David Wolfberg had big plans for his Miami architectural firm. Too big, as it turned out.
You have to see the building site through the architect's eyes. To the casual passerby, it is just another construction project, one more pit in the ocher clay of residential Miami. But not to David Wolfberg.
The air is hot today, even in the shaded suburbs, muggy, with gray heads of thunder forming over Biscayne Bay, so Wolfberg stays inside his Mercedes-Benz, air conditioner on high, when he visits the site. He can't afford to muck about in the mud, sweating up the crisp cotton of his monogrammed shirt and getting spots on his polished shoes. Now that Wolfberg/Alvarez & Associates, formerly Wolfberg/Alvarez/Taracido & Associates (WAT), has hit hard times, image is even more important than it was during the glory days of fast growth in the early 1980s.
But even through the tinted window, David Wolfberg sees more than just an imaginary new building -- 6,000 square feet of offices about to go up for South Miami's Hematology & Oncology Associates, his clients for the job. He sees dollars -- and the chance to get his firm moving forward again. In a break with architectural tradition, WAT not only drew the plans, but will also manage the construction -- hiring the subcontractors and monitoring cost and quality. If everything goes according to plan, the firm will earn not just the 6% architect/engineering fee, but the construction manager's 5% to 10% as well. In the future, Wolfberg expects to offer clients even more services: from site selection, environmental reports, and community relations right through to delivery and installation of the furniture and equipment. In time Wolfberg hopes to provide financing, too, or set up joint ventures. Whatever it takes to make his business grow.
About growth, the 37-year-old chief executive officer considers himself an expert. The company description he gives clients describes Wolfberg/Alvarez as the "fastest-growing" firm in America, and for a time the characterization was believable: WAT soared from sales of $200,000 in 1976 to $6.1 million by 1982 a 2,950% growth rate. For two consecutive years it made INC.'s listing of the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies in America; it even hit Building Design & Construction magazine's list of the 50 biggest architectural/engineering (A/E) firms. WAT was celebrated for seizing the technologies and management styles of the future, and its glittering roster of government and private-sector clients reflected its reputation. Virtually overnight it became a national presence, doubling and redoubling staff in a year.
Throughout, Wolfberg basked in the success, convinced that with "inherent skill" like his, business was easy. Then, perhaps inevitably, the growth curve tapered off, slowly at first, then flattening, then plunging downhill. Profits and productivity fell, and the firm that had recently grown so quickly found itself struggling for survival. Yet even that didn't shake Wolfberg's confidence. He had learned his job, he figured, crisis by crisis. The end of growth was just one more lesson in change, albeit the most wrenching.
Now, with the recession behind him, he looks at the yellow-brown hole in the ground and sees only more glorious triumphs. Other architects may scoff. His own staff may be losing faith. But he plans to become the total, modern, market-driven architect -- if only he can find the market again.
Few of America's 60,000 architects have found their markets easily in recent years. Profitability among architects has shrunk to an industry average of 3.2% of net sales, all this while the nation's architecture schools are annually releasing another 4,900 would-be practitioners into an already glutted market. Good design, most professionals agree, is still the sine qua non of success but good design isn't enough anymore. Clients are no longer patrons; they have become customers. Design competitions have become price sensitive, with work awarded to the lowest bidder. To survive, architects are being forced to give up the pipe-and-tweed fantasies of exploring art through building, to think of architecture not as a profession but as business, a service industry.
"I give it five to eight years before the conventional A/E firm is extinct," Wolfberg says flatly. "It just doesn't pay. Other architects can 'pooh pooh' the changes. But they're going to 'pooh pooh' themselves to death."
Not that Wolfberg ever set out to be a businessman. Offered a job running his family's textile-manufacturing business, he chose architecture instead, and helped start WAT specifically to escape the pressures of a business-oriented practice. He and the other frustrated young mavericks who founded the firm in 1976 were idealists, and their objective was to create the new-age A/E firm, a warm and humanistic environment in which creative young talent could thrive.
There were six at the start. Wolfberg, the wunderkind design director at Connell, Metcalf & Eddy (now called Connell Associates), a prominent Miami A/E firm, fired for being too cocky, too outspoken -- too New York. Julio E. Alvarez, a project electrical engineer at Connell, a Cuban exile, a former employee of the power company, disgusted by the red tape of big companies. Hector Seiglie, who had worked with Alvarez on occasion; C. David Morton, a solo practitioner with a yen for big projects; and Karl Frese and Manuel Taracido, two more frustrated Connell engineers.
"The whole point was to avoid becoming what we ran away from," Alvarez says. Connell, they felt, dictated design from the bottom line. Connell didn't understand that architects sell environment. The distant old men who ran the firm didn't know real design, or care; they spent their time making rules, tightening a corporate chain of command meant to stifle the young and imaginative.
In their company, all six agreed, there would be no bureaucracy, no obsession with profits, and no chasm between management and employees -- once they could actually afford employees. The partners would stay involved, rolling up their sleeves and sitting down with blueprints, all six making management decisions in concert. To begin, they aggressively pursued government projects; although that meant filling out reams of forms, at least they could save the cost of four-color brochures and client lunches. On paper, they would vest 51% of the business in the firm's Cuban-born partners -- Alvarez, Taracido, and Seiglie -- so they could check off both "small business" and "minority owned" on all the applications. At first they thought of using a generic name, such as "The Design Group," but settled instead on listing all six names on the letterhead, along with the company's conservative gray and maroon logo.
