column: trust

This week, we celebrate cepezed's 50th anniversary, or half a century of pioneering prefabrication, circularity and ‘different’ construction. I myself experienced half of this period. Freshly graduated, I started at cepezed with the idea of learning the full breadth of the profession. Meanwhile, I have been a partner and co-owner for twenty years and I know this is impossible. However, my design experience and strategic insight into construction, development and design processes did grow.

What grew above all is my trust in the cepezed team; a diverse group of people whose insights, knowledge and expertise are indispensable both in terms of design and business. We are more than an architectural firm; we educate, face technical challenges and apply the latest software. Our view of the profession is broadening as the context of collaborative partners, regulations and environmental issues becomes increasingly complex. After 50 years, the agency culture is more focused than ever on collaboration and co-creation, which also challenges me to take another step.

From this trust, our anniversary took a beautiful turn. Whereas previously, as partners, we would draw our own plan, we now left it to the team. This created the surprising starting point of looking forward rather than back, and using the anniversary year to learn. Lectures for the entire agency offered insights into new challenges and future perspectives. And in dialogue with external frontrunners, we delved deeper into current technical, economic and social issues.

The most surprising anniversary aspect was the wunderkammer, set up in cepezed's entrance hall. For this, each team member contributed an object that inspires him or her. The collection thus created makes the breadth of our team tangible and a special jubilee website uses the objects to show who we are, which lessons for the future we take to heart and which questions are still relevant. We are looking forward to the next 50 years! Learning the full breadth of the profession is impossible, but that's what's fun about it.

ronald schleurholts
architect-partner cepezed

Expertise and trust in it are strongly under attack these days. Solid information increasingly devalues to fake news. Highly educated antivaxxers refuse the vaccination of their children. Last week, Amsterdam welcomed a symposium of flat earthers, a growing group of people who think the earth is flat and the spherical earth is a NASA hoax. The soap concerning the renovation of the Binnenhof (the housing of the Dutch parliament) also demonstrates fundamental distrust between the parties involved.

Interestingly enough, trust is increasingly becoming a key concept in design tenders. Tendering contracts are increasingly undefined and, in a way, messier. A design brief, budgetary frameworks, the way the process is organized and the distribution of responsibilities – more and more, we have to sort these things out ‘together’ in the course of the process. A fixed fee is mandatory, nonetheless.

Similar issues play a role in construction tenders as well. In order to attract any interest of construction parties at all, clients increasingly opt for a ‘construction team method’. As a result, construction parties become involved in the design process to come to contractual frameworks, but virtually without risks. Moreover, the roles and responsibilities for design work on the one hand and construction work on the other often remain unclear. Who monitors who, who controls the quality and budgetary frameworks and with which and whose mandate?

Without clear responsibilities, associated authority and transparency in knowledge, costs and motives, trust often quickly turns into distrust. Moreover, cognitive dissonance is constantly lurking. Regularly, parties make agreements of which everyone involved realizes they are untenable. In addition, the demonstrating of inaccuracies in assumptions or reasoning make some people hold on to their viewpoints even more doggedly. In a recent documentary, the flat earthers accidentally proved their own wrong: their measurements showed that the surface of the earth is indeed curved. In response, they did not return home enlightened, but diverted the discussion toward optical margins of error and the influence of the weather.

Ronald Schleurholts, architect partner cepezed

Cobouw, October 7th 2019