Learn to sell something, anything. You’ll never learn more about what it takes to run a business than when you put yourself out there and make an offering.

– Michael Kilkelly, Founder of ArchSmarter

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Be persistent and don’t give up on your dreams. Find the best team members to build your business with and, most importantly, – don’t be afraid to dare and enjoy what you do.

– Adi Biran & Lihi Gerstner, Founders of Splacer.co

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It’s all about surrounding yourself with the most talented people who can help you realize your vision and stay most true to your ideas.

– Natasha Case, Founder of Coolhaus

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Studying architecture is just the greatest thing there is. The skills learned are actually quite good for management. You learn to form a vision, present this vision or break it down to smaller tasks.

– Kaspar Helfrich, Co-Founder of Archilogic

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I hope that if architects and design minded people are impacting development and urbanism in a greater way, our buildings and our communities will only get better.

– Ari S. Heckman, Founder of ASH NYC

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Architects have a huge contribution to make to the world in the 21st century – particularly in shaping how we can live sustainably and happily within ever-denser cities and within the Earth’s resources.

– Will Hunter, Founder & Director LSA

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Just get started, and don’t be afraid because the people who are successful are willing to fail and so you should be too.

– David Belt, Founder of Macro Sea

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I would like to see architects be less passive in their roles and with their profession. For me that means real estate development. But it could mean any number of other variations on the trade. Architects are holistic thinkers. I am at my best when I use my right brain and my left brain equally. Architecture school hones both of these hemispheres in a way that’s not common in other professions.

– Kevin Cavenaugh, Founder of Guerrilla Development

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Start today…! I suffered from analysis paralysis for a long time, fearing I’d never be able to save enough working capital to make a run at starting a business. I was determined to spend as little as possible to make it work.

– Eric Reinhold, Founder of 30×40 Design Workshop

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In the architectural profession we mainly think about solutions, and we constantly challenge how things are normally done. I think that’s a rare quality.

– Jakob Lange, Partner at BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) and Head of the BIG Ideas project unit

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I see a profession that is completely different from the one we know today. Traditional practice is broken – I yearn to see solutions that we can’t even imagine today.

– Marc Kushner, Founder of Architizer & HWKN Architects

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I think that the most important step is to just do it. It sounds bold but in the end you need to think about your business idea and how customers will use and pay for it. Finally, you need to implement it. Do not wait too long; make it a reality.

– Antje Kunze, Founder of SmartBetterCities

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My advice to architects who want to start their own business is to put creativity at the heart of their activity, and to try to invent new things that can be really useful for other people.

– Filippo Schiano di Pepe, Founder of CoContest

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As architects, we like to think that successful projects come because we have a great idea. But a project’s success is actually down to risk management by a practicing and experienced developer.

– Roger Zogolovitch, Founder of Solidspace

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Go for it. I think you just have to start small, and start with what you can do with your own hands and feet, and find a way to be innovative. I think the biggest trap that you can get into is borrowing a lot of money and then finding out that it doesn’t work.

– Matthew Griffin, Co-Founder of Deadline Architects

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Follow your heart and do what you love to do. However, if it’s business you want then you need to learn to take care not only of yourself but also your customers.

– Qi Su, Co-Founder Modelo.io

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Architects have to educate themselves a lot more in the areas of digitalization, programming, economics, and the invisible infrastructure of cities. It’s not enough to simply understand how a building is drawn and set up if you want to shape and think about the modern cities of tomorrow.

– Andreas Rauch, Co-Founder of CABIN SPACEY

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What are your favorite quotes that inspire you?

The post 17 Inspirational Archipreneur Quotes that will Motivate You in 2017 appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Igor Marko and Petra Marko, founders of Marko&Placemakers.

Marko&Placemakers is a city design and research consultancy based in London.

Their concept of placemaking is about understanding the city as a living organism, linking the different layers of a city in unexpected ways and creating new narratives to allow curiosity and desire to interlace with the physical space, both existing and new. In this experiential design process, the role of Marko&Placemakers is that of a creator, bringing new ideas, as well as a mediator, linking existing processes and people.

And process – interaction, mediation and communication with groups and people – is the core of the work of the consultancy.

Keep reading to learn how these two architects address social, environmental and economic issues that cities face today.

I hope you enjoy the interview!

What made you decide to found Marko&Placemakers? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you?

Igor: Our paths crossed collaborating on public realm projects. I had previously led FoRM Associates, an urban design practice. Petra worked as architect at John McAslan + Partners before qualifying as a ‘creative entrepreneur’ to develop her role as enabler and facilitator.

