Quiet Observations from Archi-hell

An Architect's life?

2011-12-14T22:05:00.001-05:00

Something to think about over at Archdaily....

Overrated

2011-11-14T12:32:00.001-05:00

I hate to say it, but sometimes -well, really, many times - I have agreed with this. Particularly in the past three years or so, as I've existed on the fringes of the professional world. So far, I've eeked by, freelancing, working for a firm on and off, and renovating. I've supplemented this all with some teaching, which at times fuels my idealistic dreams, and at other times, makes me want to warn anyone wishing to follow through that this life, this profession, isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I want to believe that what architects do has value; even on something small, like renovating a house, I believe that we, as architects, can provide insights into space planning and organization that can make something old new again. That is in large part why I tackled the renovation I did. I wanted to show people how a 1950s home could, with thought, have a floor plan that could meet with today's lifestyle. The hope was that, after the blood, sweat and tears, when the house was done, people would come through, appreciate the work, and, well, fall in love.

So far, there has been some love, but not enough. Well, enough for a sale, which is ultimately what I need to move onwards and upwards, as they say. I took a gamble, hoping that people might appreciate attention to detail, unique features and finding a home that meets today's standards within an establish, well-sought after neighborhood. The complaints have left me discouraged. For all the talk of "right-sizing", the negative comments have mostly dealt with a small master bedroom. Granted, it isn't some grand palace like you see on Cribs, with separate sitting areas and room for a trapeze, but the suite we created has a large walk-in closet, room for a queen bed, night stands and a credenza, and a master bath with dual vanities, separate shower and tub and its own toilet room. I mean, couldn't you live with this:

So, despite my hopes, I find an unreceptive audience. And it makes me wonder, as I still see developer homes selling, and the good old McMansions filling the pictures of local home magazines and TV shows. Do Architects provide value? I hope so. Do people value what Architects do? I am not so sure.

Bureaucracy, perhaps?

2011-10-12T21:43:00.002-04:00

This article, just posted over at Good Design posits an interesting question: what is keeping so many "architects" out of architecture. I have to say, more and more, I feel apart of those who may be potentially "lost". While I have busted my but for years now, I am still quite far from being able to call myself an "architect". I have seen projects from design to construction, managed contractors, consultants, clients, detailed numerous drawings, slaved over permit sets and redlines. But, without my IDP complete, and my exams finished, the most I can ever consider myself is a designer.

I am working hard to get there. But, sometimes, things get in the way. My job gets in my way. Where as Lawyers take months off to study for the Bar, Doctors have residencies that support their studies for the Boards, we are supposed to work full time, studying whenever possible for our professional exams. And, I'll admit, it's been hard to squeeze it in. Especially when 18 hour days became my norm.

I like that someone is asking about the structure of our profession; we need to take a hard look at the status quo. Hopefully people will start to listen. If you don't click the link, you can read the article, by John Cary, below:

Perhaps it was the Legos, or watching Mike Brady belly up to his drafting board on TV. In recent months and years, the likes of President Obama, Brad Pitt, Lenny Kravitz, and numerous other public figures have divulged a love of architecture, going so far as to say they once—or still—wanted to be architects. They, like so many of us, have a romantic view of the architecture world.

It makes sense when you stop to think about it: there are few more creative, more transformative, more direct ways to literally make the world a better place. Almost nothing influences the quality of our lives more than the design of our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and our public spaces.

Architecture can enliven and inspire. Three decades ago this year, at the tender age of 21, Maya Lin, then a Yale student, captivated the nation with her minimalist design for the Vietnam Memorial. Her subsequent work has won acclaim the world over.

We need more architects like Maya Lin to lift us up. But there’s a problem: Lin is not considered an architect by the architecture profession itself. You’d think those within her chosen field would at least embrace Lin as an architect—if not as a luminary, an innovator, or even a genius. Instead, the architecture establishment does something astounding, demeaning, and perplexing: they relegate her to the title of “intern” because she focused on making architecture, rather rites of passage.

Earning a diploma from architecture school isn't enough to be awarded the title of "architect." Graduates must also complete a multi-year internship and pass a costly seven-part exam, steps Lin skipped because she was spending her time designing. It’s a long, arduous road that many in the field are either unable or simply unwilling to travel. Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary of Housing & Urban Development, who earned his architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, isn’t an architect, nor TED Prize winner and showman Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity. Architecture school deans, firm owners, and countless others aren’t “real” architects either. These people are doing amazing, world-changing work, exactly what we want and need more architects to be doing.

In fact, more than half of architecture school graduates don’t enter the profession. Fewer still get licensed, which means that the majority of the best and brightest are held in professional limbo or exit the profession entirely. This has been the status quo for decades, and it’s time for a change. We, the public, need architecture and dignifying spaces now more than ever.

Lest you think this title stuff is just semantics, think again. The profession and the public are measurably worse off because of this issue. While diversity in architecture schools is comparable to law and other fields, architecture remains one of the most elite and homogenous professions, clinging to institutional barriers that have thwarted gender parity and diversity efforts. Massive resources are spent on bureaucracy instead of nurturing a more representative profession to serve our diverse society, and supporting architects to create better, more vibrant public spaces.

Rather than spending their energy protecting their territory and titles, what if architects and their associations focused on resolving our nation’s housing crisis, improving our schools, or generally creating more inspiring environments for people to live their best lives? With buildings now accounting for almost half of greenhouse gas emissions, we need an army of architects to go back to drawing board and create more environmentally-friendly buildings, rather than an aging few tending to the drawbridge.

I’m not arguing against professional standards, especially not for a profession charged with making sure buildings don’t fall down. Clearly, there must be ways to demonstrate one’s qualifications in architecture or any other field, and an exam is widely regarded as the most reliable way to do so.

The difference is that medical school graduates are universally recognized among their peers and by the public as doctors even before their residencies and subsequent board exams. Graduates of law schools are considered lawyers even before passing the bar. But graduates of architecture school, who have at least five to seven years of schooling, are recognized with the lowly title of “intern.” They are forced into under-compensated internships as well as warned, policed, and even fined by architect-led state licensing boards for infringing on the word “architect” in any way. Is there any wonder why architecture graduates are defecting in droves?

These inequities, when combined with the economic downturn, are pushing greater numbers of graduates out of architecture, and the profession is weaker for it. More importantly, the public is also losing out, as the creative skills of architecture graduates are channeled into an overly bureaucratic process, rather than into solving very real societal challenges.

For years, even the leaders of the high and mighty American Institute of Architects have recommended reforming and broadening the rules of becoming an architect—starting with what we call graduates. Yet year in and year out, nothing changes due to institutional resistance, protectionism, and self-preservation.

It is high time that architecture focus less on enforcement of titles and fortifying its barriers to entry, and more on creating an inclusive profession truly dedicated to the health, the safety, and the welfare of the public.

9-11 Ten Years Later

2011-09-11T09:46:00.003-04:00

It seems surreal. 10 Years ago, today, the world changed as we know it. How we live changed, irreversibly. 10 years later, I, like everyone, can remember that morning with such finite detail. In honor of the memories of those who gave everything, I thought I'd bring back the entry I wrote 5 years ago, today.

Monday, September 11, 2006

The Power of a Symbol

Five years ago, today, I sat in class, structures class if I remember correctly, trying to stay awake. After all, it was an 8:30 lecture. The moment class ended, a student stood up and said, simply, “The World Trade Center was just attacked.” It was 9:25 am.

The student walked out without saying another word, and for a moment, I thought it was some weird practical joke. I would find out, five minutes later, eyes riveted to a television set in the department office, that it was not. It’s been said over and over again, the world changed that day. It’s not an exaggeration.

I watched, on television, as the World Trade Center crumbled down, floor by floor, until it was lost in the cloud of its own dust. I remember our academic advisor bursting out into tears, as we stared on in disbelief. I remember walking home, after school officially closed, thinking, how could the weather be so perfect, the day so unbelievably beautiful, when, elsewhere, chaos was erupting.

As we would learn, the targets were specific. The buildings were chosen for the special meanings they embodied. They were symbols, markers. It was meant to be as significant a psychological blow as it was a physical catastrophe.

As we look on, five years later, so much has yet to be done. The wound is still open, the healing not really begun. In the wake of 9/11, a call went out, a challenge made, one which some considered the opportunity for architects to reassert the value of their work. Rebuild on suddenly sacred ground, and create something that respected the past while inspiring the future. It was a wish for remembrance. It was a cry for defiance.

I fear for the success. I feel deflated by the solution. And perhaps, more than anything else, I am disappointed by the process. Politics, egos, personal interests – they dominate the rebuilding process. They are the stories to arise from the rubble of that day.

Three years ago, during a scholarship interview, I was asked the question on everyone’s mind, “What do you think should be done at the World Trade Center site?” A loaded question. I faced four strangers who looked on expectantly.

I told them that what I hoped for. I hoped for a place that would remember the significance of the event while engendering new life, new activity, a new spirit. I hoped that, in the process of reconstruction, disparate parties might unite under a common goal, a vision that could encapsulate the hopes, memories, desires of the expectant millions watching. I told them that the challenge, above anything else, would be reconciling the desires of those who saw the site as a massive graveyard and those who saw the site as an opportunity for massive redevelopment. I told them that any solution would have to successfully address both. That life and death, happiness and sadness, would need to exist, side by side. I told them that I believed architecture had the power to reach such greatness.

I still believe in that greatness. I still believe that architecture can take on such weight, such responsibility. It is the power of a symbol – this ability for concrete objects to illicit abstract emotions. I just don’t know, given the process so far, if the results will ever meet the heavy expectations. Some might say nothing would. And perhaps they are right. But, perhaps, if the process hadn’t been derailed the way it has, there might have been a better chance for success.

Miss Me?

2011-08-26T21:55:00.008-04:00

I fell off the face of the earth. A black hole that seemingly took every last speck of the light that made up my days. Renovating this house has been a herculean task. Up at sunrise, working until dusk. All in the vain hope of completing this craziness.

Add to it teaching. Rewarding, yes. And an additional time suck. Nights preparing assignments and slideshows. Desk crits and reviews that interrupt the work day. Suddenly torn between two jobs, two lives, unsure if I have been able to dedicated myself to each with true conviction. That's what's been on my mind.

I am actually living the dream. One foot in academia, one foot in practice. On a good day, I tell myself, this is what I want. I like going back and forth. I like working on site and in the classroom.

But on rough day days, which seem to be a majority of them lately, I wonder if one might have to give for the other. If I commit to something, I give everything I have. But when you have two things vying for that attention, can you do each justice? Or does something give? I worry that, if I find out the answer to this, it may be because of an incident that I am unable to recover from.

I know, I come back after months with something depressing. Not necessarily how I'd like to do things, but its all I got right now. I only hope that, on the horizon, is a light that provides new inspiration.

Inspiration

2011-04-15T17:01:00.002-04:00

Inspiration

2011-04-02T00:21:00.002-04:00

Kinda love this.

Education I support

2011-03-30T23:48:00.003-04:00

image by Drew Kelly via NYtimes

Given my own experiences, you can imagine that this is something I'd totally want in schools.

Make it work.

2011-03-27T17:11:00.008-04:00

During my third year of architecture school, we took several field trips to learn about materials and construction; a pre-cast concrete company, a masonry manufacturer, a steel mill, and carpentry school. We were to learn about the way things go together, get our hands dirty if at all possible. And while laying bricks are still a mystery to me, carpentry school was something of a revelation.

It was a 6 am bus ride, 45 minutes from school to, if you could believe it, and island in the middle of the Ohio river. And, in a giant warehouse, we learned to frame. Basic skills first - hammer a nail, without hitting your hand, saw a 2x4 without an electrical assistant, identify a jack vs. king stud. The several guys brought in to show us the ropes were admirably patient, given our range of aptitude. There were those who had been building sheds with their fathers as kids. And there were those that were not quite sure how hard you really needed to swing a hammer.

I was somewhere in between; I had begrudgingly followed my dad as he did minor repairs to some rental homes, mostly resenting the time it took me away from Saturday morning cartoons. I'd gotten dirty and pretty much hated it. But I knew my basic tools, and, surprising to most of my classmates, could lift heavy objects with more ease than they expected. So, sure, I was out of place; my grungiest clothes were a pair of Abercombie jeans and an Abercrombie jersey shirt. And sure, my friends had a good hearty laugh at my expense - at seeing me getting dirty and dusty. But, as we moved from basic skills towards our task of the day - in groups, frame up 4 walls, with a window or door in each and a basic vaulted roof - I found myself lost in the constant motion, activity and noise.

Maybe it was the material - wood, which I seemed to have an affinity for. Maybe it was the process - that, as a group, we were doing something together, rather than competing with one another. Maybe I just liked the idea that, despite what people thought of me, I could actually do this. Whatever, it was, I knew I liked it. I could see it - someday, I'd take time off from my amazingly successful practice to build myself a home. Be apart of it, day in and day out, so I could do it they way I wanted.

Fast forward to today. For the past three weeks I've dug in on a renovation. It's design-build, and I am putting in a lot of sweat equity. I figured, if work ain't coming to me, I'm gonna make it for myself. Given the course of my professional life, it should be no surprise that this has now come before a successful practice. But, well, we can only take the cards we get and play the best hand we can. I'll make it work.

So, after some finagling, and with the help of many, I now sit at the point of no return, with permits pulled, walls demolished, and large areas of concrete cut. In two weeks, we cleared two 30-yard dumpsters, and for everyday of those two weeks, I've been sore. What can I say? When I renovate, I go all the way.

One track mind

2011-02-20T22:38:00.001-05:00

Hi there. It's been a long time (long time). How have you been?

I feel like I need to re-introduce myself, seeing as I've gone MIA. Remember me? I used to post regularly, occasionally making an, I'd like to hope, insightful observation. I may have even been funny from time to time. But, for quite a while, it seems, I've lost my mojo. Maybe that's life. At least, it seems, that has been mine.

My life, however, is beside the point. At least for today. I'm trying to get my groove back, you might say, and finally get down something that has been nagging me for a while.

As I mentioned here, I had the opportunity to find myself back in Studio. Observing the dramatic change in process, particularly the design tools being used, from my collegiate days was...shocking? Unnerving? Inspiring? I'm not sure, exactly. Conflicted. Yeah...maybe that's it.

As the studio progressed, thoughts about this evolution in education stayed at the back of my mind. It gnawed at me more after I read this, which, while interesting, failed to explore what I thought was the most provocative statement of the entire interview:

Prince-Ramus: It’s an architectural education issue. It’s not that I’m not hiring architects. But as someone who teaches and has a practice and has real projects, I see the skill set of people with architectural education as increasingly irrelevant, if not detrimental.

I've tried to understand this statement, reflecting on my students and my approach towards the studio. But I am still not sure what is Mr. Prince-Ramus's ultimate point. Given the context, where his comment follows a contractor who has mentioned hiring more architects for his company, I first took it to mean that architects skills have now made them increasingly production oriented. Thus, rather than leading, we have a generation adept at executing.

When I first began teaching, what struck me most was the time students now spend on a computer. Unless asked to specifically produced something by hand, everything I saw was on a screen, or a printout of something digital. It was jarring, not only because I had been a model guy, but because I found it very difficult to have discussions with the students about their process.

If anything, iterative design was the one thing drilled into me during my own studies. Try one version, then another, compare, contrast, and repeat. But, crucial to all of this, was that you could view versions simultaneously, which allowed you to make decisions based upon the relative strengths and weaknesses that you observed in the comparison.

While the students may have been doing this, it was unclear, as I spoke with them, if it was really happening. I would often have them go back to materials they showed during previous sessions, asking them for sketches or printout that seemed to be already tucked away - out of sight and out of mind. For many of the students, the design process seemed so linear - decisions made considering only direct cause and effect. Address one problem, then move on. Checklist done.

If this is what Mr. Prince-Ramus is referring to in his comments, then I heartily agree. The technological tools my students relied upon seemed to have fostered a certain simplistic attitude towards their design process. If it works on screen, it looks okay in the model, it's fine. Move on. Move down the list of things to address, and once the list is done, the project is good to go. Forget about considering the implications of decisions to things previously decided, or potential pitfalls down the line. At that moment, the decision made sense, and so the decision is made.

But, I have to say, I can't be sure if that is really Mr. Prince-Ramus's take. He has made a certain distinction between what architects are now learning and what he thinks they should be. He condemns this new architectural model that technology, like BIM, has seemed to usher, as well as what traditional model that others often deride architects for having - the "someone will make it work" attitude that many think architects have when designing. So I guess I'd like to know, what is the right way to educate future architects? Because, from where I now stand, it seems like we better figure it out soon.

You can always dream...

2011-02-16T13:29:00.003-05:00

Yes...you too can be an architect. Isn't it inspiring?

Hidden Treasure

2011-01-04T16:54:00.005-05:00

Courtesy of Sam Horine via Gothamist

I love that, amongst all the building and rebuilding that goes on in Manhattan, a treasure like this exists. Hopefully whoever owns it does it justice.

Things to think about

2010-12-05T17:44:00.003-05:00

Run on over the ArchDaily for some life lessons....

Full Circle

2010-11-30T11:14:00.000-05:00

Opps. There goes a month. And some more. Dedication fell to the wayside, but I promise, for good reason.

On a number of levels, I have come full circle. That isn't necessarily a good thing. For example, I began this year looking for work. I end this year in a very similar position, furloughed until further notice. So much for a turn in the economy, eh? So, as this year ends, I am once again forced to ask myself, what's next?

With no real answers for that mind numbing question, I'll reflect on that other moment of cyclical completion. As I hinted to with this, I was invited to teach a design studio this past fall. Or, quoting Men Behaving Badly, "the student has become the teacher." Ha.

Returning to the vaunted land of academia was both a wonderful respite from the disappointment of my professional life and a reminder of why I was so wary to seek out a more permanent place in that world.

It is inspiring interacting with students who still approach their work with idealism. It is nice to envision a project were constraints are defined by program and function before dollars and personal preference. And it is nice to talk about architecture in aspiration terms - what it can achieve, how it can potentially improve its context, the lives of its users.

Granted, this positivity relies on students ready to engage with the problem before them. I felt lucky. For the most part, I had a group of students who were proactive and hard-working. And they produced work that I think they will be proud of. That I could be a part of the growth, is humbling.

In some ways, I felt much more comfortable back in studio than at any time in my life out working. With experience like that, you'd think I'd be running back to the arms of a university as fast as I can. But, let's face it, being comfortable isn't a place I should be at this point in my life. And, well, there were again reminders that academia is a minefield to be delicately maneuvered. I didn't blow myself up, but definitely watched as different sides lay down their defenses. I lived through that once, coming out bruised, battered, and deflated. If my life is a series of cycles, that is one I definitely wish to avoid.

My relationship with this profession, this field, has been a series of ups and downs. It's slapped me around a lot, left me licking wounds and telling myself, I'm done, over it. And again, I've come to that place, where I have to ask myself, is it worth it, or should I imagine myself somewhere else. Really, I am back where I began. That is some serious limbo. And, well, it kinda sucks.

The best portraits I've seen

2010-11-02T22:30:00.001-04:00

I hope one day I'd get immortalized like this.

Preach

2010-11-02T17:43:00.005-04:00

Well, I guess this would be one way to expose a person to the truths about architecture.....

What were they thinking?

2010-10-22T14:48:00.003-04:00

Many times you come across things that make you ask: What were they thinking? Here's one just outside my workplace.

Please share any that you have. We all need a good laugh.

Moments in Hell #5

2010-10-05T10:41:00.006-04:00

Moments in Hell #5

The office has been pursuing a client for quite some time. A custom home.Could be great. Except, while the client has no idea about how big of a home they are looking for, any clear desires for number of rooms,additional features, or even exactly what lot they would like to build on,they have been working closely with an interior designer, and have already settled on tiles for the kitchen floor.
S.O.

Knock Knock

2010-09-26T23:44:00.002-04:00

I'm here. Just not, well, here. I'll update soon, I promise. But, there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many ways I can get everything I need to do done. Oops. But I'll give you a peek of what has kept me busy...

Moments in Hell #4

2010-08-05T16:43:00.005-04:00

Moments in Hell #4:

I had just spent the entire day surfing the internet, since no one in the office had work I could assist with. I was getting ready to leave when I heard the ominous words you never want to hear: 'Do you think you can come as assist us with a presentation.' The wonderful people in charge of marketing wanted programming diagrams for a proposal, which of course, were due the next day. Funny how they couldn't get around to it until 6 pm. Let's just say I made up those 8 hours.

Silent Observer, (when I was in New York City)

Moments in Hell #3

2010-07-07T10:50:00.003-04:00

Moments in Hell #3:

The other day a client, who is developing a set of townhouses, asked me to revise a floorplan: smaller laundry room, bigger closet. Fine, except that the new laundry room, with a corner door that the client wants, will prevent a washing machine from fitting through the door and then back into the space provided. I explained this to the client, showing a drawing with dimensions. The client thinks it will be fine and has gone ahead and built the corner door. I guess we'll just have to see who was right.
Silent Observer, Utah

You've got 6 months...

