The Myth of Originality: Two Perspectives on Collaborative Design
Yasaman Esmaili of Studio Chahar is currently collaborating with a local cooperative in the village of Gouron, Iran to uncover architectural strategies for the revitalization of a Hara mangrove forest in their Sarzurzuma public pavilions project. Courtesy of Studio Chahar, photo by Heidar Najafi.
By Yasaman Esmaili & Lauren Gallow
Yasaman Esmaili is an architect and educator from Tehran, Iran, currently based in Boston. In 2017, she founded Studio Chahar, a research-driven collaborative architectural design studio focused on community-based design. Studio Chahar’s collaborative projects have been recognized with several awards including a Regional Gold and a Global Silver LafargeHolcim Award. In 2020, Yasaman received the Tamayouz Award of Excellence, Rising Star category.
Lauren Gallow is a design writer and editor living in Seattle. She is the Editorial Chair of Pacific Northwest non-profit design platform ARCADE and the organization’s 40-year-old magazine. Lauren has an MA in Architectural History and is passionate about sharing meaningful stories about collaboration in architecture and design with bylines in Interior Design, Metropolis, Dwell, Luxe Magazine, Atomic Ranch and more.
It all started one fateful evening, pre-pandemic, when we were each taking the lightrail home from our respective offices in Seattle. A few steps above on the escalator, Yassi overheard Lauren telling a friend about the strange and wonderful world of Arcosanti, the experimental urban laboratory in the Arizona high desert, launched by Paolo Soleri in 1970. Yassi’s ears perked up—she had lived and worked at Arcosanti for several months as an intern architect, and in one of those kismet moments that make urban living so rich, a new friendship was born.
From that initial escalator conversation about the wonder of collaborative design and the meeting of global minds at Arcosanti, Yassi and Lauren have continued to talk about the potentials of co-creation in design today.
We come from different backgrounds—Yassi grew up in Tehran, Iran and is an architectural practitioner and educator, while Lauren is from Tucson, Arizona and is a design writer and architectural marketing consultant. Nevertheless, we’ve found common ground in our belief that the field of architecture as it exists today has yet to fully tap the creative potential of collaboration, each working in our own ways to pave new inroads towards co-creation.
It’s no secret that architecture is a highly collaborative endeavor. It takes the combined skills of many over the course of not insignificant periods of time to bring buildings into form. And yet, architecture is a field whose systems of study, practice, and reward are structured around the myth of individual creative genius. Everywhere, we see variations of the “starchitect” model upheld as modus operandi. One principal in charge, one architect accepting the award, one blank for the architect name on the credits form. While many other professional fields, like medicine and engineering, celebrate a collective thought process where ideas are advanced through teamwork, architecture continues to veil its collaborative processes. How do we break from this, and what are the possibilities when we do? We believe it starts with a conversation. Here, we offer a window into ours.
Sarzurzuma Ideation session with the community. Courtesy of Studio Chahar.
“Creativity is: playing with found objects, reconstructing things that already exist, transforming ideas or stories I already know. It's not about the colonization of new territory, it's about exploring inwards, examining your existing presumptions, squinting at the archive of experience from new angles, and hoping for some sort of revelation.” —Shaun Tan, Australian artist & filmmaker
Yassi Esmaili: In my work, I have observed that the design process is very systematic even if the result might feel like a free-form of expression. It took me a while to frame the ideation phase of design in a way that made sense, but Shaun Tan’s description of creativity helped. To me, “design” means reinterpreting objects that are found around us, whether inherited from our ancestors, derived from our natural and built environment, or pulled from the politics of our time.
“Design” does not mean searching out completely new ideas, plumbing the depths of a black hole of notions in our brains that have yet to spring into existence. This definition of design is very different from what my architectural education in Iran and the US taught me. I only knew about starchitects with their napkin sketches and God-like fountainheads, which leaves no room for collaboration and teamwork.
Lauren Gallow: It’s those images and mythologies around artists and creators—including architects—that inform cultural expectations and, in turn, realities. As a writer who’s made a career out of telling stories about the built environment, I have seen firsthand how images and stories can become the focal point through which architecture’s cultural meaning is made. In fact, since 1896 when House Beautiful published the very first issue of the very first shelter magazine, the design media industry has banked on the profitability of pictures and stories about buildings.
