Mary Duggan
Welcome to Office Talk, a fortnightly podcast featuring in-depth conversations with leading architects about their approach to business marketing and communications. I'm your host, Dave Sharp, an architectural marketing expert and director of Office Dave Sharp, a marketing practice offering specialized consultancy, marketing, and PR services tailored to meet the particular needs of architects. Visit office dave sharp.com to learn more or follow the practice on Instagram at officedavesharp. Joining me on the show today is Mary Duggan, a London based architect known for her well conceived and thoughtfully detailed architecture for clients in the cultural and housing sectors. In this episode, Mary and I discussed how keeping her practice small allows her to focus on the work she wants to do and allows her to avoid some of the challenges and compromises required to sustain a larger practice.
Dave Sharp:We spoke about why she believes architects don't need to be involved at every stage of the design and construction process and how her front end, conceptually focused business model is rethinking the way architecture is delivered. We spoke about the impact other creatives, such as ceramicists and composers have had on her practice and why she believes architects should look outside architecture for their inspiration. We spoke about how making inexpensive models in the concept stage, sometimes out of materials like cardboard, ceramics, or dried flowers, allows her to communicate ideas quickly without large financial and time investments. And finally, we spoke about why she prefers her website and Instagram to focus on conceptual models and the ideas they represent rather than photographs of built projects. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mary Duggan of Mary Duggan Architects.
Dave Sharp:Mary, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Mary Duggan:No problem.
Dave Sharp:So should we start off maybe a bit of a background on Mary Duggan Architects? I mean, when did the new practice start?
Mary Duggan:Okay. Well, I established Mary Duggan Architects in 2016, 17, having demerged from a much larger practice with with that I set up with my previous partner. The reason for the demerger, well, there were lots of reasons, but I really wanted to move into, I suppose, focused on smaller, more bespoke projects with, a a greater degree of a kind of programmatic opportunity. So over the last few years, I've been working on I've been really trying to push myself into culture. Actually, quite a lot of buildings that have gardens.
Mary Duggan:So I've engaged a lot with landscape architects and landscape gardeners and have become quite obsessed with the materiality of landscape and and materials, which has always been I think that's probably what I'm known to do, which is to to really think about where the materials are going to come from, how the textural quality is going to inform the design. That's very much what I do as a practice, but that has kind of broadened, I suppose, to start to encompass gardens and, and landscape. So I've been working on two key projects for me is the garden museum, which is a competition I won, in 2021. Very exciting. It's, it's essentially, it's a pavilion structure, which is a new, threshold building to the garden museum, which, which sits within a listed church in the London borough of Lambeth.
Mary Duggan:And my role in it is to design a new structure that supports a garden, which has been designed by Dan Pearson Studio. Well, in my mind, it doesn't really have a typology, so I've had to work really hard with the client to define it And it's actually become defined as it's essentially a walled enclosure, with a very, very specific idea. And I think is the reason I won the project about where the materials come from, but also how I will engage with the garden design. Another project actually very similar to that is, another horticultural building, which is a support structure for a garden that's already been designed and implemented by Tom Stuart Smith, and that sits alongside the Hepworth Wake Field, which is a gallery that was designed and completed in 2008 by David Chipperfield. That's also got a very lovely story about sort of inventing a vision for the building and understanding what they actually need, which is, which is a building which on one level is a, a kind of garden shed, but they also want to engage with horticulture.
Mary Duggan:They want to invite in local community and volunteers and create an education program around the garden. I'm working on a number of small houses, all of them sort of speaking to the their specific context, the materiality of the context. I'm looking at, architectural salvage and reclamation, local crafts, just to see how those, contextual processes will inform the design. More often than not, you get a client brief and there's always a huge pressure on clients to give you a, an accommodation schedule or to give you their vision statement or, you know, those things that you're supposed to be able to hand over a couple of A 4 pages and send your architect a task. But actually, you know, the world is complicated now, climate change, material shortages, but you know, most clients aren't, don't have, aren't armed with a creative mind or they're not able to think laterally.
Mary Duggan:And I think they're skills that architects have an architect should bring to the table. And I think more architects should be, you know, mobilizing a vision before the brief is pinned down and be able to open up those sorts of opportunities and move away from the kind of catalog design, which is, you know, has become slowly become the expectation of architects in a very kind of commercial world, I suppose.
Dave Sharp:And do you find that the cultural clients are more attuned to that idea of going to architects for that kind of creative input and that lateral thinking earlier on in the process before the concrete sets on their brief where they've already sort of diagnosed and solved their own project problem and defined exactly what we need.
Mary Duggan:Yeah. And, actually, more understanding I have found of and respectful of the creative process. You know, I've, I've worked in my previous practice with lots of commercial developers, you know, developers who are, you know, in it to understand the commercial gains. And I don't have a problem with having to make money on projects, but I think what tends to happen is your work as an architect within that commercial project and budgets needs to be, you know, measured by milestones. Have you made your mind up?
Mary Duggan:You can't revisit that. Sorry. You need to make your mind up by this date. And more often than not, you need to put something out there. You need to mull it over.
Mary Duggan:You do need to change your mind. You need do need to allow your client to sort of absorb it and decide if they want it. So, you know, I'm not making a case for architecture being slower. I'm sort of making a case for building in allowances for that sort of conceptual thinking and processing to take place. But, but in answer, direct answer to your question is cultural clients are much more aware and understanding and immersed in that a a kind of more creative vision for for the project and unpacking it, I suppose.
Dave Sharp:And I mentioned that those residential clients are similar in a sense because they have a different relationship with the project and there's that level of personal investment.
Mary Duggan:Yeah. And I, you know, I quite I'm always really interested in, you know, going to if if it's a client who build they're building a house for themselves without being nosy and weird, it's always interesting to go to the house that they live in and see how, see how they live, see how they move around it, see whether they're tidy or messy. And, you know, you can get a fairly immediate picture of what will work for them because it sometimes clients just want the beautiful picture that they've seen in wallpaper or whatever it is. And actually you can kind of know that certain things will suit them, other things won't. And, you know, then that that kind of follows through with materials and and all all sorts of other things.
