by Craig Applegath

When I first started my own practice I thought everyone wanted to run their own practice. It turns out not. Most people just want to work in a great practice run by someone else. But for those who are real archipreneurs – and you know who you are – there is nothing so thrilling and fun as starting your own business; and nothing so scary and anxiety producing as starting your own business! They are the flip side of the same coin. But in terms of general advice for people starting their own practice or business here are ten key lessons I have learned over the past twenty-five years of practice:

#1 – Design Your Life

Before starting your own business, make sure that starting a business is the right thing for you, and figure out what kind of business you want to be in. One of the best ways to do this is through something you are probably pretty good at already: design thinking.

However, to really see design thinking effectively applied to designing your career, reading Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ book Designing Your Life, is one of the first things you should do. (I am actually using it right now to design the next decade of my career.)

One of the things that they show you how to do is ask the right questions so you can solve the right problems. The last thing you want to do is start a business that is smart as a business idea, but does not succeed in helping you develop the career that will be most fulfilling to you, and that you will be most successful in.

#2 – Aim to Make a Difference

I think to be successful you need to lead a meaningful, purposeful life – that is, a life that provides you with a powerful and meaningful raison d’etre for what you do. As part of designing your life you will be thinking a lot about this. You don’t want to get into late middle age and wonder what the hell you have done with your life!

Life is short and needs to be lived with passion and intent. Having the goal of making money, or winning design awards, as your life’s purpose is a good recipe for a mid-life crisis. You have to make money to succeed, and winning design awards will probably help you succeed, but they should be understood as a means to an end.

And that end is something you need think very carefully about. Some purposes that serve people well include increasing the wellbeing of your community; providing your clients with consulting that makes a real difference to their success; designing projects that reduce environmental harm; and designing projects that increase the quality of life for the people who will use the project.

As designers, we have a wonderful opportunity and responsibility to create things that improve the lives of others, and this provides wonderful opportunities for practitioners to find very rich and meaningful careers.

#3 – Develop a 20-Year Plan

Whenever I tell young interns this, they seem incredulous, and typically tell me that they are having a hard enough time figuring out what they want to do over the next five years, let alone twenty years. But there is a very good reason for having a 20-year plan. A 20-year plan is really the length of a well-thought-out career, and therefore, if you are looking to plan a meaningful career, you will need to think about it in a 20-year time frame.

This is in no way at odds with the fact that most professionals change jobs or positions on average every five years. A job is not a career. A job is simply a place of employment with defined roles and responsibilities. In designing a career, you should be looking at it as a life’s project, and it having a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning of your career provides you with the knowledge and expertise you will need to be successful in your mid-career. And mid-career experience provides you with the foundations to build your legacy in your late career.

The objection I hear most often to creating a 20-year plan is that “I might change your mind about your career direction as you go along.” Actually, you will most likely change your mind as you go along, and you should make a point of taking stock each year about whether or not your 20-year plan still makes sense. But the planning process is still very useful.

One of the most important things a 20-year plan does is that it provides your unconscious brain with a map of what is important, and once your brain has this map, everything in the environment that in any way relates to your plan will be picked up by your brain and brought quickly into focus.

In other words, it is a way of your brain cutting through the clutter and noise of everyday life to make sense of what is important to you and what is not.

#4 – Business 101

Most architecture schools do not provide you with a good grounding in the business aspects of architecture practice. So, before you quit your day-job to start your own practice, it’s probably worth taking a continuing-end course at your local college or university on how to start and run a small business. It will teach you the basics of sales, marketing, bookkeeping, and managing your team.

I would also recommend taking a course in negotiation. Architects, for some reason, are typically terrible negotiators, especially in negotiations for fair compensation for their services! And you will also want to start building yourself a library of go-to business books. One of the best books you can read on how to lead, manage, and develop business for a professional service firm is David Maister’s book, Managing the Professional Service Firm.

This is certainly my go-to bible for understanding how to successfully lead and manage a design practice. I don’t think there is any better advice out there then Maister’s wise and insightful guidance.

