Investorenarchitektur / Management of Architecture / The Marriage of Architecture and Real Estate

Out built environment is an important cultural asset. As Baukultur, it shapes our identities and defines our legacies (Swiss Confederation 2018, p. 12). But architecture or architectural design, as key elements in the creation of what is understood as Baukultur, is also an important process step in economic organization of real the estate firm.Without answering questions of architectural design, buildings do not come into existence. Many of these questions do not have a direct economic relevance, or their economic consequences remain opaque. Quality may involve higher production costs, however increased expenditure on quality does not automatically yield into profitable investments or better architecture. From the point of view in real estate economics architectural design can be understood as step in the production process of real estate, a technical necessity for a functioning real estate market. From an cultural or sociological point of view however, architecture primarily serves the functioning of societies and establishment of cultural identity. It can be defined as a “social art” (Cuff 1992), involving many disciplines and stakeholders, including the real estate sector.In recent years the commercial real estate sector has been scrutinized on the architectural quality of the buildings it produces. This has led to various kinds of initiatives and regulations that establish the importance of architectural quality and aim to provide incentives or regulations to those who assign for buildings to be built. But how is architectural quality managed in the real estate organization? What defines architectural quality, and how can this be implemented in company from an organizational point of view?The thesis aims to provide an answer to these questions by means of a systemic exploration of high quality architecture as an objective for of economic organization of the real estate firm. It explores the concept of high quality architecture and which elements are essential for the process of real estate production. Thereafter it turns to a reflection on organisational principles such as principal agent theory and other organisational approaches derived from the field of institutional economics. Finally the thesis aims to concluded on a set of measures that can be implemented in real estate organizations, real estate and architecture education. As such the research contributes to the discussion on the implementation of ESG standards in the real state industry.The paper is a (modified) continuation of the PhD project presented at the ERES Conference in Delft 2017: “The Imperatives of the Real Estate Industry and its Effects on Architecture and the Built Environment; Case Studies Presentation” (Kuil and Wellner 2017).