Mary Duggan:But, yes, I mean, usually when I'm asked to design a house, that's by someone who's seen my work and they want a similar sort of thing. And and most of them understand too, once we've had a few chats that I'm not gonna just give them the other house that I've designed on another site, We need to be more engaged with the the brief and more precisely what they want.
Dave Sharp:When you started the current practice, at the very beginning, did you have a sense of the type of projects that you would find yourself doing over the next few years?
Mary Duggan:I was very clear in my mind. You know, I was at the time when I set up my practice, I had a 20 years of experience behind me. So I, I have delivered schools, you know, in the UK, there was a built in Schools for the Future program. I've built schools that have been demolished and then rebuilt bigger because there was kind of this, new program that was government program that was brought forward. I've worked in commercial offices.
Mary Duggan:I've worked on, in housing. I have worked with cultural clients and I've worked on big and small projects. So I, I knew that, you know, you get to a point in your career and your life, I think whatever, whatever your career path is where you just know what you're good at and you know where your interests lie, interests lie. You kind of know that you'd be better doing the things that you enjoy and you're good at. You know, I'm not someone who desperately has, I don't want a business that has a growth plan.
Mary Duggan:I, you know, I'm not I'm not desperately sort of in the world of sort of making profit and then selling my company or or whatever happens. I I want to do beautiful projects and I want to work with materials. I want to innovate and I actually want to be able to control them as well as I can without a kind of unwieldy workforce. Because I think the problem with large practices is you you do have to be very respectful to your employees, which is obviously right, But sometimes the size of your practice starts to inform the work that you need to bring into it to feed it and not the other way around. And I suppose what I set up to do was be in control, make sure that the resources I have are specific to those projects.
Mary Duggan:And if that means I have to be very small to do it, then that's what I want to do.
Dave Sharp:Was there a time where you felt like you had more of that kind of calculated growth mindset? Obviously, you're part of a practice that grew really big. And was there a sort of period in your career where you were kind of thinking that way and then maybe something shifted and it was a kind of, this isn't really what I'm after professionally?
Mary Duggan:Yeah. Definitely. So when I set up my first practice, I my mindset was, and I still agree with this, we, because I was with my partner at the time, my business partner, we need to make an architectural practice and we need it to make money. And actually we set it up without money in the bank. So the, the, the, our business agenda was win work, make money, you know, figure out what the profit margins are and just sort of build build it up because that's what business art businesses are.
Mary Duggan:Right? You know, it it shouldn't be you shouldn't be working for free.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. That's
Mary Duggan:what we did, and we did it really well. We didn't have a single Yeah. For many, many years. You know, we we did everything really well, and we pleased clients and we got repeat work. And it was absolutely, you know, I would say, a model architectural practice for a very, very long time.
Mary Duggan:And I but I, you know, I wasn't happy in that place and and many architects are, and I 100% respect that because I don't think architects should just work for nothing. I think we're so important in the world, and I think we bring, you know, we're in charge of the architectural environment to some extent and responsible for making it as good as possible.
Dave Sharp:Do 100 of them pull you aside at events and go, I hate my 30 person practice. Should I do what I shouldn't
Mary Duggan:say, but having done when I having kind of broke away, there are some people who are quite envious. Yeah. I kind of clean slate. It's still very stressful, but I think there are architects in big practices who know that their skill has moved away from design. You know, they probably don't hold a pen in their hand and sketch for a few hours anymore.
Mary Duggan:They direct and they skirt across 10 to 20 projects in their practice without really being able to do what they want to do. You know, there, there are a lot of compromises, I suppose, when you have a large business.
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Dave Sharp:It provides a thoughtful approach for your marketing that focuses on quality, not quantity. So for more information or to book a consultation, simply visit office dave sharp dot com. Do you think that there's a point with a growing model practice where things start to kind of maybe go in that kind of slightly out of control commercial direction or can or where you kind of personally end up kind of getting pulled further away from that sort of design stuff that you wanna be spending more time on? Is there a stage that you get to or or a key decision that not just in your past experience, but you sort of now are tuned into this maybe recurring thing that happens across the industry?
Mary Duggan:Well, I think there's this sort of I think, you know, 25 employees that sets a different agenda for the way you have to manage an office. And I would say 25 and beyond, that kind of growth plan, the way we had to restructure the office, build teams to focus on certain projects, you know, that's when we started to take, you know, who was working with who and whether the team dynamic was right. You know, HR issues started to kick in. And when my previous business partner and I realized, we'd we'd definitely stepped out of working in CAD, and we we designated everything to a senior sort of team leaders and a workforce. And then, you know, every day it was a pin up and a review of projects, and that proceeded really from a 25 month practice up to 50, which is the point that I left.
Mary Duggan:You know, I also found that the, it was almost impossible to run the smaller projects, which I loved because the smaller projects just become less important when you've got a giant fee going out measured against a much smaller fee, whether you mean to or not, but you reweight the importance because you know there's a fee that's going to be important to pay salaries and one that's lesser that might be more of an R and D thing, but actually there isn't enough time for it. So you don't, you don't foreground it. You just don't. And I, you know, I'd like to know how those practices might respond to that, but certainly things, things commercially start to dictate how you behave. And I don't think any, I don't think any director of a large practice would deny that.
Mary Duggan:But I also think you make a decision about where your head is. If you want to grow, if it's a growth plan and you want a big practice, great, you know, do it. I just understand that that's what you're doing and you're going to lose control to some extent. You might carve out a space for yourself to to mark up, to really push a design concept, but you're not going to be really delivering it and exploring it to the degree that you you might like. And if that's okay, then many architects just don't want to do that and accept that it, it, it will just look different because of that.
Mary Duggan:It's not that it won't be as good, but it will look it won't you won't be able to control all of it.
Dave Sharp:Aside from the financial motivation to maybe go from 25 to 50 plus, What are the other drivers or motivations of that, I suppose? Is it also kind of thinking about the sort of scale of projects that maybe somebody has an ambition to work on, or is that, like, an important driver or just to be a significant practice, I guess, is also, I guess, a pretty attractive idea, isn't it?
Mary Duggan:Yeah. I think there is, you know, somehow size of practice is very much attributed to your significance. You know, I go to events
Dave Sharp:You're street cred.
