Individual Assignment. Arghya Mandal

Architectural Practice_2040

I, after more than 20 years of experience working in the field of architecture, would be practicing architecture by setting up my own firm. Hoping to get the hold of the profession and the business of practicing architecture by then, I would my in the middle of my career and having a stability at work.

For the duration of this essay, AP stands for the architectural firm registered by me and another partner as owners.

AP will be a small firm with maximum 4 partners, all with diverse expertise and interest. There will be other levels of designers, Structural consultants, MEP consultant, legal advisor, draftsman, visualizers associated with the firm.

The office will be a hopefully virtual existence rather than a physical amalgamation of these mentioned people. The firm would mostly function and work through a server. Only the designing work would be taken care of the core people of AP. Rest work would either be outsourced to trusted teams or done by part time members. Hiring all the people and maintaining an office will not be a favourable option. The services of the structural engineer, legal advisors or draftsman can be rendered as and when required.

This web dependent office practice would give us the flexibility of work timings and our locations of stay. I would probably be staying in some third tier cities with less polluted and less crowed environment. The core team even may have the freedom to stay at different parts of the country with some anchor points like permanent office space in some metropolis like Delhi.

AP will be taking up housing, institutional building, transport infrastructures, community spaces of these third tier cities or smaller towns. At those time period, developing those places would be very important to limit the population increase in the mega cities and keep a balance between those cities and smaller towns or villages. These growth of this middle layer of settlements would be necessity to balance this densifying of few cities. AP’s target clients and target locations will be these places.

These developments will be complex in their own ways and solutions for these site have to be very localised and unique. This could be managed by having diverse knowledge for the partners and architects and collaborating with other firms. Projects would gain if solved and worked in a collaboration and in a consortium of firms with multidisciplinary background.

The work culture will of AP will be as it is in practice now in other architectural firms of this scale. For this sale of firm with around 10 members and working together without being physically present in a same building have many benefits. The work won’t get hampered for any office related problems. The time wasted in travel and the hassle of living in an overly crowded city and health problems related to this won’t be there. The flexibility of time and working environment enhances production and increases creativity.

All these will work assuming that the technology will become more advanced and make teleconference, data storage and security more easy and simplified by then for companies to function in the virtual platform. The copyright of architectural data and the security of the designs will be an issue to question, which can be solved by IT advancements by 2040.

This is my business plan to practice architecture.

RFP/ Tender Review

Tenders read:

1.      Development of Smart Campus for IT/ITES in Madhya Pradesh

2.      GAME Tower at GAME City, Hyderabad Knowledge City

3.      T Hub (Phase-II) at GAME City, Hyderabad Knowledge City

The selection of architects is done by this process:

1.      Sale of tender documents

2.      Submission of Technical bid and Financial bids by eligible architects with deposit of document fee and EMB.

3.      Opening of technical bids and presentation in front of screening committee

4.      Opening of financial bids of selected architects

5.      Award of contract to the most suited firm by evaluation in 60:40 manner (60 technical score: 40 financial score)

The eligibility for participating in the bid was to have 10 years or more of practicing experience. This criteria filters the kind of firms which can apply to only well set up firm. Fresh firms cannot participate and which misses the young talent from the project.

The technical bid contains the design proposal and the work history and qualifications of the firm. The evaluation process of the firm is also laid in the RFP document. The time to prepare the technical bid after the issue of the tender is around 2 weeks which is too low to prepare an informed design proposal. The architects are required to visit the site and collect site related data before bidding. 2 weeks are less for all this process.

Also in the 60 marks allotted for the technical bid, only 10 is given for the architectural design proposal. Rest goes for the experience of the firm, turnover of the firm, qualification of key people related to the project. This kind of evaluation makes and marks distribution makes no sense after the eligibility criteria is set for 10years or more of experience. Eligibility vs. evaluation criteria?

This has a major flaw in marking as a firm with more experience and huge turnover can get the project in spite of having a bad score in design as the weightage is very less. Why low weightage for design proposal?

Also the deposit of huge money like 6 lacs for 300cr projects in the case of last two tenders by all the bidders and then returning back to all the unsuccessful bidders is transaction of huge amount unnecessarily. What is the use of EMD?

This process of selecting of architects gives more importance of the architecture firm as a brand than the proposal made for the particular case for which the tender is issued.

Does following this system beats good design in front of well setup firms?

Architectural Competition Review

Call for entries of competitions studied:

1.      Twin Museum and Auditorium at Visva Bharati

2.      Nalanda University

3.      Redefining homes

The process for architectural competitions followed are:

Stage 1: Request for Expression of Interest (EOI)

Stage 2: Request for Proposals (RFP)

Call for entries or EOI are issued by the clients. This stage filters the applicants on the basis of their experience, fees received, and work completed for related kind of buildings.

After this stage a detailed RPF document is provided to selected firms.

The other type is single stage competition which was adopted for the Nalanda University.

A jury panel is appointed to judge and select the winner of the competition among the shortlisted entries. The marking criteria is mostly on design proposals and this ensures that the most deserved design gets the contract.

Theses competitions were free to enter and there were monetary prizes for top three winners. Which gives firms much more reasons to invest in competitions. The eligibility of firms done works earlier on same kind of project restricts new firms to participate.

Organising competition ensures that the best design is selected without looking into the firm’s history or experiences after setting a minimal filtering criteria.

THE ARCHITECTS ACT OF 1972- Interpretation of clauses

 1. Clause 4: this clause of the act talks about the temporary vacancy in the council. 

If a post in the Council of the Architecture gets vacated before the end of the term, fresh election or nomination will take place to appoint a member to fill that post for the rest of the term. Once the term is finished and the new terms starts, again a new member will be elected through the election. 

2. Clause 12: Clause 12 states some o the powers of the council to elect their members.

As per the act the council may appoint a Registrar who may act like a Secretary and a Treasurer if needed and if the council decides so. In order to carry out the function as mentioned in the Act properly, the council is free to appoint some other officers and employees. From the previous amount of money received from Central Government, the council is bound to fix the pay, the allowances and other services for the employees and officers of the council