We strongly felt there is a new paradigm in city making, which is about involvement and education of users. While our portfolio builds on a decade of hands-on experience of implementing urban regeneration projects at FoRM, our goal with the new consultancy was to work much more closely with the clients and users in the strategic and conceptual phases of projects.

The initial stages are when important decisions are made with impact on long term design quality and resilience of places. This negotiation process often happens without creative input and doesn’t have a holistic understanding. Form an entrepreneurial perspective this is a niche our consultancy operates in, striving to break generic and mechanical city making processes.

What are the major problems and opportunities that cities face in the 21st century?

Igor: The biggest problems are inflexible and technocratic planning systems, which can’t cope with constant change – a natural state of cities today. Lack of effective instruments of communication; distrust between the citizens, local government and private sector; and ultimately lack of political vision add to the planning conundrum. “Who owns the city” (David Harvey) is a question pertinent to 21st Century urbanisation.

On a global scale, migration and climate change are huge challenges that cities can’t solve on their own – we need to work together as a global community. Transport and mobility remain big issues as cities try to move towards pedestrian-friendly environment while retaining the convenience of cars. Recent transformations such as pedestrianisation of Times Square in New York show that it is possible to reverse the trend from a car-oriented to a people-oriented environment.

On the other hand, multi-million cities are springing up in Asia entirely focused on cars. It is a challenge the global leaders need to address urgently. That’s why it is important that architects have the right communication tools to engage with policy makers about these issues.

What services does your company provide to create successful solutions for city development?

Petra: Our work addresses the overlaps between place, process and people, reaching beyond the physical aspects of design. In this experiential design process, we see the role of the placemaker as that of a creator, bringing new ideas, as well as a mediator, linking existing processes and people. We often work on client side in the strategic phases of projects – helping them to develop the brief and long term vision, as well as a ‘roadmap’ how to achieve this.

We see public space infrastructure as fundamental in city making, especially when creating new urban areas. Public space is the glue in between – an exchange space for people, which helps develop character of a place through joint experiences.

Our work is supported by continuous socio-economic research, which identifies strengths and performance of neighbourhoods in order to help integrate new development as well as supporting the existing assets of the place. Our approach is ‘parametric’ in that each of our projects revolves around its specific challenges. While our core team remains small, we collaborate with a wide network of experts, often beyond the field of architecture and urbanism, such as economists, sociologists, geographers or artists.

How do you create great places? What strategies does your company provide?

Igor: Our ‘signature’ as a consultancy is our way of working – i.e. the process, rather than specific aesthetics or form. Our process can be described through several principles. Firstly, inclusivity and sustainability – not only ecological but more importantly social, understanding the impact of projects on existing and future communities. Secondly, it is the experience a place enables – something that may sound basic but for us is fundamental, such as meeting friends. And finally – communication – without which nothing could happen!

Our approach is about facilitating and negotiating change using design thinking and creative tools drawing on these principles. We believe that successful city making needs to combine both bottom up and top down approach, in order to sustain growth and genuine character of places. This means not only engagement of local people and stakeholders, but also lobbying and negotiating with decision makers to ensure that energy invested into bottom up initiatives will have genuine and lasting effect on the whole community, not just communities of interest.

Who are the clients you usually work for?

Petra: We work for public, private as well as third sector. Our consultancy is part of London Mayor’s special assistance team for High Streets regeneration. Many of the local High Streets which used to be central hubs for the capital’s town centres are struggling with competition from shopping malls and other more popular destinations.

In our research we focus on building on the existing qualities of these places. By engaging the local shop owners and visitors we uncover potential of places which can be often harnessed through simple interventions and support. We have already mapped the London Olympic legacy area and several London boroughs, revealing the people behind the local economy. Our most recent study of Coulsdon Town Centre for London Borough of Croydon will establish the base of a Business Improvement District, which will help attract greater mix and build on the existing assets of the town centre.

Igor: On another scale, we are working on several riverfront masterplans in Central Europe, where we oversee the public realm strategy – so we are working as an intermediary between architects, the client and the municipality. In Bratislava, we are working on the public realm framework for a new city quarter designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The new mixed used development will integrate an existing industrial heritage building which will act as a cultural hub for the place.

Alongside these strategic projects, we have also completed a number of public realm commissions, including a community park and a new public space within an administrative complex. We also enjoy getting involved in projects outside Europe, with successful competition collaborations in South Korea and Singapore, where we were recently shortlisted for a strategic vision for Orchard Road – the central shopping precinct of Singapore – in collaboration with ARUP.

Which one was your most challenging project and why?