Mary Duggan:It is a street cred thing and, you know, I'm gonna say it, a kind of a male thing. I, I I can't every time I go to any networking event, you'll say, hi. How are you doing? How big are you now? Sounds that would sound really weird in a different context, but how many how many how many employees do you have now?
Mary Duggan:It's it's the second or third question. And, you know, I even say it and it's it is a measure of your success. You know, nobody says how many people have you made redundant in the last 5 years. It it's just a thing, but and also, you know, the bigger, the bigger projects and, yes, some practices really want to design towers. Getting to the point when they've designed a tower is really important.
Mary Duggan:And I think other lots of practices just do want to either become specialists. So specialists in housing. There are lots of practices in the UK who were just brilliant at housing and others who want to be, I suppose, sector neutral and move between, you know, more commercial offices, housing, and and cultural buildings. And it's very much about having a practice with those skills to be able to encompass cross sector, projects.
Dave Sharp:So, obviously, you were kind of doing a fair few kind of commercial projects, and that was something that you weren't particularly, like, enjoying aspects of that. But do you think that having gone through that experience that it'd be possible to or achievable to build a 30, 40, 50 person practice doing cultural projects almost exclusively and beautiful small residential projects and and things like that. Do you think that, like, really appealing those really appealing sectors, like, as a business model, you can glue enough of them together to create like a foundation for a 40, 50 person practice I mean there are some out there but but but in your experiences, it's not that easy, is it?
Mary Duggan:No. So there are brilliant practices who deliver amazing cultural projects. You know, I've already mentioned David Chipperfield is one of them, but I don't suppose now, and I don't know, but I don't think he would move between a a a large cultural building and a very small residential project. You know, I I don't think those two things can actually exist within the same practice. I think the way that you could do it is to, I mean, I'm I have a very different business model now, but I I think you could do it by engaging and designing and doing a kind of front end design for a very, very big project and then facilitate a team that would then come in and deliver that very large project.
Mary Duggan:So most practices, there's an umbrella, and underneath the umbrella, everything happens. I think there's a model, and I don't know anyone who does it or, but I'm sure there is someone out there where you, you do all the front end work, you build the ideas, you develop the vision, you potentially get the planning permission, but you bring in architects or share resources with other practices to to to to take the giant projects onto the next stage. So, I mean, with 1 and this is also common practice, but but not within a procurement path that I particularly enjoy in. And one way that that happens in the UK is not because the architects decide to collaborate with the delivery architect. It's because it becomes a design and build.
Mary Duggan:So the, client will sell the design onto a contractor and the contract will choose his architect to deliver the details that the design architect, let's say, has specified. And that happened to me on one of my projects called Lion Green Road. I designed the scheme up to planning and I sat client side to to kind of oversee the delivery of it. But it was into and and actually I chose to do that because I didn't want to have 6 architects employed to chug away at details and probably have lots of arguments with a contractor. And I knew the architect who was going to be on the delivery side and I knew he was very good.
Mary Duggan:So I was quite happy to let that happen. But so I think there might be a way to do that better. I was lucky there that the architect was good, but I think somewhere in this way, because I don't still don't agree with design and build. I'm a bit old fashioned because I don't think you can sell design to a contractor. Really.
Mary Duggan:It's just a really odd concept from the off. It's purely about derisk. It's shuffling all the design growth and the design changes that do happen into someone else's to someone else's problem. And that problem is needs to be resolved by someone who actually doesn't care about the problem. It's all, you know, it's a slightly twisted game really, but I, it's just happening.
Mary Duggan:And most architects have just run with it and made it work the best they possibly can. But I quite like the idea. So the other way that it does happen is there will be a delivery architect and potentially a much closer collaboration. But I don't know if a client would trust a smaller practice to design something enormous cultural with great amount of significance, and they'd have to convince their board that it's a good thing and they would come in and need a big practice. So, you know, me and 5 others designing, then we're going to hand it over to this 100 man practice.
Mary Duggan:You know, you can imagine a client thinking, why why would you do that? Why don't you just give it to the big guys? Because there's less risk and all of those things.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. And then let the little guys do the gift shop or something like that.
Mary Duggan:Yeah. Yeah. Give them that. Yeah. Give them the bookshelves.
Dave Sharp:Give them some little pop up element. The big architects can do the, like, 50 story building behind it.
Mary Duggan:So Yeah. Yeah. It's I mean, I don't want it. I I'm oversimplifying it because bigger practices have got so much to do and think about and generate and look after, you know, their own finances, the well-being of their staff, the well-being of their, you know, the, the, the communications with their client and the confidence that their clients have in them. I I understand all of those things are significant factors in running a larger practice.
Dave Sharp:In terms of then talking about your sort of new start with Mary Duggan Architects and your opportunity to kind of redefine your business model in a sense. It sounds like you have really tried to then emphasize that front end concept driven element. And as you mentioned on a project like Line Road where you didn't then continue through to the you know, you didn't hire 6 people to document everything and then kind of follow through the construction process and everything like that, that you were just sort of there at the front end. I guess it kind of goes against this idea that architects have to do everything, doesn't it?
Mary Duggan:It's like It does. I don't think we do have to do everything. And I, you know, I've, I've employed, I've, you know, I've been around for a long time, and I've employed probably over 200 members of staff and I from lots of different universities, different come from very different backgrounds and training. And I've seen, you know, how what the, what the education system kind of gives you. And architects have very different skills.
Mary Duggan:Some architects are just brilliant at nerdy technical things, brilliant in CAD, or really good strategically at the front end, just breaking down a problem. There are just so many skills that you need to have in the field of architecture. You know, you said it earlier, quite often you get 2 directors and one is a really smart communications, can convince a client that they need to do something, and their their business partner might just run the whole studio really, really well and really efficiently. And then there are some practices you might have a third who were just really good at contracts and other things. That's just people, isn't it?
Mary Duggan:You just tend to be you have peak highs and lows in your kind of field of experience. So the other thing that's happened within our industry is we have let certain skills go. So there are, you know, we've allowed this whole concept of project managers to step in and start to oversee projects, which is quite often really annoying because when I started in architecture, you'd have a lead architect and actually just a few consultants, and you'd kind of manage it all and speak to the client. As all of these other things have started to be clipped on and there's new legislation to do with, meeting environmental goals and targets, which are all really important. All of these things have started to make the process of processing design architecture really quite large and complicated.
