Rethinking Innovation: When Less is More
What comes to mind when we think about innovation in design? A breakthrough technology? A new topological form? A space age material? LinkedIn’s feed might have one believe that the future of the built environment is being borne out by a new 6-axis robot that prints polymers like spiderwebs. And that might well turn out to be the case. But these flashy upstart concepts can also be a distraction from a more reliable - and ubiquitous - source of innovation: the everyday opportunity to reinterpret the metrics of success.
To understand success, we need to understand failure. In my class at Columbia we investigate the John Hancock building, one of the most distinctive in Boston’s skyline. It is a glass tower extruded vertically from a narrow, deep lot in the Back Bay. From Cambridge, it appears as a wildly thin blade piercing the sky; from the west, it looks like an imposing glass wall stretching 200 feet deep.
Two very different views of the same building.
Shortly after opening, occupants at the top of the tower began noticing something unsettling. The horizon, visible through the building's expansive windows, appeared to move - not in the typical up-and-down motion common in tall buildings, but in an alarming side-to-side slide. The building wasn't just swaying; it was twisting in the wind.
The situation grew more concerning when windows began popping out of the building's facade, raining glass onto Copley Square below. The twist of the building proved too much for its unitized facade system to handle. The media, quick to seize on the story, dubbed it the "Plywood Palace" as temporary solutions were implemented to cover the gaps left by fallen windows.
The building, roughly one year after its official opening.
The ultimate solution required sophisticated engineering: a tuned mass damper, weighing as much as a steam locomotive, was suspended from the top of the building to counteract the twisting motion. While effective, this fix came at great cost - both financial and reputational.
At no point was the building at risk of collapse. The structure remained fundamentally sound. Yet it failed because it didn't meet the basic expectations set for it: providing a comfortable environment for its occupants and maintaining its exterior envelope intact. Structural failure isn’t strictly about whether it falls down. Failure happens when the structure doesn’t meet all of the criteria it needs to meet in order to be successful.
Redefining Success in East Asia
So how does that relate to innovation? The systems we design - and our design process itself - are shaped by the requirements of our projects. Increasing the number or severity of our success criteria invariably constrains them. In the case of the John Hancock tower, no one can argue that it isn’t essential for the tenants of the building to feel safe on a typical day, or that it’s ok for facade panels to detach from the building on their own. The case study demonstrates that achieving success means complying with a wide range of defined criteria. And we can look to other case studies for inspiration on how we can redefine this criteria safely to unlock innovation.
About a decade ago, I was involved in the design of a large commercial high-rise tower in East Asia. The architectural concept for the tower required a unique perimeter structure, one that wasn't as inherently stiff as those found in typical commercial office buildings.
This characteristic became a central concern when we conducted our wind tunnel testing. According to the initial results, the building's movement was acceptable under normal conditions. But during typhoon events, the accelerations would be noticeable and potentially disturbing to occupants. Our initial reaction was one of concern - had we failed to create a viable design? The most direct reaction to this feedback would have been to throw steel and concrete at the problem: we could add heavy trusses at various floors throughout the building to stiffen it. This would reduce the tower’s overall building movements to be sure. But at the same time, these added trusses would cost many millions of dollars to construct, and would add weeks (or even months) to the construction cycle time on these floors, thus adding delays to project completion.
An example of the kind of complex structural detailing needed to stiffen tall buildings using outrigger and belt truss systems (image from Shanghai Tower, not from projects referenced in this article).
Inspiration from the Hospitality Industry
To evaluate the heavy truss idea, our team revisited the project goals. To be sure, a safe and comfortable building was paramount. However simplicity, cost and speed mattered to the client as well. Like all designers, we sought to strike a balance across these goals, and our way of getting there involved a measured view of what was truly needed from the structure. To explain this point, let’s look at how another industry balances the often competing objectives of controlling cost and providing customer satisfaction.
In the restaurant business, cooks, servers and hosts comprise much of the human infrastructure that make things work. When staffing up a restaurant, owners will consider the number of customers they intend to serve and the typical needs of each customer. The owners’ decisions will address typical conditions in the restaurant but occasionally things will go awry. On unusually busy or special evenings the staff may get overwhelmed and customers may receive their food late.
What do they do when customers are dissatisfied with this? Many restaurants will comp their meal. This is often enough of a gesture to repair the customer relationship. It presents a loss on the individual sale, but in the grand scheme of things the hit to the restaurant’s bottom line is far smaller than what would be needed to always staff the restaurant at the capacity needed to handle those unusually busy nights. The restaurant’s strategy, therefore, involves having the infrastructure to handle the typical and the operational procedures to handle the atypical.
So instead of immediately pursuing costly structural modifications, our team was inspired to take a step back to consider the design criteria, and correspondingly the metrics of success for the project. We began examining the planned programmatic use patterns of the building and its specific context. Several crucial insights emerged from this.
First, this was an owner-occupied building, meaning a single corporation would control the entire space. The executives would occupy the uppermost floors - precisely where the movements would be most pronounced. Second, typhoons don't strike without warning; they can be anticipated days in advance. And during such extreme weather events, it’s unlikely that anyone would be working in these upper floors anyway (it became even more unlikely after the pandemic given the broad shift toward remote working).
This deeper understanding led us to reinterpret what the building truly needed to achieve. Rather than implementing expensive structural modifications that could compromise the architectural vision, we entertained the idea that higher movements during rare typhoon events might be acceptable - because no one would be there to experience them.
The conventional metrics of success would call for a tighter range of building movements during rare typhoon events. Meeting those metrics would mean revisiting the architectural vision or stiffening the building through additional structural systems - outrigger trusses, belt trusses, and other elements that consume entire floors in a building. These interventions add months to a project’s construction schedule and millions to the budget. Why do all of this to solve a problem that would occur only during events when the building is essentially empty?
The True Nature of Innovation
The case study in East Asia reveals an important truth about innovation in design: sometimes the most powerful innovations come not from inventing new solutions, but from more thoughtfully interpreting what's truly necessary.
This principle extends far beyond structural engineering. In any field, we often assume that innovation means adding something new - a new feature, a new system, a new layer of complexity. But sometimes the most elegant innovations come from questioning our assumptions about what's truly needed and having the courage to do less rather than more.
The key lies in understanding the real requirements of a situation, not just the assumed ones. It requires looking beyond conventional wisdom and standard solutions to ask fundamental questions about what success really means in a specific context. Sometimes, this means having the confidence to challenge established norms and the courage to propose simpler solutions.
Innovation isn't always about creating something new; sometimes it's about seeing what's truly necessary with new eyes. In an era where complexity often seems to be the default answer, the ability to find elegant simplicity through deeper understanding may be the most valuable innovation of all.