Igor: Northala Fields Park in London has been the most challenging, but perhaps also most rewarding project, which fundamentally shifted my thinking about the role of architects. Architects naturally default to controlling up to the last detail. In case of Northala park, we have gone through a two-year participatory process, where locals were directly engaged in shaping the future programme and activities within the new park. Working directly with the users meant that as designers we could always test ideas in discussion with people and make them better suited for their needs.

Our role as designers went beyond the physical aspects to developing a financial model – we used recycled construction waste from adjacent developments. The deposit of this inert waste material generated £6milllion income to create a new topology and programmable landscape at no cost to the taxpayers. Today, Northala is a vital community asset and people actively take care of the park. Coming back after years to see that the park is becoming more and more loved and cared for by the people is what motivates me.

Petra, you have a degree in Creative Entrepreneurship in addition to your architecture degree. From your experience, do you think this is absolutely necessary in order to run a consultancy?

Petra: Since the economic crisis of 2008, the architecture profession has been adapting to the new realities of the industry – lack of investment, unstable political landscape, as well as global factors such as climate change. I found there was little room for discussing these challenges in practice.

If you are working on a tender package of a £40million building, it is all about the detail and delivery. I was interested in the bigger picture – how does a project come off the ground in the first place – how to assemble the best team for it – and how to retain a vision from inception up to completion.

ICCE (Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship) was in its second year running at Goldsmiths when I joined the course in 2009. I conceived of my masters’ as a ‘sabbatical’ to allow me to get out of the ‘architecture box’ and explore the possibility to develop my role as facilitator of built environment.

The learning process at ICCE was very much revolving around each individual student as we were a diverse mix of creative individuals from a wide range of backgrounds from performance, media and music through to architecture and design. It was very much about recognising and fine tuning one’s personal values and reflecting these onto our professional lives; as well as huge amount of practical learning from business planning and time management to networking.

The course Director Sian Prime’s one-to-one approach gave invaluable guidance and confidence to each of us on our path ‘in between’. Many of the people I studied with remain good friends to date and a great network beyond the architecture field.

Alongside my masters’ I also started working for an architect-turn-developer (Solidspace) and gained a glimpse of the development process from the other side of the fence. This was really eye-opening. You start understanding that the architect is part of the process only for a limited period in the middle – with important strategic phase and post occupancy phase on either side. Land acquisition, which in London is the biggest challenge, along with financing, are perhaps two most significant factors determining any new development.

It is not surprising that many architects today act as facilitators of self-built housing projects, in order to gain more control over the building process and thus also the final product and its financial viability. This role requires additional skill sets apart from design and an MA in creative entrepreneurship or even a ‘traditional’ MBA could provide the additional tools that many architecture schools lack.

You told me you are currently part of the new London School of Architecture (LSA) practice network and leading the Unstable City design think tank. Could you tell us a little about this project?

Petra: The London School of Architecture was set up by Will Hunter and his colleagues as a response to the need of a more practice-based education model, which would prepare students for the realities of the profession today. With my interest in architecture education I was immediately drawn to the school and our practice joined the LSA network right at the start. It is a very exciting time with the first academic year nearly completed.

We led the LSA Unstable City design think tank jointly with Grimshaw architects and over the past 6 months our group of students developed ideas around the notion of instability as positive phenomena. Our starting point was that cities are in constant change. We embraced this change and sought to understand London’s instability as an unlocking mechanism for sustainable development.

Our aim was to explore resilient and responsive approach to understand, design and manage the evolutionary balance of London in face of the pressures of the next 25-50 years on the case study of Rotherhithe, a somewhat ‘forgotten’ central predominately residential area on London’s riverfront. The research and proposals from all five think tanks will be published online so look out for news on the LSA website. You can also find out more about the school and its ethos by reading the Archipreneur interview with the founder, Will Hunter.

Do you have any advice for “Archipreneurs” who are interested in starting their own business?

Petra: Become an expert at communicating. Nice images won’t be enough – you need to be able to describe the benefits of your work and the process not only to your peers, but to a range of people from investors through to the users. Promote your work where your clients are – it is nice to be featured in architecture magazines, but these are often followed by architects only.

While architects are an important and natural network you will be part of, reaching beyond the field can be surprisingly rewarding. Get out as much as possible and don’t be shy to ask questions – people who are passionate about their work always have a good piece of advice, no matter how ‘important’ they are. And finally follow your instincts and be true to yourself.

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?

Igor: I think it is time for architects to get engaged with politics in order to enact change. Cities today are the most powerful social and economic structures, and while we are in an increasingly digitally networked world, cities are still physical structures and urbanism and politics are inherently interconnected.

