Bill Kerr: Our experiences are shaped by the work of architects. Cities, campuses, and corporate headquarters bear their stamp. They influence the quality of work, education, civic, and home life. The business of architecture also reflects technological change, economic trends, and cultural forces. So what can it tell us about the future of work? Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. I’m joined today by Stefan Behnisch, founding partner of Behnisch Architekten, a 140-person architectural firm with offices in Germany and the United States. We at Harvard Business School have had a front-row seat for one of the firm’s latest projects to reach completion, Harvard’s vast Science and Engineering Complex. We’ll discuss today the state of the industry and its workforce, the post-Covid city, the future of the office, lab, and classroom, and also green buildings. We’ll also look at differences between the U.S. and Europe in terms of design education and training for the skills trades, and we’ll consider the tension between automation, standardization, and crafts in place. Welcome to the podcast, Stefan.

Stefan Behnisch: Thank you. Thanks for having me here.

Kerr: Stefan, we have been able to observe your work firsthand with the Science and Engineering Complex at Harvard Business School, but obviously, many of our listeners are digital and far-flung. So can you introduce us to yourself a little bit as well as your firm?

Behnisch: My name is Stefan Behnisch. I am a German architect, grown up and educated in Germany. I am the son of a well-known German architect, and my firm was founded in 1989–1990 and has since then worked in different locations. Originally based in Stuttgart, we opened at one point offices in Los Angeles, in Boston, and in Munich. We are organized in a partnership. Each office is headed by a partner, and I join all of the partnerships in all locations. We are what you would call a full-service architectural firm, meaning we are not just design architects, but we also do construction documents, site supervision. That means we are architects responsible from the original first design steps until the building is completed and handed over to the client.

Kerr: So for those who are less known to this industry, take us through a few of those steps—like the jobs that are involved, from going through this conceptual sketch all the way to the famous ribbon cutting.

Behnisch: We acquire all our work through architectural competitions—mostly anonymous design competitions or, in the U.S., competitive interviews. We call them “beauty contests”—meaning, you go there, you introduce the office to explain the situation, and try to convince the clients why you are the best-suited person or office to deliver the project. Usually, you get the project when you have already a design approach, an architectural intent, I would say. And from then on, you work closely with the client and the users to verify the programming, to verify the design, develop the design further. And also early on, we have engineers in place to work closely together with them and to drive the design further. In the schematic design, the first three to four months on a project, you can change, you can develop. And the further you go in the process, the more difficult it gets to adapt the building. That is usually a conflict, because most of the time, clients notice very late in the game that either it’s over budget or it’s not the right thing, and then changing is very difficult. Then once we have a good design developed in the team, we go to more details. Then we do the façades in more details—how is this space formed? And then you get into technicalities—technical drawings in the U.S. You usually then have already a construction manager or general contractor on board to develop the technicalities. Here in Germany, it’s quite different. We then have to tender anonymously the trades with the drawings and specifications. And then, onsite, you resolve the issues, you manage the time, you manage the contracts on behalf of the client, and you do onsite supervision, quality control, until the infamous ribbon-cutting moment comes and the building can be handed over to the client. And then, usually, there is a phase to adjust the building to make it work. And that goes on almost a year and get the last problems and challenges and things solved.

Kerr: Stefan, one of the key themes of this podcast has been how work has been changing. I’m sure that the job is a bit different than your father’s architectural firm. But just over the course, the 30–32 years that your practice has been in business, has that process changed substantially in terms of staffing and management?

Behnisch: Yes. Our work is in constant change—the way we deliver buildings, the way we design buildings. And the change is partly technical. The change [in] traditions, the change [in] fashion, are important. And the change is also [in] the way clients want to see themselves represented. First of all, I have to say, the building industry is one of the most conservative industries we know. It’s very hard to convince a construction company to do something they haven’t done for 100 times before. They are relatively innovative in the means and methods, but not in the outcome. When I started out, AutoCAD just started out. When I developed architecture, most of the designs that I did were pencil on vellum. That’s where I come from. And I still like it. I still think it’s good—it’s fast, and they’re beautiful drawings. My father’s office never changed to computers. He hated them, for the very simple reason, he was then about my age, and he didn’t want to learn something totally different and new. He hated looking over people’s shoulders to look at the screen. I still hate that as well. Then with the computer drawings—we think with pencils or pens. Suddenly, we are always drawing with our fist—the mouse. That’s a very clumsy interface. I love tablets and pens, pen computers. That is the first progress. And I hope it changes more in this direction. We are working with 3D modeling now. We are working with building-information software and all these kinds of things. So far, it enabled us to do more-complex forms, but it didn’t make our lives easier, and it didn’t make work less. It just did turn, over the last 30 years a little bit, the process of designing a building upside-down. Suddenly, during the creative process of the schematic design, the earlier stages, we need in these complex programs to feed information we don’t know yet. So the programs will hopefully learn the creative process as well. The creative process is a three-phased process. It’s first the perception, the very early stages when you have a vague idea. And that needs to be neutral. Then how would it work? And then once it’s developed further, then you can test it, then you can put it in the strong winds of critique. And these programs, new computer programs, are almost artistic. But sometimes, I have the feeling, we do forms, weird forms in buildings, just because we can do it.

