For as long as they’ve been designing buildings, architects have had to balance their vision for design with the wants and needs of their clients. Some clients may be harder to please than others, but ultimately, the support of a project’s financier is essential if it is to be built. Even the work of the greatest architects could not have come into existence through the efforts of the architect alone. Often, the best designed buildings are conceived by a designer who is not afraid to challenge the preconceptions of their client, and sometimes, persuading a client to another way of thinking about the project is the biggest challenge faced by the designer.

Despite (or perhaps, because of) the necessity of their involvement, architects often have complicated relationships with their clients. Some clients may become too involved in the design process. Others may be completely hands off with very few requirements for their project. Whatever the case, the job of the architect is not to simply take the exact description of what a building should be from a client, draft it out, create renderings, and figure out how it should be built. Architects must possess technical skills, yes, but contractors and engineers have long been involved in the technical side of construction. Conceptual skills are really what separate the value of the designer from the value of the engineer or the builder. Architecture, then, has become about the crafting of creative solutions to the problems that the client presents. Without this conceptual involvement, a project is simply a building, crafted by builders, not a work of architecture, conceived by an architect.

Though the phrase “the customer is always right” is an often heard phrase in business, in some ways, architects must challenge this notion in order to provide truly exemplary service. Almost always, a client will have preconceptions about a project, but part of an architect’s job is to challenge these notions. A good architect who is fully engaged in the design process will usually craft a solution which differs from/expands upon what his/her client had envisioned. If this were not the case, why would the client even hire a designer?

Christopher Wren, one of Britain's most famous architects, was commissioned to design a replacement for St. Paul's Cathedral after it was destroyed in a fire in 1675. The conservative church commissioners in charge of the project requested a typically ornate gothic church with common Renaissance frills, and they approved a proposal from Wren that met those criteria. As the project progressed into construction, Wren managed to significantly alter the early design that they had approved into the noble building that stands today, crowned with one of the world's finest domes. Though the cathedral is now a treasury of Baroque architecture, for its time, Wren’s work was revolutionary and met with criticism. The end product was not what his client had originally wanted, and in fact, differed significantly from what had been approved, but Wren’s refusal to blindly follow his client’s expectations speaks volumes to the manner in which architects today must take responsibility for design innovation. Wren’s decision to alter the design, though it went against the wishes of his client, ultimately ushered in a new era of Baroque architecture in England, and helped to propel the field of architecture in a new direction.

Written by Jake Rose