Mary Duggan:And we've allowed other disciplines to take over those things instead of taking control of them ourselves. So when I meet a project manager whose background is architecture, I just think, yay, Brilliant. You're lateral. You're not necessarily on my side, but you probably understand what the process is about. More recently, I've started to meet architects who are much more focused on sustainability and environmental goals.
Mary Duggan:They've they've gone into that direction. Occasionally, you meet an architect structural engineer too. So I think the discipline should be more diverse and I think there are areas that we need to cover now that should be under the umbrella of architecture or the, you know, or the the field of architecture.
Dave Sharp:Diverse in the sense of what I'm picking up is that as people, we each have their own interests and specialties and skill sets, and it's more about finding that sort of special niche for oneself in the entire architecture process rather than what it sounds like. You're almost going, no architect has complete control over this entire process anymore. We're all inevitably a small piece of a larger process. Once, I guess, you get to a project of a certain size or complexity, it just becomes bigger than any individual architect, doesn't it?
Mary Duggan:Yeah. It does. I I mean, I'm very conscious that, you know, of who I am now and what I want to do. And I think I'm probably stepping out of what most people would consider to be a more normal practice, which is a practice that does everything. And so I'm very conscious that I am promoting a kind of practice that, you know, many people say to me, well, Mary, you've, you've got 25 years of experience.
Mary Duggan:You know, I'd argue otherwise, but, you know, apparently I have a reputation that might allow me to sort of fast track into or or find or draw in the sort of project projects that I want to do. And I think to some extent, that's true. I mean, the phone isn't ringing every day with inquiries. So I suppose what I make trying to make a case for try, along with trying to answer your question is I think we can rethink the way architecture is designed and delivered. And and I think push back on this notion that large practices can do everything very well.
Mary Duggan:Because more often than not, they can't do everything very well. And I know this because I've sat in very large, good practice design discussions. And I can see that they're charged by a process, which is about what they need to do to deliver the project with that client in the room. And it's like anything, you know, you bring an person in the room who's wearing a particular hat and they're championing something and you listen to them. So let's say a big practice with a director, you know, they're on their own treadmill.
Mary Duggan:They're running away. You need another character in that room to interrupt that conversation to say, oh yeah, but maybe you can do it like this. And their client might need to hear this other voice that isn't part of that practice. You know, much like I've just talked about consultants, but consultants can say things and they will get a they'll get a look in, but a practice who's got a very particular goal and agenda might not be able to say certain things about a project. So when I set up Mary Duggan Architects, I decided that, you know, I've drawn this diagram, which, you know, if, if you can imagine a flower and the flower shape when the leaves are pointing inwards, that's practice.
Mary Duggan:That's the field of architecture where everyone's just talking to each other. There's nothing new in there, you know, and there might be lots of intelligence in there, but nothing is breaking in. So if you turn the leaves the other way and maybe sort of cut some holes in them, other disciplines sort of entering into that field can change the dialogue, the way you talk, the way you behave. And so when I set up, I set up this, what I called a residency program. Strictly speaking, I don't know if it was that, but for the sake of not having another word, that's what I called it.
Mary Duggan:And I brought in I brought
Dave Sharp:in Sounds good.
Mary Duggan:I like yeah. I brought in other disciplines. And what I wanted them to do was to just sit in my office and do other things, other creative things. So there was a different, different set of sounds in the office. You know, we had, a ceramicist.
Mary Duggan:She brought in a potter's wheel and she made pots, and she'd set up a whole system whereby she would make pots, send them off to a kiln, bring them back and do the next stage of the glazing process and send them off for firing again. And we were very much engaged in that. And as a studio at the time, we were, you know, in CAD doing things very slowly, arguing with contractors on the telephone, all of those kind of architecty things, which are mostly actually quite boring. And she was there like chugging away, making stuff. It was really quite incredible to have these 2 different to be aware of a very different way of working.
Mary Duggan:And it was actually quite motivating. And then we overlap. We had some converse at the time we were designing a house in Somerset and we were looking at we were sort of collecting information about local stone quarries and what ingredients we might add to a facade that we were innovating. And off the back of that, she decided she'd go to the farm, gather lots of organic material, reduce it to an ash, and she made this glaze for one of her pots. So it was quite nice to have that.
Mary Duggan:You know, we didn't collaborate. She did her thing, and we were influenced by each other's processes. So that was Cara Guthrie. She was amazing. And then we had, an illustrator, poet, a a guy called Nigel Peake, who's also fantastic.
Mary Duggan:He sat in a cupboard actually, and he did, he wanted to do lots of drawings and respond to what he saw in the office, but he kind of wanted to do it not blind, but without, he didn't wanna document anything per se, but he just wanted to respond to it. But, but his work was incredible. Each, he produced 10 pieces of work, all with pencil and the pencil, 8 layers of pencil work, lots of different grains and textures. And then he presented the 10 pieces. This was about a 3 or 4 months residency.
Mary Duggan:All the while he was doing other other work that we also heard about. Then he gave the 10 pieces back to us and we then, our dialogue was with him as we took the pieces and then we made a three-dimensional object each and presented that back. Some of the work, it was very obvious that there were an illustration of a project. Others, maybe an illustration of a texture or implied lots and lots of layers in something that some of us read as facades. And then we had a composer who just tracked a really amazing historic, conversion of a grade 2 listed old rectory building.
Mary Duggan:He gathered sound data from the construction site. There was a belfry. He took a reading of the pitch of the bell. He took the construction Gantt chart and then he made a piece of work. I don't know if you call it a script, but he made a piece of music and he played it in the bell tower at the end.
Mary Duggan:It was a 15 minute piece, which was this kind of sound capture or capsule of a kind of 2 year project. And it was, it was actually very new moving. You know, I just love that, you know, there we were battling with conservation officers saying, yes, we want to take this cornice out and we don't want to put another one back because that's a fake thing. We want to somehow market in a different way. And, you know, we, we were working with conservation officers who just wanted to freeze time on the building.
Mary Duggan:And somehow he came in with his discipline and he made something that sort of really beautifully pulled layers and layers together into something else. I've, you know, I've never heard before. Amazing. Benjamin Tassie. That is my very long way of saying, I think there are other conversations that you can have.
