RL: Do you find it difficult to find architectural quality? We have a culture we call “dialogue and discourse” in which project designers invite other designers, architects and managers to see and criticize the proposal. If you are going in the wrong direction or do not have the expected quality, you receive a lot of pressure as manager. Once a week we have a design presentation for the entire office where managers explain the project and all listen, criticize and suggest. This is the culture that helps to improve quality. It can be hard, but it's great to keep the horizontality of quality in each of the offices and this is reflected in the projects. YB: In Chile the client demands to solve a problem very quickly. In your case, do you set the timing or does the client? Both. Most of the time the customer has a general idea about the delivery of the project and then we tell them if it's realistic or not. Most of the time we help the client develop his schedule, although sometimes they reject it, forcing us to rethink our processes. What we are doing is applying technology to speed up submissions, now we do it in half the time than three or four years ago and with the same quality. The world and global trends are changing rapidly and we must
adapt, it is no longer exclusively the US economy leading the world, it’s the world economy and global trends. And if you work in the world you have to adapt, so we have developed processes that allow us to adapt. PL: Today in Chile architects are under threat, we face people who are increasingly empowered to oppose any project and exert pressure, which appears to be a global trend ... How do you handle this? It is a problem all over the world, including the United States. In the case of high-impact projects we make presentations to the community, we make them participate in the design process and we transform them into partners in the design. It's not always fun, we must have the patience to listen and respond. Moreover, you must always give something back to the community. Right now we are in a project in which we must provide a city park, as part of our negotiations with them. Generally the community is concerned about issues that have to do with the scale of the buildings and the urban fabric, and it is difficult to implement the projects. But in the end we succeed because of this partnership that we put together with the community, which works well almost everywhere.
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