Category: Architecture

I wrote this email to my architects after completing a punch walk for the FF&E installation at the new school of education building. The week before, we had walked the offices, so people were already moving in during this second walk.

My memory of final reviews in college are all mixed.  The group studio adrenaline rush towards the deadline.  A four hour grind of people talking about themselves.  And after the event, the sinking realizing of final exams for all the other classes that I’ve been ignoring for the past month. Those were some sad cigarettes, watching the sun setting behind the prefabricated concrete walls of Wurster Hall.

So yeah, there still a little bit of work to do, and we are all working on our future projects already.

But goddamn we crossed a big milestone yesterday.  There’s real people in our building!  Of course, the Dean was great as always, but I also stole a moment to chat with one of their program managers working on grants for developing Spanish students, a big Dr. Who fan that has fully settled into her office.  This shit is real!!!

Our world over the past four years is now their daily life.

Congratulations!

I can retire within the pension system in twenty years. Given the four year cycles for large projects in Nevada, that means I might get five more bites at the big apple (if I’m assigned a flagship project every time I’m available).  It’s sobering when to math out one’s career and not count past one hand.

Looking at the small projects, I don’t think I’ll have more than fifty, certainly less than triple digits. It is sobering to realize that my time in this profession is no longer limitless.

This morning, I wrote this quick email to a three sophomore from Rice where I’m doing a mentorship program.

Hey!

I woke up thinking that y’all are just a couple weeks from pencil’s down.

I wanted to wish you the best as you enter the home stretch.  I also wanted to recommend that you draw out a big calendar and fill it in with all the deliverables you need to prepare by pencil’s down.  

My guess is that you still have some design left to do at the moment, but by next week you will have rounded the corner into pure production mode.  When you get into that zone, this calendar will help you be strategic and miserly with your time.  Be realistic with what you can do.  Count your hours.  Start with the most important exhibits and work your way down from there.  Sometimes that extra layer of polish on that one diagram is what you need to really sell the idea, sometimes you need to create a family of drawings to tell the full story.  That’s where an overall calendar for the next couple weeks will really help you choose to spend your energy. 

As I mentioned last week, be smart about jettisoning class requirements that don’t advance your design narrative.  Everything is about telling your story, the rest is just fluff (just make up any missing stuff after the final review).

Don’t forget to schedule sleep and eating – your body is your engine, and you still need to pace yourself until the last couple days.  Plus you need to rest so you can clear your mind and see things with fresh eyes.  One summer, I made the mistake of not taking any breaks for the entire six week stretch and it ended quite badly.  Even so, with two weeks to go you need to be tactical with your breaks.

I did a quick calc and you have 348 hours to go (if pencil’s down is 6pm on Sunday).  Every hour you spend on something is an hour you’re not spending on anything else.  Choose wisely.

Good luck, have fun.  I know this is a ton of stress, but this is going to be a very, very short phase of your career.  Once this semester is over, you’ll be 30% done with your academic studios.  Try to enjoy the moment. 

Cheers!

PS: After pencil’s down, take the time to rehearse your presentation a few times (if possible pin up your diagrams and really do a dry run).  I was a pretty bad presenter for years and this practice made all the difference to being at least decent. 

We’ve done a few things that have supported social distancing on my big project, so I thought it would be worth sharing.

• Weekly OAC meetings are held via teleconference. This is a no-brainer, but as an Owner-side PM, I have the leeway to maintain this practice long past the lifitng of official quarantine, which is something I will almost certainly continue.
• Job walks are held in the afternoon (3pm). The late walk lets us avoid the worst of construction noise, allowing for more distancing while still being able to communicate. We have also reduced the walk to every other week, on a day separate from the OAC update call.
• We are still coming out of the ground. As such, the CMAR’s weekly drone videos and aerial photos have been invaluable for groking what is happening on site without being there on a weekly basis.

To be clear, this emergency has been timed ideally for this project, given the current progress of construction. Since this is a State project, we have a full time inspector on site, and the CMAR delivery method fosters a more collegial atmosphere than design-bid-build. As such, I’m in a bit of a fantasy world which would be more difficult for smaller firms to institute. But I hope this brings up a couple ideas that may be worth requesting for your own projects.

Stay safe y’all!

Charles Jencks was the first architectural theorist I read when I came across his books at the Saratoga Library while in high school.

It inoculated me of taking architectural theory too seriously. His thoughts on high modernism made me always quite skeptical and cynical concerning architecture as a formal aesthetic exercise.

Rest in Peace.

A couple months ago, one of my architects showed me their latest plug-in which creates a rendered model. Not a single rendering but the entire model – you can actually walk around the darn thing.

Not only that, the rendering process only took a couple minutes.

They made a point of clicking render in my presence and a few conversation points later, I was walking around in a rendered model.

Not your flat planes of color that you seein your typical BIM 3D view, a rendered model with lights and everything.

Obviously, it wasn’t as polished as a professional single shot pretty drawing rendering. But damn!

One of my first projects in the profession was to work on a small quad-plex complex renovation for an architectural illustrator Phil Ishimaru. I remember some gorgeous watercolors on his office walls.

It still boggles my mind, how far we’ve gone in this short career of mine. I stepped right into this career as the world was changing, from graphite on vellum hand drafting to walking around in VR.

It was an epiphany when I read about the idea that college students pay their professors to pay attention to their work.

Stated this way, it is blindingly true.

I am extremely grateful for those professors who not only paid attention to my work, but actually cared about me as a person. It might be an implicit part of the job description, but one should never take for granted someone’s emotional investment beyond the cold hard financial transaction.

You can’t buy that. Thank you all!

As an architect who has gone client side, it has been interesting to observe the work of multiple firms. By leaving the practice of actually producing drawings, my sense of what architects should do has sharpened.

The ideas of producing clearly cross referenced drawing sets or making it easy for a client to make a decision are not new concepts. But now that I am on the receiving end of these services, I feel even more strongly about what that work of the architect should be.

Admittedly, I am detached from the day to day contingencies of doing the work, so a little compassion is in order.

But only just a little bit.

Because these expectations are cultural. I’m not asking my consultants anything more than what I expected of myself just a year ago.

This is who we are as architects.