#5 – Read, Read, Read

I think that one of the most important ingredients for success is to be constantly at the intersections of culture, science and technology, and business, and to do so you will need to be constantly reading – reading books, blogs (like Archipreneur), newspapers, and journals of all sorts. You need to read both broadly and deeply. You need to understand the bigger world around you; but you also need to maintain your expertise in whatever your specialty niche is (and you will want to have at least a couple of specialty niches!).

So what is on my current reading list this month? In addition to the standard journals and mags, I am reading: Before Happiness, by Shawn Achor; Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit; Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans; Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them by Julian Cribb; The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, by Kevin Kelly; and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson.

#6 – Find a Blue Ocean

This is a reference to W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne’s book, Blue Ocean Strategy, that suggests that entrepreneurs look for business opportunities in uncontested waters – blue oceans – rather than competitive, bloody waters – red oceans. This is good advice if you can find your own blue ocean. One thing is for sure, in North America and Europe, architecture, urban planning, and design are mature markets with limited opportunity for new traditional practices.

If you are starting a traditional practice, you will be up against dozens, often hundreds of competitors who will have much deeper portfolios and much broader client networks than your new business will have. So you will need to offer something that really differentiates you from your competitors.

Maybe you will be the new expert in computational design? Maybe you can team up with an emerging builder to become a niche design-build practice? Maybe you will be a developer-architect? Whatever you plan to do, you need to develop a “secret sauce” that your competitors will find difficult or impossible to copy.

When I started my own practice just as the Internet was emerging, I positioned myself as a “virtual architect” and used the Internet to pull together consultants form all over North America to do projects – mostly buddies from grad school. But it sounded cool, and got me some good speaking gigs at conferences, and conferred a degree of uniqueness on my practice that got me noticed.

#7 – Build and Support Your Network

I have not met any successful entrepreneurs who do not have a deep network of people they trust and can rely on. Networks are for support; networks are for leads; networks are for advice; networks are for collaboration. Networks are the important bonds that allow you to see and realize potential opportunities. One of the best guides to developing your network is Harvey Mackay’s book, Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty. And one of the most important lessons in Mackay’s book is that networks are not to be exploited, but rather supported.

You build a network of people whom you will try to support, and care about, and they will in turn do the same for you. I can’t say enough about how important building a good network is. Without a good network success will be virtually impossible. And make sure your network is made up of smart, decent, and honest people, because as John Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

#8 – Build Great Teams

Part of building a good network will be spotting great talent for your team. Unless you plan to work as a sole practitioner, you will need to build a great team to be successful. Volumes have been written on how to recruit, manage, and inspire great teams, and you will need to familiarize yourself with the field of management and leadership if you are to be successful. From my experience of leading both a small and a larger practice, there are three important aspects of building and leading great teams that you will want to focus on.

The first is talent spotting, long-term networking, and relationship building with future potential team members. The second is selecting and hiring the right team members. And the third is leading, inspiring, and nurturing your team. For the long-term growth of your practice, talent spotting will be one of your most important tasks – and one not often talked about in management and leadership literature. How do you spot great future team members? You always need to be looking!

When you are at industry conferences; when you are giving public presentations; when you are at professional industry events of any kind, you should be constantly on the lookout for future talent. And when do you spot bright, able, ambitious, innovative people, make a point of connecting with them and building a relationship. Make them an important part of your network. At some point in the future the stars may align and you may be able to invite them to be part of your team. Talent is a long game!

#9 – Take Care of Yourself

You will not be able to succeed in any new venture unless you are physically and mentally up to the challenge – and can maintain your physical and mental stamina over the long haul. You will be pulled in a thousand different directions when you start your practice, and you will continue to have a private life with its own demands and stresses.

So you will need to learn how to take care of yourself to manage your energy, and your physical and mental health. There are two very important things you should be doing, even when things are crazy busy – in fact especially when things are crazy busy.