As anyone who has worked on marketing and PR for architecture knows, rarely are those stories created in isolation or in a vacuum. Firms collaborate with photographers on photo shoots, architects and writers co-craft project narratives which get fed to press, who in turn assemble media features that sculpt this source material into digestible bits of content. Although stories about architecture—much like the buildings themselves—are often attributed to a single author, the truth is that these stories are more like the Gee’s Bend Quilts or the assemblage structures of Arcosanti. They’re a collage of materials and forms created by the hands of many. The writer simply builds the scaffolding that holds it all together.
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.” –Joan Didion, American author
YE: A designer who is not so obsessed with originality knows that even if inspirations arrive unconsciously, they are based on previous observations and lived experiences. If we acknowledge the designer is reframing known or hidden ideas, then we can let go of notions of ownership and tracing the origins of design ideas. Co-creation instead offers a process with a much more humble and accessible path for reaching design excellence in comparison to traditional hierarchical models of architectural practices. In this new model, designers piece together found-ideas like a three-dimensional puzzle, finding playfulness and function, through a process of mindful observation, discovery, and discussion.
Goharkhatoon Girls’ School visioning session with the students. Photo by Farkhonda Rajabi.
LG: I like your idea of inviting a level of playfulness when inventing new modes of collaboration in design. I often find people take design writing—and architecture—SO SERIOUSLY. There’s an underlying allegiance to “the way things are done” and a feeling that if it’s disrupted, it’s disrespectful and lacks integrity.
Sarzurzuma Ideation session with students. Courtesy of Studio Chahar.
Recently, I took a workshop through a local writing center in Seattle. The focus was on long-form journalism and how to craft cohesive stories involving complex narratives and data sets. I signed up for the class because for some time, I’ve been searching for new ways to write collaboratively with architects and designers, and was hoping for some inspiration. During the Q&A, I asked the instructor for thoughts on how best to share drafts of my stories with my subjects during the writing process. She was aghast—“You shouldn’t EVER do that!” she scolded me. Why, I wondered? To me, this type of feedback loop with the architects, designers, and artists I write about is essential to my process. It’s a group effort which yields something far greater than the sum of its parts, and we could do well to daylight the collaboration that already happens behind the scenes in architectural storytelling.
“Paul Klee once described an artist as being like a tree, drawing the minerals of experience from its roots - things observed, read, told and felt - and slowly processing them into new leaves.” — Shaun Tan, Australian artist & filmmaker
YE: As an architect, I’ve been exploring the possibility of shaping a design process around shared ideation, not only with other designers, but also with a project’s users and stakeholders. I first experienced this in the design process of Goharkhatoon Girl’s school project, located in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
The project was carried out by an international team of architects, engineers, aid workers and community representatives led by late architect Bob Hull. I found a unique opportunity to tie my background in Iran, studying in a school more or less similar to Goharkhatoon, to my status as a global citizen searching for connectivity through architectural design. What stood out to me was that during the design process, we found ways to set up community participation sessions to hear everybody’s voice, even though the project was being designed collaboratively across continents. Our best achievement in this realm was initiating a national mural competition for women in Afghanistan, with the winners applying their murals to the walls of the school’s common areas. Giving a share in creation to the community meant the space could relate better to their needs and particular cultural preferences once in use.
LG: As a writer, I’m seeing more and more of these types of projects gaining mainstream attention. While we still have the Architectural Digests of the world, who love to spotlight a single (ideally celebrity) client and a personality designer, increasingly more media outlets are showcasing something different. I recently wrote in Interior Design about the Mukilteo Ferry Terminal just north of Seattle, which was the first new ferry terminal to be built in Washington in the last 40 years and was collaboratively designed by architects and the 11 Native American tribes who still lay claim to the coastal waters. In a feature for Metropolis, I spotlighted a community alley revitalization project in LA’s San Fernando Valley instigated by a neighborhood environmental justice group. Media wants to showcase these types of stories, which to me indicates that audiences are hungry for more stories about community-based design.
