Founder Insights: Rafael Santa Ana - Architect - Rafael Santa Ana Architecture Workshop

Rafael is a licensed architect and the founder of Rafael Santa Ana Architecture Workshop, which is based in Vancouver. After eight years since its inception, his team currently has 25 members.

They take on a range of project types from academic, multi and single-family residential, commercial and more.

Rafael earned his bachelor of architecture and environmental studies in Mexico the University of Manitoba, and his Masters from the University of British Columbia, a school in which he later on turned into one of his clients.

Key Takeaways

• Rafael considers continued growth and targets 40-50 people as the next milestones, depending on project demands and economic conditions.

• The practice has a second studio in Mexico City.

• A principle of not letting people go and weathering potential storms as much as possible.

• RSAW survived and grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred when they were four years old. They diversified projects, including taking on telecommunications store designs, which helped keep the business afloat.

• A typical day involves reviewing proposals, ensuring unified output, and overseeing various aspects of the business.

• The firm has faced challenges with employee retention in Vancouver, explaining that his practice might often be viewed as a stepping stone for career progression.

• There is a focus now on hiring senior architects.

• The company balances basic projects with others more creative, using the former to financially support the latter.

• The firm remains open to various project types and challenges, believing that every project has potential, regardless of size or initial constraints.

Website & Selected Projects

Q&A with Rafael

Your team is currently 25 people (including yourself), do you plan on growing it or remaining at this size, and was it your rationale for growth? Do you have employees working outside of Canada?

My theory behind that is that you can sink a raft quite easily but you can't sink an aircraft carrier as easily. Scale matters. We have tried really hard to make sure that we're covering a lot of sectors in different industries, whether it's private sector, multifamily, residential, single family, institutional, academic, you name it. We are very excited and privileged to be working now with First Nations infrastructure too.

With that diversity comes the need to service it with different collaborators. Sometimes the scale of a project demands that we escalate and we just have to have the resources. I think it just made sense to reach a certain scale, I think we're still heading to a larger number, but it is difficult to forecast whether we're going to be happy at 40 or whether we're going to be happy at 50.

What we've tried to do, because I come from Mexico City, we decided to also hire a second second studio down there because the elasticity of the economy back home would allow us to weather a downturn a little more easily. That's what we're hoping we can do because we have a principle of not letting people go. You can't dial in and out human resources like they're just a commodity.

Now, I say that with relative confidence because we didn't have to do it during covid and that was a time when we were just four years in and we thought this was gonna be it. We tried, and we picked the worst of times, but we survived it and we actually grew during that time. That allows you to humbly say we're gonna make it and we're gonna be okay.

What does a typical day look like?

People say that you start trading off all the cool tools, your 3d modelling, your CAD software, your Adobe suite and all that for spreadsheets and then just email. That's the part that I'm at right now, arranging meetings and things like that.

There's a team that's now in proposal writing and marketing and of course the production side which is 90% of us. I pretty much review everything that our office outputs. It's not a controlling factor, It's more of a curatorial concern and a legal responsibility I think. I just want to make sure that we are looking unified. Whether it's something on social media, whether it's a proposal, whether it's a set of drawings, whether it's coordination with consultants, I find myself asking,  how are we doing that? Are we are we satisfied? Is this the best it can be? Is this sounding right and looking right? So I'm still pretty much involved at that degree which makes my days 14 hours sometimes.

What is your hiring process like? How many interviews do you usually go through with your hires? Are there any CAD tests?

No CAD tests. They made me do that one time and I thought this is a bit goofy because you can try really hard to seem fast and efficient under stress and later on not. 

It takes at least three rounds to get to know a potential collaborator and to explain that one is not working for me, I'm working for our team and collaborators work for a project, and that project becomes theirs. I ask: “Do you understand the ownership that you've got behind it?”, because unlike most offices we make a point of saying you're not going to be working on just ABC, i.e. just schematic design or contact admin. You're going to work from A to Z, and you're going to see your project through to the end. The success of that project is going to be fundamentally tied to your performance in it, which is a big responsibility.

How was your firm’s experience with COVID as you were still a young firm at that point?