Architects default to communicating with each other, but it is vital that the value of architecture is promoted at policy level as well as towards the general public. A good example is the office of Chief Urban Designer in New York City. Any bottom up processes that make cities more livable can only thrive and survive while there is good decision making enabling this from the top down.

About the founders Igor Marko and Petra Marko

Marko&Placemakers is part of a growing wave of new city design consultancy that fundamentally shifts from a product-focused to a process-based urbanism. Their role is often strategic, looking at the overlaps between place, process and people, and goes beyond the physical aspects of design to address socio-economic issues.

Igor Marko is the co-founder and director of Marko&Placemakers. He has extensive experience in advising on strategy and integration of public realm in new developments and major regeneration schemes. Igor has led transformational projects including Northala Fields Park in London, critically acclaimed as an exemplar of people-led sustainability. His experimental approach to urbanism crossing boundaries between art, architecture and public space resulted in visionary ideas preparing the ground for transformation of London’s pedestrian and cycling environment.

Alongside practice, Igor is a passionate mentor, having supervised initiatives for organisations including European Urban Design Laboratory Stadslab and various architecture schools. He is a regular speaker at debates concerning participatory placemaking including forums such as European Economic Congress (Katowice), reSITE conference (Prague) and Changwon Eco City (Korea).

Petra Marko is an architect, communicator and enabler of creative projects within the urban realm. She is co-founder of Marko&Placemakers and believes that sustainable design practice is about combining creativity with hands-on facilitation, mediation and communication. Pursuing her role as facilitator of good quality built environment, Petra completed a masters in Creative Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She has been actively promoting research and entrepreneurship through her work, as a member of the RIBA Small Practice Group and as leader of the Unstable City design think tank at the London School of Architecture. Petra has led several High Street and employment studies in the UK and Europe and has been a contributor to numerous initiatives including RIBA Guerrilla Tactics, reSITE (Prague) and Urban Transcripts (London and Berlin). She is the author of Together Alone. Architecture and Collaboration – a book exploring the future role of architects.

The post How to Use Placemaking to Create the City of the Future – Marko&Placemakers appeared first on Archipreneur.

The business world is changing, and so is the world of architecture. The ‘space as a service’ concept and digital technologies are affecting the architect’s profession. Unfortunately, architecture graduates are coming to learn about these changes somewhat late in the game, and part of the problem lies in the plodding, defunct methodologies that are taught in architectural schools.

The LSA, founded by Will Hunter in 2013 (read our interview with him), however, is proposing a different type of educational enterprise. The LSA wants to make an education in architecture more affordable, emphasizing ‘real world practice’ and better preparing talented graduates for tackling the vast changes that the architectural profession is currently undergoing.

The future for architects is one of the school’s most pressing concerns. In a panel discussion at the Design Museum last month, the LSA invited leading thinkers Alastair Parvin and Daniel Susskind to debate the contemporary state of the profession.

Alastair Parvin is a strategic designer at 00 London and a co-founder of WikiHouse Foundation. We have previously written about WikiHouse, where we outlined Alastair’s simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? This concept is at the heart of WikiHouse, an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build a house, anywhere, anytime.

Daniel Susskind is co-author with Richard Susskind of The Future of the Professions, and is a lecturer in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. Previously, he worked for the British government in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, as well as in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street and as a Senior Policy Adviser in the Cabinet Office.

Alastair and Daniel – who are at the forefront of critical enquiry into the role of the architect – both presented their visions for how the profession must evolve in a panel discussion with LSA founder Will Hunter and Farshid Moussavi, founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture and Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

See for yourself:

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We presented our own vision for the 5 emerging trends that will shape the future of architecture in a recent article. What do you think the future for architects will look like?

The post Editor’s Pick: Daniel Susskind and Alastair Parvin Debate the Future for Architects appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Will Hunter, Founder and Director of the new London School of Architecture (LSA), which proposes a different type of educational enterprise. The LSA wants to make architectural education more affordable, with emphasis on ‘real world practice’ and preparing talented graduates for tackling the vast changes that the architectural profession is currently undergoing.

Here are Will’s thoughts on architectural education, alternative routes for architectural professionals and the future of the profession.

I hope you enjoy the interview!

What made you decide to found the LSA? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you?

The original idea came in 2012 when the tuition fees cap in England was raised to £9,000 per year. I was worried about the effect this would have on access to architectural education. A group of like-minded collaborators and I started to explore different financial and pedagogic models for educating architects. Ultimately we sought to forge a new relationship between practice and academia to enhance both.

Could you tell us about the LSA’s approach to architectural education? What do you want to do differently, compared to more the traditional architectural education courses out there?