First, you should set aside a minimum of an hour at least three to four times per week for exercise – some combination of cardio and resistance weight training.

Second, learn how to meditate and do so each day. If you are new to meditation try the Headspace App on your iPhone or Android. I have talked with a number of entrepreneurs who say they could not function without exercise and meditation, and most accounts of successful entrepreneurs I have read have said the same.

#10 – Be a Rational Optimist

Of the list of ten lessons learned, this lesson may be the most important. My personal experience over the past 25 years of practice has taught me to make every possible effort to see failures and setbacks as doors to new insights and opportunities that one would not have otherwise been able to see.

As a personal coach I know asks when one of her clients runs into a particularly difficult setback: “What is the gift provided by this situation that you would not have otherwise had access to without the setback?” This is a powerful re-framing question because it cleverly redirects your brain away from the negative emotions associated with the setback, and forces it to start exploring new opportunities that may exposed by what you might otherwise simply see as a failure. This turn of mind is what I like to call rational optimism – an optimism founded on the realities of a difficult set of circumstances, where you are willing to explore the positive opportunities that may be inherent in those circumstances.

For example, like most architecture firms in North America, we are experiencing significant fee competition based simply on the supply and demand for architectural and engineering services. This fee pressure is making it ever more difficult to maintain the high levels of both expertise and client service that our firm is known for. Instead of cutting both service and expertise to remain fee competitive, we have instead been heavily investing in various design and production technologies that will allow us to be more effective and productive and even improve client service. So as you face significant challenges and even failures, keep asking yourself: “What’s the gift?”

There are no guarantees of success in this world, and starting a business venture in the design sector is especially fraught with challenges. But your chances of success will most likely be greater if you look for ways to deploy, in your own fashion, these ten principles. Most importantly, try to be a rational optimist. Business, like life, is one challenge after another. Do your best to look at these challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. So always ask yourself when you are faced with a tough challenge, or a failure, “what’s the gift?” Good luck and have fun!

***

Craig Applegath is the founding principal of DIALOG’s Toronto Studio, and a passionate designer who believes in the power of built form to meaningfully improve the wellbeing of communities and the environment they are part of. Since graduating from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design Craig has focused his energies on leading innovative planning and design projects that address the complex challenges facing our communities, as well as on his advocacy of sustainable building design and urban regeneration and symbiosis.

Craig’s area of practice includes the master planning and design of institutional projects, including cultural and museum, post secondary education, and healthcare facilities. In addition to his professional practice responsibilities, Craig speaks about his research and design explorations at conferences and workshops internationally. This has included recent presentations at conferences in Prague, Munich and Beijing.

Craig was a founding Board Member of Sustainable Buildings Canada, and a Past President of the Ontario Association of Architects. Craig has lectured or taught at Harvard, the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, as well as at many professional and sector related conferences around the world. In 2001 Craig was made a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada for his contributions to the profession.

The post The 10 Most Important Lessons Learned in 25 Years of Architecture Practice appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Craig Applegath, Founding Principal of DIALOG’s Toronto Studio.

Craig is a passionate designer who believes in the power of built forms to meaningfully improve the wellbeing of communities and environments in which they play a part. Spending his childhood summers in the forests of Northern Ontario, Canada where he learned all about forest ecosystems, it came as no surprise when he later enrolled in biology.

But biology didn’t satisfy his additional passion for designing and making things, so he switched courses to architecture. His early passion for biology, however, remains visible in his work, many of which include sustainable practice, green design, integrated design, and urban resilience among others. The question that defines his work is: How can we shape our built environment so that it is more effectively and constructively integrated with the natural systems within which we live?

DIALOG was able to position itself in the Toronto market as a leader in integrated design and green design. The company grew from a one-person operation in 2003, when Craig founded the Toronto studio, to the one-hundred-and-fifty-person operation they are today.

Keep reading to learn about environmentally integrated design projects and Craig’s vision on how climate change, artificial intelligence and automation will change architecture for good.

Enjoy the interview!

Could you tell us about your background?