2010-06-29T19:29:00.003-04:00

So, in two days, NCARB begins its vaunted 6 month rule. The short of it, every six months you should file IDP hours. Anything falling outside that 6 month block? It gets left behind.

In principle, I get it. NCARB is trying to prevent what many interns have done...wait. Wait until the last possible moment to file their experience, which, done in a rush, is probably inaccurate. After all, can you really tell me everything you've done over the course of one year? And what category it falls under, and how many hours really apply?

But, to he honest, I'm frustrated, annoyed, verging on angry that NCARB has decided to pursue IDP in this manner. Why? Well, though it is great that you want us to get in our hours in a timely and more accurate manner, the 6 month rule does not, in any substantial way, ensure that I complete IDP in a timely manner.

If NCARB can require us, as interns, to show competency in specific knowledge areas, they it should also provide a more substantial method for ensuring that we can, in fact, get that experience. For instance, I have approximately 5 times the amount of hours needed for Schematic Design. But, because of where I worked, and how they executed projects, I am far from completing Construction Document hours, though much of what I was counting for Schematic design would, if our firm was structured differently, fall under Construction Document hours. So what choice did I have? I had to leave a job that I quite good at, since I wanted to get licensed sometime within the next decade.

Effectively, the onus is on us interns to get through it. If our offices do not have the projects that can provide us the range of experience we need, then we must wait or move on. If we have been sidelined, we are supposed to demand change. Otherwise, languish, despite the 3-year limit on your NCARB number.

Look, I am not saying interns should be able to lie back and have the experience handed to them. But, if NCARB sees this as a crucial step towards educating responsible practitioners, then there should be a more rigorous framework that provide those experiences in a timely manner. To have a governing body say "you must" while simultaneously saying "figure it out" is, in my opinion, ridiculous and irresponsible.

Look, I agree with NCARB. The current education that architects receive does not prepare them for professional practice. But, if that is the assessment, then overhaul the system. Move towards the model of other professions, such as medicine. Extend the educational requirements and time frame, provide co-ops or standardized work experiences similar to medical residencies. Schedule the exams in stages after certain experiences have been complete, symbolizing competency and skill in that area. And then, after our education, if we specialize, we head to firms which do that work. But, if we wish to practice generally, we will have had the experience and exposure to graduate as Architects, not as interns.

Instead, we have those who have practiced for years, even decades, who are not licensed, but certainly skilled. And we have those who have completed their licensing exams, but are not truly prepared to operate on their own. We have a mess. Let's recognize that fact. And let's fix it.

Moments in Hell #2

2010-06-23T23:45:00.006-04:00

Moments in Archi-Hell #2:

Today, our client informed us that they would like to buy a sculpture piece for their living room. It is 22 feet tall and 3 feet wide. To comply with the town building's requirements, we can have 19 foot ceilings. Still, they forwarded us photos of the sculpture with the request: At some point would you tell us if there is a way we could fit it in?

CASwimmer, California

She asked me to include this:

Introducing....Moments from Hell...

2010-06-21T17:56:00.004-04:00

So, as you can see, going back to an office has been less than helpful on the writing end. Let's just say, going back to work is pretty much like pushing the play button on a life you had on pause. The scenery changes, but not much else.

Today, I was gchating with an old classmate, lamenting about certain horrors that have come rushing back now that I am working again. Her converstation, along with an awesome email from another classmate, has lead me to this new series on my blog - a way to kick-start things back here. So, without further ado:

Moments from Archi-hell.

Think of it as twitter updates, or shorts stories along the lines of fmylife. I'll take submissions, if readers out there have some gems they wish to share. Send them to me, with your psuedonym and location. Otherwise, I'll draw from my own archives....

Moments from Archi-Hell, #1:
Today, a client asked me to re-arrange a corner office and a server room. The new arrangement has created a windowless office and a server room with a great view.
-melis, alabama

Back to Reality

2010-05-15T17:47:00.003-04:00

On Monday I begin working at an architecture office again. It's hourly, with hopes of something more permanent. I should be excited. Somehow, though, I feel melancholy. Not because I don't want to work at this firm. In fact, on paper, it is perfect. But, damn it, I just tasted a life that I'd love to have. It just came at wrong time.

Here's to reality.

Paid what you're worth...(again)

2010-04-13T17:03:00.003-04:00

Nice timing. I talk about free services, and the NYTimes does an update on the On the Cheap series.

From the start, this series bothered me. Mainly because the NYTimes solicited their readers to write in their problems as potential clients and then asked designers to participate by waiving their fees. The readers got beautiful rooms that "fit within their budgets". The professionals participating? Well, supposedly publicity.

The projects required full design services from the professional participating. And, to the credit of those participating, the professionals seemed to take on the projects with zeal. Not just a 5 minute consultation, some sketches, and a sample board. They were on site, arranging furniture, ordering, coordinating, even making items for their respective clients.

Now, I know many firms write off a certain amount under marketing expenses. So, I imagine the professionals who opted in for this series saw it as such. It might be time not paid, but certainly it is magnificent exposure. But, as with any foray into a public forum, not all the articles in the series were flattering.

The professionals, in participating for free, were not only subject to the typical ups and downs of completing a project, they were now doing in under the scrutiny of the NYTimes readership. Everything laid open for others to judge. The problems that might arise between client and professional. Aired for entertainment, framed by the narration of third party. Worth the price? I wonder how many new jobs the participating firms got.

I am glad that the NYTimes included the cost of the design services performed. And the services fees weren't insignificant. Personally, I think it would have been better for the NYTimes to cover those expenses, rather than asking for professionals to donate it. After all, the NYTimes isn't some non-profit organization, publishing for free. They make money off what they write and the subjects they write about.

Paid what you're worth...(cont.)

2010-04-05T12:28:00.004-04:00

I promised I'd follow up on my previous post. So I'll begin with a story.

Since completing the renovation projects that brought me home, I've been hunting for work. Any work. Cause, well, I gotta pay some bills. I've been up for anything. I've done some writing and editing, some graphic design, a competition, and even some consulting. Small things to get me by while I received letter after letter telling me what I already knew - no one is hiring.

So, you can imagine my excitement after getting a referral from my parents. A restaurant: it was small enough that I could do the work by myself, and seemed like a pretty clean slate, design-wise. Sure, it'd be a tight budget, but these projects always are. Besides, aren't these also the projects that launch people's careers. Small, quirky...get it out there, get some press, and I could be well on my way.

I should have seen it coming, from the second they thanked me for agreeing to do the project. Why? Well, because, this was the first thing they said to me, despite me having never met them, nor actually agreeing to do anything besides meet with them. Let's just say, somewhere along the line, there was a miscommunication. I'd learn quickly what that was.

In their initial conversation with my parents, they had discussed their dire budget. They hoped they might find a designer that might help them in light of their financial situation. You know what that means? They wanted someone who might do their work for free. Or at least, do it all up front with promise of payment at some later date. They got the impression from my parents that I'd be amenable to that.

That initial meeting was extremely awkward. They approached it as though I had fully committed to designing their project. Not knowing anything, I got drawn into the discussion, noticing that any discussion of fee was being carefully, but consciously, avoided. Only when I mentioned the need for consultants, especially for the mechanical, electrical and plumbing, did they go on about their need to "save", and perhaps I'd know people who'd understand their position and be able to help them like I was.

I left torn. The designer in me wanted to dive in - say, what the hell. I've got nothing better to do. The business man in me, the one thinking about my upcoming bills, wanted to go home, write a service proposal, and send it back to them immediately.

I spoke with some mentors, some colleagues, to get ideas. You see, my professional practice course drilled into me one mantra - never work for free. And, in principle, I agree. Doing work for free, as an intern, or as a professional, is a disservice to you and the profession. It devalues the work that we do, leaving people the impression that what we do doesn't really have any worth.

Working for a free as an intern bothers me because the firm utilizing your efforts rarely, if ever, passes those savings on to their clients. Your free labor is used to help that firm stay afloat, because they undercharged to get the job or are trying for a high profile gig, in which they through everything they have at it, even if it means exceeding the hours budgeted. Either way, it perpetuates the undervalued perception of the work we do.

Working for free as a professional - well, it becomes a more personal dilemma. After all, you as the professional, are responsible for saying yes or no. As one of my mentors reminded me, sometimes, you take on a job, pro-bono, in the hopes of achieving another outcome - publicity, portfolio building, experience in a new field. And for many of us trying to break out on our own, without the connections or backing that allows for paid commissions, doing free work might be an avenue towards recognition.

And, to be honest, there are times when I can see free design services are justified - doing work for non-profits, which use your expertise to achieve something that benefits the underserved, or a community in need. By all means, take some time to help out. But, in my particular case, I felt unmoved, despite my excitement for the project itself.

I went back and forth for a couple of weeks. I did end up doing some work for them - options for their logo, as well as four floor plan options on organizing the space. But I stopped there. And then I wrote a service contract for the services I provided, as well as a service proposal for the work they would need from me take the project forward.

At the second meeting, I showed them the work I had done. They were excited, they asked questions, they wanted to know more. And I gave them options - ideas how to move forward, the things they needed to complete before they could continue, how to finalize their budget. And then I gave them my service contract and my service proposal. They stopped being excited. They stopped asking questions. I explained to them that, if money was that tight, there were a number of things they could do themselves. The consultants they would need to find, the drawings they would need to get, the concrete items they would need to price so they could determine how much they might actually have for their interior fit out. The client only focused on "this is how much I owe you?" I told her that the rates were negotiable, and to review them and get back to me. It's been two weeks. Do you think they've called?

In the end, my gut tells me I was right to do what I did. If it had been a close friend, or family, I might have been more open to doing work upfront, without worrying about the compensation. But, if close friends or family had asked me, they'd have also been willing, hell, they'd have been adamant, to discuss the nature of my compensation, whatever that might have been. I would have done the work because, ultimately, I'd trust them to carryout their promises to me. I didn't have that feeling in this case, and so far, I've been proven correct.

Everyone has to figure out what works for them, what they ultimately decide is right for them. So I'm not going to judge, or definitely say you should or should not do work for free. I admit, I wanted that project. And for a moment, I seriously considered moving forward. I had a number of ideas floating in my head from the second I met with them. In the end, I ended up doing some work for free, as I doubt I'll ever get money for what I completed. But, though they might have a floorplan, they didn't get anything else. Those ideas, for everything from their material palette to the design of feature elements, is still locked in my head. And, even if these ideas don't get built, they are ideas that I imagined and these clients could not. So I'll save them for another time, when I think they'll be given a value equal to their worth.

Paid what you're worth...

2010-04-02T22:56:00.004-04:00

This NYTimes article hits on something that our profession often utilizes - unpaid internships. It happens, more than we'd like to acknowledge. Pros and cons abound, and I have some thoughts about it too, which I need to get down soon. But, until then, take a read and leave your own thoughts...

Landmark?

2010-04-01T15:13:00.008-04:00

What can I say besides, yes, if it looks like this, it will be a spectacle indeed.

On the Other Side

2010-03-18T19:34:00.002-04:00

Recently I got to sit on the other side. Instead of standing alone against the firing squad of visiting critics, I was, this time, one of those dreaded gunman.

Let’s face it. Our profession is a glutton for punishment. There are few other academic fields that require you to, with frequency, present a concise version of weeks of work, to people who have little to no idea what you’ve been doing. And then, you get to stand while these strangers dissect you, in front of an audience of your peers. It’s a less bloody, but not necessarily less painful, cage fight.

My experience with reviews has been, well, heated and often frustrating. See here and here, for just a couple of examples. Let’s say, looking back, I can see a certain error to my ways. But, at the same time, I defended my work, which I would still do. Maybe I’d do it with less passion and more logic, but can you blame me?

Presentations are tricky, mainly because, the presenter, who is most familiar with the material, presents to a naïve audience. Having spent months with your project, it is easy to forget that your chain of reasoning isn't as logical to others as it is to yourself. Remember, the information the presenter provides is pretty much all that the critics can pull from to understand the designer’s intent. Beyond that, each critic will draw from his or her own knowledge base, references, experiences, to process what they see and hear.

What about that wall of drawings pinned behind you? Well, while drawings might provide enough insight, we, the audience, usually sit about 5- 8 feet away. Plus, we don’t always get the chance to study every line and notation. Then, there’s that whole time thing. We have to look at the drawings fast, process them fast, and dissect them fast. Those are not great odds for perfect comprehension.

So, if you spend 10 minutes taking us your journey of self-discovery, failing to mention the fundamentals of your intent, we critics will be confused. Ignore referring to your drawings, or point out why you programmed your project a certain way, and we, the audience, are going to have to guess. And, this comes from experience. You don’t want critics to guess.

At this past review, some students were well prepared. They did as they should, acting as tour guides, leading us through their project with clear, concise descriptions that balanced intent and basic information. Discussion in those projects could get into more complex issues – relation of execution to concept, material choices, use. Those discussions could focus on weaknesses and provide the student with possible avenues of exploration.

But, some of the presentations - they were rough. There was a student who began defensively, since they wanted insights from a specific critic who was running late. Another spent most of the 10 minutes trying to clearly explain his original intent, but ended up repeating the same thing over and over. In each, the discussion barely got beyond a basic understanding of the designer's words; instead of having a conversation concerning strengths, weakness, material choices or directions, it was spent on basics of why and how.

For the first student, her frustration only made it more difficult, as every question was rebuffed, as though we should have already known the answer. Missing from the discussion could have been the formal translation of the concept, which was odd and seemingly random, or how the programming could have been improved. The student ended upset, and to be honest, as a critic, so was I. Instead of getting critical feedback on the project, the discussion was 10 minutes of getting the basics figured out.

For the other student, without any real information, what could critics do, but hypothesize? Could the circulation move in any direction? Could the floorplan be flipped to the other side? Could the façade be completely open? Did you need doors? How is that empty spaced used? And why do you have empty room in the first place?

Without any real information to pull from, commentary was abstract and vague. As vague as the student’s own design intent. Undoubtedly, the student probably left his crit feeling directionless, but as critics, so were we. Without knowing what the student hoped to achieve, we could only give him ideas of the potentials we saw. Whether those directions fit with the student’s own ideas, we couldn’t tell.

So, in light of the season, with final reviews looming, if any students are reading out there, please, take away this small piece of advice. When you present, consider putting in the time to consider how you present, and not just what you present. You spend hours and hours getting ready. Don’t blow it because you ad-lib, and in ad-libbing, confuse your audience even more than if you hadn’t spoken. Prep a script if necessary, run lines in front of classmates. Whatever you do, remember that you represent your work. You need to do it justice.

Inspirations_Video Edition

2010-03-03T13:56:00.003-05:00

You've got to love Rube_Goldberg Machines.

Cat Fight

2010-03-03T10:18:00.002-05:00

Kinda loving this post over at Design Observer. I've had issues with some of Mr. Ouroussoff's articles in the past, but Ms. Lange really takes him to task. If nothing else, she brings up some great points about what an architecture critic should be....

Missed Connections

2010-02-22T12:46:00.004-05:00

My experiences have so far taught me this: finding a job is a bit about your own qualifications, a bit more about luck and even more, timing. Of the three, I have only the qualifications on my side.

Like so many others, timing is against me. One day, news is positive that things will get better. The next, news is that things aren't quite what people hoped. The most optimistic news from the AIA: firms will begin hiring in earnest come mid-year. This means, if they are right, I’ve got another couple of months of resume sending ahead of me.

In the past couple of months, I've had a couple of "what if" moments...glimpsed opportunities that seemed so close to becoming real, only to evaporate like the mirages they were. The rise and fall of hope is a rollercoaster that I am not sure I want to be on. But, with no other choice, I have to ride on, figuring as long as I don't puke, I'll survive until the end.

You know the most striking thing about those mirages? They would take me to completely different places – places unrelated and previously unimagined. In fact, some might call them crazy, and I certainly, in my past, never considered them. But there they sat, like gleaming nuggets, taunting me with futures that I suddenly, very desperately, wanted to come true. In troubled times, you open yourself up to many possibilities. In my case, it's an ever-broadening and foreign landscape.

When I was younger, I believed in two things: soulmates and career paths. I like each concept because each presents a rather logical, cause-effect progression to a future. You were meant for one thing or one person. Find it, and everything else falls in place. Life falls in place.

If you’ve been a reader of this blog, you’ll notice one thing – my life has not been quite what I’ve planned. And I think, right now, it will be hard to find anything that makes me feel settled. And I’ve definitely gotten over the soulmates and career paths thing.

But, as they say, if one door closes, a window opens. So, while I try and climb to that window, I’ll now contemplate a contingency for the very real possibility that, when I get to that window, it will be shut. Not an overwhelmingly optimistic point of view, but neither it is it completely cynical. Because, when I get to that window, I might glimpse a view out that window to a world I didn’t even consider. And perhaps my contingency will provide me with a way to get there.

Life in the Modern World

2010-01-28T23:27:00.007-05:00

Is it really like this? I'd like to think not...but the captions are really, really good.

More on the Fall Out

2010-01-21T13:54:00.003-05:00

Well, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one wondering about my situation. It's good that the Fall Out is getting notice, particularly outside of our profession. I already heard back from my first firm - they are not currently hiring. Surprise.

Maybe I need to set up a stand...or go back to taking out personal ads.

Architect Hotness...

2010-01-19T21:21:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned Hollywood's obsession with architects - or at least their stereotype of architects as sexy and hot. So you can imagine what I thought of this article, sent to me by an old friend. Sure, it's an old one, but it is still relevant, particularly this line:

Unlike a painter or poet -- to which the adjective "starving" is for good reason attached -- architects are assumed to have an earning capacity that would allow them to live large on the screen.

Seeing as I have yet to experience the second half of that statement, I'll mosey on, laughing at the silver screen.

The Fall Out

2010-01-11T10:48:00.003-05:00

Let's get straight to it: for architects, 2009 sucked. In some ways, I was lucky enough to escape the worst of it - I quit my job before a round of lay-offs let half my firm go. And, while others toiled away at finding a job, I at least kept myself busy for 90% of the past year.

However, even though my hands were busy, it's been unsettling, Why? Well, while the cuts and scrapes told me I was working, my tax returns most definitely don't. And now that the projects that brought me home are complete, I face the ever daunting task of landing a job.

At the start of this new year, I'd like to be optimistic. But, I tell ya, it isn't easy. One, prospects are, as the Archpaper article points out, not great. Two, finding myself in limbo isn't exactly what I imagined at this point in my life. Kinda easy to feel the opposite of optimistic with the baggage of last year still on my shoulders.

To be honest, my last year was pretty awesome. If I overlook the whole part of living with the parents again, or the minor detail of feeling like a little kid needing an allowance, my past year is probably be close to a life I'd want to live. I had my own schedule, I managed work where I had a lot of creative control and, more importantly, quality control. I worked regular hours. I had time to travel. I accomplished things. I lost weight.

The past year also taught me a lot: I like working with my hands, I prefer a worksite to an office, I am pretty quick on my feet. It also showed me how much I still need to learn, and eventually, master: When do I need a permit, what codes need to be met and, in particular, how to meet them and cost estimating are just a few.

The black cloud that hangs over me, despite the relative content I feel for many aspects of my current state, has a bit to do with both personal expectations and professional aspirations. For one, I never thought I'd be a closing in on the big 3_0 without a secure professional path.

The dreams of an associate track at some high-design firm died pretty much after my first round of job hunting. I'm not an idiot; I'm pragmatic enough to learn from that experience and recognize that the portfolio I have isn't one that those firms want. I personally believe in my talent, and moreover, my work ethic and intellectual abilities. But I'm not flashy nor big on self-aggrandizing statements. I'll prove myself if given the opportunity, not with my words, my look, my ego. But you need those things to cut your way to the top.

The dreams of an academic life died pretty much during graduate school, when I got continually knocked for being too practical, too immersed in the problems of the real world. And I won't deny it, nor wish to relinquish it. I understand that, for those wishing to invent the next new thing, playing to the constraints of the here and now doesn't make sense. But I'm not that person, and for me, the most interesting things about architecture involve addressing those constraints. Thinking around them is, in my humble opinion, more provocative then ignoring them for your own rules.

So where does that leave me? The aspirations I had in college have been laid to rest. I am, like so many of my friends and colleagues, looking for something after discovering what we were told to expect isn't what is, or what we want. That's disheartening. A blow, really, given the years now invested. Easy to put off optimism, isn't it?

So the fall out may be more than just economic; right now, I, like many I know, face the hard question of whether to stay or go? Do we suffer through for the hope of a better fate when things turn, or imagine, given our past experiences, a new life outside of what we know now. This fall out has caused the profession to shed numerous members; whether that is a permament statistic remains to be seen. Whether I am will be one of them is something I have to give some serious thought.

