“If we make nice details the driver, we’re going to lose control of the project.”
I was stunned. Losing control? That wasn’t a concern I’d heard voiced so early on any project I’d worked on before. After all, we were the architects — weren’t we the ones in charge? Why was our partner + design lead, Jens, so convinced that we were headed for risky territory?
I paused the meeting. “Jens, I need you to explain.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that focusing on details would somehow make us lose control. In my past experience, details ensured control. They were what guaranteed a project’s success, anchoring our vision and protecting it from dilution.
Jens’ response was as counterintuitive as it was illuminating.
As it turns out, when working on a project prone to aggressive value engineering, conventional wisdom about details has to be inverted.
For those unfamiliar, value engineering is a process where an external consultant revises the architect’s design to cut costs. It happens on most projects to some extent, but before this I had mostly worked on high-end buildings, where this process was less aggressive. This project — a student housing development — was a different game entirely.
Jens made it clear: we were dealing with a cost-conscious client, and that meant they would probably have value engineering applied with ruthless efficiency. Details and high-quality materials wouldn’t be allowed to carry the project because, in all likelihood, they wouldn’t survive. Cheaper alternatives would replace them, and anything deemed extraneous to the building’s most basic function would be stripped away — regardless of the damage to the design’s conceptual integrity. If not a certainty, all this was at least a strong possibility.
This was what Jens meant by losing control. If our vision depended on details, we were setting ourselves up to fail.
At first, I wondered: If the client is so cost-conscious, couldn’t we offset the price of better details and materials by making cost-saving choices at a larger architectural scale — like the fundamental configuration of the building? After all, that’s where the biggest costs and efficiencies are typically found.
But that’s precisely where this approach becomes so counterintuitive. Jens explained that a client committed to aggressive value engineering (as we imagined ours might be) will strip out the details no matter what. That meant we couldn’t rely on those details to anchor the project’s architectural value. Instead, we had to embed that value in big moves — the core massing, spatial arrangements, and structural gestures — because these elements are largely tamper-proof.
A glass canopy over a sidewalk? Easy to cut. An inset pedestrian arcade? That’s a fundamental aspect of the building’s massing — changing it would require redesigning the entire ground floor plan, or even parts of the structure. The same principle applies to setbacks, window arrangements, and any feature deeply woven into the building’s framework.
This strategy was a revelation — or at least I thought so. If you recognize from the outset that value engineering is inevitable, designing with big, tamper-proof moves gives you the best shot at preserving architectural quality.
As effective as this approach is, I’ve come to believe it should be treated as a last resort. Every design project is, at its core, a negotiation. But in this context, it would seem the relationship between architect, consultant, and client becomes unintentionally adversarial. The client assumes that whatever the architect proposes will be too expensive and commits to cutting it down. The architect, in turn, responds by embedding costs into big moves, making them difficult to alter.
The result? Both sides lock themselves out of the only conversation that really matters:
What does architectural value actually mean in this project, and how can we work to achieve it?
The real goal should be finding the right balance — a mix of impactful big moves and meaningful details that maximize value within the budget. If all parties can align on a shared strategy and trust each other to make thoughtful choices, value engineering itself can become just another unnecessary expense.
Designable.blog 