I trained as a biologist at the University of Toronto, with an interest in ecology and marine biology, and then as an architect at Dalhousie University, in Halifax. After graduation from my first professional degree in architecture I worked for a year in the studio of O.M. Ungers in Frankfurt, Germany, where I was introduced to the importance of the critical relationship between architecture and its urban context. It was that interest that led me enter the Master of Architecture in Urban Design program at Harvard’s GSD.

The next 5 years was spent qualifying as an architect and beginning my own architecture practice in Toronto in 1992. After leading my own practice for six years I joined Dunlop Architects as a partner in 1998 to focus on institutional projects and lead the development of their green design efforts. In 2003, when Dunlop was purchased by Stantec I didn’t relish the idea of being a corporate architect so I left to found the Toronto Studio of DIALOG, lead the firm’s green design strategy, and be part of DIALOG’s institutional design team.

Since joining DIALOG, the Toronto Studio has grown from myself to an integrated team of 150 architects, planners, interior designers and engineers. My primary role now is to lead the Higher Education design team, coordinate the efforts of our computational design group, and continue to push the envelope of green design. The project that I have most recently completed is the Bill Fisch Forest Stewardship Education Centre – a facility designed to be a LEED Platinum and Seven Petal Living Building Challenge facility – the greenest building in Canada.

You started training as a biologist. Is this were your awareness for the environment came from?

Since as far back as I can remember as a kid I was passionate about making and designing things, and fascinated by the natural world. I was extremely lucky because my uncle was a science teacher, and I spent a lot of my summers as a kid tromping around Northern Ontario forests with him and his daughters learning all about forest ecosystems and the role that various plants and animals played in those ecosystems.

The thing I remember most about those outings was how my uncle refused to simply explain things to us, but instead encouraged us to figure them out for ourselves by developing hypotheses and then proving them or not. He provided us with just enough clues to build a hypothesis so that we ourselves could figure it out.

I think this early experience with the scientific method instilled both a sense of wonder about the natural world, as well as a deep love and respect for the scientific method. I also had an amazing biology teacher in high school who continued to inspire my love of all things biological. Upon graduating from high school I entered the science and biology program at the University of Toronto with the intention of pursuing a career as a biologist and academic.

What changed your mind and made you follow a career in architecture?

Although I had started university with the intention of becoming a biologist, I found that as a study, biology didn’t satisfy my other passion for designing and making things. Also, I came to realize that what was really starting to fascinate me was the intersection our built environment and natural systems, and how we could shape our built environment to be more effectively and constructively integrated with those systems. So the more I explored opportunities to do this, the more I was drawn to architecture.

So now, years later, I still find myself still as interested in biology as I do in architecture and urban design, and I am finding that I am able to more and more integrate all three passions in my work.

When did you found DIALOG’s Toronto Studio and how has the studio evolved since then?

I started DIALOG’s Toronto Studio in the fall of 2003. DIALOG (then Cohos Evamy) was well known in Alberta, but new to Toronto. A classmate from the Harvard GSD, the late Tom Sutherland, and I had had parallel careers for many years and when I left Dunlop Architects we agreed that I should start a Toronto Studio for DIALOG. It was really the absolute best of both worlds. On the one hand, it was a start-up, with all the excitement and fun of a start-up. On the other hand, DIALOG’s Alberta studios provided significant knowledge and resources to backstop the Toronto Studio in our first couple of years.

As it turned out, we were very quickly able to position ourselves in the Toronto market as a leader in integrated design and green design, and to win some key projects that really started our growth, allowing us to grow from a one-person operation in 2003 to the one-hundred-and-fifty-person operation we are today. We now have a truly integrated studio of planners, architects, interior designers, and structural, mechanical and electrical engineers.

This integration is critically important because not only does it allow us to do very green design, it provides for a highly collaborative and creative environment to design in. It is also turning out to be very important to our ability to leverage the use of computational design (also called parametric design). The integration of architecture and engineering disciplines significantly enhances our studio’s ability to integrate all aspects of the building design into the computational design process.

