What is a client? Is it somebody who enters into a creative process? Or is a client someone who is like a linesman — refereeing? The person who makes sure that the ball stays in the court, who keeps you to the pre-filled Excel sheet, you know? Who makes sure that you've done what you said you do. Is referring to a ‘bad client’ like saying ‘a badly behaved dog’? Or is it just that we just don't know how to behave with them?

We have more experience operating with the disenfranchised than with people in power. We don't understand rich people. Or, we refuse to let rich people know that we understand them.

Another recurring problem is that clients buy into us at the first stage of a two stage competition process; like they always want to see the baby and not hear about the labour. There, that can be the quote. My words, but the story behind them is about a client who insisted on co-design. Co-design has become more than a trend, it’s a policy and an orthodoxy; like a necessary performance to legitimise institutions.

We had this client who was insisting on a co-design process — it was written into the brief — and then they employed project managers to control the process. The co-design process was forced on everyone, but this particular client actually found people quite challenging. So we found ourselves in a workshop room full of people from the neighbourhood — fulfilling our co-design requirement — while our client sat on a chair outside the door, with the door left open, ensuring we were fulfilling that requirement. I mean, I've never visited a prison where your intimate encounter is watched over, but…

So one type of bad client is someone who makes demands that they're not prepared to do themselves. Like any bad relationship, bad clients can have a lack of commitment to risk, or to a common idea of risk. In any good relationship, there has to be some comfort with discomfort. Bad clients have no comfort with the necessary discomfort of making a good piece of work.

It’s delicate to judge how much complicity is required in hanging around long enough to transform a brief. And it makes me sad when we reveal too much. Like you have a client who's in a position of power, and you're interested in the site — the place — but if you reveal your own anger with the situation, you might betray that place. It’s a mistake to get fired — or eliminated — before you can make yourself useful.

When talking about clients, I always wonder if someone is really a ‘bad’ client, or an anxious client? Because you always end up supporting clients psychologically; speaking and mirroring their language to reassure them that this is what they wanted in the first place. And self-regulation is a lot of labour.

Another time, our name got put forward for a two-stage competition. This was an example of where we were pre-selected for our finished work, but investing deeply in reality often gets in the way of an easy process. The budget was 80 million dollars. When we presented our scheme —ambitious and site-responsive—one juror said, but you've only spent 40 million! Where's the rest? Well, 80 million was too much to spend on that space. And the other juror said, but what would you do with the other 40? I don’t know, spend it on some parks somewhere else in the city? So we were not selected for being both too ambitious and too modest.

And, by the way, LinkedIn is a great thing for practitioners with bad clients. What we see a lot with our bad clients is that people are cultivating careers like growing plants by constantly moving between different pots. You can see traces of that in LinkedIn. Because people stay in a job for a certain amount of time, and then they move on. So, if you're lucky, maybe you're coming in as they're moving on to the next job. Sometimes, if projects run long enough, you might just lose your bad client.

Bio

The Reluctant Client Tamer has been practicing architecture for over twenty years.

Lev Bratishenko is a writer and recovering curator. His most recent publication is 21 Games you can play with a Cosmic House, and his curatorial inventions include the Come and Forget series proposing benevolent acts of mass amnesia, and How to, a workshop that brings strangers together to produce interventions in architectural culture: How to: not make an architecture magazine (2018); How to: disturb the public (2019); How to: reward and punish (2020); How to: not become a ‘developer’ (2022); How to: do no harm (2022); How to: mind the moon (2023). He was the inaugural Curator Public at the Canadian Centre of Architecture.