Again

2010-01-08T12:48:00.002-05:00

Many moons ago, I was doing this. I'm at it again:

I'd like to hope that, in the intervening years, my experiences have given me a leg up on this process. As it is the new year, I'll bend towards optimism for now. We'll see how it goes...

Whoo Hoo...

2010-01-07T17:54:00.001-05:00

Nice to see someone got it....

Inspirations (of the techie variety)

2009-12-15T19:48:00.002-05:00

If knowing Revit allows you to use this, then I'm all game for learning....though I still like real models, this has potential you really can't ignore:

Holographic Architectural Imaging by Zebra from Core77 on Vimeo.

Context

2009-12-10T12:48:00.004-05:00

View To Kowloon

Lately, I’ve been thinking about context. Traveling halfway around the world does that, I assume. Comparing where I was to where I am is putting contradictory lives aside one another. You can easily draw out the contrasts – the density, the language, even the side of the road people drive on. It ain’t Kansas, as it were.

But, more than comparing this place to that, traveling has made me thing about the idea of context itself - how we as architects or designers use it, speak about it, manipulate it. I mean, we refer to it all the time. I can’t count the times I was asked in a critique, is the design contextual? Or, how has context influenced the product? But, in thinking about my answers then against my experiences now, I wonder if, perhaps, I got context all wrong.

Studio may be the place where context is most revered. I don’t know about you all out there, but every project I ever had started with an analysis of context. Go to the site. Make observations. Photograph, document, sketch. Those were the fundamentals that you made sure to complete before any designing began. Why? Well, as I was taught, by addressing context, the design was grounded with reason. And a design with rationale allowed others to understand the project and critically assess its success.

It is here where my problem with context begins. Maybe it’s in the semantics, but I realize now that, many times in studio, context and site were often interchanged. What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, in a place like Hong Kong, a lot.

Hong Kong is constantly in flux. The prevailing attitude, it seems, is: Change is good, New is good. Context, if considered interchangeable with site, doesn’t last long enough to really count, especially if you consider that, within a decade, the island that is Hong Kong has grown in size. Reference points pretty much go out the window.

As I wandered around the maze that is Hong Kong, making a distinction between context and site seemed more are more important. Site became everything physical – the geography, topography, constraints of building code, and so on. Context assumed the ephemeral – the time, the culture, the relationships between a project and things that exist at that moment, but may not in the future.

Why make the distinction? Well, imagine approaching the design for a project whose site didn’t exist a year ago? Or imagine designing a project knowing that, within the very near future, everything bounding it might change? What do you respond to? Plan for?

But, if context is separate from site, then in situations like this, there are still influences to guide a design, both in its development and in its assessment. Maybe this isn’t a concern to others, but for me, it seems like a way into a project that might, at first glance, seem endless in its possibilities.

This site and context distinction is not black and white, by any means. Really, as I write this, there are still plenty of questions – this is something that I kept coming back to, but not necessarily something to write down as rule and law. Maybe I’ve delineated something that will better inform my own design philosophy. Maybe putting this out there helps someone else who has struggled with this. Or maybe I’m completely wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. Whatever the case, it’s bugged me enough that I needed to write about it. So, if nothing else, it’s de-cluttered my head a bit. Which means I might have some room to think about other things, like that small little thing of where do I go from here…

Nothing lasts forever....

2009-12-07T16:31:00.005-05:00

You know it going in. That what you do, what you design, won't always be there. That, some fateful day, it will be replaced - perhaps because it is outdated, out of use, worn out, broken.

We finished this renovation at the end of September. We put it on the market, and within two weeks, had an offer. We closed within one month. Not bad, the way things are going nowadays.

You think that, given the speed of the sale, that the house was everything the buyers were looking for. That they'd happily settle in, set up some furniture, and enjoy it. Well, apparently not.

Today, as I happened to drive by, I noticed a truck outside. A granite truck. And, well, this in the driveway:

Boys and girls, my contractor and I spent probably 3 days piecing this together, trying to make a corner counter that looked nicely seamed together. We had two join two pieces to get the width for the sink area, and then join the adjacent sides to get the L shape we needed. We shimmed and sanded to get the top face smooth. And then we had to install that bitch.

Well, sadly, that's the life ahead for anyone in the business...I just didn't think it would be so fast.

Here was the counter installed:

Let's just say, I thought it was pretty good.

Japan in Photos

2009-12-02T13:32:00.003-05:00

Here are some photos from my recent excursions East. Hope they tide you over until I post something that requires more than a sentence of text....

Kyoto at night

Matshusima

Yamadera

Ryokan Meigetsuso, Kaminiyama Onsen

Kakunodate

Kyoto Train Station

Kyoto to the North

Inspirations (of nerdiness)

2009-12-01T19:11:00.002-05:00

I kinda love this:

The dedication to their muse, in this case a typeface, is just, well, awesome.

I'm Back....

2009-11-23T17:20:00.002-05:00

I started here:

Tokyo at Night

I ended here:

Yokahama at Night

In between we covered pretty much 3/4 of the main island. Plenty to show, which I plan to get to, and many thoughts inspired by what I saw. Stay tuned, as my time of nomadic living has come to a close. At least for now...

Howdy from the East....The Far East that is....

2009-10-30T03:50:00.006-04:00

This is a lame way to update, I know, but I am right now I am sporadically available because I am here:

http://borget.info/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/Hong-Kong-Skyline-night.jpg

I will follow continue on to:

courtesy of lonely planet online

I'll be stateside at the end of November. If I finally find a camera, then I'll post some photo-ops. If not, then please imagine me, an asian, who, being white on the inside, feels more out of place here than anywhere else in the world.

See you on the flipside...

A bit of Insight...

2009-10-15T18:31:00.003-04:00

image from The Times Online

Take a look at this article. Not only does it capture a lot of my own current hesitations about this profession, it provides great insight into a place I spent one mind-blowing, madly-frustrating year. And I didn't have to do the interviews....

Keeping Busy

2009-09-13T23:17:00.004-04:00

Somehow, I've kept myself busy. Here I was thinking unemployment would mean a lot of free time on my hands. Not so much.

Just as we wrapped my parent's house, this project came along - a renovation of a small home that used to be rented out. We have (I hope) about two or so weeks until we're done.

Still working with my contractors, still learning a lot. This time, however, I took on a bit more responsibility...I'm still a rookie, but was given access to power tools. Casework, check. Kitchen Cabinetry, check. You know architects...we think we can do everything. Let's just say that I feel extremely lucky to work with an expert patient enough to back me up.

Pictures are probably better than words:

Living Room (Before)

Living Room (In Process)

Entrance to Kitchen (Before)

Entrance to Kitchen (In Progress)

Upstairs Bathroom (Before)

Upstairs Bathroom (In Progress)

Kitchen (Before)

Kitchen (In Progress)

Maybe, just maybe, once this place is done, I'll finally get a chance to think about filling some free time.

Insiprations

2009-08-24T22:46:00.003-04:00

I used to post inspirations. Maybe I should start again - a way to get myself back into the mindset that, above all, to create exciting things, you have to be excited about things...

Check this out:

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

Rolling with the Punches...

2009-08-21T01:30:00.001-04:00

It was only 6 hours. Less than a full day of work. But, I was exhausted as I walked back into my colleague’s office after the first day of our charette. 24 kids really sap the energy out of you.

That I would assist in a project dealing with kids surprises most of my friends. Mainly because, well, I am not what you’d consider a kid kind of guy. At least, that’s what people would say if you asked them about me.

But there I was, floating around my ghost life, planning a project with kids in mind. What did we want them to get out of the project? How could we achieve that? What am I doing here?

Variations of that last question have preoccupied me a lot lately. What am I doing here? What am I doing teaching kids about the design process? What am I doing with a respirator over my face and lacquer dust accumulating on my jeans? What am I doing on painters stilts? What am I doing with this 60 lb jackhammer jammed against my hip?

It’s August. In a month, I will have officially left my office life for one year. The steadfastness of that routine, the 9 to 6 (or well, 8 or 9 or 10), the desk where I kept my papers, the co-workers who I lunched with – all of that has also turned into a ghost world, one that goes on without me in it. The life I thought I would return to in a few short months? That door has now closed.

So, when I received that call from my old colleague, pondering my interest in a trip back east, what else could I do but say yes? I had nothing planned beyond the completion of my parent’s home, and her proposed dates were well past that benchmark. And, given our past experiences working with each other, this small project would be diverting if nothing else.

Teaching kids brings back ideas and lessons that fade against the grind of conference calls, redlines, deadlines and bosses. Reminders of why you thought this was a profession you wanted to be apart of. In the confines of our temporary studio, Idealism trumped cynicism. Imagination trumped practicality. Why can’t an empty lot become an area for outdoor play and worship? Why can’t abandoned railroad tracks become the foundation for a local amusement park? In the end, our exercises were about exploring the richness of possibilities, in hopes of igniting the interests of our young participants. Getting wild and outrageous ideas on paper, in models and with words reassured us that we had at least made headway.

For two weeks, I found relief in knowing what I was doing. Unlike this past year, where my days have been spent feeling pretty incompetent, for two weeks I was suddenly the “expert”. That’s a good feeling.

Limbo is cool for a little while, but I still haven’t quite found comfort in rolling with the punches, which I guess this entire past year has been about. Yet, while not necessarily loving life in the unknown, I find myself less and less inclined for a return to the way things were. I look back on this past year with a sense revelation. As though I might be close to a breakthrough. To what, that remains to be answered. But it seems close enough to imagine and dream. To ignore reality and think of possibilities once again.

Ghost Town

2009-07-24T10:26:00.003-04:00

It’s been eleven years. More than a decade ago, I found myself standing in front of two glass doors, the threshold that would lead me into this crazy world. And now I am back, a brief interlude into a world that I left several years ago.

Returning to my Alma Mater has been a walk amongst ghosts. So much still remains as it was when I was a student, running around with the unstoppable energy that only stress can power. Many of the buildings are the same, as are the stores, streets, sidewalks I frequented with clockwork regularity - unchanged it seems, in the years that have passed. People, even, who I once saw daily, still at their posts, though my time interacting with them stopped long ago. A former life, still in motion, just without me in it.

What is perhaps most odd to me about this almost-homecoming is that it doesn’t feel like a homecoming at all. Not in the warm, comforting way of going home on winter break, or during a summer respite from school. Rather, this homecoming seems odd, a displaced vision of a life that I might have lived, had different choices been made. It is a parallel universe, that I get to somehow observe, watched like a movie on some three dimensional screen.

Maybe this melancholy nostalgia is due to the fact that the ‘Burgh was once home to me. I had a place here, once, where I returned to, where I lived. I had a mailing address here, where bills were sent, packages received, which told people that this was where I had laid roots. I drove by that house my first day in the city, and out of habit, found myself reaching for a garage door opener that I had long since handed over to new owners.

Maybe this only happens to me. But I have found that, if I have once lived in a place, returning fills me with a combination of excitement, yearning, and remorse. The memories of that place, and my life there, so little thought of when away, haunt me with vivid clarity. Insignificant moments are relived. Cravings return. A desire to re-inhabit that life with I left can become almost overwhelming. I never quite feel comfortable. I long to go back to the place I once called home, inhabit the rooms I once occupied, sleep in the space I once felt mine.

I am not one for sentimental collections. I don’t buy knick-knacks on vacation as “reminders” of where I’ve been. I rarely take photos. Instead, the places I have been house the events of my past. Overlaid upon the bricks and concrete, frozen within the walls and windows, are my memories, to be revived when revisited, remembered when touched. The physical wrapped in the ephemeral, myself the decoder to an invisible world.

Two steps forward...

2009-07-06T17:32:00.003-04:00

And one step back. That's the old adage, no? Well, it seems to be the absolute truth regarding my life at this moment.

A major milestone. We moved my parents back into their home about a week ago. The run up to the big day was, as always, a mad dash. Odds and ends to be finished, lots of details still hanging out. But finished enough for them to get back in, which like kids anticipating Christmas morning, could not come any more quickly.

Top it all off, I foolishly scheduled the LEED exam for the following day. Let me tell you that, had I foreseen the timing of everything, that would have been the last thing I would have done. But, without any more time, I found myself working all day, studying most evenings. Repeating enough to revert to my old school schedule of little sleep and a lot of sugar. A couple of weeks was pretty much my limit.

The move went as smoothly as one could hope, I guess. Furniture got tentatively placed, beds unpacked, window coverings hung to prevent any accidental exposure. Within a day, my parents were sleeping in the place they had been for 25 years before...well, except for our little 6 month hiatus. It was a relief.

The LEED exam also went as well as one could hope, I guess. Passing was the goal, which it pains me to say, since I used to hold myself to high academic aspirations. But things give when time isn't on your side. And neither is the ability to concentrate as you once had. Rusty study skills, distractions left and right, the minor project of our move. Let's just say that, the day before, my confidence was lacking.

A hour and a half of sitting in a silent room was enough for me. I actually closed my eyes when I clicked to end my testing session, as though somehow the potential blow of failure might hurt less if I didn't see it hit me immediately. Lucky enough for me, I can now consider myself an Accredited Professional of the LEED system. And thank god for that.

But highs must be tempered. Late that evening, just a day after my parents had moved, and just 12 hours after the elation of not making an idiot of myself, I sat on the phone, listening to my mom rapturously describe her new jetted tub. Minutes into the converstation I heard my dad yell from behind her "Honey, get buckets. It's raining down here." Let's just say, If I EVER specify jetted tub again, it will be free-standing, with room to access it from any side.

So now, as we wait for parts and a certified repairman, I stare at the holes in the ceiling of the room below my parent's bathroom and think, we'll get there. Only now, it's just a bit later than we thought. So close.

Detours, Visually Explained

2009-05-25T23:09:00.009-04:00

Quiet. Yes. Any reason, in particular? Well...we are still working on this little thing:

Progress has been steady, but as always, you have one step forward, a couple steps back. Things are added, things are delayed, and what you thought would take a couple months takes a couple months more... (We are closing in on the finish, but my photos are a bit behind.)

I've been with my contractors day in and day out. They still haven't told me to get lost, so I guess I've proven myself to be useful. Or, at least not a liability. And, had I not gotten along so well with them, then I wouldn't have had the chance to participate in this:

A side project for my grandpa. A surprise, really, which needed their immediate attention. I learned I suck at a 60lb jackhammer, but can shovel chunks of concrete like no one's business. Hey, at least I'm learning new things....

I'll hopefully find inspiration soon...something that gets a good rise from me, or at least a funny story to share with you all. For now, however, I'll just leave you with this:

Timing

2009-04-14T22:26:00.004-04:00

It's Architecture's Big Prize. And this year, the winner was someone whose name doesn't necessarily ring a bell. Unless you're an archi-nerd of some variety.

Photo © Architekturburo Zumthor, Haldenstein
via Arcspace

The choice of Peter Zumthor isn't surprising, if you've seen his work. Pictures take your breath away. Well, they did for me. The first time I saw his work, way back when I was a freshmen, was revelatory. A shot of his thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland, it captured a sense of gravity, permanence, solitude. I connected with the image instinctively. I wanted to be in that photo, submerged in that still pool, lost to the world.

That gutteral response to his work was something I'd never had before. It was the response I hoped one day someone might have upon seeing my own work. So far, no luck.

Maybe it's just me, but the jury's choice seems, in particular, to reflect the current state of our profession. The flash and bang of other winners would seem a bit extravagent given the tough times we currently face. The values of craft, materials, space rise back to the forefront.

Greatness is part talent, part luck, and part timing. Making my way through school, I found myself drawn more and more to those professors who emphasized the things that Zumthor's work so effortlessly exudes. But, as I noted before, the things I had come to admire, sought to incorporate into my own work, made me a relic amongst my peers. Apparently, my timing was a bit off.

Now, as I worry about the next step, which approaches more quickly than I care to think about, I can't help but wonder, will my timing will always be a bit off?

Surviving the next cycle

2009-03-16T21:30:00.006-04:00

Lately, I find myself coming back to thoughts I made in this post. Though made a year and a half ago, I am still asking the same questions today, especially given the current plans to "green" our way out of this historic recession. Green has moved beyond fad. It is, apparently, Architecture's way forward.

The economy has hit Architecture hard. There's no pretty way to put it. But, then, our profession has always been susceptible to the ups and downs of the economy. It's not rocket science, given that the money that drives construction in turn drives the need for the services we primarily provide. If people are building, we're in business. If people aren't building, well, we're screwed.

But, I would also argue that the profession has made itself increasingly susceptible to these winds of change. We have become increasingly "market-driven", you might say, relying on flash to get across the value of what we do.

Let us take, for example, the NYC construction scene. Last year was the Year of Architects, you might say, with projects big and small drawing great press for professionals. The glamorous openings of condo developments by Jean Nouvel and Herzog and De Meuron lead to record setting sale prices for the units they designed. The opening of the New Museum could be easily considered the turning point for the transformation of the entire Bowery.

Piece by piece, projects inserted themselves into NYC, their noteriety gaining them press which gave them, and their creators, credence for other projects, which would hopefully, for those fronting the money, provide the same returns and press that the intial projects provided. Celebrity begets desire begets profit begets new projects begets greater celebrity.

But, when the money dries up? What happens? The work gets cut. The designs ideas that were so effusively promoted by the marketing machines and architectural press get eliminated for their extravagence.

The "green" road is suppose take us out of this recession - save our profession from the decline we are now suffering. But, unless the profession takes a greater role in the development and implementation of the practices that will guide us, we'll be in the exact same place as we are now. We'll be out specifying green materials or integrating green energy products into projects until the money dries up, the stimulus money runs out, or the market decides that, without tax rebates, the products don't make financial sense, which will end the demand for our work retrofitting/ungrading/remodelling. Then what? The hunt for the next saving grace?

Our profession will always have an aspect of salesmanship. We will always be relying on people looking to trade in, trade up, buy new. But we need to be more than that. We have to be if we want to survive the inevitable downs that following the ups.

What happened to the profession that challenged the way people lived? That proposed grander visions of life - aspirations that, in failure or succeess, at least led people to ask hard questions about the status quo? We need to lead, to take positions that direct the change that will shape the future of our profession. And, since it seems like many of us are out of work anyways, this might be our chance. The chance for architects to take their knowledge and skills into politics, into lobbying, into consulting, into think tanks, into policy making, into the companies that we often promote to clients. We've always been capable of more than what the public has acknowleged. It's time to shown them.

Changing Expectations

2009-02-25T00:47:00.001-05:00

I’ve been quiet, sucked into the daily routine of our extreme makeover. The hope is that we are halfway through. But you know what they say about expectations.

It’s about this time in most projects that I find myself falling into a rut of sorts. The doldrums of the project, I suppose, when the end seems too far away and I second guess what’s been accomplished. Part of me wishes we were done. Part of me wishes we were a few steps back, and I could address some things differently. Part of me knows that, given the way things are, I should just lay low and ride it out for as long as possible. After all, once this is over, real unemployment awaits.

Where I sit now is miles away from where I thought I’d be. I don’t think anyone expects that, five years out of undergraduate school and weighed down by grad school debt, they’d be living in the basement of their parent’s temporary house. And I have it better than many others. I am at least doing work of some sort. Plenty of architects are in a far worse position.

But this isn’t the dream, is it? The one they sell you when you sign up. The one that drives you through late nights, past the criticism, hits to the ego, the numerous hours in front of a computer or at a modeling table. You don’t dream of looking for a new position during an economic crisis. You don’t necessarily plan life goals with the catastrophic collapse of your profession in mind.

If you were to ask me, in school, what I imagined for my life at this point: IDP completed, ARE exams completed and working in a mid-size, respected firm as a project manager of some sort. I’d be in a large city somewhere, on my own, with enough knowledge to be thinking about going out on my own, and the better sense to think about rounding out my experience by jumping to a new ship.

The reality? Well, I’ve tutored, taught, been an administrative bitch, a shoulder to cry on, a student adviser, a student and a junior staff monkey. I made good headway in an office I enjoyed working at, but doing work I didn’t quite fall in love with. (And don’t get me started on the fact that the principal of my firm never bothered to learn my name, even though I was one of the fastest junior members to get promoted.)

Not quite the dream, eh? Hell, it’s not even a direct-to-TV knock-off sequel of the Hollywood feature. For the most part, I’m actually okay with that. I’ve had experiences in the past five years that I never considered for myself while in school. In school, I was sold on the professional practice version of becoming an “Architect”. Who wouldn’t be, since it seemed so clear and simple. Do this, record this, work for this amount of time, and before you know it, you’ll be ready to go.

But, let’s face it. School does not provide enough time or experience to make a definitive decision on how you will practice. In fact, it seems unlikely that during your first, or second, job you’ll have found yourself doing what you want in a manner you wish. You may fall in love with the work, but hate how your firm runs its business. You may find yourself in a firm with solid client relationships, admirable benefits and working environment, but doing work that bores you to death. At one job, you may find yourself filling a niche, which makes you indispensable to the firm, but in no way helps you fulfill all those IDP units. At another, you’ll get all your IDP done without seeing a project from start to finish. It’s a crap shoot they don’t dwell too much on in school.