During covid we were only three / four years into operations at that point. We thought that we were going to have a steady growth. We were ambitiously resourceful, but we weren't aggressive at trying to get work during the pandemic and yet, we started facing the potential of losing everything which would have not been the end of the world, but it would have been morally devastating.

What we thought of doing was forget all our comfort zones for a second, and try to get registered in other provinces, places we never thought of getting work before. Let's try to go and work in other countries and see what we can do. Just get your name out there. And interestingly, that's how we scored the Shaw store projects. Telecommunications were booming because everybody was now remote, and we were gracefully helped by a friend to introduced us to their development team.

Fast forward a little bit, and the same people that gave us the work with Shaw moved to IKEA and now we're working on a 180,000 square foot expansion.

And yet, we're still able to do smaller projects like a basement renovation which is a project that normally we wouldn't be taking on, because it's not lucrative, but that's okay. We can have fun with this project and that one is a project we're going to be proud of and show it to the world.

Are you more selective about the projects you take on now, or do you accept every project that comes your way?

Not quite yet. The bar has to adapt to market conditions. Plus, we also think that there's no bad project. I'm ambitious enough to say that if they're coming to us, that's for a reason. At this point, we've got a lot of work on our portfolio, designed by a multitude of talent and people are clever enough to know that this is what they’re getting.

Have you ever encountered clients who are just "window shoppers" and not making serious inquiries? How do you manage these?

We have had developer groups request proposals. We know that they're just going to price check. In the back of our minds we only see the opportunity, as we do with the projects. We rather entertain that projection of a financial forecast, even if it never materializes, because by then, we would have had meaningful conversations that demonstrate a mutual interest in working with us.

We also make an effort to speak to the folks who are the decision makers, as not all proposals end up in the hands that can understand our contributions. And when proposals do not turn out how we expected, we are the type of studio that wants to know why. Cost cannot be the only driver.

How do you plan for future unprecedented events like COVID or recessions?

We're winging it, to be honest, at least with world ending scenarios! I’ve heard that very knowledgeable architectural practitioners say that they can't beyond three months ahead. It's just impossible. Not in this industry. I start to see the truth in that. You have to continue to put one leg in front of the other. If you stop, the bicycle falls, and there's just no easy way to admit to it but the vulnerability is very real.

It depends on what sort of projects you're working on. A lot of large house projects were commissioned during covid. You just never know. Once again, diversity, I think, will be the key.

What's the day-to-day software that you use in your firm?

We're big advocates for Vectorworks. We still quite like that tool even though for us it remains mainly a 2D drafting tool. SketchUp is another tool that we love in the office, or at least I do, a lot of people bring Rhino every now and then and of course we have adopted Revit. We will likely remain bilingual for a while still.

But nothing beats good old pen and paper.

What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence?

I'm excited about using AI in the following way: one should spend time thinking of the project because there's something zen about the mental exercise of going over it so many times and in doing so, thinking about it, solving it… is this going to be good? Who's going to be using this? This rhythm of Q&A doesn't exist on the cloud, therefore, AI cannot extrapolate the results of such origin.

Once that’s done, I'm excited about AI taking care of the mindless endeavors; schedules, code compliance, perhaps even to envelope. And yet all of these things that could be interesting tools to explore with AI may well be an override afterwards.

Even leaning on AI to analyze a project for any excess fat it could have with circulation could be a useful way of enhancing the performance of a project. Tell me how I could just link a couple of spaces differently and let the algorithms tell me, like a perspective to a puzzle we hadn’t explored. Therefore, reducing building by 5%, 10%, 20% etc, you are designing much more efficiently and affordably. But carefully because sometimes you don't want efficiency for the sake of utilitarianism.

We're going to have to make those decisions. Which is very powerful and overloaded with responsibility, because now you're all going to be aware having opted out of performance perhaps for the pursuit of the exploration of expression, where before it was whatever the architect established. 

I would say that when computers became something that we started using, I don't think that firms started slashing personnel. We introduced technology as a tool and then there was certainly an efficiency that was appreciated. We never went back to hand drawing the way we used to and yet it didn't kill the amount of architects behind a firm, it changed the volume of output.

I would question whether we're going to be able to reach better times financially because of AI, as I remain thinking that the creative aspects of the profession will remain under our control.