Kerr: Stefan, as you look ahead toward the future, as the programs are able to accomplish more-creative tasks, do you see it going all the way to a point of automation—that the architecture and construction trades are able to go end to end?

Behnisch: I worked on computer research programs in the mid-’80s with Fritz Haller—the first building-information models and so on. We did clash protections even at that time. There were studies of if computers could design without our help or our input. So far, I haven’t seen it. Even though we design according to various parameters—the situation, the program, and everything—design is often a very illogical and intuitive process. And the problem of machines is they cannot be illogical, intuitive really. To get a different outcome, you need to change the starting parameters. A lot of clients don’t get that. They want from us a very different building, a very sustainable building, a green building, whatever it is, but are not willing to change the outset parameters. That’s the challenge of machines as well. So far, machines can only do what we taught them to do, even with AI. I studied philosophy before I studied architecture. And I was very interested in the chaos theory. And I had this dream of the chaos theory—that it has no logic in the beginning. But even there, the outset defines the outcome. Even there. And we studied that. And it’s important also for architecture. One of the most famous examples of the chaos theory in art was Jimi Hendrix’s feedback guitar. Interestingly, still the parameters are the six-string, the parameters is the guitar, it’s the box. So the outcome is still defined by parameters. The same thing we have in architecture. Even if you have a wide range—and architecture is defined by not a formal dictate, it’s defined by trying to find the most appropriate outcome for a building, for the situation, and the needs. If I design a building with this exactly same outset, it will be very different [than] if one of you defines the same task, the same building. But with a machine, it will be always the same outcome because it follows a logic.

Kerr: Stefan, I’m going to chalk up this conversation by saying that the key role of the architect is going to remain for some time in the future. But there’s also a lot of other people that are involved in the design, all the way through the construction of the building. And as you think about the workforce, do you see a scarcity of people that can fill the key skilled roles?

Behnisch: No, I don’t see a scarcity. I don’t see a problem. The younger generation is different and has different skills. Yes, they are different. But first of all, we need them more than they need us, so we have to be flexible. We have to learn to work and to actually see the advantage of the change and the different skills. We all know that life-work balance today is far more important for the younger people than it was in my generation. Is it worse? No, I don’t think so. Even if they do work-life challenge more than we, and they don’t have the ideal that you have to work all night to get a good result, they get good results because they’re far more efficient. The education here in Germany and also in the U.S., there is right now a problem. The challenge is not the young people, the challenge is the boomers, we. We actually crippled their education by privatizing it, by saving it. And then, the worst thing in the U.S., in my personal opinion, is a lot of these students come out of university with such debt, so high student loans. I taught at Yale and other schools. They come out with so hefty loans—promising, fantastic people—that they have to go to the worst possible firms to start out because it’s a safe job and it’s the best-paid job. A good studio, where they could learn a lot, cannot afford them because they cannot afford to work for that kind of salary. So skills are good, the basis is good, but we deny them the necessary steps in their education.

Kerr: Let me continue though onwards in this U.S.–European differences and go a little bit further down into the guilds and apprentice models that you have in Europe, which we don’t have in the United States, and how that affects the skills trades, the people that are going to come on to construction sites.

Behnisch: In the German-speaking countries, we have the guilds in the different trades: carpenters, electricians, plumbers, brick layers, masons, and so on. It’s a very interesting education because it’s a parallel in education of school and practice. These are usually people who leave school after 10 years and then go to a trade school and work as apprentices in a firm in parallel. They have usually one or two days of school, and the rest they work. And they do different steps. It’s first geselle [journeyman] and then it’s meister, it’s master. It’s most of the times an 8-year education, 6-year education. And then they, themselves, they can teach people, take apprentices. So they are very skilled. It’s not only the skill, but these guilds, they might be a little bit old-fashioned in a way, but it’s also work ethics. So we experience on the construction site in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, for most of the trades, very skilled people who actually know what to do. They can read a drawing, they can work according to the drawing. In the U.S., these are very nice and very interested also people, hard-working people, but they lack the traditional education. So for them, it’s very hard to actually often read a drawing. And for them, it’s very hard to work, themselves. They need more guidance there. There’s also the quality gap. That’s one of the reasons. The building industry over here is more quality driven and more durable. But that’s not only to the working skills, it’s also a different perception of architecture and building. We work more for long-lasting. In the U.S., it’s changing faster. But I would say, this double education—practice and theory—has big advantages.