So, beyond my (to be eventually discussed) rants about the ever-changing standards for sending in IDP units, and the ARE exam format, is my considerable frustration with this so called intern life. This state, between student and Architect, leaves a lot to be desired. Supposedly, I am still learning; that’s the justification by firms for the lower wages we receive versus other professions which require a professional degree. But, since I am not in school, I get to pay back my student loans asap. Since I don’t know enough to practice on my own, I need to go out and find it. But, unlike residency programs for medicine, I can’t guarantee I’ll get the experience I need, in a timely fashion, or in any specific order. In the end, we are responsible for how well we prepare ourselves, especially if we wish to practice on our own. That is a heavy weight to shoulder, given the potential impact of the work we do.

So my expectations have changed. They are still changing, really, given that landing a job, any job, is not a guarantee right now. I know now that so much that awaits students who will, this May, join me in this state of non-professional professional life, will be far from what they were told, far from what they expect. Some will find the direct route to the land of “Architect”, but I think most will find themselves on one of many potential detours.

It’s not that detours are bad. For most, these detours may actually take them to a destination far more suited to their dreams and desires. But I think it’s time for our profession to take a look at how we get from here to there, and what guides we provide to those about to set out. It’s not simple, not easy, and not that clear. And after all the time and effort put in, the expense undertaken to qualify for this profession, the least we can do is make sure everyone understands that.

A Real Writer

2009-01-27T20:06:00.004-05:00

Maybe I can call myself an author now. At least a published writer. Thanks to Crit, I can now add a small entry onto my CV - "published article". Sweet.

Crit is sent to all members of AIAS (American Institute of Architecture Students). You can also become a library subscriber to get a full issue, which is filled with articles, essays, images from other architecture junkies/students/critics. Highly recommended as an alternative to more readily available publications. For me, it's nice to hear what other people are thinking about/writing about when it comes to issues within this crazy profession.

This past issue focused around ideas of infrastructure. You know, the things you use everyday, but usually think nothing about. There is a whole world of issues that need to be addressed, and I am glad that Crit took the time to explore this area that often gets passed over for flashier pursuits.

As for my take on infrastructure, well, I've attached the text below. Hopefully it'll get you interested enough in getting an issue yourself, or at least finding an issue in the library to check out.

The Street Where You Live (from Crit Fall 08)

I find myself miles from where I grew up. My childhood was spent running between the backyards of my friends' homes, clustered in an idyllic suburb of American mythology: green grass, sidewalks, open doors, neighbors that knew you, family, and probably everyone you called friends.

I now live on a numbered street, in a small walk-up in the East Village. The street where I live is filled with—best guess—a couple hundred other people, all in apartments, all living the life of metropolitan fantasy: a quick walk to restaurants and bars, a 24-hour deli right around the corner, a local Laundromat with drop-off and same day service, and of course, a gym just five minutes away.

So much of our life is spent outside; outside of buildings, homes, schools, offices—the spaces that fixate our profession. In the car-oriented world of my childhood, this time was spent on roads—some quaint, some vast—all laid out to meet an exacting set of standards for parking spaces, passing lanes, and—at least in my home town—bike lanes. In the dense, pedestrian packed urban landscape of the city, this time is spent on sidewalks, narrow and wide, often dodging other people, plants and the odd bag of trash. There is a haphazard quality to the sidewalks of New York, the way things are patched together, the surfaces changing from building to building; a marker of the city's evolution, perhaps.

Despite the amount of time we spend transversing this part of the built landscape, we spend little time thinking about it; how we use it, how it is laid out, how we experience it. We walk on it, we drive on it. It provides us access from one point to another. The thing we use most is, well, the furthest from our minds.

It seems to me that this space between is both a product of, and a producer of, the designed spaces that border it. That the streets of my childhood were also my playground is partly because this was where we would run into our neighbors. We all had backyards to play in, but being out on the street meant we could see our friends as they came home and could call them over to hang out. It facilitated communication, contact—the principles that made my neighborhood so idyllic. Even now, when I go home to visit, I am more likely than not to strike up a conversation with a neighbor if I just hang out in the driveway.

In Urban Design class, we were drilled on the ideal street section. In our world, where New Urbanism ruled, you needed front porches on each side of the street, each with a section of front lawn, a sidewalk, a small green curb, and a two lane street in between. We laughed at it then, since it was so dogmatic. But, then again, my childhood home was a prime example if it working.

My current street isn't quite like that, or even that of the New York streets depicted in Sesame Street. I don't know any of my neighbors, though there are various characters with their very specific routines. The man in sunglasses, for instance, who, from sun-up to sun-down, stands in front of the door to his building, staring straight ahead as the world passes in front of him. No kids play in the street, and it is often lined with garbage bags, awaiting their every-other-day pick-up. On my street, you'll see people going about their urban lives; walking their dogs at morning and night, hauling their laundry to the dry cleaners on the street, carrying their groceries back to their apartments. The street fits the people here—mostly young singles and couples, working during the day, and out at night, who need their streets to fulfill the other necessities of life.

And yet, a funny thing happens in the city. This space, seemingly owned by no one and everyone, is under constant occupation. We wait for friends on shady corners, take a quick lunch on curbs or stoops, strew about haphazard barriers so that we can dine al fresco. Everywhere one looks, people occupy and use the streets—a secondary manipulation.

The same could be said for the street of my childhood. We would chalk up the street for games, and in the winter our sidewalks became raceways for sledding. This zone of communal ownership was our playground, and we used it for all it was worth.

What I realize is this: if space is available, we want to use it. This is especially true in the city, where space is limited. We'll find places to sit, to congregate, even if these spaces aren’t designated for those purposes. By adding a bench people stop and rest, even if the street is less than picturesque. Street fairs turn ordinary thoroughfares into plazas, which bring out thousands, damn the traffic headaches they may cause. New York City will even close a 6 mile stretch of road—from Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park—for three days this summer, just to give the city a place to play. Carts will roll in, tables will come out, street performers will appear, and we'll pretend that Lafaytte and Park Avenue are Las Ramblas of Barcelona or Le Champs l'Elysee of Paris.

So imagine. Imagine if we planned for this? Imagine if we, as architects, thought about ways to connect experiences beyond the walls of the projects we build? After all, we are able to turn a dirty New York street into a festival for a day, despite lack of planning, or the infrastructure to support it. What would that festival be like if we had? I'd like to think, that with the right planning and fore-thought, it would be a hybrid of the street I live on today and the street on which I used to live. And for me, well, that would probably be pretty close to perfect.

Digging in

2009-01-11T23:16:00.005-05:00

So I've rung in the new year with dust and dirt and just a little bit of anxiety. Renovation territory, I suppose.

Tearing up tile was cathartic, in a way. Demolition gave me something to do, a place to go every day for the last month or so. A job for the jobless. And the challenge of beating a foe whose back-breaking stubbornness could make you cry at the end of the day. Imagine tile glued to particle board glued, stapled and screwed to de-laminating plywood.

It was my Everest for this past month. You reach one point of accomplishment only to see what lies before you. Almost endless, it seems. But you plug yourself back in, because, well, there ain't no turning back once you've set off on this particular challenge. Especially when the challenge ahead is a direct result of the accomplishment just made. In this case, tile removed, only to realize a weak sub-floor must be addressed.

Renovations are full of surprises. Taking the floor to the joists was one of them. Guts exposed, the hidden workings brought to light for the first time in 24 years. It's amazing how much has both changed and stayed the same in the construction field. Solid wood joists? Rarely find those anymore. But the method of framing? Pretty much the same now as it was then. (Though our house was probably a particular nightmare for the contractor back then.)

It's been an interesting way to ring in the year. Much different than the office job which filled my time last year. But, at least I'm still learning. Like, how the size of a prybar does not always relate to its effectiveness. Or how to walk across beams quickly (a useful trick I hope to use in the future). Or how important your fixture choice is when you know you'll be living with it daily.

In a couple of months, I hope this Everest will be surmounted. Until then, I'll continue taking it a step at a time. It helps, however, to be able to look back, and see at least something has been done.

It also helps to know that you have people helping you who know what they are doing.

MIA

2008-12-11T16:53:00.004-05:00

Above, you find the reason for my absence. Just a part of the madness that has kept me surrounded by cardboard boxes, tape, and suitcases.

Remember at the end of this entry, when I decided to quit? Well, I did have a plan. My timing may have been fortuitous, given the current state of things, but luckily, I left of my own volition. It was time to go. It had been for some time. The final catalyst, however, was that I had also been called home, to help with a little makeover.

My parent's have lived in the same house for 24 years. It is home to me, the place that holds most of my memories. My room, the container of my entire youth, had been all but untouched since that day I left for college, 10 years ago. So you can imagine the challenge of boxing it all up to get ready for a bit of freshening.

Oh what we keep if we have the space. Report cards from elementary school. Key chains from that first trip to Disneyland. Letters to pen pals from days gone by. Trinkets of all shapes and sizes, which may have once held sentimental value. It piles up.

It is strange to deconstruct the room you spent a lifetime building. To decide what things are worth keeping, what things you can part with. To imagine your space being different then how it always was.

I can understand how my grandparent's house can still have the original finishes from the day they moved in almost 30 years ago, down to the pink tiles and etched mirror walls. It is a momentum thing, or perhaps the lack there of. Things find their place, and the spaces that once evolved around you, find footing and take root. You get use to it, comfortable with it, attuned to it. You can walk around your space, lights off, and still know where you are, where you put your favorite book, and what to step over on your way out the door. Things imprint themselves, your body memorizing the distances, the paces - a second sight that requires no visual ques.

And so, while it is exciting to propose new things, pick out shiny finishes and fixtures, dream about possibilities, it is done with some sense of melancholy. The space held in my memory is now gone, slowly erased as each box was packed, each piece of furniture moved. An empty shell now sits waiting new life. A life in the shadow if its past.

Maybe everything will go back to what is was, furniture finding way to their original places, called back by a sense of nostalgia, a reclaiming of the past. Maybe this rupture will allow for a new way of living, a new space to evolve, reflecting the fact that my room has not actually been home for quite some time. The anticipation of what is to come is as intoxicating as it is nerve racking. I guess, in a few months time, we'll know for sure.

A little busy

2008-12-05T20:14:00.003-05:00

Yes, it's been quiet here. Really quiet. Let's just say I've had something else pre-occupying my time, leaving little for observations of any real sort. But I couldn't pass on sharing this with all those archi-fiends out there:

Recognize the building? Perhaps as a proposal for some personal mansion in India? Maybe facebook is trying to tell us something....Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Now it makes sense

2008-11-24T19:52:00.003-05:00

I refer to the squashed, mirrored jelly bean. The rest, well, yeah...it's been done. Nice music though.

56 Leonard Street from david basulto on Vimeo.

Traveling Man Part II

2008-11-12T13:54:00.003-05:00

Blue Mosque, Instanbu, Turkey

Topaki Palace, Istanbul, Turkey

Topaki Palace, Istanbul, Turkey

Topaki Palace, Istanbul, Turkey

Jumped the Shark

2008-10-31T21:15:00.002-04:00

Courtesy of Curbed

Maybe it's just me, but I thought the point of the whole MoMA endeavor was to show the public the sustainable potentials of Pre-Fabrication.

Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? In this case, not so much.

Traveling Man Part I

2008-10-23T14:12:00.010-04:00

I've been remiss. Perhaps it is the freedom of unemployment. Or just the numerous amount of time spent in a flying tin can. But posts here have been sparse, and I do apologize.

Some might note that the links disappeared. My bad. I tried to tweak the template, and in doing so, erased everything I had done. I'll work on it soon. I have the time.

For now, though, here is a picture essay to catalogue where I've been and what I've been doing.

Hagya Sophya, Istanbul, Turkey

Basilica Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey

Commoditized.

2008-09-22T00:29:00.003-04:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article lately.

Having spent the last couple of years working in the retail sector, it is without a doubt that what I do has more to do with creating a product than some form of intellectual inquiry. Despite any other ideas we may have, the ultimate goal is to design environments that enhance the items that are stored within. If we do our job well, then what we do encourages visitors to buy our clients’ things. Our design’s value is equated to rise in foot traffic, the time a customer spends within the store, the dollar amount turned over.

To that end, what I do right now has little more value than the commodities it houses. Relevant for a frame of time, the designs I have worked on will likely be deemed obsolete some years from now, replaced by the latest, the recently conceived. Transitory at best, my work will likely turn to dust.

Realizing what my work is worth has been bothering me. It is probably why the article struck such a cord. While Mr. Ouroussoff’s observation of high-end architecture becoming commodity should not be shocking, the implications for architecture, as a whole, should be. Sure, interest in architecture and architects is good. For those getting the seemingly unimaginable commissions, it must be a god-send. Architects are building in revolutionary ways – ways that, admittedly, would have been written off just a decade ago, when I first entered school. And that is what we wanted, right? Patrons, clients with oodles of cash, willing to take a chance, believe in the vision and foresight of those leading our profession?

The problem with becoming a commodity is that it ties what we do to some type of imaginary value – a value not based upon tangible evaluations (performance, utility), but on the potential of its association (stardom, fashion). And, as I’ve so often confronted in the past two years, the latter values are subject to change, fluctuating wildly from one new tread to the next. As it is, Architecture has currently becomes less about movements, ideas, theories, and more about people, or rather, personas – the publicly created image of what an architect, or a firm, wants people to see. New York is awash with “starchitect” developments, whose cache is primarily based upon the name of the designer, not the revolutionary environment that they might potentially create. In newspaper ads, the flashy websites built to promote the project, big bold letters call out the names – Herzog De Meuron, Koolhaas, Nouvel. The rest, well, the rest is a mish-mash of glossy, seductive, and slightly interchangeable renderings. There, I said it. I’ll probably never get a job at any of those firms for that single sentence.

The other problem with being a commodity? Falling out of fashion. As Heidi might say, “one day you’re in, the next day you’re out.” And, what happens when architecture falls out of fashion? Wrecking balls and the next new thing. It’s the gamble of moving architecture into the realm of celebrity, stardom. You can fly high while the cognoscenti are blowing your sails, only to crash land if they see something flashier nearby. Or you might transcend it all, and rise to the distinction of the revered few, and land a place in history.

Nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts forever. But knowing that my work will meet its end well within my own lifetime is, well, not exactly how I imagine things to be. It wasn’t what I wanted my professional life to be. I wanted what I did to mean more than that, to do more than that.

I am not naïve. Even the greatest works or Architecture have had their facelifts, their nips and tucks, to keep them functioning, current. But not the work I’ve done. It will be wiped out one day, its existence maintained only in my memory and the photos taken before its demise. Knowing that made my decision easy: I resigned from my job. In a month from now, I’ll be doing who knows what. And in this economy, who knows where. But, for the moment, I feel as though I’ve taken a big step towards keeping myself from being commoditized.

Architecture School - The Next Reality

2008-08-24T22:14:00.002-04:00

It’s intriguing. A reality show, based in an architecture school? You know I’ll be watching.

Having premiered on the Sundance Channel this past week, Architecture School follows students of a studio at Tulane University’s School of Architecture. Their task: design an affordable house for residents of central city, a neighborhood in the heart of New Orleans. The prize – the chosen design will be built, a single student’s design realized in wood, glass, and in this particular case, structural insulated panels (SIPs).

The first episode is a whirlwind, as the project, the students, the history, are all introduced. You get a brief sense of the major student players – I say major players because, there were, it seems, more students than the ones named and profiled – and an even briefer sense of them as designers. Maybe they are holding off for now, but, in the first episode, all I could gather is that one student designs a lot with the computer, most design with small parti models of chipboard, and everyone is adept at drawing with sharpies.

I admit to a good deal of the shows appeal is for the nostalgia I feel when they show the studio space or round-table critiques. Watching the studio professor quickly cut through the concept BS brought me back to those long afternoons, when we would sit, models and sketches in hand, trying to display some sense of design acumen. “I wanted to bring the outside in”, “I wanted to carve the volume”, “I wanted to connect public and private”. We all said those same things. We all believed those things. We all were probably speaking out our ass.

As for their studio spaces? Well, they were a LOT nicer than ours; A LOT cleaner as well. I’ll chalk that up to clever editing and camera shots. But, hell, if I were a prospective student nowadays, I would be dreaming of their cavernous spaces, new desks and seemingly endless amounts of workspace. Dude, I was lucky to have room for a drafting board, which doubled as a modeling board, cutting board, gluing board and materials storage.

If anything, watching the first episode made me wish I had done something like this first. I mean, how better to capture the experience of architecture education than tape it. So simple. It would have been particularly helpful when I worked for my alma mater, meeting with prospective students.

So much of what architecture is, as an education, is the indoctrination into a culture unique unto itself. It was hard to describe to prospective students the life they were interested in pursing, the world they would enter if they chose architecture. It was my responsibility to honestly answer the questions of “how much time will I spend in studio”, and “is it hard to do well?” It was also my responsibility to promote the school, and my belief in the education, despite its flaws. It was good training in diplomacy. I think a show like this would have greatly helped my cause.

Thankfully, this “reality show” is less MTV “Real World” and more a true documentary. Though only thirty minutes into this six-part series, Architecture School has already grasped the pace of studio, the ambitions of architecture, and some of the outstanding questions facing the profession. It has also, for now it seems, avoided the fake conflict and producer-induced drama that makes “reality tv” so unreal.

In particular, I like how the show has captured the student’s desires, their drive – why they are there in the first place. That’s probably the most interesting thing about this entire project. Interest in architecture is a combination of altruism and ego, the need to give back, be an responsible steward, and the desire to see your ideas built. It’s probably the best marketing campaign architecture has ever had.

So each Wednesday night, for the next few weeks, you’ll find me on my couch, watching, quietly cheering these students on. Because, despite my own frustrations, my own struggles, I still want believe in the possibilities. And, hopefully, the possibilities imagined by these students will conclude with a successful, provocative reality. I think you should join me.

Heartbroken

2008-08-07T22:18:00.001-04:00

I still haven’t learned my lesson. And it leaves me heartbroken once again.

The call you never want. The client. And it’s halfway through construction. They want changes. And you wait – wait for the shoe to drop.

It wouldn’t hurt so much if it had been a budget problem, maybe a complication in fabrication, or some problem with the design or detailing. But samples had been made and approved. The shop drawings had been reviewed and signed off. Everything was a go. And then the client, or rather someone within the client’s organization decided, despite having had drawings for months, the design secured, the documents completed, that they’d like to use the space differently – or rather, very much like one of our very first proposals, which they had, at the time, written off.

So the work, the effort, is erased. A simple click of the delete button, and it is as though it never existed. Creative imagination, on the verge of becoming something tangible, left stillborn.

It hurts. Even if I don’t want it to. Even though I know better. What’s that motto? Until it is built, it isn’t guaranteed. That’s it.

A month or so ago, I was catching up with a friend, both of us venting our frustrations with this profession, I joked that I was the kind-hearted pushover in a dysfunctional relationship. Optimism, hope, idealism, kept alive a small belief that, in time, things would get better – that, perhaps, in time, the profession would reveal to me those qualities that first were so tantalizing. That in time, it might be kinder, perhaps spacing out the blows it too at my increasingly shattered heart. I’ve rebuilt the pieces again and again. But there comes a point when you have to ask yourself, is it worth it?

Perhaps I’m a traitor. That I’ve asked the question must mean I am not a true artist. After all, true artists are ready to sacrifice for the art, no? Our passion for what we do is supposed to be enough. Right? Maybe the fact that I question, that I wonder, means I will never be the great architect. That I lack the passion to overlook the problems must mean something.

But passion itself may also be a fallacy – an excuse to rationalize the things that really bother us. Like the low pay – a concession for doing something you love. How many times have you heard that? One too many times from my employer, thank you very much.

I’ll admit it. Right now, each day I wake up and ask myself, do I have to go to work today? That is a plight I am not supposed to face – at least according to everyone who hears I work as an architect. Wow, they say, what is it like to love your work? It must be so cool to do something you love, they enthusiastically conclude. But rarely do they listen to my answer, enamored by the idea of being around someone who chose a “creative” profession. Rarely to they wait to hear about the projects cast aside, the energy expended on fruitless proposals, all for clients who, in control of the purse strings, control your life.

So forgive me for a moment, but I have a deep wound that needs to heal. Yes, it is a wound that has healed before. I’m just not sure if I want it to heal again.

Call to Arms

2008-07-13T23:01:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I met up with friend and classmate – one who escaped our profession for another path. A year or so ago, he decided he had had enough. Enough of the constant battles, the clients with overzealous expectations, the bosses that were more than willing to bend over backwards, the feeling that the hurdles asked of us by our profession were just not worth it. So he made a change, applied to graduate school for something entirely different, and decided to never look back.