Mary Duggan:There are other influences. You know, architects have got a very bad habit of looking at architecture to influence architecture. And we look at buildings on the streets that we're designing because planners tell us that we need to kind of emulate what's in the street and collage into the architectural urban fabric and all of that. And we assume that all the architecture that's happened before is good, but it isn't always good. And the other other architects who have had books written about them and have had the accolades are good and have made decisions, but not necessarily.
Dave Sharp:I like what you're talking about in terms of the diagram of the flowers with the the inward leaves and then the kind of this idea of, like, the the industry is only sort of being self referential and being inspired by itself and then talking to itself. When you're sort of establishing a practice that is essentially, it sounds like trying to almost in a way sell new ideas and creativity and lateral thinking. You have to start from a place of what does that get inspired by? Like, what references do you start to draw on? Because, again, if you if you just sort of dredge up all the same material that is fueling every other architectural sort in the industry, I mean, you're not really gonna be bringing something kind of new and inspired.
Dave Sharp:It it just sort of reminds me of I was reading this book about the the history of the big four accounting firms that tells you how boring I am, but it was talking about, like, I think Boston Consulting Group or someone like that who went out and they were hiring violinists to go and advise their fortune 500 corporate companies on their strategy, and they were violinists and painters. And it sounds like your residency program in a way because they were finding that these artists were coming up with these incredible corporate ideas that no one had ever even contemplated before. Even even though they weren't sort of experts in that sort of that area, they were they were bringing their own sort of approach to it as part of a team with other sorts of strategists and things like that. It just kind of comes to mind this it it sounds like the way you're describing your practice is this kind of boutique strategy consultancy, art creative consultancy. It's sort of like kind of blurring the traditional model of, like, what an architect is actually offering, I suppose.
Dave Sharp:Yeah.
Mary Duggan:But it's funny, isn't it? I mean, I've really started obsessing over Tim Ingold recently. He's an anthropologist. And, you know, not so far removed from architecture, I suppose. But I was watching a lecture recently, and, actually, I refer to him a lot, but he was just talking about the fact that you'd go to a forest and you'd see a bunch of lovely trees and you'd admire the trees and you'd have this experience of being in the forest.
Mary Duggan:And then you might go home and you look at your beautiful Danish piece of of furniture and you don't make the connection between the wood and the piece of furniture, you know, let alone anything that's happened in between. And I just thought, oh yeah. You know, you don't often plot those journeys or think about materials in that way, where they've come from and, you know, the much more so, you know, so the other thing I talk about a lot is I think the other thing that architects do is accept a brief and make a building and walk away. But I think as an architect, you can understand the much broader consequences, where the materials come from, the journey to get the materials and make them, and people and clients can be immersed in that. And then there's the other end of it where you talk about how you're gonna live in it, what it's gonna be like in 50 years time.
Mary Duggan:So you're, you're kind of your scope, you know, your fee is somewhere, but your scope how you scope out a project, I think, can be very, very different and much more immersive.
Dave Sharp:How do you do that? Like, a client comes to you now with this sort of, like, open problem of, like, they're they're on board to that point where they're going, you know, we haven't sat down as the committee and already predetermined exactly what this project needs. We've seen one of Mary's lectures. We are totally on board with this idea of, like, engaging somebody to really work with us to even start laying down that initial sort of vision of this project. Could you put together a fee proposal for us, please, Mary?
Dave Sharp:What do we do?
Mary Duggan:So I'll give you an example of a project where I think I've done this quite quite successfully. So the garden museum, I mentioned it at the beginning. It was a competition, which I won, which was just, you know, amazing. The invitation was to prepare 1 page, 1 a 3 page to describe how you'd respond to a brief. And the brief was quite specific, but open, a very well written brief.
Mary Duggan:It's the kind of brief that architects like to respond to because it's inviting ideas and design. And, essentially, what the project is, is to design an open garden, a beautiful garden, the kind of garden that only well off people would have. We're gonna put this garden that's in in, let's say it's a wealthy person's garden into the public realm, and we're gonna let everyone in to see it. And it's gonna have amazing plant species, and it's gonna have 2 apprentices in there understanding how to make this garden and volunteer gardens. And it's going to have a whole bunch of people wandering around it with wheelbarrows and anyone can watch this and be inspired by it and, you know, become a gardener or, or develop another interest.
Mary Duggan:Because the public realm is full of naff shrubs. Let's be honest, that are low maintenance. So I said, that's amazing. That's I get that. We need, we need this in the world, beautiful gardens.
Mary Duggan:We need biodiversity. We need all of those other, you know, climate action things, well-being. So what about materials then? So I said, I love this idea that this is a garden full of gardeners and activity, and we're really going to celebrate that. Why can't we do the same with the walls of the structure?
Mary Duggan:There are all these buildings in London that are being remote, broken up, and taken to salvage yards and whatever. Why don't we track all of those projects and bring those pieces of stone or whatever materials to this project? Because for me, what that means is those other stones have stories that you can bring. You can bring pit history from elsewhere and replay it on a different site, And we can track those stones way in advance of building the project and that that's part of the project. And that what that might mean is that whoever's involved in providing those materials is a is part of a much longer story.
Mary Duggan:And, you know, I'm not saying you know, there's nothing really clever about that because we've been architectural salvage has been around for years years, and there's, you know, lots of architecture that's made of spolia pieces that have moved from a to b. That's very common. But I think what I'm saying is if we do it and expand a program much wider, you cast the net much wider and you think about so the materials are not just from the materials catalog. They're from somewhere else, someone else provided by someone else, sourced by someone else, and they've been contributed to the project way in advance of the kind of construction programme. And then you might have apprentices who learn to build these new special walls because of that idea, because there are no walls that are built in that way.
Mary Duggan:So that's one example. And just to more directly, I don't really know how you say to a a client I'm gonna do this, but I think I think you've got to do it, deliver it. And someone has got to understand that actually it's good. So maybe the next project will do again or someone else will do it. You know, I I will procure a project in this way.
