Kevin Harris, AIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Kevin Harris, AIA, is principal of Kevin Harris Architects in Baton Rouge and chair of the Small Project Practitioners advisory group. At the AIA National Convention and Design Expo in Boston on May 17, Harris and AIA Director of Media Relations Scott Frank will present Media Relations for the Small-Project Practitioner: Spreading the News Like a Light in the Old North Church.

Education
I did my undergraduate work at LSU, got a BArch, and then went to Harvard University to get a master’s of architecture in urban design. I graduated from LSU in 1977 and from Harvard in 1980. I taught graphics and drafting at LSU for a year between graduation and starting at Harvard.

How did you become interested in architecture?
I’m from a family of five boys. I was number four, and, at the time, my mother thought I was the caboose. Dad has a first cousin who was an architect with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin. After Wright died, my father’s cousin, Roy Guderian, wanted to go back to New Orleans. On his way back, he stopped in Baton Rouge when I was five years old to do an addition to our house. He was trying to build up a body of work. Since I was the caboose at the time, instead of going to kindergarten my mother kept me at home, let my hair grow long, and I hung out with Roy.

I remember him taking pictures of the house and doing the drawings, and we just got along famously. There was something about him that I really loved. My kindergarten was watching our house be added on to, which was a wonderful experience. We had the only copper insect screening in the city, probably. He had mitered corner glass windows and lots of redwood inside. It was gorgeous. Anyway, I forgot about being an architect because my father was a physician, and I was destined to be the physician in the family. I got into high school and it was decision time. I took a drafting course in high school and did two years of drafting in one year. I figured that I had a knack for this, so maybe I should look into architecture, and so I did and just loved it. It was exactly where I was supposed to be.

How would you describe your work?
In all of our work, we do our best to be culturally responsive, i.e. represent the culture of our clients. We also endeavor to be very responsive and sensitive to the climate and the site that we’re working on. For the houses that we do—single family houses—we do our best to make them fit very well into the site conditions so they look like they belong there. When our clients live and work in their houses, they feel like that house belongs to them. They associate culturally to the architecture.

Have you noticed a decline in inquiries?
No, the opposite. Our office has been busting at the seams with work and inquiries for work in the last five years.

Is that largely due to ongoing Katrina renovations?
Only in part. The architectural niche that we’re in deals with residential renovations, new residential construction, and historic preservation. Because of Hurricane Katrina, the new construction is up in this region. The historic preservation is also up in this region. However, the residential renovations have always been up, and the demand for residential renovations is up all over the country.

[AIA Chief Economist] Kermit Baker has the statistics on that and monitors it with the Joint Center for Housing Studies. In 2005, the market for residential renovations was $250-some billion. Now, some of those projects are very small pieces. However, what I’ve experienced with our practice is that we started off doing $50,000 additions to houses and that quickly grew to $100,000 additions, then $150K, $200K, $250K. Today it’s not uncommon to have a residential renovation addition exceed $800K to $1 million. The reason is that there are so few architects doing residential renovations to really nice houses, and they’re getting old and need help. The need is to be updated for the current families, and there are too few architects servicing that market, so we’re swamped. The market in my region is too big for me, so we end up turning down more clients than we accept.

Are your clients looking for bigger or greener renovations?
Actually, it’s a mix of both. They want to improve their lifestyle, but they also want to lower utility bills and feel like they’re not hurting but helping the environment, especially our very large residential clients. They want their houses to be green.

What’s the current state of small firms?
I think there has always been a huge majority of architects in small firms. Recently, the AIA has confirmed that suspicion. At Grassroots this year, it was announced that 90 percent of firms of have 19 or fewer people, and that 50 percent of firms have two-and-a-half people or less. I’m not sure how you count a half a partner, but that’s astonishing. When you look at the numbers, the bulk of our profession is made up of small practitioners. As chair of the Small Practitioners Knowledge Community, I see it as our goal to guide the AIA in providing more substantive information and assistance to firms that do small projects, an area that’s traditionally been underserved by the AIA.

What do you think the AIA can do to provide better support for small firms?
One of the initiatives that our KC is working on is to have the AIA explore the actual business of small architecture firms: what they look like, and at what size does it make sense, for example, to hire a secretary or an accountant? Or what will it cost you to run your firm with x-number of people? Talking to architects, they’ve told me that when they were at 15 people, they had lots of work but they were ragged and didn’t make enough money. But, when they were smaller or larger they seemed to do better. That’s just an anecdotal story. No one’s documented it, so I think the AIA could help document the business of small firms around the country with what works and what doesn’t. We need to look at a large enough spectrum and sample of firms from 1 to at least 19, so you’ve got 90 percent of the AIA covered, to determine the characteristics of those firms. I think that guidance for architects would go a long way towards servicing the needs and answering the questions that are out there.

How could the AIA help bring attention to small-project practitioners, since they don’t typically have a PR budget?
I think the office of Media Relations is doing a wonderful job. They’ve got lots of resources. There’s going to be a seminar at this year’s convention on Media Relations for the Small Project Practitioner, and there’s a resource kit online at the AIA Web site. The information is there. They just need to toot the horn a little bit more because that help is available. Another way the AIA could help would perhaps be to have an award set up for the various components that work diligently to promote the work of their architects in various chapters and state divisions.

What would be your dream project?
I’ve had several of them already. Not to be cliché, but certainly my next one. I’ve had so many wonderful clients that have opened themselves up to me and allowed me to interpret their vision, and they’ve had wonderful budgets and sites that I’ve worked with, so if it comes out as anything wrong, it’s my fault.