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The following article about Michael Chusid was published in the December 2001 issue of The Archi, the magazine of Alpha Rho Chi, a national fraternity for architecture and the allied arts.

The Road Less Traveled

How one architect forged an alternative career path

By Karen L. Marker

Anthemios alumnus Michael Chusid (“Mickey” to his pledge brothers) has used his architectural training to create an apt professional niche for himself. As a marketing consultant, Chusid helps manufacturers create building products that will be useful to architects—and helps make architects aware of some of the new innovations in construction materials.

Chusid has served as a consultant to more than 100 companies and trade associations including USG Interiors, Weyerhaeuser Company, the AIA Online Electronic Network, and McGraw Hill’s Construction Information Group. His articles have been published in Architectural Record, Building Design and Construction, Construction Marketing Today, and Progressive Architecture, and he has delivered dozens of presentations at universities, technical institutes, and conferences around the nation. But this isn’t what he set out to do. Growing up, he’d planned to practice architecture in the traditional sense.

Evolution of a Career

Chusid describes his parents as “architecturally aware.” “They would point out interesting buildings,” he recalls. “And I grew up in a community where I knew several architects—parents of classmates. I knew what an architect was before I knew what any other profession was.”

When he entered college, he enrolled in Buckminster Fuller’s design program at Southern Illinois University. The interdisciplinary program brought together architects, industrial designers, urban planners, physicists, mathematicians and others from a broad range of fields to study product design, communication systems, graphics, and a variety of other subjects. Chusid received his B.A. in design in 1974 and turned to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to pursue a master’s program in architecture. There he discovered Alpha Rho Chi—a place, in his words, “where people were respected for studying all night… where you could get help with structural engineering or architectural history.”

Upon graduation, Chusid took a job as a product development designer with a building product manufacturer in Milwaukee . Two years later, in 1979, he moved to Sheboygan , Wisconsin , for an internship with Stubenrauch Associates (an architectural firm that had been founded, incidentally, by an early APX Alum, Edgar Stubenrauch, who had studied at UIUC in 1928 under Nathan Ricker).

In 1982, recession hit and Chusid found himself without a job. He recalls the following three months as “probably the most valuable of my life.” During that time he crossed the threshold of more than 100 architectural firms from Colorado to New England and from Wisconsin to Dallas . “I learned so much about our industry… about myself,” he remembers. “I learned that my most marketable skill—and something I enjoyed – was spec writing. I ended up with five job offers—in the midst of the recession!”

Chusid accepted a position as specification writer with HTB, Inc., a 200 person A/E firm in Oklahoma City . Unfortunately, the boomtown mentality in Oklahoma collapsed just as Chusid arrived. “The day we arrive in town was the day the first of the big oil banks closed.” Over the next 10 years, a third of the state’s population would emigrate and construction projects would grind to a halt. Chusid remembers his tenure at HTB as a depressing, challenging time.

Before long, however, he had been promoted to chief specification writer and his work began to rake in awards. Eventually, he began doing freelance spec writing on the side—sometimes for architects, sometimes for manufacturers. In 1985, deciding to devote himself entirely to the manufacturing side, he founded Chusid Associates.

Helping Architects Make Intelligent Decisions

Now based in Los Angeles , California , Chusid strives to communicate his clients’ messages in a way that helps architects make intelligent product selection decisions. Although he is no longer practicing conventional architecture, he still maintains his license and considers himself an architect. He describes what he does now as “meta-architecture”—a higher architecture, where other people assemble buildings out of the materials he’s helping to create.

“It’s all about…how do buildings come together?” he observes. “Buildings used to be done with materials that were immediately available on the site, using techniques that had been handed down over time. Now, a larger palette of materials is available, sourced from all around the world and then assembled on site. Design depends on the architect’s ability to identify and assemble the methods and systems that are available.”

Chusid’s role is to enrich the architect’s ability to meet the building’s needs. “Marketing is the process of identifying and solving consumer needs and desires,” he explains. “People think marketing is selling. But you can’t sell what you make unless you understand for whom it meets a need.” He accomplishes this task in two ways:

· By observing the industry and assessing needs in the field, reporting those needs back to product manufacturers; and

· By working with companies that have already developed new product concepts to determine who might want those products.

“When manufacturers come up with a new product concept, it can cost million so manufacture and market. Before they make that investment they want to know what its potential is from a marketing standpoint.” Chusid helps manufacturers make that determination. The process may be formal, involving focus groups and presentations, or informal, based on Chusid’s voracious reading and personal observations. After making an initial determination about the most relevant target group (architects, electrical engineers, contractors, facilities managers, etc.) he takes a prototype into the various industry offices, solicits feedback, and absorbs the suggestions from those in the field. He then takes those ideas back to the manufacturers so that they can improve their products.

Chusid’s architectural training is a huge asset in his work “I know the language of the industry. It gives the people I’m talking to the freedom to speak freely.”

Once a new product goes into development, he creates a comprehensive marketing plan, including a product name, pricing structure and distribution plan. He designs sales literature and advertising campaigns, obtains the necessary code approvals, and trains the sales teams who will be presenting the new product. “I try to help the sales people understand what architects need and expect from them—how to become part of a design team, offering their expertise, rather than peddlers trying to shove something down an architect’s throat.”

Chusid is currently working with a variety of new products, from autoclaved aerated concrete (long accepted in Europe and Asia but only now making inroads in the States) to innovative roofing systems, colored concrete, school lockers, sealants, insulation, fasteners, and much more. The most exciting product? “Whichever one I’m working on right now!”