Dave Sharp:When you're sort of developing kind of a new way of practicing and think one of the difficulties is that people have obviously kind of ideas about what architects do and how they work and what their responsibility is and all of that sort of thing. And then when you sort of depart from that and you're in your practice primarily doing the concept stage and hanging out with musicians and composers and these sorts of things, When you meet somebody at a party and you tell them that you're an architect, you have to sort of explain exactly the way that you are an architect in in this kind of way against what they would expect you to be doing or working on or how you would work. There's quite a bit of distance there between, I guess, like, what a general public audience would assume of you and then what you kind of are actually doing. But it feels to me like the key thing is communicating your work, even though the process in the background can be a bit a bit unique and unconventional. The way that you share that process with the world can be really, really simple and easy to understand, and then it doesn't actually you know, it's it's easy.
Dave Sharp:People can get it. Clients can get it. Part of this whole podcast is, like, trying to understand, like, what your new model kind of looks like, and it's hard. Like, it's not a straightforward thing. But when we see, like, the imagery that comes out of your practice, like, it's easy to understand and you just get it.
Dave Sharp:And so I think that's interesting. I'd like to kind of talk more about, I guess, like your approach to that images and illustrations and models and
Mary Duggan:So I think it's so important that you get ideas across very quick quickly and effectively. And I don't think so for example, I do make models sometimes out of really basic things like cardboard and dried flowers I use a lot. And I make them really quickly and I photograph them. And then then they go in the bin or they'll sit on the my desk and my cat will walk all over them or actually chew the dried flowers. That's what's tending to happen at the moment.
Mary Duggan:So but I really like the fact. So and and as I've said, I think having come out of a commercial practice, a design process can be, like, really expansive. You'll sit with a team of 4 people who have to work for the day, and you'll say, okay. You test that. You test the typologies.
Mary Duggan:You look at the materiality, and you do all these and you make a big matrix. So you have, like, a design matrix, which has got typology material, whatever along the top, and then you tick and decide that way. I'm do I don't mean it's that expensive, but it there's quite a lot of work that goes into it. I do believe in intuition. I do believe you can be really effective with an idea and just say it immediately and lock it down.
Mary Duggan:And then and whatever it is, I think the faster you can make the thing, the the the in a way, the stronger the idea. I think you can be quite kind of, almost bionic with it, but spontaneity, I nearly said bionic, but bionic intuition is like a weird thing. It's like a superpower. But I, I, I don't, I don't know if that's the right word, but iterations and options are a problem because if you communicate iterations and options to a client, they will think that they need to make a decision about it. And surely you want your architect to, to give you the answer to that.
Mary Duggan:You know, part of my idea as a practice is to, to be sure and certain that your project has a shape and a material quality and try and lock it down really quickly. And I think, you know, much like a lay person will look at a painting and kind of get it and imagine with a, with a bit of dialogue, they'll imagine something, you know, whether if it's a kind of quick model of a house or a quick model of a pavilion or something, they'll look at it and they'll imagine something and hopefully love it because of you've, you've allowed their imagination to project themselves into this project. Not a beautiful CGI with a very particular ornament on a shelf or a particular thing that they will imagine themselves using. You know, I think it's just a much in a way, it's a very, it's a much looser way of organizing a client's minds or expectations from something less specific, because then you can kind of get on and do your job and just try and deliver that vision. But what I, I really have a problem with at the moment, and I apologize to architects who are listening to this, because I don't think this is going to be particularly well received, but the idea that you have an idea, a conceptual idea, which can be a sketch or a model, and then that thing moves into a discussion about how you're going to build the model to convince the client that they're going to do it.
Mary Duggan:And then that sketch becomes a CAD drawing, which then becomes a 3 d drawing, which then gets broken down into pieces to make a model. And then the model, 4 weeks or 5 weeks later, gets put on the table. And the model then through those seek, that sequence becomes a very specific thing that you ask very specific questions about. I think just think that that gives me a headache. I used to do that and I think it's just, I think it's wrong because then, then you can't kind of, you, you kind of tied into something that has a different, different set of expectations than the initial idea, which is looser.
Mary Duggan:It's, you know, taking a, taking a painting and making it something. Did that come out really
Dave Sharp:badly? On the one hand, and there's one side to this which I'm interested in talking about, which is like the public facing side of the communication. So we'll get to that maybe a little bit later. But in talking about the client communication aspect of it, I think that's really interesting. So you've got this sort of intuitive, quick, bionic, loose kind of just some essence of an idea that comes out through a small model or a sketch or or something like that or a piece of ceramic, and and it's this really, like, beautiful simple way.
Dave Sharp:And as you're saying, clients and people can kind of use their imagination to kind of, you know, interpret it in different ways. But I guess, like, how do you then go on that journey of becoming more specific with that design? Like, does it then make that jump into the 3 d at any point, or do you kind of go, like, actually, we're just gonna have conversations around these more loose aspects until we make this big jump, and then it's a building? Like, how do you how do you kind of?
Mary Duggan:Actually, ease quite easily, I move into CAD drawings and elevations onto which I can collage materials.
Dave Sharp:So it does happen, but we maybe delay it more than you would than some architects might. The way that first conversation is gonna be super specific as soon as they're showing anything.
Mary Duggan:Yes. Yeah. I think that's that's probably it. There are there are it's it's delayed. It's very clear.
Mary Duggan:It's not options. And then after that, once there's a buy in, you'd move and do all the architectural things that most architects do, which is drawings and elevations and color. And so the things that you need to communicate to planners, clients, obviously, and then move into the engineering aspects. It's I suppose it's how much you need to to say to clients.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. It's, like, it's interesting, but that's it's your kind of working out what is that minimum that you need to say to them, isn't it? You're sort of trying to find that line and not go in the other direction of going, say as much as possible because that will be more convincing.
Mary Duggan:I'm I suppose I'm not setting out to to minimize. I'm setting out to have a really, really strong idea and opinion about something they agree with obviously. And, you know, it's not always the case that someone would actually, no. I don't think anyone has said no to something I've put forward.
Dave Sharp:There you go. We found the secret recipe. But that's interesting is trying to control the space of that kind of conversation and sort of the kind of the nature of it and by not trying to prevent it from too quickly going into that very specific place and that conversation, that logical mind around options and and and making decisions, decision making. You know, in that kind of system 1, system 2 thinking thing, it's a very, like, the logical processing brain is is get kinda kicking into gear there. But it sounds like you're trying to engage on this kind of, like, more kind of intuitive, emotional, kind of more engaging idea driven sort of level.
