The market drives the design. It has its own set logic. We need to understand that and to learn to live within its rules.

But who writes these rules?

The weak client says that the role of the designer is to create excellence within the limited resources that's available. It's to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s the role of the architect to creatively respond to these constraints and to develop something that is unexpected, and pleasantly so. If you can't come up with a great design response, it is your fault as a designer. You lack imagination.

Too often, under this script, the design process is not much more than a series of shallow, quick reactions to what is economically expedient. It’s a means to get to a maximum return on the investment.

I have had a client tell me, “Take your design and strip it down to 90% of what you have. The essence of it will still be there and that's all I want.” His motivation was simple; to make his project looked "designed" while extracting as much profit as possible out of it. My motivation was to create a humane environment within a reasonable budget. We pretend we were not in conflict, but we were.

You can't blame the client for not doing anymore than what is economically viable. Design projects start with feasibility studies. If it's not feasible, it doesn't happen. But within these limits is a great variety of client motivations. If the client and the designer share a wish for excellence, magic can happen. To get there, the client needs courage and the architect needs talent.