Building blocks: Ivar Krasinski

Ivar Krasinski is design principal at Burt, Hill in Dubai.



The solution is simple, says Krasinski. “In a time where you have a need to constrain expenditure and to really control the cost benefits, the time spent at the early design stage needs to be focused on.” This involves a paradigm shift for clients. “Clients used to come to a site, look at the constructed condition of a project, and say: ‘I do not like this; change it.’ In the past that was something that people would just have gone ahead and done. I think that now the clients themselves will think twice before doing that. This is not something that designers will decide upon. The clients will just say it is okay the way it is, and let us think about it earlier next time.”

Krasinski remarks that Burt, Hill has always been technologically astute, having embraced Building Information Modelling (BIM) three years ago already. “Our aim is to introduce optimisation basically from the infrastructure master planning phase all the way through to the actual specifying. We achieve this with an iterative process that improves the building performance continually with every cycle. Optimisation in terms of financial feasibility is definitely something we can leverage more in this climate, but I would maintain it is really the right thing to do all along.

Shortening the loop

“The idea of shortening the feedback loop of design and then being able to run through more iterations, and being able to check more variables, so as to give the client the best possible solution, is something that was pretty much the right thing to do no matter how high the margins were. Now that we are starting to enter into a period of significantly lower margins for both designers and developers, and all the sub-consultants, it is even more important to use those kinds of processes,” says Krasinski.

Such an approach is very topical now in terms of cost-cutting, but it was a totally different environment back then. “It was a more exuberant and experimental environment, and a lot more carte blanche was given. Things were not as necessarily set in stone, so we had very open briefs for projects. Clients were actually encouraging our architects to expand beyond the brief, which was an interesting behaviour – financially more risky, but it gave us an opportunity to test some new ideas,” says Krasinski. He adds that this is the major difference between the UAE and US markets, for example.

“In the US, clients always have very exact project briefs tied in intimately with financial feasibility projections, and an architect would change those at his or her peril, whereas here we are actually encouraged to do that. I think what you will find now is that, as the economic environment is changing, clients are opting more for the US approach. This means doing the financial feasibility very rigorously upfront, deriving exact figures from that, and only then proceeding with the design. So that is a major sea change we anticipate in the next few years,” says Krasinski.

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In terms of green building regulations being introduced by the Dubai government, Krasinski points out that: “The impression that Dubai has not taken sustainability seriously until now is not accurate. Many people have been doing sustainable design for over 20 years. Burt, Hill as a firm has been a leader in sustainable design since the 1970s actually. When I joined Burt, Hill in 2005 and began working on the Auto Mall, no one asked me to do this. I just had the ability to work with passive solar design, day lighting and low water use landscaping, which were concepts pretty much designed into the project right from the beginning, because it was a basic tenet and a core value of our practice.”

However, Krasinski says that what has changed in the interim is “that now clients are more willing to discuss it. In the past, if you were doing something sustainable, you in a way almost did not mention it to the client because you were afraid they would cost it, as they were often of the impression that sustainable design was somehow a more upfront cost. Now they are more willing to listen to that sort of thing, so it gives us more leverage to be able to achieve what we always wanted to achieve. In that sense, the decree has been very helpful for design professionals.”

Ivar Krasinski

Ivar Krasinski joined Burt Hill in 2005, and has been a design leader in the Dubai office since his first project. As a principal, he is responsible for leading teams in the investigation, execution, and refinement of architectural concepts on many notable projects. Also a leader in the architectural community, Krasinski is a founding member of the Architectural Association of the UAE (similar to the American Institute of Architects), and is the initiator of the aaUAE’s Urban Design Forum, where he has moderated a series of discussions on urban design, with panels including internationally-renowned architects, planners and developers. Krasinski believes in a design approach that exemplifies rigorous, sustainable, and kinesthetic elements.

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