Category: Architecture

One of my inspectors came to me asking an accessibility question. He had caught something on site and was not satisfied with what he was hearing from the architect.

It wasn’t something as simple as a 60″ diameter turning radius, but it was still something where the architect was clearly incorrect after a short review of chapter 11 of the IBC.

Part of the art of this profession is being willing to say I’ll get back to you. Cause most of the time you don’t have to be right, but you can’t be wrong.

The title is stolen from Seth Godin, who has been using it for his new book, This is Marketing.

Architecture students have always had a fairly strong culture, from the long hours chained together inside our rooms. Plus, our work is distinctive work, not just pages and pages of letter sized reports. And in distinction from the other flakier visual arts, we’re hard on ourselves – we have high expectations in rigour and craft.

But when we leave school, this all gets exploded. We’re atomized into different aspects of the profession (there are only so many design positions to go around) as well as into all sorts of different professions.

And even for those of us that stay in the game, this cohort of youths is blended into the hierarchical ecosystem of the business world. The boss is worried about making payroll. The manager got two crazy kids at home. You’re just trying to figure out how to avoid drawing this detail incorrectly.

And yet, I still think there is still an “us” there. I don’t know the answer, but maybe question starts with “what things do we do?”

One of the common complaints among architects is that it pays quite badly.  Relative to other state sanctioned professions like Doctors and Lawyers that’s certainly true. Architecture is a good profession, but it isn’t a lucrative one.  Part of it is just that there are so many architects in the game, but then again lawyers seem to make a good living in spite of flooding the market.

I suspect it boils down to a risk / reward thing.  The architect is buffered by the contractor who really takes the primary responsibility for delivering the physical building. The engineers own all the tangible aspects of the structure. We do the amorphous work of “coordinating”.

That’s a hard sell and we aren’t that good at selling the marginal value of good design.  By being unwilling (or unable) to promise the value of good design, the we effectively avoid making a promise we can fail at – shirking risk. Without such a promise, architecting is just a commodity it just becomes a race to the bottom when it comes to low fees and shortened schedules.

Aside from selling better architecture, the most tangible way for an individual to increase one’s risk (and thus reward) is to either start managing other architects, either within a firm or go client side. In both ways, you step away from the technical side of the profession, and take the risk of managing people. You take on a bigger plate of projects, and are now responsible for that much more work.

Your name and reputation are now staked to many more results and the scary thing is you’re not going to be the person doing the work.

Always trying to improve the process.

Fair to all parties, A/E team, Contractors, Users, Taxpayers.

Request excellence, expect high professional standards.

Give them the resources to do reach it – time, money, and guidelines.

Timely responses to questions.

Don’t waffle, the team must be able to trust your decisions.

Be one step ahead of the team, have foresight into potential roadblocks.

Encourage and excite the team.

After six months into this gig, this is my best guess. Stay tuned.

Architecture is a profession where you learn by drawing.

Certainly you learn some things from books, but mainly it’s about drawing it again and again, addressing the same problems over and over again in each of its unique permutations for any given project.

And that’s for the technical aspects of the profession, even more so for those who have gone into the aesthetic design aspects of this art.

If there is one thing I rue from jumping sides, it’s the loss of this practice, but then again I was on a similar path within the profession as I headed towards lower middle management.

As a friend once said, one of the main career tracks in this gig is that you go from managing drawings to managing projects to managing people – and that is especially true if you’re not one of those guys who have not gone the route of wielding the big fat design pen.

I’ve always taken pride in my lettering. Architects (that can letter) usually do.

It’s a totally anachronistic skill, though it did pay for 2.5 years of my life in Berkeley, so it’s not nothing. Then again, that was also almost two decades ago, and it was an anachronistic skill then.

It’s not a hard skill one to learn, maybe ten hours at a drafting table and you’ll have it for the rest of your life, as long as you keep up the practice. Even so I would agree its a waste of young students’ time to force them to letter. There’s nothing practical to be gained from it.

But there is some value in being able to letter. Most of the time, my handwriting is either a god awful train wreck to a cursive-print when I’m dressing up a personal note card to a friend.

However, when I’m handwriting a something to another architect, I sit up straight, make sure the pen is seated correctly in my hand, take a breath, and I letter.

In those moments, what I say is less important than how I say it. Beyond the gesture of sending a handwritten card, my handwriting is signaling that I am part of the profession, part of the tribe, one of us. I am how I write. Here I am.

My two major life-design lessons came from failed architecture studios.

“Take breaks, get out of your own way.”  My first architecture-proper studio was taken over the summer term as a six week course.  I ran full speed for the full 42 days, and could not finish the model.  The professor passed me due to my obvious effort through the studio, but in retrospect, that was exactly why I couldn’t get the job done.  I never got distance away from the project.  I should have taken days off along the way to let my mind process things in the background.  I never gave the unconscious a chance to do its work and I burned myself in the process.

“Sometimes you gotta tell the professor to shove it.” A couple years later, I took a class with a brilliant professor who constantly took my ideas and turned them inside out.  It was intellectually challenging and I got absolutely nowhere the whole semester.  I was stuck at the early concept stage, rethinking the meaning of what I was trying to do.  I finally came up with a good architectural concept for my last, but it was too late to have anything ready for final presentation, which led to the most interesting desk crit in my academic career. I showed her my concept diagram, we agreed I had finally come up with a promising avenue for further exploration, I then pulled out a form to drop out of the studio, which she graciously signed so I wouldn’t get a failing grade.  It took a while to process what went wrong, but I eventually realized that I needed to grow a backbone as a designer.  The critquer’s job is to critique, and my job is to complete the project.  Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes you just have to ignore everything and keep it moving.

Ultimately, these two studios have become the touchstones in my memory of my college days.  Partly because these were both from my Berkeley days, so I took and used them for seven semesters at Rice; but also because what you produce in these studios are will eventually fall by the wayside as you progress in the profession.  But the hard lessons you dearly earn from failure will not be easily forgotten.

Twenty years ago I was getting ready for my own sophomore review.  I don’t remember much from it aside from accidentally knocking off a piece off the top of someone’s model as we were rushing downstairs.  A couple years later, I gave her a book of the collected covers to the Sandman comic series.  It was the least I could do to atone for my error.

I was invited to final critiques at UNLV on Monday.  In talking with these students about their projects, I kept returning to the primary lesson that was hammered into me twenty years ago.  What is the concept?  I found myself constantly pushing the students on their story.  Not the narrative of how they got there, but the story that crystalizes a design into a cohesive whole.

If the design is good, the story is embedded in the work. How do you improve the design?  Interrogate the concept more.  It should be flipped upside down, challenged to the core, and understood so intimately that all roads lead back to the product being presented. No decision should be arbitrary, every layer must be investigated.  Take a stand and then push it harder.

I’m sure these kids at UNLV will remember as little of my rants about rigour as I remember of my critters from two decades ago.  But I was reminded of what I need to do in my own work. I’m pretty sure I got the better end of the deal yesterday.