Habitus and second birth: the development of a model for architect-client relationships in house designs based upon culture shock theory

The architect-client relationship in the house design process has long been recognised as problematic and complex. The diverse backgrounds and worldviews of architects and their clients can often lead to gaps between expectations and realization. Problems arising from gaps between expectations and realisation can include potential loss of fees, time delay and dissatisfied parties. Within the disciplines of environmental psychology, sociology and architecture it has been identified that architects and clients attribute different interpretations of the built environment. Numerous models have been developed to indicate ways to achieve better architect-client relationships. These models take on a highly optimistic, if not unrealistic view of the situation. It is argued that there is a significant lack of positive models to describe and explain the architect-client relationship through empirical evidence to assist in the understanding of how architects and clients actually behave in real world environments. This research will consider theory from sociology and in particular borrow the concept of habitus to explore the architect-client relationship in the house design process. This theoretical paper aims to develop a model for architect-client relationships, which seeks to explain and describe how and why architects and clients develop different interpretations of architecture and more specifically identify the extent to which such interpretations can change. The conceptual model developed in this paper relies upon culture shock theory to inform potential patterns of change to the habitus. This paper also seeks to develop a research question for future empirical testing. This research has relevance to other more complex architect-client relationships; however, the model is firstly developed for the simplified residential architect-client relationships and will be tested through future empirical fieldwork.