Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA

Summary: Kermit Baker is the AIA’s chief economist as well as senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) at Harvard University. At JCHS, Baker is the project director of the Remodeling Futures Program, a research program that aims to “develop an improved understanding of the dynamics of the U.S. repair and renovation industry so that businesses can better take advantage of the opportunities that this market offers.” As AIA chief economist, Baker analyzes business and construction trends and examines their impact on AIA members and the architecture profession.

Educational background: I have a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, a master’s in city planning from Harvard, and a PhD in urban planning from MIT.

Hobbies: I enjoy gardening, and now that I’m an empty-nester, my wife and I are able to do more traveling than we have before, so that’s emerging as a hobby.

Last book read: Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. It’s a very quick read. I thought some of the examples that they gave were very convincing and compelling. Some of them were a bit of a stretch, but overall I enjoyed it.

Favorite building: I park at the Harvard Business School to get in my daily walk—it’s about a 15-minute walk to the building I work in. That daily jaunt takes me past Moshe Safdie’s Class of 1959 Chapel on the Harvard Business School campus. It’s a small cylindrical building that I think is really spectacular. I’d put that very high on the list.

First job: I think my very first real job was the year after I graduated college. I worked for a year in the Baltimore City Department of Planning.

Why you became involved in forecasting economic trends in the design industry: Well, my thesis at MIT was on housing and housing markets. That led me to a position with what was Cahner’s Publishing Company and is now Reed Business Information, tracking trends for their construction magazines. I started commenting on and analyzing trends in construction for those publications and eventually got into forecasting future trends for the market for them.

Biggest professional challenge: I think the most challenging part of the work I do for the AIA is helping provide architects with information that they can use to run their businesses. It’s a major leap between broad economic trends and trends in the construction industry to how small, midsize, and even large firms can use that information to make sensible business decisions. I guess the most challenging thing is trying to figure out ways to be helpful to AIA members in making business decisions in this challenging economic environment that we’re in.

Link between the two jobs: I thought there was going to be a little more overlap in the activities I’d be responsible for than there has been, but what they share in common is both of them are trying to understand what’s going on in the construction industry and making sense of it for other people. At Harvard, I direct a study on residential remodeling, so I’m working with remodeling contractors, and they have a lot of similarities to architecture firms. They are small businesses; remodeling businesses are even smaller businesses on average than architecture firms. They got into the business because of a passion for what they were doing. For remodelers, it’s really the craftsmanship of working on a home. For architects, it’s designing buildings. But neither of them, by and large, got into it for the challenges of running a small business in a very challenging economy. I think trying to figure out how to provide information to them in a way that they can use to make a difference is very similar.

Greatest achievement: I think there’s been a lot of progress in the 10 years I’ve been with the AIA in providing more useful business information to architects. Probably the key [achievement] was the work that we’ve done on the Architectural Billings Index. That was a project that I started just a couple months after I joined the AIA, and we’ve recently developed that into a major indicator for the economy and the construction industry. It does exactly what it was designed to do, which is shine a very bright light on architects and the important role they play in providing the path for construction activity.

What’s in store for architects: Well, I think they’re on the cusp of some really dramatic changes in terms of how the profession is organized and how they relate to their clients. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity. Architects are in a critical position to really capture the essence of the relationship with their clients. A lot of firms are bringing in more services and more design disciplines and building up their operations that way to provide better service to their clients. But how they integrate all these new technological developments like BIM and sustainable design in their practice is going to be interesting. I think the profession is going to look a lot different in 10 years than it does now.

—Heather Livingston