So for example, a parametric exploration of a building façade design can be wholly integrated with the design of the building structural system. In the time that it used to take us to do three options, we can now do two hundred. The use of computational design is also serving as a launching pad for the exploration of cognitive computing and AI in the design and projection process, as well as more effectively tying our design process into the future realities of the construction and building operation processes.

I would argue that cognitive computing is the next space race for our profession. I think it will change just about everything we do.

Could you give as an example of one of your office’s environmentally integrated design project? What was the biggest challenge?

Probably the best example of an environmentally integrated project is the Bill Fisch Forest Stewardship Education Centre. It is 4000 sf education centre designed to be both LEED Platinum and achieve all seven petals of the Living Building Challenge. It was designed as a Net-zero water and Net-zero energy building.

The biggest challenge on this project was to achieve the requirements of the Living Building Challenge Materials Petal, Red List. Many of the materials and product manufacturers and suppliers we researched were unwilling to provide us with the information we needed to make a determination of whether their material or product complied with the Red List requirements. However, it was such a compelling project to work on that these kinds of problems could be taken in stride.

How do you define urban resilience? And how does it define your work?

I became interested in urban resilience some years ago when our studio started to discuss the challenges that our cities would face as climate change started to bite. In essence, planning for urban resilience asks the question: how can we plan and design cities and buildings in ways that will allow them to rebound from the shocks and stresses that will be associated with the climate change impacts that will be increasing in frequency and intensity over the next century?

These explorations were actually the starting point for us to expand our study into the broader question of how we can plan our cities, and the regions they are part of, to be environmentally symbiotic rather than pathologically parasitic. It’s clear that we have a lot of work to do to both reduce our harm and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

You created the Symbiotic Cities Network in 2012. Could you tell us about the network’s mission?

The creation of Symbiotic Cities Network was an opportunity to bring together like-minded professionals – planners, architects, engineers – to explore how we can shift from being pathologically parasitic and environmentally destructive species, to being mutualistically symbiotic and regenerative species. Although this might at first hearing sound hopelessly naïve and optimistic, there are actually a number of important things we can do to move in this direction.

Over the past couple of years we have boiled it down to three overarching and interconnected strategies:

First, we need to radically reduce the harm our species is causing to the biosphere. At the moment we are consuming somewhere in the order 1.7 planets worth of ecosystem services per year (obviously, the world only produces 1 per year so this is obviously not sustainable). This means we are now chewing into our natural capital. We are also pumping millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and have reached over 400 ppms of CO2 in our atmosphere (350 ppms is considered the highest “sustainable” concentration).

To significantly reduce the harm we are causing we will have to economically internalize the costs of using our natural capital, and move toward a much more circular economy, and radically reduce our CO2 emissions. The good news is that we have the technology to do this. The only question is whether we can deploy it soon enough to be effective.

Second, we will have to learn how to adapt our cities and communities to the mounting impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, increased frequency and intensity of severe weather events, as well as stress that a changing climate will cause existing ecosystems. This is where resilience comes in.

Third, we will have to invest significant resources to repair and regenerate the damage we have already done to the biosphere. We will be adding between one and two billion people to the planet over the next 25 years, so this will be particularly challenging. This is where regenerative design is important.

What’s your opinion on the architectural education? Are the architects to be prepared to work with complex challenges like the climate change, population growth and climate-induced migrations that our cities are facing nowadays?

It is probably impossible for any faculty of architecture to adequately prepare students for the complexity of challenges that they will face young architects.

Climate change, population growth, in-migrations of climate and political refugees are all big picture challenges. New building technologies, new design technologies, artificial intelligence, and cognitive computing, and the increasing commodification of architecture are additional emerging professional challenges.

I think that many faculties of architecture in North America are struggling to maintain their currency and relevance in this rapidly changing environment. There is no silver-bullet fix, but I think that both the profession and academia will have to find more effective ways to cross pollenate and collaborate in developing effective learning strategies for both educating and training future architects if they are to be successful.