The funny thing about the study of architecture is this: you might end up hating it, but it will stay with you. Maybe you won’t end up practicing, maybe you might not even graduate, but you’ll still find yourself fascinated by it. At least, that’s what’s happened with all my friends who have chosen something other than the profession they first professed their love for.

Despite his protestations of being done, he couldn’t help but be preoccupied with major Architecture issues – the responsibilities of the profession, the obligations of its members, the missed opportunities. His mind still spun over the things that bothered him – that preoccupy me. And after a good long discussion, we parted with a weight lifted off his shoulders and placed squarely on mine.

We agreed that the current climate is ripe for change, for a re-evaluation of the role the profession has in today’s society. The collusion of energy concerns, the ability to deal re-build after natural disasters, the massive urbanization of nations around the globe make the role of our profession tremendously important. But, while there are those in the field making significant headway – Architecture for Humanity and Public Architecture come to mind – our profession, as a whole, is not seen as the authority to turn to in these trying times.

Perhaps my perception of our profession’s stature has to do with the area in which I currently work, but I feel that, as a whole, our profession carries a certain gloss of frivolity. People see the work we do as nice, but not ultimately a necessity. And, lately, being called the “designer” by others has really meant “the one making things complicated.”

We draw, but don’t build, we create, but don’t construct, we dream, but do not develop. When you hear your own office colleagues deride your experience as secondary to theirs, even though they haven’t even trained in architecture, you being to see how the world views your place in it.

As long as I have known him, my friend was in search of something that had purpose, meaning. He wanted to contribute to the world, change it. He had aspirations for architecture to do just that – to change the world for the better. But his experiences made him feel more and more disillusioned, year by year. He felt he was moving farther and farther away from what had inspired him in the first place. So he went to a field that would engage our pressing social, cultural, and political issues on a day to day basis. I don’t blame him.

It is me, or have we lost our guts? Maybe, it’s because we can’t afford to do otherwise. So many other people have their hands in any architecture project. And the more people impacted, the more hands dig in. More people shout out what is right, what is wrong, what needs to be done. A developer shouts about his bottom line, community members speak of the destruction of their way of life, a city demands revisions to accommodate new codes. And the Architect? They revise, redraw, reissue. They negotiate, they balance. They accommodate. Rarely do I hear of an Architect who has put their foot down. An Architect who has stood firm, demanded people to trust them, their expertise. Not too many Howard Roarkes are out there any more.

That’s what bothered my friend so much. Despite being a “profession”, we are not considered experts. Despite our training, everyone thinks they can do what we can do. And often times they think they can do it better.

We aren’t the medical field, the law field. Those professions have established a degree of respect for those who work within them. People trust their evaluations, their suggestions, their directives. Well, for the most part.

In my world? The client changes finishes on a whim, without consulting our team. They skim on due diligence and act surprised when we present them with the impossibility of their expectations. Any on-site conflicts? They would rather handle those issues without us. Granted, they have plenty of experience, plenty of construction know-how. But, knowing that they would rather by-pass us than engage us annoys me.

I admit it, I am an idealist. But, idealism is always apart of what we do. We idealize our projects - their purpose, their design, their concept. Then we compromise – adapt to city codes, client comments, restrictions, budgets, community boards. The list goes on. In the end, if we are lucky, the final product is but a distant cousin of that ideal first.

But, if we are good at what we do, that final product is even better than its beginning. Because our training, our experience, our education are supposed to give us the ability to address these issues, these challenges, better than anyone else. That’s why we are hired, paid for, right? So, shouldn’t we, at some point in time, feel like we can, perhaps must, say no? Say things need to change? That we should be listened to? Say that, perhaps, the compromises we are being asked to make shouldn’t be asked of us in the first place?

When we parted that night, my friend and I had figured out little. However, he left me with a mission – a call to arms, one might say. It is time for this profession to transform itself, to emerge as an entity with a manifesto, an attitude, a direction. We needed specific goals, for both our profession and its role in engaging those social and political issues that face us all. We need to be leaders, experts. We need to be a force. The time is ripe. Now who’s going to take that stand?

Moving on

2008-06-22T20:33:00.002-04:00

No one tells you how to do it. And that sucks, because it seems like information that would be great to know. So what do you do? How do you do it? How do move on?

The hardest thing about trying to find a new job, beyond the fact that it probably isn't the most ideal time for it, is being motivated to change. Change your daily routine, face the prospect of being a stranger with something to prove. I think I'm good at what I currently do, and I like to think that my company acknowledges it, respects it. So I'm not looking to leave because I think I have to. I am looking to leave because I think it's best for me.

There should be a handbook for this. Something like, "It's been great, but..." or "I'm just not that into this..." - tips of some sort for how you can ease yourself out of a job without burning bridges or feeling as though you've put team members in a lurch. I mean, ideally, I could sit down and tell my manager, "hey, I'm kinda jetting, so maybe you should staff others in management roles and leave me as a foot soldier." But that, my dear friends, is occupational suicide, especially if you don't have anything solid lined up.

Silence, however, leaves you in a strange predicament. You have job responsibilities, deadlines still looming. But you're always on the look out for that escape route, that perfect time to slip out. Since I respect my colleagues, I would love to leave without a bunch of loose ends for them to tie up. I like to think of this as a professional courtesy others would bestow upon me one day. But I can't guarantee it. Because, well, I have to be committed to my current job until that fateful day when I give notice.

They say breaking up is hard to do. It would be easier if I was mad, upset, disgruntled. Nothing like anger to light a fire and motivate you. But, when you are comfortable, yet unsatisfied? You can go through the motions, perhaps keep at it for another few months, a year or so. It becomes a bit more complicated when your just, well, a bit discontent. The best analogy I have: it's like being in a stable but distant relationship, and realizing that there might be something amazing awaiting - awaiting if you just took the chance to leave your current situation.

The scary thing is this idea of something better may be nothing more that that - an idea. Something to chase, but never obtain. And there is the great potential of finding yourself in something worse than what you had. Something that may make you regret what you gave up for an elusive fallacy.

So what do I do? I guess what I've done for the last little while. I'll sit in limbo, quietly doing what I do each day, pretending as though my future at my current job isn't finite while doing everything I can to bring about that fateful day. The day when I screw up the guts to say, "Can we talk?"

The Circuit

2008-05-27T21:58:00.003-04:00

How did a month go by? Suddenly May is here and, well, I’ve left things hanging. Sorry about that.

It’s not that I’ve been ridiculously busy. In fact, I’ve kept some surprisingly regular hours. In before 9, out at 6, with a late night sporadically required. It’s a far cry from where I was a year ago. This is even with a new project under my wings. Can’t beat that, eh?

I’ve used the new found free time to catch up on a number of things: I rearranged the furniture in my room, added a few more days at the gym, finally seen friends that I haven’t for months. And, to make sure I felt increasingly inadequate, I’ve gone back to attending Architecture Lectures.

If you’ve gone to Architecture School, you’ve attended a number of Architecture Lectures. In fact, your school probably sponsored a full lecture series, announced at the beginning of the semester or year with bright graphic posters and a tremor among classmates as to who was really worth going to. Attendance was probably required for at least one or two.

For those uninitiated few, Architecture Lectures are as close as Architects get to going on tour. And it seems like a pretty good deal. Lecturers get flown to some new place, treated like royalty, so that they can tell a room full of strangers why their work is worthy of the adoration they most likely already have. After an hour or so, most people fawn, some try to ask pretentious questions to feel smart, and everyone leaves hoping that, someday, they too will get to be that voice over the speakers, making a new generation green with envy.

An Architecture Lecture is typically full of two things: images and big words. The images make sense. Unless you plan on taking everyone with you to each and every project you wish to speak out, great photos will have to do, often shot with an artistic eye towards perspective, framed views, and, usually, lacking people, who would ruin the composition with their mish-mashed clothes. Once the bastion for neatly ordered slide carousels, PowerPoint presentations are now de rigueur on the circuit, though lectures are often confounded by hardware issues, screen compatibility problems, and the occasional computer crash. Tech guys are always within a two second leap from the computer.

The big words work their way into the descriptions of the work. With the lights dimmed, the glow of the computer screen casting a blue-white halo on the speaker’s face, a spell is soon cast, as these big (and often made-up) words work their way through the crowd, hypnotizing them with their whispers of complexity, intellectualism and invention. The words are intended to clarify the project’s conceptual development, approach, program. I often find myself just a bit more confused, yet oddly intrigued.

Like music tours, the Architecture Lecture Circuit can be divided by potential crowd size. At the stadium-capacity tour level are starchitects, who can command audiences of several hundred, and necessitate pre-sale tickets to attend. Often, the big design schools are the venues for these superstars, with museums a close second, often to celebrate a retrospective of the starchitect’s work in one of the museum’s galleries.

At the club-capacity tour level are the up-and-coming faces, usually younger talent that has already been published or has respectable buzz, but hasn’t landed those publicity-laden commissions that will elevate them to rock star status. These lecturers find themselves presenting to arts groups and professional organizations, the cognoscenti in short, and usually because their work has been recently acknowledged for some precocious understanding of design. These are the smart-chitects, as I like to call them, whose intellectual inquiries into architecture and building often sit at the boundaries of our profession.

Now, to be honest, Architecture Lectures are not the best place to really learn, despite the best intentions to teach. Projects that took months to develop and refine are often condensed in to 10 or 12 images, and often finished shots that are carefully lit and perfect. The complexities, challenges, changes, permutations are often glossed over, as the triumph of the completing is celebrated. It is rare to see a lecturer delve into the lows that the project traveled through on its rollercoaster path towards the finish line. And likely, it is at those places where the most is to be learned. We get plenty of eye-candy to satiate our curiosity, but the meat is rarely there. It’s disappointing.

Yet I continue to haul myself out, attending as many lectures as I can get to. Why? Because I find lectures the best place to be inspired. Better than reading the glossy magazine articles, and just slightly behind an actual visit to a project.

I find that, while I might not quite always understand the minutiae of the ideas, hearing them from the voice of its progenitor always seems to get my creative juices going. It reminds me that, behind the images, the money shots, there was someone, or a team of someones, working hard. And while an overwhelming amount of my thoughts fixate on the innate genius of those presenting, and my inevitable inadequacies, a small part of me leaves excited, since I have just seen something new, something creative, something innovative. It motivates me to get back to the job and find some way to sneak in a little of the ingenuity into whatever I am doing. That's enough to make the trip worth it.

Six Degrees

2008-04-30T20:43:00.007-04:00

It's all about who you know. People try to deny it, but it is one of life's ultimate truths. Especially in this profession.

Photo by Doug Kanter from The New York Times

This article, in the New York Times, seems to reinforce the unspoken truth. Imagine, by answering an email, you'd be given the opportunity to design a large villa in an exotic locale, unconstrained by anything other than your own imagination? A young designer's dream project, with the added bonus of international exposure and the guarantee that the project will be built. Why can't we all be so lucky?

We can, apparently, as long as we work for the celebrities of our profession, in this case the dymanic team of Herzog and de Meuron. Their reputation brought them a commission which they magnanimously bestowed on 100 firms. They spread the wealth to those they trusted, admired, knew. And why not? If they at one time employed these designers, they must certainly have some faith in their abilities.

This "six degrees" concept was something I thought long and hard about when choosing to go to graduate school. I took a risk, attending a school whose program that, I felt, offered more in terms of personal growth and intellectual exploration. I turned down a school whose faculty and reputation attracted an international list of big names for critiques and reviews. In the end, I spent three months looking for job. My friends at the other school? Picked up by starchitect firms before they even left.

I remember visiting some friends attending the "other school" for a summer abroad. One of their classmates was obsessed with getting big name firms on her resume, even though she had at least three years before graduating. She had her summer internships all planned out. As a California native, she would apply to Gehry or Moss or Morphosis first. Then, after her third year, she'd look for a big East Coast name, like Holl or Eisneman. And after fourth year, she'd look at an international firm, like OMA. With such a resume, she was certain that, come her fifth year, she'd be accepted to any Ivy League grad school, which would, of course, lead to a permanent job at some star firm. That would, inevitably, lead to her own success later on.

At that time, my friends and I pondered the logic. Weren't other things important? Like the size of firm you worked for? Or how the firm practiced? Maybe the firm's business model? How about the potential exposure to different projects and building types?

But, after my rounds of graduate school applications, my first bout in the arena that is the job hunt game, I understand her perspective. She was younger than me, but much less naive to the realities of the world that we operate in. She realized the fundamentals. Relationships mean something. Connections mean something. Not everything, but definitely something. Name-dropping, when the relationship is significant, greases wheels, opens doors. And if your goal is to be as famous as those you currently idolize, it just might be the fastest way to get there. So let's just acknowledge it: in the design world, incest is best.

Traitor to the cause...

2008-04-08T22:44:00.002-04:00

I’ll be called a traitor. I’ll be laughed out of all respectable architecture circles. But I have to admit it. Having spent nearly a week visiting friends in the vast land of suburbia known as southern California, I could see myself living there. Yeah, I just said that.

Admittedly, this particular suburb of SoCal was only 20 minutes from the beach. And the sun was out nearly every day. For this New York City dweller, having come via London, the blinding yellow sun was like teasing a child with an ice cream cone after feeding them steamed broccoli. It was a bit of luxury, a break from a streak of ho-hum life. And you just want more. We’ll gloss over the fact that I was playing around for nearly a week without work. That would make any place seem appealing, I imagine.

More than the lack of responsibility, though, may have been the sense of overwhelming ease. It was a return to the lifestyle of my childhood – car rides to the grocery store, evening walks along streets where kids played ball in the street and the neighbors passed with their dogs in tow, all while bathed in the blanket of orange-red light that lay itself over every surface at sunset. Those were the visceral moments of my childhood, when the air carried a crisp chill, as it swept down from the canyons, carrying with it the scent of pine and mint. While I was with my friend, walking their stubborn yet adorable pit-bull along the trails surrounding their home, I was once again twelve, out for a walk with my own dog, transfixed by the beauty of nature.

I’ve been on the move a lot, recently; less than others, probably, but more than I’d prefer, to be honest. Before my year abroad, then back, I lived for seven years in Pittsburgh, five in the same house, which I have previously mentioned my fond affinity for. It grounded me, despite my fantasies of moving here or there. Wherever I was, I had a place to return to. It’s different now, in the city. To rent with roommates means living a life without absolute security – the knowledge that you’ll be in the same place a year from now.

The appeal of suburbia, in part, is that which has been marketed to us. In that sense, it is fantasy, make believe. No wonder that the front yard and picket fence ideal polarizes the population into camps of “hell yes” and “hell no”. Some want nothing more that to move into that home of their own, where they’ll raise their family, have play dates with neighbors, and eat out on weekends at the local Applebee’s.

I always thought of myself in the other camp, ready to make a life in the grittiness of urbanity. Any progressive architect could not consider otherwise. After all, we were supposed to know better, armed with our education, which allowed us to see past the developer’s illusions of suburban harmony. City living, at the fringes where industrial and commercial ventures meet, is where we are supposed to find ourselves. We’re homesteaders not suburbanites, right?

School seemed to reinforce that idea. Cool architecture existed within confined contexts, the spaces in-between. Those were the projects professors got excited about, that most of us, if given the choice, would pursue. Even in Urban Design studio, our site was not the blank slate of the suburban fringe, but the examination of existing, though decaying, centers.

Urban Design, as we were taught, was dogmatic. This was probably due, in part, to the fact that our professor was considered, by many, to be one of the fathers of the New Urbanism movement. We were taught the importance of tradition, uncovering the story of a place. For some reason, the story seemed to repeat itself over and over again as the semester went on, but there were some key ideas that made sense. The emphasis on community building, on diversity, appealed to the liberal, democratic spirit of architecture dreamers, hoping to change the world. But, the way we were taught, seemed limited, constrictive. There were so many rules.

When our professor first started preaching his ideas, in the 1960s, the ideas were challenged as contrary and radical. By god, who would want mixed income neighborhoods? Or messy commercial districts near the expansive yards of their personal estates?

That was then. For us, sitting in lecture, this wasn’t new, wasn’t radical. It seemed like common sense. But, feeling the need to pass the class, we begrudgingly did pattern-book house studies, mockingly repeated the “perfect” street sections for our group presentations, and told ourselves that, if we were to do it our way, we’d do it different, better.

Ironically, those tenets which we had to learn by heart – the 15 minute walking circles, the mixed-use main street at the center – are now the en vogue urban design principles being implemented from coast to coast, from one new development to the next. They definitely guided the design of my friend’s neighborhood, with its community park and arts center, a small area business zone with a café. The only concessions to the car-centric life that is California living: a super-sized (by city standards) grocery store, with parking, and a gas station, centrally located between the various residential developments.

Sure, my friend’s neighborhood lacked access to public transit. Sure, every house had at least two cars in the driveway (and often two in the attached garage). But, for the most part, these new developments were following, the ideas we were continuously taught in our Urban Design course. As I watched families arrive at the local ball field for their weekly games of softball, chat with neighbors as they let their dogs run free in the local dog-run, I felt a bit foolish in my contempt for my Urban Design class. It seemed that the rules worked. Very well, judging by the general contentment of everyone I passed.

Fact is, for a large portion of the population, this is the lifestyle they are seeking. Architects, quite often it seems, willfully ignore this. We chase the glitzy, the adventurous, the sexy, the new, Maybe it gets back to being told, over and over again, to “think outside the box”. We are attracted to the idea that the status quo needs improvement, change, a radical shift in ideology, and of course we are. That’s how we justify the existence of our profession.

Don’t get me wrong. Suburbia isn’t perfect. The new suburbs can be applauded for incorporating ideas of density, mixed use, community building. But they can also be derided for their emphasis on materialism, repetition, appearance. Without a doubt, every new development my friends and I explored, used the standard SoCal housing clichés; every development allowed the buyer to finish their house in one of four styles: Italian Villa, Arts and Crafts, Traditional or Hacidenda; every development had fanciful, aspirational names for their models, which all showed granite and stainless steel wherever possible; all developments had driveways proud and center; all developments still had private, fenced off yards.

But, as with all clichés, there is a foundation of truth. These homes are what many dream of. These are the places people hope to call home, imagine coming back to each and every night. These are the buildings people are willing to put their hard earned money towards. That says something to me. It says that these developers, for better or worse, understand the world better than I do. It reminds me that, for many, perhaps a majority, this is the lifestyle they want to live. Not the sleek, glassy living that our profession so often highlights, promotes. We vilify what the majority aspires to. That is a huge disconnect.

And that’s where I find myself, lost, torn between the nostalgia of my youth, the principles of my education, my nascent and undefined personal desires. Our profession tends to knock suburbia, its lack of identity, its mind-numbing sameness. But, and maybe this is just me, there is something appealing to the suburban model. Maybe it is because, for all its faults, it works rather well. I know. I was a product of it.

Eye-Candy

2008-04-03T15:56:00.003-04:00

sample panel, engraved graphic on tinted mdf

Vacation

2008-03-27T14:01:00.002-04:00

We all need one. After this last month, I definitely need one.

So while I recharge, posts will be on hold. If you got some time to kill, check out the archives, and hopefully, when I get back, I'll be filled with inspirations, of the visual and intellectual kind.

Burned

2008-03-11T19:28:00.002-04:00

I should have paid more attention. After all, I made it to every mechanical systems class, despite its 8:30 am start time. And though I sailed through, it was more because our professor was a softie, than that I really absorbed the material. After this week, I definitely wish that wasn’t the case.

The minutia of the technical components inherent in the creation of one project is often glossed over in school. There are a number of reasons why this happens. Some argue that there just isn’t enough time in the architecture curriculum for in depth study of these aspects, which other professionals spend significant amounts of time studying. Some say that these fundamentals are better learned on the job, when real world constraints provide lessons in compromise and efficiency. Still, in my own humble opinion, I think it would be in an architect’s best interest to take a keen interest in the things that, as students, we considered mundane and rather superfluous.

The problem that arises from this predicament, in my particular case, is the reliance on others to complete necessary work for your client. The right consultants make this part an engaging process, as you learn how other disciplines react to the challenges of the project. The things that worry them don’t necessarily bother you, and vis versa. They worry about airflows, efficiency ratios. You worry about how they’ve crossed your space in odd locations with their exposed ductwork and conduit. They remind you to think about wattage loads and noise levels. You remind them that you can’t have an 18” duct in a space with only 7’-3” clearance.

In the best relationships, this back and forth progresses towards a positive resolution. Through some compromise, a bit of back and forth, a solution is finally reach that incorporates their knowledge of those finite details you might not know with your design intent, which they might not have ever imagined.

The problem with an interdependent relationship, however, is the potential pitfalls that arise then one partner falters. Or ignores you. Or misses deadlines. Or fails to ask you questions until they realize that, yes, they need to provide you with the things you have been requesting because, no, your request were not for fun.

