Understanding What Your Client Wants..

Architects and their clients, often at odds but always needing each other. Understanding what one’s client requires is paramount to completion of a successful architectural project. Listening to what your client wants is the fundamental first step in cultivating the ideal productive partnership.

The client-architect relationship is one that must be carefully managed and cultivated in order to achieve a symbiotic and synergistic relationship that ultimately leads to, not only a successfully completed project but also repeat projects as well.

While many service-oriented businesses devote a large portion of their resources toward client experience, architecture as an industry oftentimes treats client experience as peripheral and not central. This however is a concept that must change and is changing.

As agreed by practitioners of customer experience, the very beginning of a project is the most crucial point at which communication between the architect and client should be established. This involves a lot of tact and restraint on the part of the architect to ensure that this process is more of a harvesting of the client’s ideas as opposed to bombarding the client with a design and its specifics. Building up trust between the architect and the client is essential at this stage and understanding one’s client requires a considerable amount of reading between the lines in order to extract as much information from the client as possible.

At this point, the potential for misunderstanding (on both sides) is extremely high. As such the need for prolific note taking and record sharing is crucial. Conversations with one’s clients should be documented, and all salient points shared to ensure all elements are covered and priorities assigned.

The ultimate fleshing out of a client’s idea onto an architect’s design is entirely dependent on the efficiency and effectiveness of the communication between the two. The client should always feel his/her ideas are welcomed by the architect and must always be ensured that the architect will try to incorporate as many ideas as possible within reasonable architectural principals. This involves building a bond of trust wherein the architect knows his/her client’s needs and the client trust the architect will implement his suggestions within structural and legal limits.