Mural Workshop Introduction Session. Photo by Farkhonda Rajabi.
Goharkhatoon Girl School north open space. Photography by Nic Lehoux.
YE: That’s really encouraging to hear as someone working in community-based collective design. I think a great challenge for collaborative design is to critically explore and expand diverse approaches. It’s hard work, and usually takes longer than “the norm.” My experience with Goharkhatoon led to me joining three other architects (Elizabeth Golden, Philip Sträter and Mariam Kamara) to form a design collective called united4design to design a housing project in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Because each team member was from a different continent, we were forced to forge new modes of communication. We had to spend time breaking from what we unconsciously defined as “the norm,” since norms are not universal.
As calls for more equitable and inclusive spaces get louder and louder, I have found that a shift in perspective on the part of the planner is the necessary starting point. We architects need to hear from people of different backgrounds and areas of expertise, and actively disrupt our learned process, which is what I’m pursuing with my new practice Studio Chahar. Instead of a top-down approach, I’m looking for new ways to invite discussion on design ideas by all team members, even the non-architects. In the end, no one person can claim ownership of design ideas, and the process leads to an increased sense of collective ownership by the people who actually inhabit these spaces.
Hikma Religious and Secular Complex Design and Construction Team. Courtesy of Atelier Masōmī and Studio Chahar.
Hikma Religious and Secular Complex, Dandaji, Niger. Courtesy of Atelier Masōmī and Studio Chahar. Photo by James Wang.
“We need to dismantle the mindset that the individual has any particular form of mastery. [...] I’d like to see a conversation about collective knowledge building, and a collective mode of operating.” —Justin Garrett Moore, American designer and Executive Director of New York’s Public Design Commission, as quoted in Deem Journal
LG: While I agree with Justin Garrett Moore that collective meaning-making can be a powerful tool, I’ve struggled with the work situations in my career that have held up “the collective” as justification for sidelining or straight-up erasing individual contributions. For many years I was an in-house writer at an internationally renowned architecture firm where, as a storyteller, I was all but invisible. My words and stories were distributed far and wide under the firm’s umbrella in the form of proposals, press releases, and in some cases, editorial writing with bylines attributed directly to the firm’s owners. It was ghost writing in the truest sense, and it’s the kind of personal erasure that all of us—writers, photographers, drafters, digital illustrators—are expected to agree to when we sign up to work alongside a certain class of architect.
YE: I also have experienced being a shadow designer in a so-called “team approach,” as most architects and designers have. Even if we put together a project as a team, media and awards outlets, academia, professional institutions, and even clients are often looking for that single person to idolize and shine a spotlight on. We rarely see an entire design team being celebrated, much less acknowledged.
Mural Drawing Session. Photo by Farkhonda Rajabi.
We know that lasting change happens from the ground up, and all of us—designers, design writers, media, professional organizations, academics—can start by reevaluating our definitions and processes of ideation. Whether it’s finding ways to create a spatial and physical dialogue between culture, tradition and religion as we did in collaboration with Atelier Masomi in Hikma Project, in the Nigerian village of Dandaji; or collaborating with a local cooperative in the village of Gouron, Iran to develop an insider-outsider perspective for our Sarzurzuma public pavilions project, we’re forging new paths for collaborative design.
LG: I love that you are looking internally at your own process and implementing personal micro shifts as a way to create lasting change and drive towards greater equity in the outside world. It happens for me every day when I seek out projects to pitch to the media and people to spotlight. Not every writing assignment is moving the needle towards a better future, but I hope when I look back, I’ll see that most of them did. I believe we all have to ask ourselves, how are we practicing in our work every day the values that we’d like to see to take root in the world around us?
YE: I can’t agree more that the true impact of our work is the reflection of every little step and decision along the way—or, in other words, the process. I like to think of architects as facilitators, envisioning and co-directing the design environment. It’s about teaming up with the right players and enabling freedom of thought, meeting people where they are and finding ways to spotlight their unique gifts. I imagine a world where the architects and designers, the writers and photographers, the engineers and craftsmen, and also the community representatives and stakeholders are like jazz players, each improvising as they co-create together.