Mary Duggan:Yeah. And that, you know, there's very much there's a place for that way of thinking too. I mean, I know also that it's a kind of weird commodification of an architectural process. So when you're working with a developer who has a banker or a backer, or they're JV ing with someone, you know, you know, that they want a document that has all of the options tested. And they want to know that the team that they're investing in has gone through a due diligence process.
Mary Duggan:So you do you do need to produce these books that are saying, yeah, no, because it was too expensive or no, because there was issues concerning, I don't know how the site might be procured. You know, I I know that you need to do those things to substantiate something to someone who's quite seriously investing in something. And a model made of toilet rolls might not make the cut scenario. But there's there is a there is a middle that we I suppose, I think there are more effective processes and I think architects who can can spend for staff doing options when actually you could fast track the right one and develop the right one with that same time investment. There's waste.
Mary Duggan:That's what I think. I think there's a lot of waste in what we do, the thinking and processing.
Dave Sharp:I think it's also interesting just from a marketing standpoint and a kind of content standpoint of your ability to generate ideas quickly and cost effectively and then share them. If you're trying to communicate your ideas with the world as a practice and your way of doing that is £5,000 per image renders or whatever, like just making up numbers. But let's say that's your method. That's a really, really nice method, but that's a really slow and expensive method as well. And it's it's interesting to say that sort of simpler, quicker forms, but, you know, with the right sort of consistency and just a really well thought through sort of aesthetic that kinda goes across all of this stuff.
Dave Sharp:I mean, it can be tremendously effective, like, out there in terms of getting people interested in these ideas. Like, a physical model is still extremely accessible. And I think also the ones that you put out there don't feel like they've just come out of a 3 d printer. You know? Not that I'm a snob about certain types of model making.
Dave Sharp:I think all model making is a really beautiful thing, but there's models that have become the byproduct of that specific digital process, then there's ones that are kind of coming in the front side of the process, which say a very different thing about what your brand and your practice is and is about.
Mary Duggan:Yeah. Yeah. You know, take my mom for instance. She knows nothing. She's not a creative person.
Mary Duggan:She knows lots of things, but she's not a creative person at all. But she will see something that's been folded out of a piece of paper that might have a pebble from a beach and she will piece it together. You know, she'll tell herself a story and then she'll figure out that actually it's an architectural proposal. And I co I like the way that she might access that model because of the things that are in it. An amalgamation or a or a organization or some kind of still life of objects almost compared to the kind of rigidity and the arguably, but inaccessibility of a beautiful model that's come out of a work shop or a or a or a CAD cutting machine.
Mary Duggan:You know, there's just a different mindset to your your response to that model.
Dave Sharp:I guess also in terms of model photography and drawings and concepts and some of this more conceptual imagery, I find it interesting the balance between that and finished imagery or finished project photography in sort of, you know, your website, your Instagram and things like that, because you've got projects that are there on the website that have beautiful sets of images, but you don't take the direction that a lot of, I guess, other practices would, which would be to go, oh, cool. We've got these photos. Let's just can all the model stuff and the diagrams or whatever because photos of finished buildings are so much more important and so much more convincing for clients than concept or process driven imagery. So let's, like, overhaul everything and just really focus on that finished stuff. That's just such a typical approach, but I find it, like, even just in terms of sort of going into depth on looking through all of that stuff in preparation for this episode, I found it quite amazing how hard it was to find some of these incredible images.
Dave Sharp:And I'm, like, going, Mary is making no effort whatsoever to put these images out there more prominently. She's doing the exact opposite of it. So Yeah. And then, of course, like, the projects I'm talking about, I know that there was, like, you know, you weren't involved through the whole process, and there's, like, of course, there's those aspects to it. But I guess, like, the real kind of question kinda comes down to this idea of, like, this process driven content is not this unimportant placeholder for finished photos.
Dave Sharp:It's like, it's important as as imagery and communication.
Mary Duggan:It's as important. The process is as important. You know, I'm I'm quite flattered. So I've been told off for not having, you know, architectural photography right at the front front of my site. And I, you know, I I take it as a compliment actually because I I like the idea that someone might find my work really interesting and then discover that I'm an architect and have a different opinion about what architects do because I definitely build buildings in the end.
Mary Duggan:That's what I do. But, you know, I've also designed a door handle, which I love. It's one of my favorite projects. And the reason I made the door handle was because of the design concept for the building. And the fact that I wanted this building to actually be consumed by landscape.
Mary Duggan:And I had this idea that I needed to make the most beautiful door handle because maybe in 50 years time, it might be the only thing that will be visible of this building as it becomes consumed in climbers and things. Yeah. I suppose I'm just trying to say architects can do lots of different things and you know, what is the, the, the beautiful photograph of the finished model, finished building with a blue sky? Yeah. That's the end game.
Mary Duggan:That's what I, you know, that's what you're commissioned. You're commissioned to make a building and walk away from it, but it sort of represents an end of something. And actually, you know, I see them very and they're staged and they're with lots of happy things, usually summertime photographs and people smiling. And when the flowers are in full bloom, It's like, I don't know. It's not really what architecture is about for me.
Dave Sharp:I mean, architectural photography has gotten pretty recently in terms of looking in terms of look and feel, so I don't know if, like, the happy go lucky blue skies are really, like, as much of a thing.
Mary Duggan:Yeah.
Dave Sharp:It's there's a there's a general bleaker kind of atmosphere to photography at the moment,
Mary Duggan:but softer.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. But, like, in a good way, it looks awesome. But the point you're making, like, absolutely, That's what I was picking up, I suppose, in terms of the, like, defiant prioritization of process is for me going, you know, actually, I could put some of these finished images here, but, you know, get stuffed. I'm gonna show this stuff because I I want you to know that we're doing things a little bit differently is kind of what that says, I think, and taking, like, a different approach. You're not going down the road of the kind of the typical way of doing things.
Dave Sharp:Maybe not intentionally. Again, it's not this kind of calculated thing, but there's a little bit of a statement to this idea of, like, still maintaining conceptual development at the foreground of what the public see of the practice?
