The Spirit Of Architecture I

Growing up I had three core people speak into my life. An architect, a builder, and a developer. Having a developer father, general contractor step-father, and architect as mentor growing up meant I lived out the OAC contract by osmosis. Profession was how I was able to make sense of the world–and entrepreneurship a way of life. (OAC is owner–architect–contractor: the three parties behind a conventional building project.)

In Alamo Heights, Texas there exists a partnership so compelling to me as a young person that I changed the trajectory of my life to understand it. I am speaking about the Overland Partners, whose mission is to model how we should live and influencing the world through our practice of Architecture. (That is the mission as I remember it, not a quotation I can source here.)

In 2012 I finally had the opportunity to work with my mentors there, and it shocked me. I did not understand the depth of love for the built environment that would be required to relentlessly pursue Architecture. One time Mr. Jones told me that he wouldn’t bill the current effort to the client because he thought we could do better!

Not billing means the hours come out of the firm, not the client. That is the problem underneath this essay: in the practice I saw, the care that makes a building good was often paid for by the people giving it.

Coming from a development family, I did not understand the lack of wealth in architecture — at least in the parts of it visible to an intern. Mr. Winn one time took me aside, empathetically, to say that talking about my vacation to the Bahamas might be rather insensitive, as many laboring in Architecture cannot afford such a luxury. I now have to cope with thoughts of “What if we just did design-build so everyone can have value” and “Why don’t architects simply develop their own deals”.

Mr. Winn’s point is the other half of Mr. Jones’s. On the development side, whoever takes the risk on a building also owns its upside. An architect, as far as an intern could tell, is paid for drawing the building, not for what the building becomes; a better drawing can cost the firm hours without earning it a dollar more. Neither escape hatch is as simple as it sounds, though. Design-build puts design and construction under one contract, which can give the designer an earlier say on cost — and hands the same firm a builder’s reason to cut what is expensive to build. An architect who develops owns the upside, and also the temptation to value-engineer their own design. Moving across the contract changes who decides. It doesn’t guarantee the decision is good.

By 2013, my 3rd year of Arch School, my studio coursework likely looked very bizarre to the UTSOA (University of Texas School of Architecture) faculty. I was constantly worried about parking ratios and figuring out how to have exceptionally well designed commodity buildings — the ordinary apartment buildings that get built because the numbers work, not because anyone commissioned a masterpiece.

Parking is not a detour from design. A parking ratio is a design decision that is often made before the architect draws a line — by the zoning code, the lender or the pro forma — and it multiplies: stalls = units × ratio. At 1.5 stalls per unit, a round number used here for illustration and not any city’s rule, 300 units need 450 stalls. Every one of those stalls is land or structure that isn’t a room, a courtyard or a better window. The economics are already in the drawing, whether or not the studio draws them.

My life mission might be: How can we care both for the deep love we need for the built environment, and profit while doing it?

The judgment that follows from those two lessons: care that lives only in unbilled hours depends on people who can afford to donate them, and Mr. Winn’s point was how many can’t. Care that lives in the plan — the parking count, the unit layout, the decisions the pro forma is built on — can be underwritten, because it is part of how the building makes its money. So the architect who wants care to last has to be in the room when those numbers are set, and has to argue for the building in the owner’s terms. The unbilled hour is a gift; a profession can’t be built on gifts.

What the October 2026 revision changed: original text kept, with grammar fixes; defined OAC, design-build, UTSOA and commodity buildings; marked Overland’s mission as remembered and the view of architects’ pay as an intern’s; added the paragraph on who captures value, the parking-ratio illustration and the closing.