We’re offering a two-year post-graduate programme in partnership with London Metropolitan University and 50 architecture practices based in the capital city.

A lot of courses that have a practice component deliver it as a block – so a year in practice, then a year in the school. In our course, they run continuously, so first-year students spend three-days per week in practice and two days per week with the school. The students earn a minimum of £12,000 for their three days in practice, and this covers both years’ tuition fees, which are £6,000 per annum, so it’s effectively cost-neutral to study with us.

One of the main innovations of the school are the “Design Think Tanks”, where groups of practices and students collaborate for six months on a piece of speculative design/research around a shared agenda. The themes for this year are extremely varied, from “unstable cities” to “new knowledge”, and I’m super excited to see how these evolve.

We don’t have our own building but use the city as our campus. In the first year, the Design Museum in Shad Thames is our main spatial partner, where lectures and crits will be held. And our new HQ is at Second Home, the extremely cool new workplace for entrepreneurs and creative businesses designed by Spanish Practice Selgas Cano.

In the second year, all the students will be with the LSA full time, and we’ll be renting a studio for them. Their thesis projects will all be based in London. Instead of it being taught using a unit system – where students sign up to a particular direction set by the tutors – our students must develop in the first year a clear critical trajectory for their second year that is individual to them.

You also launched the research group “Alternative Routes for Architecture” (ARFA) to explore different models for architectural education. Could you tell us about the research of that think tank?

ARFA emerged out of an article I wrote in The Architectural Review. Perhaps a dozen people were involved, most of whom are faculty today. In a way, it was a slightly defective think tank in that it didn’t produce a single publication. Instead it morphed into the school.

At one of our meetings [Professor] Nigel Coates (Nigel Coates Studio) said he didn’t like the name ARFA and Deborah Saunt (DSDHA) came up with the London School of Architecture. Naming the project really helped – it turned it into something real we could all work towards.

One of the LSA’s P.R.I.M.E. values is to be “Entrepreneurial”. What are your thoughts on combining architecture and entrepreneurship?

The barrier to studying architecture is not just the high tuition fees but the subsequent low salary expectations – people pay a hundred grand for an MBA because they know they’ll earn a million back. I think one of the agendas of the school is not only to explore how you design buildings, but how you design a practice too.

We’ve constructed the school’s Practice Network to bring in a wide range of contributors on this. On the one hand, five of our practices – Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Allies and Morrison, Grimshaw, Scott Brownrigg and Aukett Swanke – are in the top 20 biggest practices in the UK, and bring huge insight into how you grow and maintain a successful enterprise and innovate at scale.

On the other hand, some of our smaller practices are acting in really interesting and entrepreneurial ways – SUSD is operating as a creative development consultancy to connect architecture, communities and development, for example, while Studio Octopi has just financed its design for a floating swimming pool in the River Thames through crowd-funding.

As a school we are definitely interested in articulating the value architects bring to our core competency – the design of space – while also exploring adjacent territories where our creative skills can have an impact.

Do you have any advice for architecture students who want to prepare for the rapidly changing architectural profession?

A good place to start would be to read two new books – The Future of the Professions by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind and Open Source Architecture by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel – both of which discuss the challenges and opportunities for the profession, particularly in relationship to technology and society. And I’d strongly recommend reading Peter Buchanan’s series of essay The Big Rethink – unmissable.

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

“Traditional practice” is too big a terrain to concede and I’d really like to see that as one of the biggest opportunities for up-and-coming architects. It is imperative that we retain – and enhance – our position in the design of the built environment.

Put at its simplest, our discipline is the one most capable of synthesising complex forms of information into beautiful and functional spaces and places.

Architects have a huge contribution to make to the world in the 21^st century – particularly in shaping how we can live sustainably and happily within ever-denser cities and within the Earth’s resources. I hope the London School of Architecture produces work at the forefront of these debates.

About Will Hunter

Will trained as an architect at the Bartlett, University College London and at the Royal College of Art. After five years at The Architectural Review, he stepped down as executive editor in February 2015 to focus on setting up the LSA.

Will has contributed to many titles including Wallpaper*, Blueprint and the Financial Times, and has previously been editor of the monthly magazines of The Architects’ Journal and Building Design.

He has taught architecture at both London Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art, at the latter as a design unit master and chair of the architecture school’s public lecture programme. He has judged numerous competitions, including the Global Architecture Graduate Awards (which he founded) and the RIBA President’s Medals dissertation prize.

Will was the creative director for the RIBA conference Guerilla Tactics 2014 and is currently editing a monograph on Peter Salter’s Walmer Yard housing project in west London (AA Publications).

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