These situations make me realize how little I know and how much our profession relies on the professions of others. I never wanted to be in the position where I felt so beholden to others. It is an impotent feeling, and frustrating to no end, because, while your project is the most important thing to you, it might not be the case to your consultant. My consultant made me understand that quite perfectly.

It’s a tricky game, once the relationship goes south. Deep down you want to scream, shout, demand that their obligations be met. You practice diplomacy, hoping that their professionalism will prompt them to keep their new promises, their agreements to new deadlines. But as they fail time and time again, you lose hope, and think, what happens now? You still need them to complete, or else you’ll really be screwed. You hang on, and think, once this project is over, you’ll never hear from me again.

A dream scenario might be the one practiced by large firms, with architects, engineers and the lot all housed in one place. Coordination would be a lot easier, one imagines, and consultants could be a part of the team from the get go. I imagine team meetings, where people from the different departments pow-wow, discussing great new ways to address the delivery of cooled air to their quirky designed spaces. Trace is used by the roll, and red ink flies, as the architects and engineers throw ideas back and forth, asking each other for more, better. And then, with a solution finally reached, they pat each other on the backs and pop open a few beers. Fade out.

Another scenario might be to become the expert. More school, more debt, but hey, you learn how to do it all. Screw the consultants, control it all yourself. That might be wonderful as well. Decisions made immediately, no need to wait. You get to decide where things go, what things take priority, and detail it all. Coordination would be a breeze, and things would all go swimmingly. Unless there was a mistake, in which case, you’d get to assume liability for it all. End scene.

I am not sure what might be the best way. As of now, I have only been exposed to this way. And this way isn’t working. So, hopefully, in my future, new relationships will present themselves, and perhaps I’ll find that perfect one. The one that works, that gets me what I need, when I need it. The one that challenges me, matures me, and teaches me. But, until then, I am at least committed to finding my damn mechanical systems textbook and hauling it into the office.

Bigger is Better...

2008-03-03T21:48:00.004-05:00

(Office of Metropolitan Architecture, via The New York Times)

At least that seems to be the running theme when it comes to all things Dubai. Just take a look at the craziness coming from the minds of OMA. A city, rising from the sands of the desert. With the Deathstar as a center piece.

The sheer size of the development boggles the mind. I mean, six and half square miles, built from scratch? And, given the rate things are going out there, probably done within the next 5 years? Le Corbusier could only dream of such things when he was drawing his radiant city.

Mr. Ouroussoff's opinion is an cautiously optimistic one, seeing success in even its failure. But his assessment assumes a fact that I am not sure I agree with: that if they built it, they will come.

Not that the money pouring into the region will draw a significant population. But to fill all this? Mr. Ouroussoff's concern is that the communities will turn into gated enclaves of the super-rich. But, what about the other, quite possible, outcome? A ghost town of the few, fighting against the unrelenting sands?

Are there really enough people migrating to Dubai to fill all that is being built, and planned to be built? I can't fathom what exodus these planners imagine causing the migration. Perhaps the thousands of bankers finding Wall street unwelcoming will make there way there. Even then, that would fill, what, one or two of the mega skyscraper residences being built. And, unless they plan to give away flats for free, I'm guessing the developments currently underway are not going to be filled by the workers brought in to build them.

As an exercise in design, this project would be a wonderous opportunity for any firm. The magnitude of this project allows for the investigation of ideas through number of scales, considering the complex connections that define a modern urban experience. But, the reality? One can only do so much before the economics take over. And even the richest developer has a budget.

But, well, hey, I might be wrong. Dubai is a place of fantasy, a world quite literally unto itself. It is the playground of starchitects, where whimsy and imagination have free reign. It is perhaps a dream coming true. Maybe that's why seeing the Death Star floating on a man-made island makes so much sense. Dubai is a fictional world brought to life, a sci-fi movie set for an imagined life that, somehow, became real.

Political Architecture: Part Deux?

2008-02-25T12:00:00.001-05:00

I’ve mentioned the idea of political architecture before. And that catch-phrase seems to bring quite a bit of you to this little blog. Especially lately, which makes me wonder if this competition has anything to do with it.

It is an intriguing proposal, isn’t it? To re-imagine such a powerful image of leadership?

It seems to be an exercise in extremes. Protection versus Access. Public Right versus Private Necessity. Authority versus Humility. One imagines the home of our President to be a place that commands respect, but still feels relatable to the citizen, at home in some suburb, in some state somewhere. It necessitates an air of pomp and circumstance, given the history-changing events that will inevitably happen. But, one thinks, it should also allow the President to feel at ease, as anyone does in the comfort of the place they call home.

Is the challenge harder today than some 200 years ago, when the first White house was designed? Perhaps, yes, given that the aesthetic of a government building, at that time, was usually clear; to express democracy, one needed a neo-classical structure to align itself with the noble roots of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Also, given the complexities that have arisen with regards to security and protection, one can forget the public access enjoyed during Andrew Jackson’s infamous inaugural celebration.

Yes, 200 years later, you have a myriad of issues that perhaps were never imagined years ago. As a prominent symbol of a nation that has, as of late, been reviled as much as we would hope it is revered, it is a prime target. The home is a bunker, the event hall is a safe house. Now, one imagines the White House needing the strength to withstand both the scrutiny of dignitaries and armed attacks.

Yet, as a symbol of what we wish for our government, our nation to stand for, images of bunkers and safe houses don’t quite cut it. One doesn’t read freedom in windowless concrete walls. One does aspire to liberty when they are coddled in a cage. I guess that’s why this problem intrigues me so much - the balance of dichotomies, the potential invention of a new way to communicate age-old values in a day when such values need to be broadcast.

So, whatever readers come here, I encourage you to take a chance, submit an idea, and expose the world to your way of thought. It might just change the world. Submissions are being accepted between March 1, 2008 and April 20, 2008.

Inspirations

2008-02-17T19:56:00.003-05:00

I know. Another small scale urban place. You might be thinking, hey, that's all he likes.

photos by Daisuke Akita via frontofficetokyo

But, you have to admit, there is something appealing about these tiny concoctions. Their ability to so much with so little. Who says bigger is better.

I also am inspired by the blog. If you get a chance, look through the archives. The author/architect does a great job of documenting the process of building in a place know for precision and detail.

I could go on and on about the various elements of this house that intrigue me, but I have to say, the thing I like best are those stepping stones in the garden. Nice touch.

Legacy

2008-02-12T22:44:00.001-05:00

Every semester ended with the same ritual. After the weeks of sleepless nights, the ten minutes to shine, the brief and rapturous feeling of relief once crits passed, you faced the single heart-wrenching decision: what the hell to keep?

I was a pack-rat. I kept drawings, sketches, study models. I organized them by date, thinking to myself that, by doing so, I could capture the process, the development, the evolution of my work. I had elaborate plans to document it all, archive it for future reference, or store in some fantastic personal library, which I would be able to come back to, perhaps to one day show a future student, child, mentee, who I once was.

Plans like these often go awry. Archiving work gets complicated as the papers, drawing tubes, parti and concept models, add up. There’s always that issue of space, which is inevitably at a premium. Then there is the constant moving of stuff, as is the typical nomadic life of an undergraduate. And other things happen along the way; the storage space that is damp, which yellows trace paper and bleeds ink, the model that is kick over, accidentally stepped on, jostled a bit too hard. In the end, you find yourself throwing out the things you probably should have in the first place.

But, even if I don’t have it all, there are certain things I have gone to great lengths to keep - drawings, and more often, models, which I felt particularly strong about. They have followed me from the halls of CMU to a small garage in upstate New York, and inside a car on a journey west, coming to rest in locations scattered throughout the home of my parents. If my career, my path to becoming an architect, were distilled to only these items, I could at least look back and feel proud for the accomplishment - my limited legacy.

I think that’s one of the most appealing aspects to architecture, the eventual realization of your creativity. For now, mine has been limited to the models and drawings of my education. And, well, my first completed project. But, part of what keeps you going through school is the hope that, one day, your work will dot the landscape. A physical legacy to follow an academic one.

However, even this legacy is ephemeral. Buildings are not permanent things, despite their heft, their weight, their concrete existence. This act is underscored by the numerous historic buildings that have been lost over the years. But, what about recent buildings? Sure, some are destroyed by natural disasters, accidents. But, as this article shows, there is a precarious nature to our work. Can you imagine it, imagine being alive to see the purposeful destruction of your work?

There are so many things that disturb me about this particular situation. As many mentioned over on a discussion tread at Archinect, there seem many ulterior motives driving the call for demolition. Read the article. There are some wonderful quotes for the newsreel.

There are also number of issues brought up about the building itself, which call into question how architecture can and should be evaluated. Should architecture survive as an aesthetic symbol, despite its inability to serve its function? Should architecture be evaluated by function first, dismissing the unquantifiable because it is unquantifiable? It’s a complex and intricate debate that has raged for centuries, so tackling that issue will be left for when I have more room and more time. But for now, I think about what it must be like, to hear people call for the destruction of your work as flippantly as they might the removal of a weed.

Legacies are never everlasting. But, in this rapidly changing world, the fate of what we do falls into the hands of a great number of hands. The civic and institutional clients of the past, who footed the bill for many of our past monuments, are dwindling, becoming increasingly intertwined with commercial and economic interests that have very different values. Stability is traded for innovation, preservation traded for simulation and nostalgia. Architecture has been driven into a world of fad, of image and fashion. It has given our work greater public appeal and consciousness. It has decimated our work’s longevity, lifespan. We are dealing with our potential future and our potential demise. And the legacy, once the record of an Architect’s contribution to the world at large, may be erased while the Architect is forced to watch.

Inspirations

2008-01-31T12:35:00.000-05:00

They've been few and far between for sometime here. I think it's time to change that.

So, for the inaugural post of this theme, I am happy to present the home of Studio D'Arc, which I had the pleasure of spending two good months working for.

Photography by Edward Massery via Azure Magazine

Yeah, for a couple of months, I looked forward to calling that the office.

Photography by Edward Massery via Azure magazie

Not bad, eh? Not bad at all...

For a full description of the project, you can hit up Azure magazine, which has a great article written by Ray Ryan, who I also had the pleasure of working with for a short period of time a lifetime ago.

One Year Itch

2008-01-23T20:43:00.000-05:00

It’s true. A year has passed since I found myself packing up and flying across the country to begin my adventures in NYC. New job, new home, new life. Or, well, at least a different one, filled with some hopes, some dreams, a bit of trepidation and a lot of unknowns.

The learning curve after such a change is always steepest at the beginning. And in the first few months I packed it in. I found a place to live, nicely located near my NYC priorities: a good grocery store and express subway lines. I bought furniture and learned that delivery services in this city are the reason why I used to pick up the large item I bought when I lived in suburbia. I had the pleasure of eating a several places I always imagined myself eating at, and becoming enough of a foodie to confidently recommend places to visitors of my ‘hood. I saw every outstanding show on my Broadway list, and hit up smaller plays and concerts that you only find in a fair and vibrant city such as this. I fulfilled a childhood promise, seeing a friend perform at his Carnegie Hall debut. I took in the dramatic sculptures of Richard Serra at the MoMA. I became a MoMA member (only for the store discount, really). I made my way to places I had never been: the Cooper-Hewitt museum, PS.1 for their summer opening, the New Museum, Brooklyn.

But, as I settled in, the adventures gave way to the routine that is everyday life. Work and sleep, with the intermittent break for some television. It was the life of the intern, the life led by thousands, be they in the middle of Nebraska or the center of London. It was growing up, growing into the new role awaiting anyone leaving the safety net of school.

I found myself with responsibilities. I found myself making decisions, calling consultants, issuing drawings, going to client meetings, meeting with clients on site. The abbreviations ASP, DRM, VIF and DO gained meaning. I learned that I CAD comparatively fast to others, and can revise floor plans like nobody’s business. I picked up Photoshop skills that I only wish I had in school, and started sketching on paper one again. I avoided Sketch-UP like the plague, found refuge in Rhino, and made best friends with a fine tip red rolling ball pen. I found myself constantly feeling inadequately prepared for the authority I had been given, but grateful for the chance to feel stupid. I made mistakes, learned how to deal with mistakes made, and, I’d like to think, arrived at a place where I feel, well, comfortable.

Yet, as I reflect on the past year, as one is ought to do as they face the upcoming prospect of that work equivalent of final grades, I find myself oddly discontent. I have done a lot. I have learned a lot. And while I am comfortable at work, where I am no longer the office freshman, or even team novice, I am not sure if I am happy.

Architecture and happiness are definitely not inclusive. I’d like to think they are not mutually exclusive either, but it has been hard to find any of my archi-friends with a burning passion for the job they rush off to each morning. More often than not, our gatherings are sessions bitching about crazy bosses, crazy clients, crazy deadlines, crazy expectations.

Yet we soldier on. We’re a committed bunch. We don’t dilly-dally. We are monogamous creatures…well, at least to our need to create. We may cheat on our employers at some point in time, free-lancing or entering design competitions or pouring ourselves into some other creative outlet, but never on our desire to imagine the unimagined.

I keep on seeing it. Colleagues who spend hours outside of work pursuing something that inspires them. Long hours do not faze them, drowsiness is all but ignored. Something drives them, keeps them committed. I’d like to say I have that too. This blog may be testament of the opposite.

Anyways, I know I’ve got it. The itch, like the mythical itch of relationships, which many use to explain their adulterous ways. I’m tempted by things around me, by alternative lives I could possibly lead, ones that take me out of this world. Ones that would make me a sell-out. Yeah, it’s only been a year. And maybe my itch only needs a change of scenery to be satiated. But, maybe, just maybe, something more drastic needs to happen.

silent all this year....

2008-01-18T15:51:00.000-05:00

I imagined myself to be filled with ideas to start off a brand new year. I had plenty of fodder, that much can't be denied. But, so far, I've only sat in fog. So, while things clear up, I'll leave you with some things:

Should we just embrace celebrity?

What will the New York City be like 100 years from now?

Why can't everything be this simple?

Why do current descriptions of architecture all sound like this?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Year End Review

2007-12-31T18:02:00.000-05:00

On the last day of the year, I thought I’d finally get back to posting. One of many resolutions I hope to fulfill in this upcoming year.

Typically, the year end signals a time for everyone to reflect on the great and glorious things that have past. There are the lists of bests, lists of worsts, lists of favorites, lists of so many things that are meant to summarize why this year might be memorable to future generations.

This little blog has been going on for a little more than two years; it was started on a whim, to chronicle thoughts that had, for the most part, sat idly in my head, taking up some much needed space. So out they came, these notions and ideas and opinions, a way to clear out my mind and clear up my mind. Things are a lot easier to reconcile when they are put into words. At least for me.

I might recall this past year most for marking my transition from student to working professional. Or as professional as one can be beginning their first job. To ensure that I would not get dooced, I have been rather vague about the job. But I can, at least, note the lessons learned moving from the studio to the office. A reminder to myself of what I should have learned.

Lesson one: You can be too productive.

In school, I poured myself into work. And even then, there were times when it wasn’t enough. When I started my job, I brought with me that same intensity, which left me pretty much a dried up prune come mid-year. I learned that, when you give yourself to your work, they only ask for more, rather than acknowledging your effort. And once you’ve set a level of productivity, they’ll push for more, expect more, until you realize you just can’t do it. Which leads to….

Lesson two: No is a word that you must learn to deftly use.

I never used to say “no”. It wasn’t the way I was taught. You took on whatever your boss/superior/teacher told you, and always with a smile. That was the way to show respect, to be a good employee. But, what I learned very quickly is that, without using “no” once in a while, those above you will constantly place more on you. Not because they are lazy or demanding, but because you haven’t communicated clearly what your own limits are. A good boss will respect your “no” if you have clearly stated why you needed to use it. A bad boss with probably resent you for saying it, but at least leave you alone. Either way, you’ve made it clear that you’ve hit your threshold. It saves your sanity.

Lesson three (a): Creative clients are great clients.

Working with people who are constantly questioning, thinking, designing broadens your own pool of ideas. They challenge you to challenge yourself. They bring to the table new inspirations, materials, approaches. They make you remake yourself.

Lesson three (b): Creative clients are pain in the ass clients.

They change their mind, swap proposed finishes for things they “just found” and often have something “in mind”. You may propose something, and they might like it. But then you’ll hear, “it’s just not, well, right for the brand”.

Lesson four: It is often you against the machine.

Be it AutoCAD, which I’ve been able to crash on multiple occasions, or the hassles of printing, this is the age of digital production. Hand drafting is now a “rendering skill” used to “warm things up”.

Lesson five: Getting out of the office is good.

Sure site visits are fast. But they are like school field trips - except you get paid to attend these ones.

Lesson six: Liking work is thirty percent based upon the work you do and seventy percent based upon the people you work with. (At least so far, in my experience)

I work with great people. I like seeing them day in and day out. It makes those long nights a lot easier to handle. Especially when you have a number of them.

Finally, Lesson seven (you know, since it is 2007): The difference between my life now and my life as a student isn’t great.

The only difference now? I have prescribed office hours now, rather than personal ones.

So there it is: my recap of my first year here in this crazy city, the first year of my “career”. Here’s hoping that your own year was filled with lessons, good and bad, that have set you down a path towards something remarkable. Can’t say if I am on one of those paths myself, but maybe having written some more things down, I’ll be closer to figuring it out. See you on the flip side.

Age of Invention

2007-12-02T23:06:00.000-05:00

Having spent a significant amount of flying in the last few weeks, I couldn’t help but marvel at the contraption I found myself in. This sleek aluminum cage facilitated the travel of great distances in a (relatively) short amount of time. It allowed me to get to places that, a century ago, would be impossible given my short window of opportunity. And, as I looked out the window, at the tiny dots of lights, of houses and cars, lighting up the black landscape below, I couldn’t help but think of how great our leaps have been in certain fields.

Invention has been a hallmark of this century. Transportation, manufacturing, media – all have undergone radical transformations. I still can’t believe that, less than a decade ago, a cell phone was considered the luxury of corporate elite. Now, I don’t even own a land line.

There’s no denying that this march forward has dramatically affected Architecture. The way we practice, the way we work and design, it all has changed. The mouse is now our rapidiograph, our screen, our drafting table.

Yet, as much as our modes and methods have changed, Architecture, it could be argued, has not. Sure, we build taller, bigger, faster. New materials and construction techniques have allowed for our current age of megastructures. But, beyond the gloss of new, the veneer that flashes itself across glossy pages in magazines, has Architecture really evolved?

Stripped of the embellishment, the spaces created from all this new technology are rarely revolutionary. The pancake model of construction, which typifies so much of the modern skyscraper or mega-monolith create the same box, only repeated at a scale not seen before. I guess that’s something. But is it enough?

I remember watching The Jetsons as a kid. Sure it was a trippy cartoon of a future many years from now, rendered in a 50’s era doo-whoop motel style, but it was a visionary one. It imagined life lived in a remarkable, transformed way. And it was communicated, in part, by the architecture that surrounded them.

But, have you looked around? Just in this crazy city, there are dozens of new condo units rising on every available lot, skyscrapers shooting up left and right. They all tout new amenities, new ideas for living, lifestyles for this new age. They all market themselves as unique, revolutionary, transformative. And then you look at the floor plans, the renderings for their “amazing” living spaces. Notice anything? How the floorplans are all the same – some variation of squares, with “open concept” living space? How the finishes usually include some type of streamlined cabinet, dark wood bottom and glass fronted top, with stainless steel appliances, granite or some stone countertop, and glass tile backslash? And, of course, the wall of windows, floor to ceiling, which in concept are wonderful and airy, and never shown with the window coverings that will, on the second day, appear to screen out the hundreds of eyes capable of looking into your slice of new generica? Your millions have bought you what? The same space as those on floors above and below you? Unique indeed.

This is not just the case in cities, contained to these glowing glass boxes. Look at the houses in suburbs across the country. Floorplans repeated over and over again, masked with stucco or wood or brick or siding to give a sense of ownership, of being different. Yet nothing so dramatic as to quell that sense of déjà vu, of thinking, I’m sure I’ve been here before. Because without that feeling, then how could you sell the home as welcoming, comfortable, “homey”.

Maybe a revolution is coming. Maybe it can’t happen. The way we eat, sleep, live both drives and is driven by our surroundings. It’s another chicken and egg scenario; do we try to change the way people live, or do we respond to the changes people are making? And if changes are coming, will the lead to a Jetsonian future? Or will it be something like we have now?

There is no denying that Architecture has progressed, has changed. But when the sketches of visionaries a century ago seem to match the renderings of buildings being planned and built today, it seems like we may want to imagine, for a new century, what Architecture may become.

Slow on the uptake

2007-11-02T16:31:00.000-04:00

There are so many things I'd like to write about:

I'd love to get together some thoughts I had after attending a lecture by Howeler +Yoon, who were responsible for this little gem:

I wanted to mention something about this article as well, which, I have to say, is quite timely.

