Phil Bernstein, FAIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Phil Bernstein, FAIA, is vice president, industry strategy and relations, Autodesk AEC Solutions. At Autodesk, Bernstein is responsible for developing and delivering technology solutions and design tools to the AEC industry. Prior to joining Autodesk, he was an associate principal at Cesar Pelli & Associates where he was project manager for commissions that include the Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami, the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, the Practice Integration Building at the Mayo Clinic, and the North Terminal at Washington National Airport. Bernstein also has served as a lecturer in professional practice at the Yale University School of Architecture since 1988 and was a contributor to the recently published 14th edition of the Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice.

Education
I have a bachelor of arts in architecture and an MArch from Yale.

Currently reading
I’m a slow reader, so I’ve always got several things going. On my bed table now is The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. I ordered a new copy of Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form, which is an old book from the ’70s that has some relevance to our design specifications strategy. I just got Kieran Timberlake’s book on the Loblolly House. And I’m trying to wend my way through Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas Ricks. Those are the four that I have going at the moment.

Why did you become an architect?
Well, actually, my father’s brother is an architect who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright and, when I was young, he designed the house that I grew up in. Architecture just looked to be a really exciting, fun career. I liked to draw when I was a kid. I liked to build stuff. My parents gave me a drafting table and a bunch of drawing equipment when I was 10, and I did a lot of drawing. Of course, all that equipment is obsolete now as you might imagine. I decided I was going to be an architect when I was 10 years old. It’s still working out, at least up to this point.

Early career
When I graduated from college there was a really terrible recession going on, so I worked for a year in Charlotte doing working drawings on a shopping center in Nashville and was making very little money. I was riding my bike to work every day because I couldn’t afford to drive my car. I took a year off between undergrad and grad school. After graduate school, I started out in San Francisco working for KMD. I worked in San Francisco for about five years and then moved back to New Haven, where I worked for Cesar Pelli for almost 13 years. I was a principal when I left there in 2000, and I have been with Autodesk ever since. Also, when I moved back to New Haven in 1988, I took an adjunct faculty position at the School of Architecture at Yale. I’ve been teaching at Yale since then, so this will be my 20th year there.

Why did you leave practice?
My career has always been about process. I realized pretty early in my career that although I was interested in design, I didn’t really want to be a designer ultimately. I was always the guy who was laying out the plan or becoming the project manager or working on the structure of the way we got things done, even in my teaching career. I teach professional practice, which is essentially process.

I wasn’t really looking for another job, but in 2000 I got a call from a headhunter. Autodesk was looking for what they call domain experts—people with deep knowledge of the industry—to help with the executive management of the company, because they were moving away from the generalized design solutions like AutoCAD to specific tools and technologies that were focused on architecture, engineering, and construction. So I thought that I might be able to help with that. I had no idea what I was getting into when I took the job. I really had no grasp whatsoever of what I was going to be doing, but it’s been an interesting eight years now.

On integrated practice
If you look at the history of the evolution of the architect’s role in the building process, you can see that we’re on the cusp of what appears to be a fairly significant change in which, rather than dividing up the process of getting a building built into discreet roles and responsibilities that have bright lines between them, the building problem has gotten sufficiently complex that we need to now use everyone’s brains as much as possible throughout the process. I recently talked about this at the National Building Museum. It’s the idea that the division—between the individuals in the process who do all the thinking (the architects and engineers) but who are not allowed to be involved in the making of a building and the individuals who are involved in the making of the building (the contractors and subcontractors) but aren’t allowed to do any of the thinking because they’re not licensed—is starting to dissolve, and that the best projects in the future will be the result of a much deeper collaboration between design sensibilities and construction sensibilities. Integrated practices are the structure for how we’re trying to figure that out, so a lot of the technology that we build here has provided the platform for that kind of integration to occur, which is why I’ve been involved in it.

I was on the AIA Contract Documents Committee for 11 years. I just stepped down in April, but the last project that I worked on was the integrated project delivery documents that we released at the 2008 AIA Convention, so I’ve been pretty involved in AIA efforts around this. The technology doesn’t cause integrated practice, but it makes it possible.

How is Autodesk responding to integrated project delivery (IPD)?
Well, we believe that the deep collaboration among all the players in the process that integrated practice is designed to foster is made possible by the kinds of technologies we make. We’re essentially working on the problem of transitioning the building industry from drafting-based paradigms to model-based paradigms. The fact that the information is in three dimensions, is very rich, and allows you to understand the behavior, construction, and design of a building is what makes the collaborative context possible, so we’re working very hard on that. Also, the company currently is the client on two IPD projects, including one that I’m really closely involved in. We wrote our own IPD contract. We’re doing two projects—one in San Francisco and one here in Waltham, Mass.—that are under IPD constructs, so we’re not just talking about the fact that we think this is a good idea. We’re actually doing it as a client. It’s been pretty interesting.

