Shaken Foundations : Architects: The recession has hit many firms hard. Flexibility is a must for many, industry insiders say.

Architect Douglas Ewing says he and others at his Pasadena firm are “doing anything that comes along, projects that five years ago I said I would never do again.”

Such odd jobs as designing graphics and business cards for longtime customers, or even a retaining wall for someone’s yard, are part of the glue holding Ewing Architects’ staff together in the current recession.

Like many other architectural firms in the area, Ewing’s has gone through a staff reduction. From a high of about 15 people a year ago, Ewing now employs nine, including two registered architects. The company is back to the size that he feels comfortable with, Ewing said, and he would rather take on small jobs than have to reduce the staff further.

In this economy, flexibility like that shown by Ewing is a must for architectural firms, said Norman Kaderlan of the Kaderlan Group, an architecture consulting firm in Los Angeles. With many previously strong sectors of the economy, such as retailing and commercial development, on the downturn, architects must be able to take on new projects or new directions, Kaderlan said.

Architects, he said, are generally known for preferring the artistic elements to the more practical aspects of running and marketing a business. Nationwide, as in the Los Angeles area, the majority of firms are small, perhaps employing six or seven people and led by an owner/principal architect.

These small firms are often ill-equipped to deal with details of business during normal or even boom-time economies, and they find recessions especially difficult, said Donna Matthewson, executive director of the Pasadena and Foothill chapters of the American Institute of Architects.

Matthewson said many architects are looking for work now, with jobs scarce. Larger firms have been closing their branch offices and some are close to bankruptcy, she said. It’s a far cry from a year ago, when business was booming and architectural jobs were going begging. “Now,” she said, “it’s almost like 1981”--the last significant national recession.

Larger firms often have contingency plans for dealing with an economic downturn, Kaderlan said. “In some cases, they may lay off people; and in other cases, they may get more aggressive in marketing. They may expand the geographic market they’ve served, may go after projects they wouldn’t have gone after before, or provide new services to clients.”

On the other hand, a large firm that has made its reputation in a particular sector may have a more difficult time branching out. And some large firms in town have been rocked by the recession.

“Firms--and there are a number in town--who do a lot of work with shopping centers all have been hit hard,” Kaderlan said. “And a number of firms have done a lot of work for developers--they’re hit hard because those kinds of projects have been drying up--they have dried up. And if you (look at) new home or office construction, that certainly has shrunk, too.”

A few areas, including hospitals and medical clinics and higher education, remain strong, Kaderlan said. “The one-person firms that do remodels, I might imagine they still might be doing OK, because people, instead of building a new house, are remodeling” their existing homes, he said.

So far this year, Ewing Architects hasn’t done a custom design of a home--normally, it might have five or six a year. More of its work is renovation than new building design. Projects with three of his biggest clients have come to either a natural conclusion or premature end. And billings this year may drop to 60% of last year’s $1-million-plus total.

“We were working for five key clients,” Ewing said. “Two or three of them have had hard times, so we’re not working for those clients and that has cut our workload in half.”

It is especially difficult for architects when a project is halted after the design phase--which may account for as little as 20% of the anticipated total fees. Ewing told of one project, for a restaurant, that fell through after six months’ work on the design. “Then the client got nervous about going ahead with it.” And in another case, an office building in Pasadena, the client became “nervous about financing, and subleasing” and pulled the plug on that project.

Ewing’s firm is seeing the trend toward remodeling, rather than building from scratch. “We’re now doing a lot of renovating. Hardly anybody is building anything new right now,” Ewing said. That suits Ewing, who said redoing a well-built or charming old structure can be fun. Six years ago, Ewing moved his offices to an old bungalow after its remodeling--designed by his firm--was completed.

But home remodeling can be difficult, Ewing said, because there are often two separate personalities and tastes to please, and time spent preparing for the design frequently is out of proportion with the fees.

“I spent 47 or 48 hours in meetings with clients on a house renovation, and the fee was maybe $50,000,” he said. “On the other hand, I met with the head of a corporation (on a remodeling) for five hours . . . and everything else was left to us. The fee was more than a half-million dollars.”

Ewing and Kaderlan both expect a rebound soon. But in the meantime, Ewing said, he’ll keep doing the “little things. . . . We’re doing them because we have to.”