DIALOG is quite a big partnership; it has four studios in Canada and one in the USA. What are the challenges to work in such a large-scale office structure?

Although DIALOG has over 500 people working across 4 studios in Canada, and one new studio in the USA, it doesn’t feel that big – and was designed that way. We are not a hierarchical organization, but rather a networked organization. There are 50 principals and 75 associates, and work is team-based and very collaborative. Because we are an integrated planning, architecture, interior design, structural, mechanical and electrical firm collaboration and design thinking are powerful cultural drivers in the firm.

I suspect that new interns that have worked in very hierarchical, top-down firms must wonder when they arrive at DIALOG just who is running the place. It takes a while for them to figure out that as a networked organization there is actually no one ‘running’ the firm, but rather, there are people entrusted with carrying through both the studio and firm level strategy that has been developed by the principals consensually.

The other important ingredient for success in DIALOG is expertise, leadership, and entrepreneurialism. Principals are only as successful as their ability to provide the kind of expertise and experience necessary to win good projects and clients.

What is your strategy to find new customers?

Two simple words: expertise and service. Our clients hire us because of the expertise we can offer them, and for our commitment to excellent client service. New business comes from either referrals, or from clients seeing us speaking at conferences, expert roundtables, or reading about us in professional journals.

The best advice I have ever seen on how to win new business was written by David Maister in his book, Managing the Professional Service Firm. As he points out, people want to hire experts who care about them, and experts are people who do research, write about it, and speak about it.

Do you have any advice for archipreneurs who are interested in starting their own business?

When I first started my own practice I thought everyone wanted to run their own practice. It turns out not. Most people just want to work in a great practice run by someone else. But for those who are real archipreneurs – and you know who you are – I will tell you that there is nothing so thrilling and fun as starting your own business; and nothing so scary and anxiety producing as starting your own business! They are the flip side of the same coin. But in terms of general advice for people starting their own practice or business here are a few lessons learned:

1. Design Your Life:

Before starting your own business, make sure that starting a business is the right thing for you, and figure out what kind of business you want to be in. One of the best ways to do this is through something you are probably pretty good at already: design thinking.

However, to really see design thinking very effectively applied to designing your career, reading Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ book Designing Your Life, is one of the first things you should do. (I am actually using it right now to design the next decade of my career.) One of the things that they very effectively show you how to do is ask the right questions so you can solve the right problems.

The last thing you want to do is start a business that is smart as a business idea, but does not succeed in helping you develop the career that will be most fulfilling to you, and that you will be most successful in.

2. Business 101:

Most architecture schools do not provide good training in the business aspects of the profession of architecture. So before you quit your day-job, it’s worth taking a community college or continuing ed course at your local college or university on how to start and run a small business. It will teach you the basics of sales, marketing, book keeping, and managing people.

I would also recommend taking a course in negotiation. Architects, for some reason, are typically terrible negotiators, especially in negotiations for fair compensation for their services!

3. Find a Blue Ocean:

This is a reference to W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne’s book Blue Ocean Strategy that suggests that entrepreneurs look for business opportunities in uncontested waters – blue oceans – rather than competitive, bloody waters – red oceans. This is good advice if you can find your own blue ocean.

One thing is for sure, in North America and Europe, architecture is a mature market with limited opportunity for new traditional practices. If you are a traditional practice, you will be up against dozens, often hundreds of competitors who will have much deeper portfolios than your new business will have.

So you will need to offer something that really differentiates you from your competitors. Maybe you will be the new expert in computational design? Maybe you can team up with an emerging builder to become a niche design-build practice? Maybe you will be a developer-architect? Whatever you do, you need to develop a secret sauce that your competitors will find difficult or impossible to copy.

When I started my own practice just as the Internet was emerging, I positioned myself as a “virtual architect” and pulled together consultants form all over North America to do projects – mostly buddies from grad school. But it sounded cool, and got me speaking gigs at conferences, and conferred a degree of uniqueness on my practice that got me noticed.