Mary Duggan:Yeah. I think, it's definitely not something that I have consciously branded. It's something that has come from what I want to do and what I really believe the how I really believe the industry should be changing and foregrounding its, a skillset more broadly. You know, they're genuine things that I the models that I I'm pretty sure you're talking about have come out of like a, sorry. I say to my daughter, got to go home now, like now.
Mary Duggan:Because I've gotta make this thing. And, you know, she'll come walking along the canal looking for a particular, like, twig or flower. So, so recently I was talking to Dan Pearson, the fantastic garden designer. It was a couple of months ago and we were talking about some trees and we identified a tree that was, we figured out it needed to be central to the building. And he said to me, I assumed that it was an oak tree.
Mary Duggan:He's I assumed it was old because I think oak trees always look kind of old and gnarly. And he said, actually, Mary, it's a teenage oak. And I was like, wow, a teenage oak. What you've she's kind of characterized the oak and I needed to go home and make a model with the oak central to it. So I found this actually, I found this post one of the hurricane twigs that looked like this sort of strange shape that an oak has.
Mary Duggan:And I found this branch and then I designed a roof around it, and the roof was like super crisp and golden and folded and very geometric. And for me, that was it, you know, as bingo, very complimentary material. And that's something that I talk about in relation to this project now.
Dave Sharp:And then that's developing into a real scheme.
Mary Duggan:Yeah. Definitely it's going into planning in the next few weeks and yeah, I kind of, you know, it's those moments come to you when you, and they, the, I mean, the other thing I would say about how we practice architecture is when you're in a chug and running and consciously working and directing a big team, you don't really, those moments don't come in that. You need to be slow. You need to be on a train, you need to be out on a walk and then you'll, then it you'll find that that very conscious, precise decision.
Dave Sharp:Comes up kind of quite often, like on the podcast. I think thinking about creating an environment for a particular type of creative process, and getting the situation just right, like being not too busy, not too big, not too bogged down in certain other things, like not too many distractions, you know, not looking at too much other architecture. There's all these different elements that can kind of happen, and then you create this kind of right environment, this kind of perfect little situation to sort of do what you need to do, and then you can kind of work in a certain way. Part of, I guess, the scale of practice that you're sort of intentionally working at the moment is you can be, I guess, a little patient to kind of wait for these things to align properly and not sort of force yourself into situations where 3 of those six things are off and you have to kind of, like, push through it or do something. Is that sort of in the right
Mary Duggan:Yeah. That is a that's been that's taken me a long time actually to realize that actually you don't need a huge workforce. When I left my larger practice and set up my smaller one, you know, you have staff, but you also have so many things, expensive things like accountants, bookkeepers, licensing software, PI insurance, employ lie all sorts of liabilities that come with being an architect. And I carried all of those things over into my much smaller practice before I realized that actually I could dispense with quite a lot of them because your overhead is very much driven by and rent. Oh my god.
Mary Duggan:Rent is a really quite a big burden, especially in London at the moment, and it's disproportionate now when you have one desk services, one person for, like, 2 days out of 5. It's just bonkers. So I, I dispense with a lot when I realized that I didn't need it. And because I was able to reflect on process and what I thought I needed to do to impress a client. Because you know, we're client pleases at the end of the day, they're paying the fees.
Mary Duggan:Took me a while to realize that I didn't need to do things in that way. You know, this is years of change.
Dave Sharp:What were those key client pleasing things that you actually realized you didn't need to do?
Mary Duggan:Iterate options. Please clients with lots of work, lots of bound books and reports. I don't they don't read them, you know, and I've gone out of my way to figure that out and ask them, have they read it? No. They just want to be told what to do and when.
Mary Duggan:I think all of the the the time that you put into, as I said earlier, the time that you think you need to put into the design process, I think is unnecessary. If you've got someone really leading it and communicating it well in a client friendly way. And I don't mean that to sound patronizing. I'm an architect. Most of my clients aren't, so they just want to understand it.
Mary Duggan:That's all. And so you've just got to say it and present it in the simplest way that you've, you know, I've made a judgment over a period of time that a model that has fallen apart in their hands and they can hold in their hands and look at is just much better than a model that they have to stick their head in and feel a bit awkward because they don't know what to say about it and feel that they need to be critical. Then you just got to be gentler.
Dave Sharp:You mentioned earlier this idea that there might be the architect that's, like, working on the project, then there might be this other person in the room who's this kind of agitator who goes, are you actually thinking about this other thing that you could be doing or this and that that the practice can kind of listen to. And I get that feeling that there's, like, this position for this this lateral thinking voice of reason that sort of can sit in some of these processes that have become, like, really convoluted and quagmires of of just design process. There's maybe a place for architecture practices that are just this, like, this voice that just pops up and goes, no. This is actually really simple intuitive kind of way to do it.
Mary Duggan:Do that?
Dave Sharp:Yeah. Yeah. You're mentioning earlier that it maybe is kind of alternative model of practice in a way that there is maybe a business model there and you don't sort of see so many practices sitting in that position.
Mary Duggan:Yeah. Or stepping away and just taking a more practical view on what's being done and said. And that, you know, quite often, you know, I said to my previous business partner recently, we did all of this work. And so often, the answer was sitting on the table right at the beginning.
Dave Sharp:At the very beginning. Yeah.
Mary Duggan:We just went on and on and on, and the books got thicker and thicker. And then we did the thing that we said was the right thing to do. The ideas are as valuable as a really good delivery. It's not that it's not that one thing is more important than the rest, but, you know, I think the compactness and the understanding that things should be perhaps streamlined is is is the takeaway.
Dave Sharp:Oh, beautiful. Mary, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Mary Duggan:No problem. I've really enjoyed it.
Dave Sharp:That was my conversation with Mary Duggan of Mary Duggan Architects. If you'd like to learn more about her studio, you can visit maryduganarchitects.com or follow her on Instagram at marydugan arc, ARC. Office Talk is hosted by Office Dave Sharp, a strategic marketing and brand definition practice for architecture. We work collaboratively with clients across the globe, so to learn more about our process and book a consultation, simply visit officedavesharpe.com. Today's episode of Office Talk was edited and engineered by Anthony Richardson of Simple Dwelling Studio.
Dave Sharp:That's all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next
Mary Duggan:time.