Autodesk’s IPD projects
San Francisco is just about ready to open. It’ll open next month. Assuming all goes well, Waltham will open by the beginning of next year, so they’re both very fast projects. San Francisco is less than a year and Waltham is going to be less than seven months. In San Francisco, we’re taking the second floor of the historic building at the foot of Market Street by the cable car turnaround. The address is actually 1 Market, and it’s the space that Microsoft gave up. We’re dividing the floor into two halves. Half will be regular office space that’s been designed by HOK and the other half is a corporate briefing center where we’ll bring our customers to have meetings and tell them about our technology and work on consulting projects. It’s a very high-end conference center with a museum-quality exhibit area and a series of conferencing facilities. The design architect for that side was Anderson Anderson Architecture in San Francisco. The contractor is DPR.

HOK, Anderson Anderson, and Autodesk all signed an IPD agreement, which is basically a structure where everyone is expected to collaborate very, very closely with one another in order to achieve the project outcomes. In fact, everyone’s compensation is based on not just doing their work but meeting these measurable outcomes of schedule, budget, sustainability, and quality. We’re using very much the same model, slightly refined, in Waltham, where our design team is Kling Stubbins with contractor Tocci and Associates. We interviewed these people as teams, hired them as teams, and contracted with them as teams. We’re also paying them as teams and holding them responsible as teams.

Result of the IPD process
I think that everyone across the board thinks this has been a very, very positive experience. The challenge I think that we’ve had on both projects is we are all hardwired to operate in a certain mode. Even me. I practiced architecture in a pretty traditional model for 20 years before I joined Autodesk, so I’m hardwired to play the classical role of architect and expect everybody to play their positions the way they would in a traditional delivery mode. We really had to work to get everyone outside their comfort zone a little bit, and that means the architects weighing in on questions of constructability and the contractors expressing an opinion about design ideas. The IPD projects are no-fault models, meaning that if the contractor and the architect can’t agree on something, the court of last resort is to come ask us to make a decision. But our expectation is that every recommendation that’s made is a consensus recommendation. That’s taken a little therapy to get everybody to work like that, but I think both teams on both coasts would say that it’s been a really eye-opening experience: much less friction, much more pleasant. I think everybody is very happy with the results, and, given a choice, I don’t think either of these teams would work any other way, honestly.

Is IPD a good idea for clients unfamiliar with the design and building processes?
No, not right now. The reason for that is that there’s so much new about the approach that it would be very difficult for a client who was not otherwise familiar with the basics of project execution to know what to do because there are very few roles. For example, I was very confident that we, Autodesk, could write a new model IPD contract because I spent 11 years on the documents committee and when I was at Pelli’s office one of my responsibilities was the A/E contract, so I was very comfortable with that whole process.

Someone who didn’t have that kind of experience would have a harder time getting one of these things set up, but that’s the nature of the marketplace, right? You’ve got your innovators, your early adopters, and your late adopters, and we’re definitely innovators. I strongly advocated for this approach on both projects because I felt that we could not be out in the marketplace with a fundamental principle of our strategy being helping the building industry move toward integrated delivery and not do our own projects that way. It just didn’t seem reasonable. It’s the same reason that both projects have very high sustainability objectives. We’re hoping to get to LEED® Gold on San Francisco and Platinum on Waltham.

Best practice tip for colleagues
Get outside your comfort zone. It’s a time right now for a lot of innovation. I think it’s a perfect opportunity for architects to do what we do, which is figure out how to get things done in a new way. In order to do that, particularly with these IPD and BIM things, you’ve got to step outside your comfort zone. I tell my students the same thing. These are times that require some new thinking, and we’re the right people to be doing this.

Advice for students
What I tell my students is to challenge authority. Because I teach professional practice, which is sort of the metastructure by which architecture is delivered, I have to make sure that they are well versed in the basic principles of how things currently are done. But because we’re in a time where things are, in my view, going to be done a lot differently, I try to teach my course as dialectic between the old and the new. What I encourage my students to do is not to take anything for granted and make sure that they challenge the normative practices that they’re going to see when they get out there. Some of them will persist, if they’re valid, and some of them will fall.

It’s going to be this generation of architects, who are very digitally savvy, who are unafraid to question their baby-boomer mentors, and who are very self-confident who will push on a lot of these structures and move them. I tell my students not to take things too seriously and ask lots of questions.