4. Build and Support Your Network:

I have not met any successful entrepreneurs who do not have a deep network. Networks are for support; networks are for leads; networks are for advice; networks are for collaboration. Networks are the important bonds that allow you to see and realize potential opportunities.

One of the best guides to developing your network is Harvey Mackay’s book, Dig Your Well Before Your Thirsty. One of the most important lessons in Mackay’s book is that networks are not to be milked, but rather supported. You build a network of people whom you will try to support, and care about, and they will in turn do the same for you.

I can’t say enough about how important building a good network is.

Without a good network success will be virtually impossible.

5. Take Care of Yourself:

You will be pulled in a thousand directions at the studio, and you will also have a private life with its own demands and stresses. So you will need to learn how to take care of yourself and manage your energy and manage your physical and mental health. There are two very important things you should be doing, even when things are crazy busy – in fact especially when things are crazy busy.

First, you should set aside an hour at least three to four times per week for exercise – both cardio and resistance training. Second, learn how to meditate and do so each day. If you are new to meditation try the Headspace App on your iPhone or Android. I have talked with a number of entrepreneurs who say they could not function without exercise and meditation, and most accounts by successful entrepreneurs I have read have said the same.

6. Make a Difference:

I think to be successful you need to lead a meaningful life – that is, a life that provides you with a powerful and meaningful reason d’etre for what you do. As part of designing your life (above) you will be thinking a lot about this. You don’t want to get to being late middle aged and wonder what the hell you have done with your life! Life is short and needs to be lived with passion and intent.

7. Read, Read, Read:

I think that one of the most important ingredients for success is to be constantly at the intersections of culture, technology, and business, and to do so you will need to be constantly reading – reading books, blogs (like Archipreneur), newspapers, and journals of all sorts.

You need to read both broadly and deeply. You need to understand the bigger world around you; but you also need to maintain your expertise in whatever your specialty niche is (and you will want to have at least a couple of specialty niches!).

How do you see the future of the architectural profession? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming developers and architects?

The world is changing so fast I am not sure what to say here, except that the chances of getting it right are highly unlikely. Having said that, there are a number of trends that smart archipreneurs should keep theirs eyes on.

The first is the transition from green design to resilient design. I’m not sure how fast this will happen, but once Miami, NYC, Boston and Seattle all start flooding on a regular basis because of climate change, resilient design will be much more of an opportunity.

The vertical integration of design, construction, and building operations is another thing that is coming, being driven by the transformation of everything into digital information – BIM is the future. Parametric design and BIM will smooth the way for this to be ever more a reality.

Prefabrication, like the work SHOP does will also be a possible blue ocean for archipreneurs.

All the above lead to the conclusion that

to be successful young architects will have to be capable of swimming in the worlds of design, information technology, business, and fabrication/construction.

The world of digital information is turning us into craftspersons once again – but craftspersons on amphetamines!

About Craig Applegath

Craig Applegath is the founding principal of DIALOG’s Toronto Studio, and a passionate designer who believes in the power of built form to meaningfully improve the wellbeing of communities and the environment they are part of. Since graduating from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design Craig has focused his energies on leading innovative planning and design projects that address the complex challenges facing our communities, as well as on his advocacy of sustainable building design and urban regeneration and symbiosis.

Craig’s area of practice includes the master planning and design of institutional projects, including cultural and museum, post secondary education, and healthcare facilities. In addition to his professional practice responsibilities, Craig speaks about his research and design explorations at conferences and workshops internationally. This has included recent presentations at conferences in Prague, Munich and Beijing.

Craig was a founding Board Member of Sustainable Buildings Canada, and a Past President of the Ontario Association of Architects. Craig has lectured or taught at Harvard, the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, as well as at many professional and sector related conferences around the world. In 2001 Craig was made a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada for his contributions to the profession.

The post Going Green: Advice on Integrated Design, Life and Business with Craig Applegath appeared first on Archipreneur.