As Morris & Empson (1998, p.621) argue, the nature of the knowledge base influences the organizational structure of the firm. Consequently, architectural and EA firms have different structures, reflecting their strategies and types of targeted market. In the literature, it is considered that a main distinction of architectural firms is the ability to design at a distance (Faulconbridge, 2009), and even to design projects worldwide from a single design-studio, in the case of starchitects (McNeill, 2005).
Interestingly, EA firms appear to have a more solid and confident presence in GCC than architectural firms, in terms of access to local networks and projects. Three main aspects may help to explain this:
Firstly, engineering related tasks and projects require on-site presence, leading EA firms to have offices next to their projects.
Secondly, as EA firms offer a variety of services, ranging from transportation to infrastructure, environment and management, it is more likely they will have projects on a continuous basis, while it is unlikely that an architecture firm will have more than one project in the same city.
Thirdly, with a majority of engineering firms present since the middle of the XX century when the oil-based economy required western expertise for major modernization infrastructure projects, engineering firms seem to have a longer experience and presence in the GCC.
Thus, we have noticed through our interviews that architectural firms have a non-continuous presence in the region. Following the end of each project, they go through a major restructuring of their offices, while EA firms, with their multidisciplinary departments, are able to preserve a more continuous presence.
The EA firms’ departments are organized following a matrix structure built upon
‘business lines’ and ‘geographies’. Designated as well by divisions, practices or business groups, the ‘business lines’ include a number of departments and each department houses a number of specialties.
From the other side, the business lines are distributed through a series of ‘geographies’
or regions. Regions are divided as well into sub-regions and sub-regions are divided into countries. For example Halcrow’s offices are distributed through four regions: UK and Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
The regional EA firms adopt a similar matrix structure, but with a timid presence in Europe and the Americas, having the majority of their offices in the Middle East. In this matrix structure, the EA firms seem to have a certain level of autonomy vis-à-vis their headquarters.
Unlike the EA firms, the architectural firms have a pyramidal structure. This is based on the architecture practice, and the other practices (engineering, management, etc.), if present, act as support to architecture, and to design in general. While the total number of employees of an EA firm in the GCC ranges from a few hundred to thousands, (in the case of Aecom for example), architecture offices there are small ones, with a staff of 20 or less.
With a majority of architects, and despite being totally design focused, these offices are considered as secondary or branch offices, and do not provide the full design of projects.
There are often senior designers or team design at the headquarters level (UK for Benoy and Foster, and USA for HOK and P&W), who may initiate ideas or concepts, leaving the task of developing schemes and plans, and coordinating with the clients, to the country level offices.
Differences exist between architectural and EA firms not only at the general structure level, but at the team level structure as well. The profiles of the professionals working on urban planning tasks vary considerably between firms, and an urban planning department may or may not exist within a firm composition. In some cases it is an independent department, while in other cases it is a sub-division in a department, typically the architectural one.
Sometimes, and particularly in the architectural firms, there is no clear separation between planning and architecture, both falling under the ‘design’ practice. In Foster &
Partners for example, the designer profile seems to be the dominant one:
‘We may have urban planners in our teams but not so many; everybody is an architect, and we have a way to design things: an architect may work this month on a table design and the next month on a master plan. [This is] because we believe that if an architect keeps working on the same things, we will lose his creativity, and the same architect who designs a chair can design an airport, helped by a support staff’ (Foster & Partners 1).
While in the architectural firms, the main profiles are architect, landscape architect and urban designer, the planning-related profiles in the EA firms are more various and specialized. We note for example, beside the classical practices present in the architectural firms noted above, specialists in land development, economic planners, strategic planners, transport planners, environmental planners and GIS experts.
In both cases, the presence of a larger palette of profiles in the EA firms does not seem to constitute a competition factor with the architecture firms, nor an element that may limit their important contribution to the GCC developments, since the latter would search for external complementary skills when needed for megaprojects.