I also could just talk about the most awkward professional experience I have had to date.

The options are endless, but not my time. I'm out for the next three weekends, so if you don't hear from me for a little, please understand. I'm still observing...just more silently than normal.

Everyone's a critic...

2007-10-20T22:38:00.001-04:00

The reality is that everyone is a critic. Everyone has an opinion, everyone an idea of what works and what doesn’t, what should be done, what shouldn’t. But some, some rise above the din of the general public. They are the ones who others read, whose words shape the larger public conscience. They are professional critics, whose lives are lived in telling others how to think.

These people fascinate me, these professionals whose words so many seem to rely upon, who so many seem to hold in such high regard. I mean, how does one really go about getting others to “respect my authority”? I am sure education has something to do with it. Pedigree as well; I have no doubt that an Ivy League degree facilitates a certain immediate respect, regardless of actually competence. Wit, l assume, charisma with the written word, all combining into some singular entity that some organization then hires to communicate to its enraptured populous.

But, on the other hand, is it, like most other things in the world, all due to exposure, popularity? I mean, like high school, where some seemed pre-destined to walk the halls, enthralling others, do these people achieve their influence by luck as much as by talent?

Ever read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson? His central character might be considered one of the best critics; her innate ability to gauge the potential success of brand and logo is her calling card, her professional edge. Because of this, she is sought after, paid handsomely, to tell others what will or will not be cool. I believe she reflects a unifying ability amongst the most popular of critics, whose success lies not in their years of experience and education, but in their ability to predict trends, movements, shared ideas and shifts in ideologies.

It was this quality I admired most about one or two of the most successful classmates I met in my undergraduate and graduate years. They had this knack for understanding trends and fads. Like premonitions, these people knew what others were interested in, or looking for, before they even began looking. And they capitalized on it. Because the other trait these people all share is a keen sense of how cool they are.

It is amazing how that confidence propagates influence. So many times, in studio, I saw others beginning to mimic the aesthetic choices of this leader. Always unspoken, the inclusions, but nonetheless obvious. But, by that time, the leader was onto something else.

But, here’s the big question. If not for the initial arrogance, the aura of being influential, would others so readily try what this first person ventured to do? And would others be so receptive to the outcome, had not this designer, whose reputation had already been cemented as avant-garde or forward thinking, done it before others?

I ask because, well, I know for one that nothing I ever did ended up influencing others. I may have done well at school, even well in studio, but I wasn’t that guy, the one that everyone looked to, everyone secretly envied, tried to emulate. So, while I may have, on one level, qualified to be amongst the primary sphere of influence, I never was elevated to that revered status of design guru.

It is a chicken and egg scenario. Who exactly shapes the dialogue of architecture? Is it those whose positions of authority lead an air of credence to their words? Or is it those designers who can get these critics to continually write about the work they do? Do architects gain influence only after gaining notice by the literati of architecture? Or does the literati of architecture gain influence only after developing a record of uncovering the trends of forward-thinking types who have defined the expected?

In the end, maybe high school is the best analogy. Maybe we can’t get past the need to be popular, even if we try to actively avoid it. Like Thom Mayne, whose rebelliousness only lent his persona, his work, greater gravitas, and who now is shaping a very distinctive style emulated by many a current architecture student. And, despite our most noble intents, or desire to practice an architecture that benefits others, that adds to the built environment, perhaps a small part of architecture will always be about what people are saying is cool right now. Determined by who we think is cool right now.

The Race is On...

2007-10-15T10:22:00.001-04:00

It appears that our friendly Norman Blogster over at PartIV is taking a poll. Best Archi-Blogs. And while I doubt my one reader can save me from the fate of being taken off his blogroll for 2008, I thought I'd at least let you know that the danger exists.

So, while I recognize that I lack the many things that make most architecture blogs popular, like well-researched articles, daily updates, or even , well, great design, I hope I do provide something unique in a world of unique individuals. Perhaps you feel the same...

Just saying.

Faith

2007-10-10T17:52:00.000-04:00

They were concerned. They didn't think it would work. They thought of back-up plans, rubbed their palms and asked what if? I told them to wait. Just be patient.

See...it works:

On the Road

2007-09-20T21:35:00.000-04:00

A minor perk while working on an architecture project is the chance to go out and see things in action. And I just got my first chance.

For me, site visits feel like recess – a nice break from the constants of a work week. Sure, you are still on the job, but you’re out of the office, away from a desk, surrounded not by computers and printouts, but carpentry, cement and dust. And it’s all billable.

The first thing you realize at a job site is, well, how imprecise everything we do is. Sure we make sure our drawings are rounded to the nearest, say, 1/16 of an inch. (That’s a personal thing.) We call out locations based upon column lines, existing markers, drawings provided by the landlord/city/client. We fillet our lines, make sure things are planar, and dimension everything to communicate, as clearly as possible, what we would like executed. But, like language itself, thing can get lost in translation.

You’ll notice things on site – like walls that shouldn’t be there, or walls you expected there now missing. You’ll see details that aren’t quite right; if you’re lucky, things will be minor, fixed simply, like additional filler to make things flush, and if you’re not, well, something is coming out. You’ll also face a number of decisions that will need to be made - immediately.

It’s reactive, a test of your abilities to think on the fly, problem solve in the heat of the moment. It’s exciting, this game, where you must address immediate concerns while thinking about the consequences for things further down the line. You banter with those around you – your general contractor, the client, some of the crew – while you hash out solutions. Hopefully, by the time you leave, everyone has agreed on the way forward.

Amid the commotion, the careful inspection of the nooks and crannies, you’ll ask yourself, why do we bother? I say this because generally, not one thing will need comment or correction. There will be a list - a list that you will need to carefully note, so that it can be sent out the following day. You’ll be jotting furiously while thinking, why spend the time, the hours and hours staring at colored lines, if so much goes unnoticed, so much must change?

It’s about leverage, really; the ability to say, well, it was in the drawings, so do it over. Seriously, your drawings are your contracts. Once your contractor accepts them, they are accountable to them. And that, my friends, will save you later on, when you look at something and think, well that doesn’t look right at all.

But, careful, as this is a double edge sword; your contractor/client has can nail you for mistakes. And, believe, as careful as you try to be, your drawings will never be perfect, never get everything down. Like a good novel, a good drawing set will provide the details to transport you to the world it captures. But, like any novel, there will always be things open to interpretation. You probably felt you were explicit, but something will be missing, or unclear, and those items will undoubtedly make themselves known.

Luckily, I am working with good people. So, the (minor) mistakes we made? Well, they laughed at them, and showed us how they had addressed them. For items that they found unclear, they listened to us as we sketched out our intent. And the problems that only get noticed once you are on site? Well, they worked with us to figure out ways to meet our objectives, showing us that they were conscientious of our concerns, our drawings, our hopes for the project.

But, even good people mix things up. It’s part of the process. As busy as we are in cranking out drawings, our contractors are busy keeping things on schedule, on budget, and as close to our design intent as they understand it. I truly believe that about the people we’ve worked with. And they are likely doing that for multiple other projects simultaneously.

So, for items they missed, we clarified. And those unexpected things, like that wall that we expected to be there and wasn't? Well, we figured it out with a bit of banter, some humming and hawing, to reach a final solution we all got excited about.

You learn, quickly, that the best way to confront these snafus is with a bit of humor. What use is getting angry, at least at first? If they keep screwing up, well that’s definitely another matter. But, like I said, I am working with good people, and they’ were more than willing to reach an amicable solution, often times resulting in more work for them.

It is easy to understand then why, while we kicked some dust, went back to the originally construction set over and over again, sketched ideas on paper, and crossed back and forth from one end of the project to another, I couldn’t help but enjoy just being there. Somewhere, some thousand miles away, my desk was waiting for me, plenty of computer time backlogging itself for my return. But, for the moment, I was a part of a team making architecture magic, working to transform random lines on a white sheet into things we could walk up to and touch.

I think I could handle a lot more days like that.

A Moment of Silence

2007-09-11T21:29:00.000-04:00

Being in New York City on this somber anniversary reminds me how much has changed in our world. To think, it's taken six years to reach a final vision of what will rise out of the ashes. It's been a long time coming.

I still believe in what I wrote a year ago. But, despite my hesitations, and my own personal struggles with this profession I've now joined, I still believe in the possibilities. And I'm glad for that.

Move In

2007-08-27T22:27:00.001-04:00

There it was, the line of cars, all idling along 13^th street. In them, piles of clothes, plastic bins, posters and expectant parents. Move-in had arrived at NYU.

It has been a long time since my own move-in. Eight years since I was that newly minted high schooler, embarking on college life. My move was a cross-country affair, limiting the amount of stuff I could bring on an airplane. (At least it was before the luggage restrictions of today’s friendly skies) It was with two suitcases in hand that I made my way to my freshman room dorm. Not much beyond clothes came along for the journey.

So I marveled at what came out of those minivans and SUVs that processed to the front doors of the NYU dorms. Like a clown car, where surreal numbers emerge from an impossibly small space, piles of things poured out. Pillows and sheets, musical instruments and lamps, computers, TVs, music systems, microwaves, mirrors and the odd stuffed animal – out they came, in plastic bags and suitcases, parents and siblings struggling under the weight of their college student’s over-stuffed cargo.

***

Despite the knowledge that a nomad life lies ahead, college students seem hell-bent on making sure that their dorm rooms effectively capture who they wish to be. The fresh start, the freedom, seems to exacerbate the need to individualize their new habitat, if only temporarily.

Ingenuity becomes the name of the game. With the strict policies leveled by universities over what can change, what must be returned in “original” condition, what can be attached to walls, ceilings, furniture, and what not, you quickly discover the available alternatives for making things stick. I believe 3M has created an entire product line for just such occasions. And with your blue wads of gummy adhesive, up go the things, both sentimental and cliché, which, despite your hopes of individuality, are likely going up on walls of universities and colleges all around the country. Trust me.

And yet, every fall, the same process inevitably repeats. Stores prepare for the rush, salivate at the numbers which will swarm their aisles for the latest in dorm accoutrements. Funky drawers and book cases, mirrors to hang on doors, colorful pillows or beanbags, a carpet or two – all bought by frantic parents in a chaotic spending spree. All done so that their soon to be adult children can shape their space, leave their mark, claim some ownership of their rented digs.

I have to admit that, beyond a photo frame or two, I left much of my room bare. It was an accurate reflection of my connection to my room. I mean, I slept there, maybe studied there late at night. But as I mentioned before, most of the time, I was across campus, hunkered over my drafting board, sweating under the heat of a western setting sun. My R.A. went so far as to informally disown me from the floor; as he put it, I was never around anyways.

Looking back, I see that the lack of connection between me and my dorm room was reflective of my general attitude towards school. I was disconnected throughout much of my first year, stuck between my dreams of escape and my refusal to believe that my college plans had not work out as I had imagined. I moved to college with a dreaded sense of inevitability – as though I had no other choice but to go and see. Excitement wasn’t really a part of my state of mind.

I remember vividly my first weekend after orientation. A friend from the summer was going shopping with her new roommate and invited me a long. Over the course of three hours, I watched these two girls buy matching glasses, plates, with complimentary sheets, a couple of throw pillows and floor rugs. They had thoroughly planned this shopping trip, sketched out, in detail, how they would decorate their new room together. Colors, accessories, the location of a new, full length mirror. We had no sooner arrived back at their room, bags in hand, than they began to unpack their space, moving the just purchased items to their appropriate “homes”. I knew right then that these two girls would be friends and roommates for the rest of school.

That should have been a revelation for my own frame of mind, but alas, I only recognized the importance of shaping my space later, about one year before I left my home in the ‘Burgh for my cross-Atlantic trek. It was only then did I feel settled, as though I had finally created a home for myself. Leaving it was hard.

***

So, maybe it is with a twinge of jealousy that I watched those happy kids, their piles of stuff in tow. They are off to create memories, good and bad, of a place they will inhabit only temporarily. And I hope that they do make it their own, if only for a year. Because the more it means to them, I believe, the better time they will have. A reminder to anyone that architecture is as much about the space created as it is the users who will occupy it.

It's Not Easy....Being Green

2007-08-19T00:25:00.000-04:00

Green is good. And this time, it’s not the paper kind.

If we go by magazines, news articles, and of course, a large music concert that brings together a disparate cast of musicians for a night of “celebration and awareness”, the new cool of our age is environmental responsibility. Saving the planet hasn’t had this much cache since hippies roamed the earth.

This rising interest in “green” is surprising to me, since environmental stewardship has been so much apart of my experience with architecture. My undergraduate school placed a strong emphasis on architecture’s impact upon the world. It wasn’t long into school before we were asked to consider how our designs could be shaped by the environment. Things like solar orientation, energy efficiency, and passive heat gain were increasingly apart of our new architecture vocabulary.

As we progressed, it became clear that our school had evolved into two equally adamant camps – those who championed an environmentally-centric approach to design, and those who wanted nothing more than to view each new building site as a tabula rasa for creative expression. Professors were easily aligned into a certain ideology, and if was often a test of wills between those who wanted nothing more than a double layer façade, raised floor systems and stacked ventilation, and those who wished us to design something ostentatious enough to birth a new architectural iconography.

Funny enough, while in school, the professors whose passions leaned towards green, were often viewed as one-track zealots, ignoring the creative opportunities one sought out in pursuing the profession of an architect. The “greenies” were dogmatic, looking for very specific elements within our design, which if lacking, would automatically mean our failure. It became a game of “find the German detail”, a lesson more in our ability to mimic the work of others than an understanding of the potential benefits of the system.

Yet, in a prophetic twist of fate, everything I learned is now de rigueur in practice today. LEED ratings are being tossed around like candy at Halloween, the most theoretical propositions now have some sort of environmental bent, and no architect, be it the local solo practitioner, or a massive factory firm, can go without at least some familiarity with the green aspects of their work. Developers are even selling based upon the “greenness” of their latest projects. I guess those hippies were just a couple decades a head of their time.

But, in the momentum of green advocacy, the fundamental question of what “being green” means has been quietly tabled. Does it mean you take the newest in technology and jam it into every project you do? Does it mean you design with a mind for the future, and even your project’s potential destruction? Is it creating the smallest carbon footprint, sourcing materials from only local suppliers, making sure everything you specify is non-toxic, recyclable and potentially organic? Does being green literally mean being green – grass roofs sprouting from every surface so that the earth you claimed is given directly back? Do you hold Cradle to Cradle as your bible, join the Green Building Alliance, and get yourself LEED certified? Maybe it is all of the above. Maybe you pick and choose. It’s anyone’s guess.

Working in retail presents a particular paradox to this whole need to be green. I work on projects whose life expectancy is, at best, 10 years – a reminder that, above all else, what I do is very much subject to trends and fads. I effectively design things that will, in all likelihood, become dumpster waste at one point in the near future. Not quite the “green-friendly” practice of architecture I learned in school.

Sure, we can specify more recycled materials, things that could easily be reconstituted into a new store, in a new location. We can design for the inevitable destruction. But it still assumes destruction, the idea that we will always have to do it over.

The thing that bothers me most about that approach is its reliance on a continual consumption of goods – that we can save ourselves from the catastrophes of climate change through the constant purchase of new things, better things, friendlier things, things that will become other things. But the emphasis is always on the replacement of things.

At my university, it is remarkable to note that the original buildings, designed and built at the turn of the 20^th century, still sit on campus today. Sure, they have been reconfigured, repurposed. They have been refinished, updated, with new technologies grafted onto the bones, allowing them to meet the needs of today’s students. But they stand, adapted to the changing needs of their users. Later buildings, built at the mid-century mark? Destroyed, deemed unsalvageable, their existence covered over by the foundations of new buildings whose life spans, we hope, will be somewhat longer.

And that is, for me, an issue that never gets addressed in this rush to be green. While we think of the new and great ways to make things more energy efficient, more user friendly, more recyclable, we pass by the fundamental issue: do the products we rush to buy actually help us create things with a solid future?

Let’s face it – much of today’s architecture, be it green focused or not, has a limited shelf life. And that’s not just from an aesthetic point of view. Buildings rise and fall, that’s a given. But it seems that what has been built lately falls a lot quicker than those buildings of the past. Why that is seems like something to explore, before we get to things like telling our clients to use lighting systems that adjust to ambient daylight.

No, we can’t necessarily plan for the future life of the buildings we will design and build. Some buildings survive because of their history, their cultural significance. Others survive by luck. I don’t imagine that Sir Giles intended his Bankside Power Station to become a center for modern art. But there it is, the Tate Modern, a quite successful transformation, in my own humble opinion.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in the need for our profession to take an active role in this wave of environmental activism. We are, by the nature of our work, responsible for dramatically altering good old mother earth; consequently, it is up to us to make sure that our work is sympathetic to nature, rather than a desecration. But, before we get swept up in ratings and bamboo flooring, solar panels and non-toxic carpets, we may want ask ourselves this: is what we plan to do is worth the permanent mark we will leave? And can we build with a longevity that provides for a different use, a different future, from the one originally intended?

So, while not overtly green, as new projects of that scale tend to scream in their publicity statements, the Tate is a remarkable case of reuse. A potential landfill’s worth of waste, saved, salvaged, and put to use for a new generation. I don’t think of it as a building many would associate with the “green” movement, but I would definitely consider it a very green project. Old becomes new, and with it, brings to life an industrial wasteland. That is a type of recycling I can get behind.

It's Extreme

2007-07-26T00:13:00.001-04:00

I have a guilty pleasure of sorts. And it embarrasses me to admit it.

I actually like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

I believe that my right to call myself a progressive student of architecture has now been revoked.

Let’s be honest. It’s over the top. It is extreme in every sense of the word. Nothing is subtle about what happens over the course of their “week”. Things get blown up, bulldozed, torn apart by everything from diggers to horses. Hundreds of volunteers descend en masse to build homes that bust at the seams. Rooms have playgrounds or swings or animals or cars, fulfilling childhood fantasies that all of us once dreamed. And then there is the stuff – the TVs of ever larger size, the kitchens with the gleaming stainless and their stocked fridges and the multiple ovens, the yards with pools, fountains, football fields, a race track or two. It is as much a photo op for the range of products available at your local Sears as it is a reality show.

And then there is the emotion, the multiple shots of wet tears, “oh my gods”, the screaming, the hands covering mouths in gasps of overexcited joy. The cutaways to reflective moments by the numerous hosts and family members, each reciting the innumerable ways their lives will be changed, transformed, by this moment. Clichés abound, but you overlook them because of the sincerity with which they are uttered.

I have to say that, personally, each and every project has been a testament to what I dread about the American Built Environment. The homes are extraordinary only in the speed in which they are erected and the excess in which they are finished. They reflect the McMansion nature of residential architecture, where more is better, even when unnecessary. The designs are, themselves, clichés, with Rockwellian ideas of “home” shouting from every pitched eve, porch, bay window and, yes, garage. This is the American dream lived large, brash and in your face.

And yet, though I might cringe at the aesthetic choices of their designers, I can’t help but watch. Watch and marvel at the impact these homes have on their grateful residents. People argue the potential impact of architecture, the ability of the built environment to affect human beings; I’d say that each episode is proof positive that the things we build can dramatically affect those who inhabit them.

****

When I was teaching my Architecture for Kids class – the one filled with second and third graders – I started simple. I asked the kids what they thought of when I said the word “Architecture”. Several drew tall boxy skyscrapers, the true ‘Burghers tried their best to draw the Three Rivers Stadium, but a majority of them drew images of their homes. Or some sort of reflection of what their own homes. Because, beyond just trying to get the right appearance, like those who were so patiently working on the stadium, these kids were adding things to their houses to reflect, well, the atmosphere. There were flowers and swing-sets, their pets rolling in the grass, and of course, family members either in the windows or outside holding hands. There was a life attached to these buildings, memories that these little artists felt essential to achieving an accurate portrait of their subject at hand. I should know. Because when I asked each kid to describe why they chose to draw what they did, I got some very detailed, very long descriptions, drawn out in ways only an 8 year old can.

Each presentation was a revelation. To be honest, I had become quite jaded by then, ready to write off architecture as nothing more than a game in semantics, popularity and image-making. But, as each kid stood up to explain why their drawing represented the word “Architecture”, I understood that they had been deeply influenced by the results of our profession. Once kid excitedly recounted his first time walking into Three Rivers Stadium, noting how the big arches reminded him of football players holding up a teammate. Another informed the class that, having gone to the top of the Cathedral of Learning and looked down, he now understood why it too his mother so long to drive around the city. The roads were just too crazy.

For the kids who drew pictures of their own homes, the presentations were deeply personal. Why their homes were perfect, or cool, or great, varied. But each spoke with great conviction. They loved their houses, and everything that was wrapped up inside them. They wanted everyone else to know why their house was so awesome, and took elaborate pains to make sure we agreed. And I loved watching these kids, knowing that they, at this moment, felt so strongly connected to a place. It gave me hope that, someday, I might just provide the shell for some future child’s happy memories.

