by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Marvin Malecha, FAIA, is the 2009 president of the AIA. He currently serves on the AIA Board of Directors as the 2008 first vice president and is the senior director representing the South Atlantic region. Malecha is the dean of the College of Design at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, and previously was dean of the College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has served as president of the ACSA and the California Council of Architectural Education, as well as vice chair of the AIA/ACSA Council on Architectural Research. In 2003, Malecha was awarded the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education.

Education
I spent the first couple of years at St. Thomas College in physics, then transferred to the University of Minnesota, where I received my bachelor of architecture. I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design for my master of architecture.

Why did you become an architect?
My father always wanted to be an architect, so perhaps that’s why I went into physics initially. The Great Depression and other things led him away from it and robbed him of his dream, in a way, so he always had this great admiration for architects.

In the second semester of my second year at college, I took some architectural history courses. St. Thomas College was all men, and St. Catherine’s down the street was all women. That’s where you found the art history classes, so I went down the street and took a contemporary architectural history course that was taught by this nun who had a passion for the study of architecture. She introduced me to an architect who was the head of the school of architecture at Minnesota, Ralph Rapson, and he showed us some buildings that we could go visit.

Ralph Rapson had designed some really interesting high-tech metal buildings, a house for the Case Study program in Los Angeles. One of the things my father did in his business was erect Butler® buildings, and here was this architect who took this pre-manufactured building technology that was like Quonset Hut technology and turned it into this elegant home. I just thought that was marvelous, and so I started seeing architecture as this wonderful diverse opportunity, something that was clearly going to change and transform and be an interesting course of study. That’s when I decided to change majors. I must have had a latent love for the discipline, or maybe it’s something that I heard my father talk about all the time. My ears were open to the suggestion. So off I went, and I did fall in love with architecture, as you can tell. I’m still doing it.

You’ve said previously that you want to foster a closer relationship with architecture schools during your presidency. How do you plan to do that?
We can start to take a look at what I’m calling the culture of practice. In the first board meeting that I have in March, we’re going to be at the University of Minnesota for part of the meeting, and I’ve already begun to talk to the dean and some of the faculty members who are developing some interesting curriculum around the culture of practice. I’m going to invite some people to come in and talk and perhaps even develop materials from the board to encourage architecture schools to think about the development of the culture of practice as a renewed part of the curriculum.

I think also that getting more AIA committees to hold their meetings on campuses and really working towards building bridges between faculty, students, and the AIA committees and knowledge communities is another way of looking at this.

I’m also in the strategic repositioning of the Institute that we’re undertaking right now. We’re talking about the development of a new strategic education committee that combines the efforts from all over the Institute so that we build the bridge of communication between the Institute and higher education. We’ll also spend some time in September talking about education in K-12, so that’s another aspect of what we’re doing. I think it’s going to be a multi-headed approach including, I hope, some connections with the Architects’ Council of Europe to discuss how we might bridge education, practice, and international issues. I think it’s complex. It’s going to take time, but it’s our investment in the future of the profession.

I’ve often heard complaints that architectural education doesn’t place much emphasis on the business side of the profession. Do you agree with that, or do you think that business should be kept out of the studio?
That’s why I’d like to call it “the culture of practice,” because it’s difficult to bring business per se into the studio. I think the studio should have a sense about what’s possible to be realized in an economic climate. Much of what practitioners experience when they start moving a project forward to be built is so specific to the economic situation of the time and place that it’s difficult to simulate that in studio. But what we can talk about are all the forces in practice that cause buildings to be built or not built, and among those are economic forces, management questions, and recognizing the economic climate you’re a part of.

For example, where we are right now is not conducive to building a lot of buildings, so we really need to make students aware of the fact that economics, business management, and cash flow have to do with the possibility of realizing a project, and that needs to be brought into studios in a richer way. Now, the difficulty is that offices are moving so quickly in how they configure themselves, buy and sell their practices, get their work done, and deliver services. Some of that is going to be difficult to mimic in school, so that’s where the internship process comes in. And that’s why we have to have a greater responsibility to the quality of the internship experience.

Who do you mean by “we”?
We, the AIA. We, the educators. We, the regulators. I think internship is very much a community responsibility, and right now the educators really don’t take much responsibility for internship. It’s a disconnected experience from education. We, the educators, have to work to find ways to bring that internship experience closer to the students and make it more relevant to the students’ experience so that we make connections and there’s continuity between the experiences.

We, the profession, have to do a much better job in conveying the joy that’s in practice. I mean the ability for a student to make progress and understand that no matter how well educated a young person is, they simply can’t be educated for all of the complexity of practice. So, in the office, there has to be considerable attention given to internship.

When it comes to regulation, we need to know the difference between appropriate regulation in order to ensure the quality of the profession and strategy that works against diversity and people moving through the profession in a timely way. There’s got to be a lot of trust and cooperation among educators, practitioners, and regulators.

How can AIA members’ businesses survive and even thrive in a difficult economy?
First of all, we’re going to have to do some strategic repositioning of the Institute itself, so we’re going to have to manage our resources better. We’re going to have to become more nimble in how we operate. We’re going to have to take a hard look at what we do and what can be combined, and how we can reduce our operating budgets to match the reality of the situation in front of us.

Now, in the strategic repositioning, we need to ask questions: “What is it that our members need right now?” I think that means that we have to continue to develop the Web as the information source, the place that people can go for job postings and where they can interact and network with each other. We need to continue to do things like Web casting to help our components adjust to the change and provide helpful hints for people in need of positions or creative ways to interact between offices in one part of the country that might be very busy and offices in another part that could deliver service to them—keeping otherwise outsourced jobs in the U.S. I think those are all things we’re going to have to talk about in great earnestness.

I just came away from AIA Minnesota, and they’re asking for the exploration of ideas for individuals who might be given forgiveness for missing a membership for a year, creative ways of thinking about membership and the payment of dues. I don’t know if there’s anything there, but we’re going to have to pause and ask what is it that we can do for our members so that we don’t lose them, and so it’s clear that we care for each other. The AIA was founded on the premise of architects helping architects, and when we come to these really hard economic times we have to get creative.

What would you say to members who are thinking of leaving the AIA because they can’t afford the dues?
I would say that what the AIA has as its greatest strength is relationship building. What people need most when they’re in economic distress are their relationships that come from being involved in things like the AIA. They really need to think very hard before they leave that relationship because they’ll cut themselves loose from an organization that can provide them a great deal of help.

Now, for those people who have no other choice, I would hope that they would make it clear that it’s a last resort, but it’s also a first choice of return when times get better for them. In the meantime, the AIA has to be delivering services that relate to the needs of those individuals. We have to find the programs that cause it to be worthwhile for them to continue to maintain their membership with us. If a person has to choose between putting food on the table for their child and their AIA dues, then of course there’s no choice. But if the person is choosing between a membership with us and a membership with another organization, we have to demonstrate that the membership with us has value.

Final thoughts?
I think there are a lot of great things that can happen at the AIA. Some people have asked if I’m distressed that I’m not going to have nearly the operating budget opportunities that my immediate predecessors have had. My answer is that we still have a lot of money to do good things for our members, and we’re going to do good things. When I came in, I talked about a strategic repositioning of the Institute for the next 25 years. That perhaps is going to be sped up by the need to reposition strategically, given our economic situation, so I’m excited about this time ahead. I am not discouraged. I think we have a lot to offer our members, and we have a lot to offer the society that we’re working in. That’s the approach I’m taking here, so I’m not seeing anything but blue skies.