from New York Newsday Saturday, February 27, 1988.
He is averaging about one home a year in East Hampton, while at the same time designing and building an increasing number of homes elsewhere for clients. Being both developer and designer, DeVido feels, has made him a better architect. It's helped him to understand field problems and coordinate what his designs with the construction workers. This knowledge has also created a more harmonious relationship when designing for other developers, DeVido added, "because now I talk their language."
More architects are taking on this dual role because they get greater control of the finished product as well as a larger cut of the profits. At the same time, though, come new headaches such as acquiring land, securing financing and dealing with the other aggravations that come with the construction process.
For an architect with no track record in the capital-intensive business of developing, getting financial backing is usually the biggest obstacle. If lenders prove reluctant, a budding developer may have to take in partners to get the initial project off the ground. The danger here is that too many partners can take away the control the architect has been trying to gain.
The exact number of architects doubling as both designer and builder is unknown. However, there's evidence that their numbers are increasing. Last year, the American Institute of Architects (MA), the trade's professional organization, conducted a survey asking how many of its members had moved into project development. Of the 639 firms responding, 20 percent said they had. If that same survey had been taken five years earlier, only 10 percent would have responded affirmatively, estimated Benjamin E. Brewer Jr., the organization's first vice president and a principal in the Houston architectural firm of Sikes, Jennings, Kelly & Brewer.
The group once frowned upon the added function, Brewer said, because it feared conflicts of interest might arise. The architect might lean away from making the most pleasing design toward formulating the most cost-effective project. But in the last 10 years, "We've come to realize there are ways to serve the public good and still do it in an acceptable and professional fashion."
In talking with architects, control is the main reason they give for wanting to build what they design. "The real estate developer is usually your most difficult client," said Thomas Anderson, a Brooklyn architect who heads the firm of Anderson Associates. "He's obsessively focused on cost above anything." If cutting something from the project will save money, many developers do it, he said, not caring what it does to the design.
In the end, the architect/builder may also cut corners on expenses, but it usually doesn't compromise the design's integrity, added Steven Cataldo, a Smithtown architect whose firm bears his name.
It's easier for the one who comes up with the blueprints for a custom-built house to be able to communicate it to the workers who execute the plans, explained Anthony Pitta, the owner of a Great Neck firm who's been putting up the custom homes he blueprints for the past 17 years. "Exactly what you design you have built."
It also allows for greater flexibility, noted architect Tony Zunino, one of two partners of Zuberry Associates, a Manhattan firm specializing in loft buildings. "If you're in the field and things aren't coming out the way you had in mind, you can make changes. You don't have to make all your decisions on the drafting table."
This is especially true, he said, when doing a "gut" renovation such as his project of loft condominiums, The Petersfield, at 115 Fourth Avenue. Even after months of designing and checking specifications, you can't always be sure of what you'll find once you start tearing the structure apart, he said.
Now some have said that architects often design in a vacuum. This, Cataldo said, develops in school when instructors ask for plans with no constraints attached. But in the outside world, there are budgets and zoning restrictions to consider. Some architects forget this, though, periodically pitting their esthetics against the developers' budget. It's often the cause for heated disagreements.
Builders deal with a mass market, said Peter Klein, executive vice president of Klein & Eversoll Inc., whose Commack firm constructs the Timber Ridge developments. Architects like to design homes for an individual's needs. But for builders to succeed, he said, they have to appeal to a wide segment of the market.
Anderson, an architect for seven years, set out to show that if you approach the design process with the intelligence of an architect, along with the dollar consciousness of a developer, you could end up with something that's both beautiful and marketetable... (missing rest of article)
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