Face of the AIA

Summary: Kermit Baker is the AIA’s chief economist as well as senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) at Harvard University. At JCHS, Baker is the project director of the Remodeling Futures Program, a research program that aims to “develop an improved understanding of the dynamics of the U.S. repair and renovation industry so that businesses can better take advantage of the opportunities that this market offers.” As AIA chief economist, Baker analyzes business and construction trends and examines their impact on AIA members and the architecture profession.

Educational background

I have a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, a master’s in city planning from Harvard, and a PhD in urban planning from MIT.

Hobbies

I enjoy gardening, and now that I’m an empty-nester, my wife and I are able to do more traveling than we have before, so that’s emerging as a hobby.

Last book read

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell makes a convincing argument that individual success is not only the result of hard work, but also is inevitably due to some good luck, such as when or where you are born. Successful people are presented with unique opportunities and have the good sense to pursue them. I recently visited New Bedford, Massachusetts, the home of the whaling industry in the 1800s. The city has done a laudable job of capturing this time in history and presenting it in a compelling manner, so Moby Dick will probably be the next book on my to-read list.

Favorite building
I park every day at the Harvard Business School to get in my daily walk—it’s about a 15-minute walk to the building I work in. That daily jaunt takes me past Moshe Safdie’s Class of 1959 Chapel on the Harvard Business School campus. It’s a small cylindrical building that is really spectacular.

First job
After I graduated college, I worked for a year in the Baltimore City Department of Planning. It gave me a practical view of how city planning is implemented in our major cities.

Why you became involved in forecasting economic trends in the design industry?
Well, my thesis at MIT was on housing and housing markets. That led me to a position with what was then Cahners Publishing Company and is now Reed Business Information, tracking trends for their construction magazines. I started commenting on and analyzing trends in construction for those publications and eventually got into forecasting market trends for them.

Biggest professional challenge
The most challenging part of the work I do for the AIA is helping provide architects with information that they can use to run their businesses. It’s a major leap between broad economic and construction industry trends to how small, midsize, and even large firms can use that information to make sensible business decisions. I guess the most difficult thing is trying to figure out ways to be helpful to AIA members in making sensible business decisions in one of the most trying times that our profession has ever seen.

Link between the two jobs
I thought there was going to be a little more overlap in the activities I’d be responsible for than there has been, but what they share in common is both of them are trying to understand what’s going on in the construction industry and making sense of it for other people. At Harvard, I direct a study on residential remodeling, so I’m working with remodeling contractors, and they have a lot of similarities to architecture firms. They are small businesses; remodeling businesses are even smaller businesses on average than architecture firms. They got into the business because of a passion for what they were doing. For remodelers, it’s really the craftsmanship of working on a home. For architects, it’s designing buildings. But neither of them, by and large, got into it for the challenges of running a small business in a very challenging economy. I think trying to figure out how to provide information to them in a way that they can use to make a difference is very similar.

Greatest achievement
I think there’s been a lot of progress in the almost 15 years I’ve been with the AIA in providing more useful business information to architects. Probably the key achievement was the work that we’ve done on the Architectural Billings Index. That was a project that I started just a couple months after I joined the AIA, and we’ve developed that into a major indicator for the economy and the construction industry. It does exactly what it was designed to do, which is to help architects better understand business conditions at their firm, and shine a very bright light on architects and the information that they can provide to help everyone better understand the direction of the construction industry.

What’s in store for architects
Historically, the greatest changes for any profession tend to occur during tough times. When business conditions are favorable, architects focus on existing project workloads and keeping on top of schedules. Changes occur when patterns are disrupted, when people start to question why they are doing things a certain way; that there may be a better way of doing things. By this measure, we can expect some really dramatic changes in the not too distant future in terms of how the profession is organized and how architects relate to their clients. We’re at a point where architects have a tremendous opportunity, since they are in a critical position to really capture the essence of the relationship with their clients. There’s no doubt in my mind that the profession is going to look a lot different in 10 years than it does now.

Adapted from Doer’s Profile by Heather Livingston, AIArchitect, October 27, 2006

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