” “social
outcomes,” and “evaluation.” We also have
to have the capability of investing in those
concepts—through how you spend your time,
how you treat your staff, and the projects you
take on. The question for our firm is, “How are
architects making progress in a measurable
way?” We have six full-time researchers and we
are making a significant financial investment
in measurability, which has forced us to
recalibrate our firm. We’ve forged three great
partnerships lately: with the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation, on the history and future
of hospitals; with Atlantic Philanthropies and
the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, to build a tool
set to evaluate the impact of architecture on
communities, organizations, and place; and
with Atul Gawande’s Ariadne Labs, to look at
a research protocol that asks how the design of
operating rooms affects the rate of Caesareans.
I believe in public interest design, but
my question about it is, “What architecture
isn’t socially minded?” I don’t think we have
a choice here—it’s a false dichotomy to say
we can do capital-A Architecture or we can
do architecture that is socially minded. That
dichotomy implies that it’s possible to work
in a vacuum and not think about political
and social issues. It implies that it’s possible
to ignore ethics—and that’s a pernicious
claim. The problem with advocates of, say,
the autonomous project in design is that they
believe there’s a debate here. There is no
debate. There is only the choice we have to
acknowledge the social implications of our
work. What makes today’s social project of
architecture different from the social project of
Modernism is that we now have data to assess
the impacts that buildings have on our lives.
I think architects possess an
underleveraged value proposition. By contract,
we have a fiduciary responsibility to the
public good. We are accountable during the
lifetime of a building. If architects can start to
leverage their actual value, they can change our
perceived value. MASS Design’s goal is not to
corner a market and exploit it; it’s to create a
bigger pie for more architects to work for more
communities. AIA
49