Is Design-Build Changing Its Reputation?

AD100 Marmol Radziner principal Ron Radziner’s own home in Venice, California, was designed to create an indoor-outdoor relationship.

Photo: Joe Fletcher, courtesy of Marmol Radziner

When Marmol and his partner Ron Radziner founded their eponymous firm in 1989, they posed the question: What if a design-build firm were driven by the architect? “We can add the discipline, planning, and budget responsibility—and the technical competence of the builder—to support the design in a way that’s more holistic,” Marmol notes. The model still delivers quicker construction starts (not to mention cost savings) because design, construction, and project management are combined. But the innovation is, in Marmol’s words, “design control and focus, with the underpinning of responsibility.”

Perhaps it planted seeds in formative minds, too. Architect Lauren Cawse, a partner at Rhinebeck, New York–based design-builder The Art of Building, remembers being a student at roughly the same time Marmol and Radziner were pioneering the architect-led design-build approach. The “delivery method was deeply alluring, [and] I know I wasn’t alone in this interest,” she recalls. “Could it be that architects of my vintage who were enthusiastic about it at the turn of the 21st century have been forging new allegiances leading to better work?”

A Lindsey Adelman chandelier hangs over the Sawkille Co. dining table and Charlotte Perriand chairs in Ulla Johnson’s beach retreat by AD100 designer Alexis Brown and AD PRO Directory firms Studio Zung and Z Builders.

Photo: Adrian Gaut

For Mammoth founder Maryana Grinshpun, field experience led her to reshape her Brooklyn-based AD PRO Directory firm into a design-build practice in 2022. “For nearly a decade, I had a more traditional design practice; I would spend months designing without a real capacity to test feasibility, conduct probes, or accurately anticipate costs during the design process,” she shares. “The value engineering that inevitably happened after bids came in was rushed, and I never felt I had the time to consider all of the challenges of a given project properly.”

Unlike Marmol Radziner’s vertical integration, which includes landscape design and fabrication shops, The Art of Building and Mammoth both directly employ construction professionals while subcontracting specialty trades. The Jackson Home Company and Studio Zung, also AD PRO Directory firms, collaborate with longtime partners in construction to deliver client commissions and speculative development projects through the design-build process. This growing class of design-forward design-build firms shares a commitment to excellence, and their dedication is matched by “homeowners [who] are becoming more design-savvy and are seeking firms that prioritize thoughtful, high-quality design,” Zung observes.

It’s a marked change from design-build’s inaugural boom in the late 1970s. “I think the industry of design-build is maturing,” Marmol says. “It’s gaining a better understanding as to the type of design-build that would be appropriate to a particular type of project. Are there examples of dysfunctional design-build? Of course there are, just as there are good examples of design-bid-build. The issue of competence is relevant no matter what process you’re working under.” As standards rise, the integrated methodology’s benefits have come into clearer view. “As a whole, architects and builders should not be in conflict,” the architect concludes. “The owner should not be stuck mediating.”

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