Kerr: S¬o Stefan, as you think about the 30-year journey of your firm, what has been the change in the mix of the workforce between full-time, part-time, gig-based work, and so forth?

Behnisch: First of all, in our office, everybody is an employee. We don’t have a gig force. We believe in the social market forces here in Germany. We don’t have freelancers. But the change is, in the beginning, we only had full-time people and the partners. Our partnership, as you know, changed also over the course of the time. I come from a time where it was full time, and when women had babies, they stayed at home. That’s where I was brought up. This has changed, thank God, over the last, I would say, 20 years. So I would say, either father or mother, in Germany, both can do half-time and get two years off to educate children—up to two years—and it’s partly paid by us and the state. It’s complex. But generally, I would say we have about, in all of our offices together, 10 percent of the workforce on some sort of part-time level, which is usually around 70 percent [of fulltime], because they educate children, take care of their children, and so on, no matter how old they are. That’s partly men and partly women. There is no difference here. Both sexes can do that. That happened, I would say, over the last 20 years. But only the last five years, it really kicked in with the newer generation coming into the offices. But all others, everybody, is fully employed with all the benefits we have here in Germany. It’s a bit different from the U.S.

Kerr: Stefan, as we record this, it’s about the one-year anniversary of Covid coming to Western Europe and North America. And as you think about that year and what your clients are asking for, what are your predictions for the decade ahead in terms of the types of buildings that will be constructed? How is this reshaping cities? Did it accelerate prior trends? Talk to us about your crystal ball for what lies ahead.

Behnisch: Covid didn’t change that much. It just accelerated trends. I know it here from big corporations, that they said they expect 40 percent of their staff not to return to the office, remain remote in one way or the other. They’re already giving up spaces. This has some implications. More important, though, is I think the trend is more rooted in a changing generation in the workforce than actually in the Covid. They have different expectations, and they have very different life plans. We spoke already briefly about the work-life balance. But they don’t own cars anymore, at least here in Germany and Austria. Too expensive, too much of a burden, doesn’t make sense—a little bit like the New Yorkers. So they want to live and work, educate their children, spend their time in their neighborhoods. They don’t want to commute anymore. That has big implications for the cities. It will trigger changes in the building sector, obviously. We need less office spaces. Office spaces will become the center of identity, where people meet, and will become communicative centers, meeting centers, and a certain amount of hotel workspaces. My guess is, we could shrink them, midterm, by 30 percent roughly, the office spaces. It makes sense, also. We made buildings far more efficient. But our footprint didn’t go down. We made our living spaces and workspaces bigger. I think our living spaces, our remote decentralized workspaces, will get bigger, and the actual traditional office spaces—headquarters, office buildings—will get considerably smaller, at least a third. This is a trend that will change our cities. People will be able to move again out of the city to the countryside and the suburbs if they don’t have to commute every day, which is more affordable. There’s more space. So over the next 10 years, we’ll see some radical changes in the way we perceive cities.

Kerr: Stefan, will that leave the main role of the architect as being one of repurposing, retrofitting, redesigning existing commercial spaces into other uses—subdividing and making them into housing complexes? Or is it going to be one where we need to fundamentally drop some of the buildings and put new ones up that are better suited for the future?

Behnisch: I think the market will demand two different kinds of architectural developments. For one, we cannot afford to just destroy and knock down buildings and rebuild pretty much the same building at the same place, especially if they’re concrete buildings, concrete and steel, for the very simple reason, 60 percent of the CO2 footprint to build a building is embedded in the substructure and superstructure. But on the other hand, a lot of office buildings are very unsuitable to live in. I mean, they don’t have the charm of the old loft buildings. They have relatively deep floor plates. You can’t have cross-ventilation, and so on, and so on. So a lot of them are not very suitable. But I think, or I’m convinced—and we looked at some of these buildings, and we do some research there right now—a lot of them can be remodeled by keeping the substructure and superstructure and to transfer these buildings to residential buildings, maybe with a working lounge. I’m convinced we get more mixed-purpose buildings and areas, where people live in downtown and work in downtown probably in the same buildings. Maybe not the same people, but the mix probably will happen. In this context, we also have to look at the ground-floor areas, which are right now commercial. But I expect a substantial de-commercialization of our city centers. But a lot of these department stores, and so on, we won’t need anymore, because people buy online, and the city centers will probably in the longer term will be places for showrooms, where you can look at the stuff and so on and order it, but it will be delivered, and that needs a lot less space. So we, as architects, our main task will be the repurpose of existing structures.

