In the field, “a decision about a technical matter is also a decision about an artistic judgment, and it is also a business decision—about liability, for example, about cost,” he adds. “If we can’t control all those things holistically, then we’re not architects—we’re artists or businesspeople, but we’re not architects.”

In addition to varied responsibilities at the firm, a good balance between work and family is another creative plus. “What really has enabled Steve and me to do what we’ve been able to do is that we have spouses who also have businesses—not together—but who are active and have their own work that they pursue, and then also families,” says Timberlake.

He is married to Marguerite Rodgers, an interior designer whose portfolio includes several high-profile Philadelphia restaurants, including Rouge, Striped Bass, and Susanna Foo, as well as residential work. They have a six-year old son named Harrison. Kieran and his wife, Barbara Degrange Kieran, a vice president with reseach-and-consulting firm National Analysts, have two children: Christopher, now in college at Vassar, and Caitlin, now in high school. Rather than one or the other partner running a given project, the model that they have moved toward has an associate in charge “with us acting as design partners,” says Timberlake. “This allows Steve and me the freedom to collaborate and employ the collective intelligence of the firm on projects.”

This collaborative model is becoming more common among architecture firms, serving as a useful counterweight to the prevailing cultural value placed on specialization. “We think specialization is the death knell,” Kieran says.

“There was a time when the complexity of the world and the materials we had to deal with, the sciences involved, was significantly simpler than they are now,” he explains. “As an architect you were not just a designer; you were a materials scientist, you were an engineer, you were the builder, you were the conceiver.” This era yielded “some extraordinarily profound art that we all still, when we get the chance, run around the world trying to find and see because it moves our souls.”

One of the “saddest legacies” of Modernism, in architecture and other fields, he adds, is the “belief that to advance knowledge we all have to quadrant ourselves into a narrow specialization.” While this may (or may not) be fine for fields such as medicine, for example, “What’s lost for architects is the ability to bring the whole of an artifact as complex as a building to life in a holistic and integrated way.”

The profession has narrowed its focus over the last 50 years, says Timberlake, both through fragmentation into sub-disciplines and by deciding that “we don’t want to design a certain aspect of the building, that’s for somebody else.” For example, landscape architecture is “part and parcel of the program that makes up Levine Hall,” he says. “Engineering is very much a part of the architecture—that’s why the wall, the infrastructure in that building, and the choice of structural systems is very much celebrated. All of that’s an act of design, in collaboration with the engineers and the landscape architects that participated in that team.”

The argument that the profession should take on less has “led to a failure in quality, in control, in an exercise of making products that have human scale,” he says. “And that’s why we’ve been practicing an integrated philosophy, and now in this new book we argue for it.”

Refabricating Architecture: How Manufacturing Methodologies Are Poised to Transform Building Construction, published this month by McGraw-Hill, is their manifesto for a new architecture, in which the profession will reclaim its central role in creating buildings by adopting practices developed in other industries such as shipbuilding and automotive and aircraft manufacturing. (The partners have previously collaborated on Manual: The Architecture of KieranTimberlake, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2002.)

Refabricating Architecture came out of research made possible by the Benjamin Latrobe Fellowship, a two-year grant of $50,000 from the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows. The award, for architectural design research, was established in 2001, with KieranTimberlake as the inaugural winner. In the first year of the fellowship, they crisscrossed the country—they mention Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, then Jack Kerouac as a better comparison—meeting with managers, engineers, and product designers at companies like Boeing, DaimlerChrysler, and the shipbuilder Kvaerner in an attempt to identify transfer technologies that could be adapted to building design and construction. “They basically have this integrated model, and it’s had a huge impact on the quality of what they can do,” says Kieran. “It is largely a computer-based model that allows for integrated, cross-disciplinary discussions and working together across continents.”

The partners also helped to organize and were featured at The Architectural Record Innovation Conference, held in New York on October 8-9. Speakers included Nobel Laureate (and former Penn physics professor) Alan Heeger of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Segway inventor Dean Kamen; and representatives from NASA, Lockheed Martin, and Walt Disney Imagineering, among others. “By having people other than architects present what’s going on in their worlds, followed by a roundtable that’s directed by architects in each of those sessions, the idea was to talk about ways of integration, ideas that might be transferable, strategies that we can learn from,” explains Timberlake.

Besides supporting their investigations into innovations in other industries, the fellowship also provided funds that allowed them to hire an in-house research staff, a distinct rarity for a U.S. architecture firm. Corporate grants have supplemented this support more recently, and “if it turns out it can’t support itself, we’ll support it,” says Kieran.

Both men place a high value on teaching, whether in their written work, mentoring the members of their firm, or in the classroom. The design lab that they’ve taught at Penn for the past four years, they say, has been valuable both as a place to share their expertise and try out new ideas.

The lab suits their philosophy better than a conventional design studio, says Kieran. “It allows us to set the agendas and direct the work, and it’s a way of combining our research interests with academics and having students learn in a different and more directed way.” That helps justify the time they spend teaching—“since we are, after all, mostly practicing architects”—as well as giving students insight into the world “of actually making things.”

In contrast to the view that “architectural form is everything,” which was prevalent when they were in school and still exists in some quarters, says Timberlake, “Our philosophy is really that form is one leg of a triad. Vitruvius’s term is ‘Commodity, Firmness, and Delight,’ and we’ve always subscribed to that: It has to be useful, it has to work and be maintained and last a long time, and it has to be beautiful. If you’re only solving for beautiful, you’re forgetting the other two legs of that triad.”