Kerr: Take us a little bit further down into green buildings and your views on how this affects the productivity, worker health, and so forth in the U.S., in Europe, and what are the key steps for us to have a greener future in terms of the buildings that we’re designing and constructing.

Behnisch: Sustainable buildings are healthier. For some people, more comfortable. For others, less comfortable. It’s also important to see where it is. Let’s point out the difference between Germany and the U.S. again. In the U.S., people are very tolerant of mechanical noise and very intolerant of temperature changes. In Germany, it’s exactly the other way around. We are very tolerant of temperature changes but extremely intolerant of mechanical noises. So here, we say, a building inside—I’m in Celsius here, you can do the math. If it’s in summer, inside, 32 degrees [or 90 degrees F], when it’s outside, 38 degrees [or 100 degrees F], we feel comfortable. It’s fine, no problem. In winter, it can drop to 19–20 degrees [F]. We are fine, yeah. In the U.S., whenever there is a difference of more than four degrees between summer and winter, you get complaints. But generally, we need to get closer here in our tolerances. If you consider that five degrees Fahrenheit in summer just doubles your energy consumption in a building, that means we have to work on our tolerances. But let’s go back to the explanation of sustainability. To develop or to design a sustainable building, you need the cultural context, the geopolitical context, the climatic context, the topographical context, some traditional context—is it urban?—and so on. So far, we designers, especially in Germany, have a fetish of metrics, of quantifiable elements. We get all interested in kilowatt hours per square meter of consumption. The qualitative aspects—and that’s where your question is aiming to— are very important. We should calculate comfort, very hard to calculate, and working hours in the per-square-meter or square foot in the building. That is efficiency, that’s sustainable. People are healthy, people feel comfortable, people like to be there, people like to live there and spend time there. The more you occupy a building, the more sustainable it is for the same energy consumption. But now, we are facing even a new challenge as engineers and architects. Our energy production gets more and more renewable and sustainable, especially here in Germany. I mean, we have summer months where we have only renewable energy. So far, we have been focused on energy consumption of the existing building. Now we need to focus on the gray energy, energy consumption to build the building, because running the building with renewables is no challenge anymore. The energy we embed in the building. For example, with concrete, it’s not only the energy to process the materials, it’s also the energy, the CO2, not energy, CO2 that is set free by a pure chemical process to produce concrete. But over a 50-year time span, I would say 10 percent of the energy was the gray embedded energy, 90 percent was running it. So if running it gets down to zero, suddenly, the difference is huge. Suddenly, we have 90 percent embedded, and we have to look into that. So doing a more-sustainable building environment we’re designing for is a very complex and holistic approach, and we architects need good clients, willing clients, and very good engineers to do that. But then, I think, we can solve that. In Germany this year, in year 2020, we have reached our CO2 goals for the Paris Agreement, except the building sector. They are way over, so we have to do something.

Kerr: Stefan, as we come to the end of our podcast, I’d like to go back to the Harvard Science and Engineering Complex. Tell us just a couple of things that you found most fascinating about that project, or most innovative, or what’s going to stick in your mind about a place that you spent a lot of time designing, developing, and constructing it?

Behnisch: The Harvard science building, engineering complex, is definitely a very key project in my architectural career. We architects, I have to say, are very privileged because we always get a glimpse in the lives of other people of a different profession. What do they need, how do they function, how do they think? We have these communications. I have worked for banks, for schools, for universities. So this is very interesting. And I’m always very curious: How do they tick, what makes them function? So this was a very interesting process. Harvard was, from the very beginning, interested in a sustainable approach from the outset. That’s how we won the competition in the beginning with our team. Then it is a very diverse and interesting and complex program. So how do you bring education, research, high-tech research, wet labs, dry labs, computers together in such a huge building? And most important—and that was where Harvard was such a good client—the social factor, the communication, interaction.

Kerr: Can you give just a verbal sense of the size of the Science and Engineering Complex? I mean, I could see it. It’s huge. But is there a way that you would, in a couple of sentences, summarize how vast that building is?

Behnisch: Yes. The Science and Engineering Complex is a large building. If you would compare it, the biggest blocks are the Washington, D.C., blocks in the United States. And that’s pretty much the size of the building, one Washington block is along Western Avenue pretty much, just to get a feel of the length. It is long enough that we had to care about the quality of the entry façade for people walking, because you walk several minutes along the building. To the north, it’s more urban. To the south, it’s more landscaping.

Kerr: Well, Stefan, we thank you for our beautiful building that’s across the street. We appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing with us so much about your very exciting field and how we’re going to see the cities and our workplaces transformed in the future.

Behnisch: Thank you.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.