****

The homes of Extreme Makeover may be clichéd architectural forms, but I get why the designers play it safe. The people they are helping have been battered left and right, and their homes reflect the turmoil. Like the families, the homes are often broken, held together by sheer will, and in need of some serious TLC.

Thus, the challenge undertaken by the makeover team is greater than just providing a new place to live. They must create something that encapsulates the hopes and dreams of a family looking for a new life, a better life, fresh from the pain of the past. Get it wrong and you not only make something a person doesn’t like, you crush the dreams of people desperately looking for something solid and firm to build a new life upon.

So, while part of me squirms at the fact that an architect fails to appear anywhere in the series, another part of me appreciates how carefully each house is tailored to the family that will live there. These families get places that they instantaneously connect with, speak about with the same reverence my kids did. And it makes me think that, perhaps, these people have seemingly done a better job than I of being an architect.

A FountainHead Moment

2007-07-08T22:09:00.000-04:00

Inevitably, as an architect, you’ll encounter at least one reference to Ann Rand’s most famous of novels, The Fountainhead. Most likely someone will ask you if you a) have met architects with the ego of her most famous of characters, Howard Roark, and b) do you think Mr. Roark was right?

In reading the book or watching the film, I couldn’t help it; a small part of me admired Howard’s commitment to doing things his way. He lived in an idealized world of architecture practice – he believed in his expertise and talent and demanded the same from others. Yes, he suffered. But, it was for his art. And isn’t that the most respectable thing you can do?

***

Studio is a unique place, a hybrid zone that is both reflective and ignorant of the realities of the profession of architecture. It was our practice battlefield, where weeks were spent answering to yourself, your expectations, your logic. Development was a labor intensive process of experimentation, with the luxury to fail. To make a mistake. To decide that, yes, that was really stupid. It was practice to make perfection, to create a final plan of attack that would, hopefully, yield a victory come final reviews.

In every studio, each professor asked us to push ourselves harder, produce more. Like over-zealous parents, harping on our irresponsible behaviors, they never seemed content. But, it makes sense, because, ultimately, it was through our work that we would argue our position. Our work was our proof, our method of persuasion, to convince strangers that our ideas had validity.

While, at the time, our professors seemed like blowhards, I can see a point to their methods. Our professors were training us not only in how to approach design, but how to believe in ourselves and our talents. Because if we didn’t, then why would anyone else? And if they couldn’t trust in our talent, then why would they bother to listen?

***

The thing about working is that, often times, you’ll find yourself second-guessing that self-belief. Time and time again you find design decisions being driven by factors that seem to be far beyond your control. Or input. You get rejected, again or again. You learn the phrase “value engineered”. After enough times, you begin to wonder what’s the point?

I guess that I find the value of Architecture to be diminished in this day and age of market-driven desires. When a name raises a property value rather than the potential of the idea. When money talks more than social responsibility. When it seems like the final decisions are made by spreadsheets and dollar signs.

Sure, the money is important. I mean, things don’t build themselves. And, well, I eat because someone pays my company, who then pays me. I get it. Architecture is a business as much as it is anything else.

But, when compromise seems to be less about give and take, and more about being railroaded, or just silenced, then I think we need to step back, take stock, and ask ourselves, what happened? When did we become ignorable?

So, while pulling a Roark on my next project isn’t really what I plan to do, I can see how I might want to. Instead I am taking stock. Evaluating. Do I have the faith in Architecture to change the world? The talent to contribute to that pursuit? Or am I worth more somewhere else?

Pause. Rewind.

2007-06-27T20:27:00.000-04:00

Remember when I wrote this? Well, let's just say I've having a flashback. Or a nightmare. Whatever. Anyways, I promised myself I'd write soon, but every night, when I finally get home, all my head wants to do is rest on a pillow. And now, as I squeeze in this moment to say, yes I am still alive, all I imagine is how nice it will be to fall asleep tonight.

So, until I find time to breathe, I hope you'll peruse the archives and enjoy the fact that you have free time.

Seven

2007-06-03T00:48:00.000-04:00

I am not the one for memes and whatnot, but seeing as my friend has used this particular one to share more intimate details about her own life, I thought I’d take the chance to do the same. So, here we go, seven random things about me. Somewhat archi-related, of course.

1) Sitting in a courtyard outside my alma mater’s student center are platters of my own design. They are the only item that, to date, I can claim ownership to. They are also an item that I have, on many occasions, denied ownership of. Chalk it up to “value engineering”, but let’s just say that I understand the disappointment of having something you imagined actually realized.

2) Our school allowed us to become teaching assistants as undergraduates. I would like to believe that, overall, I was a help to both the faculty that asked for my assistance and the students that were in the class. However, I will most likely be known as the student who, during one particular architectural history lecture, managed to dump the entire slide carousel onto a row of visiting Belgium students. To this date, I am the only assistant to have accomplished such a distinction.

3) While I have always enjoyed school, I was not always the most, well, attentive student. Let’s just say that there were several classes in my undergraduate career that I failed to stay awake through. This, understandably, pissed off my housemates who usually sat next to me in lectures, because, come finals, I still managed to eek out a better grade. They referred to it as “learning by osmosis”. Hey, I never actually missed a class.

4) I lived on campus for only one year. While dormitory life was not horrible, it wasn’t for me. For my second year, I found a studio about a mile from campus, with easy access by buses. This allowed me an escape from studio life, which I sometimes desperately need, and accounted for my more regimented second year schedule. The best thing about my apartment? Telling people how to find me, as the apartment was located above the Pussycat Lingerie store.

5) I am not really a kid person. Ask any of my friends. I’m awkward around them, partly because I think I scare them. But, for two years, I found myself assisting in our school’s Architecture for Kids program. My first year, I assisted in class for high school students, which was pretty easy. Well, that was after I got them to start talking to each other; for the first two classes, it was like a junior high school dance, with girls on one side and boys on the other. For my second year, I had to opportunity to actually run a class, down to designing the curriculum. The only catch – it was for third and fourth graders. Yet, for some reason, I agreed to be surrounded by nearly thirty innocent faces waiting to explore something that excited them. My greatest fear was that, somehow, I’d ruin that naivety with some boring assignment that would effectively snuff out any interest in the field. But, with the help of some very great assistants, we spent 10 pretty awesome weeks together. It was the first time I appreciated my education.

6) Third year in school, a friend and I decided, for kicks, to enter designs into a student fashion show. That winter break found me learning how to modify patterns and sew. While this sounds stupid, it was the first time I was part of something “cool” at university; being a major event of the social calendar, the most popular kids from throughout the school participated. I admit, the entire time, I felt rather out of place amongst the “models” and other socialites, preferring to hang in the background and focus on how the clothes would work out. Never became cool myself, but at least I could make some kick ass stuff for people to wear. And those clothes, well, they have made appearances all over the place, thanks to my brother’s days in Washington DC.

7) My class was filled with talented people, great designers. I can’t consider myself one of them. I did well in school. In fact, grade wise, I did really well. And that makes me feel like a fraud.

Creativity

2007-05-06T23:24:00.000-04:00

Working in a world of creative production has many real and imagined perks. The chance to be a designer is, to many I speak to, something admired, even envied. “You get to create things!” they enthusiastically say, a wistful look in their eyes. “It must be so amazing.”

In school, perhaps more than any where else, that was true. Days, months, years, spent pursuing the creation of things. It was, indeed, a wonderful way to get a diploma. The models and drawings I have scattered across the multiple places of my past are a testament to that. Oh the secrets those junkyards hold.

But, while creation was always given, creativity was quite a different matter. In school, it was the one thing I constantly struggled with – the idea of creativity. A constant question sat at the back of my mind; was I really being creative, or was I just remaking someone else’s inspiration?

Inevitably, the first week in your new studio will be filled with precedents. Studies of what has come before. You build a quick history of your building, a review of what has come before, what people have admired, what works. You make drawings, analyzing the spaces, the ideas, the programs, of others. And you do this work faithfully, in the hopes of finding inspiration and learning from what you have seen. Why remake the wheel, they say.

I thoroughly enjoyed precedent work. The mining, the analysis, the conjecture. It was time dedicated to the discovery of purpose, meaning, intent. Not just, well, if it was pretty. It was to appreciate a building for both its successes and its failures, and gather insights that could inform future design work.

But, once the design work began, I often found myself hesitant in the avenues I would pursue. Was the layout too much like a house by Paktau Architects? Wasn’t this double layer façade nearly identical in detail to that of Renzo Piano? Weren’t these forms a bit too reminiscent of Zaha Hadid’s graphic paintings? I battled a flood of uncertainty, second-guessing, doubt. Moments when I wished that those images, those ideas, of all those precedents could be purged, with a simple click, from the random access memory of my mind.

Originality. Does it exist? In the truest sense of the word? That was the constant challenge heralded by out professors. Be Original. Propose new and inspired ideas about how one might live, work, exist. Think Outside the Box.

The irony of their words, a cliché used to promote innovation, underlies the conundrum of creative, well, creation. I believe that any artist, be in architecture or some other creative field, aspires for moments of divine, transcendent, inspiration. To be the proprietor of revolutionary ideas that might just transform the world. To be a Picasso, a Gaudi – to generate a movement, rather than be apart of one. Okay, that might be a bit grandiose, but you never hear of a designer aspiring to be a copycat, do you?

The line between inspiration and imitation is thin. Especially when you hear “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” running through your head. As a student, you have leeway. You are learning, growing, as a designer. Exposing yourself to the ideas, forms, images of established artists assists in expanding the way you might see the world. Hopefully, by trying some ideas out, you broaden your expectations and abilities, finding, in the process your own hybrid, your own vision, to explore in your work.

In the professional world, I always imagined the line to be much more defined. After all, there are the whole legal issues of infringement and what not. Plus, wasn’t the point of establishing your own firm, or career, about defining your own approach to building and design?

But, I realize, working, that the line is perhaps even more tenuous. The collusion of client desires, economics and time make flattery an easy way out. You can’t bill for excess hours of thinking. So you find inspirations to show the client, visuals to help them understand your vision. Until the images hijack your meeting, and the client fixates on what sits before them, rather than what you are trying to imagine for them.

Perhaps that is why movements begin, why suddenly an obscure idea seems to be everywhere. The rise of blobs, the “new” modernism, going green. Somewhere an idea was born, one that some adventurous soul pushed forward, and with client support, got built. And seeing the idea built inspired others to try versions like their own, eventually moving the ideas into the realm of the popular. The “I want that” phenomenon.

Not to say that participants in movements are just copying the progenitor. They are likely adding a spin to the ideas percolating in the collective pot of shared knowledge. But there are still those moments when you look at something and say, “doesn’t that look a lot like….” I look back at my own work and see the strong influences of those who I studied. Sometimes that disappoints me. Other times, it inspires me, showing me how much I have developed from those moments of my design infancy.

I still struggle daily, sitting at my computer, working out details with a copy of Graphic Standards by my side. Is this creativity? Tweaking generic details to fit my needs? How much change makes this work my work, and not a copy of another’s? And will I ever have a moment when a book can’t help me, and I will be left, on my own, to find a solution? I look forward to that moment with anxiety and expectation. I dream that I will rise above the challenge, and really invent something unique. I fear that, at that critical moment, I’ll choke. But the moment has been elusive, as of yet. And for my past work, I still see little to make me feel comfortable calling myself an architect. I don’t know if I will ever feel comfortable referring to myself with such a title.

But, if one day, in my old age, I find someone’s work bearing a remarkable likeness to my own, I might just be able to. Well…that’s as long as they, in some way, acknowledge me as a reference.

Workaholic

2007-04-15T23:21:00.000-04:00

The hours add up. Fast. Soon it becomes natural to spend nine, then ten, then twelve hours sitting at your desk, staring at a screen. And what was once just a part of your life now defines your life.

In the past three weeks, I’ve averaged around 13 hours a day. And I was lucky, avoiding weekends until this past Saturday, when in a move I will never repeat, I answered the call of a number I didn’t recognize. “Can you come in, just for a couple of hours. We really need the help.” Not completely naïve, I knew it would be longer. Still, I felt like a true idiot, as I rolled out of the office that night, almost eight hours after I had arrived.

Among the other things I know wish I had known when I began my job hunt was the small detail of compensation for overtime. You see, I was under the impression that, well, it was nigh impossible, to ever get compensated for long hours. I was under the distinct impression that, especially in the architecture field, you get a salary, and are expected to get your work done, regardless of how many hours that ends up being. But, now, now I know that a holy grail exists out there, where a salary around a 40 hour work week, and anything beyond that is considered…wait for it…paid overtime, or only slightly less beautiful, paid time off. I get neither so I will dream on.

Yes my dear friends. Places exist that do pay you overtime. And they are architecture jobs. Alas, reflecting on how long I work, I have to say that those things would come in handy. My compensation for being called in on a weekend? A thank you and the offer to be reimbursed for a moderately priced main course.

Over worked and underpaid. It is a classic cliché of the virgin intern. Not just in the field of architecture. Many fields thrive on the foundations of cheap labor. It is just part of the culture, the mechanics that make this world move forward. Right?

Somehow, the culture of architecture has been engrained with the expectation that, from the beginning, you will always suffer, at least a little, for the privilege. The privilege to experiment, explore, dream and create. Because what we do is just that, a privilege, earned after sacrifice.

That seemed to be the underlying message of much of my architectural education. Work harder, longer. Spend more hours, build more elaborate models. Dive into it. Drown in it. Because that’s the way you learn. That’s the way you earn the right to stand up one day and declare yourself an architect.

The stories come and go about the great architects of our day. Starchitects, who suffered for years in obscurity, obstinately pursuing their passion. But then, reward. For the work, the effort, the time spent wondering if they would one day change the world like they had always dreamed.

And so you toil. You think, one day too, my work will reap some benefit. Be it fortune or fame, or just the right to sign off on a project. One more hurdle, and one day I, too, will feel as though I have made it, become apart of this club.

But, somehow, along the way, you forget to ask another question. Is it worth it? Because that question is harder to answer, more complicated to confront. It’s easier to stay the course, imagine yourself heading towards a goal, even if it lays as a dot distant on the horizon.

Too many times, nowadays, it seems as though who we are becomes defined by what we do; our qualifications, our resumes, our professional paths. In architecture, we seem to have fixated on the who and what – who we know, who we’ve worked for, what we’ve done, what we’ve experienced. Suddenly, we find ourselves facing the surmounting task of defying the expectations others have laid upon us.

I took a job because, at the time, it was a job. Did it fit into a larger plan of who I will become as an architect? I don’t know. At least not yet. It was certainly an unexpected place for me to land where I have, but one that may truly benefit me in my future life. I do know that I am learning. And for now, that is enough. But to others, who will read my resume in the future, what will the read from this experience? Will they assume things about me that I have not? Will they infer a path that I have not intended? Will I have limited myself by this choice, pigeonholed before I have a chance to decide?

Suddenly, the work I do takes on a dimension I am not quite comfortable with - one that I must seriously consider. And being a workaholic takes on new meaning. Because, in the eyes of others, the extra hours that so mindless add up, may have taken on a mind of their own.

Man and Machine

2007-03-26T23:15:00.000-04:00

It sits in the corner of the office, a hulking presence that will undoubtedly be, at one point, your undoing.

No matter that our technology has transformed out practice of architecture, there is one place where technology has seemingly cast a blind eye. And, despite our growing savvy in the use of all things computer related, we are ultimately stopped dead in our tracks by any failure of this single mechanical beast. You know which one I’m talking about.

Funny how we can develop programs to model the exact reflection of light rays on complex surfaces or animate the motion of leaves, and yet be stumped by the loading of a roll of paper into a plotter. Yes, while we can create with ease, producing it still is fraught with pitfalls.

So many things confound me with plotters. Questions like, if we can design a plotter to tell us that the paper is misaligned, why haven’t we gotten to around to making it able to align itself? And loading paper? Could it be any more convoluted? Pull down a lever, put up a hood, insert the edge one way but not another, leave a lot of slack only to tighten the roll later on. It’s like an intricate dance where your partner, while looking for you to take the lead, often refuses to follow suit. And you know what happens after one awkward dance. You become hesitant to step back out on the floor.

I know I am not the only one. All of my co-workers look upon the plotters with hesitancy, even fear. The first time I asked how to change the plotter? I went to four different people before I could find someone had changed it themselves. I’ve only been there a couple of months, but I’ve already replaced the paper in both plotters more times than half the office.

It seems odd to overlook such a crucial aspect of our technological march forward. After all, as I mentioned before, our projects are only as good as our tools of communication. If others can’t understand what you’ve imagined, either because they cannot understand your drawings, or, as the case sometimes is, you can’t get the drawings out onto paper in the first place, then what is the point of all those hours spend waiting for the rendering timer to show complete?

There is, of course, projecting the images somewhere. But powerpoint slideshows can be the death of any salesman, so you take a gamble in pursuing that route. In school, especially at my masters programme, you’d be scoffed at immediately if powerpoint was your mode of communication. Too generic, too business, too corporate. If you were a true “creative type”, then flash would be your answer. Many an AA project presentation will attest to the abilities of selling through an interactive onscreen presentation. But, ultimately, in the office place, we still work with lines on paper, though these days it is shot out through a process of hot ink and lasers.

Somehow, it’s the last thing we think about. The time it takes to print. The possible problems we’ll inevitably have. Paper running out. Ink running out. Color matching not matching. Paper Jams. Large files unable to be processed. Drying time. These are all little things with very big consequences. Like failing to make it to your presentation on time, which not one, not two, but while I was working at my alma mater, dozens of students would flirt with doing come final reviews. Note to you all out there. Because the plotter is located at school, on site and not off at some Kinko’s somewhere, does not mean that you can plot twenty minutes before you plan to present.

An office environment seems to feed the temptation to push the limits of time. Maybe because, unlike school, where the cost for additional prints comes from your own pocket, you’ll be charging the client, for at least some portion of the printing costs. And, in an office, if you have a deadline, your project gets priority. In school, everyone’s deadlines are priorities.

So you get complacent. After all, what’s one more print? One more change? It just means that, where you thought you were leaving the office at six, you will now find yourself leaving at ten. It happens. All the time. I shutter to think the number of trees that have given themselves up in the name of getting the perfect aqua blue. At least we recycle.

And in the end, when you final get approval, get the all clear for that final print, well, that’s when the real countdown begins, when you really notice how long it takes to get everything out. So you stand in front of the plotter, watch the inkheads spread their glorious mixes, line by line, and wait for the plot to finish. Just so you can cancel the extra 40 seconds of drying time, and catch the print before it falls down into the drawing tray, where it would most likely get creased in the process. Because, somehow, 40 seconds makes such a difference to the 4 hours of overtime you’ve just put in.

So, if someone at HP, or some other wonderful company, could come up with a solution to any of my plotting problems, I would be forever grateful. Well, except that, in sorting out my current problems, you’d probably give my boss new reasons to think they can push a deadline. I guess, either way, I’ll be staying late.

Deadlines

2007-03-13T00:13:00.000-04:00

It doesn’t matter. The plans, the schedules, the directives. In the end, there is always a rush to a deadline.

Last week was a doozy. By Wednesday night I had completed my forty hours. A late night to start the week, a later one in the middle, I found myself dreaming of sleep, the morning just beginning. All to get things done, meet goals that were overly-ambitious to start with.

In school, ambition paid certain dividends, though the measure of them required a certain subjectivity. After all, normal standards for success would never reconcile why you had just spent a sleepless week, working your ass off in order to barely pass. So you tell yourself you’ve learned things, accomplished things that were personally important, significant to your own growth, evaluations be damned. Ambition often got you in over your head, but it also often got you noticed. So, you might say, the worked paid off.

But, the same is rather more difficult in a professional setting. At least as an underling, as my case may be. Because, as an underling, you don’t answer to personal ambitions, you must submit yourself to the ambitions of those above you. And your work is their pay off.

I have yet to meet an architect that doesn’t have some small tendency towards perfectionism. It does make sense; without the attention to detail, the insatiable need to have things done a specific way, some serious mistakes would be made. And mistakes in our profession can have some disastrous consequences. Case study after case study provides proof. So does lawsuit after lawsuit.

The problem with perfectionism is that it often supersedes a rational understanding of time. Suddenly, the mind believes that, yes, those several additional drawings can be finished, as well as the new revisions to the plan, which will ultimately change the sections, the elevations, and every other drawing you might possibly wish to present. Oh, those colors, well, they aren’t right. Not the first time, not the second. But close on the third.

And that’s where I found myself that late night, trying to figure out if the shading in my latest printout was close enough to the real swatch that I held in my hand. It would have been easier had our plotter been calibrated as well as our color printer. But, since that wasn’t the case, it became a guessing game of hue and saturation, my eyes tearing up as their stared at the tiny pixels facing me.

I reached acceptable color matches somewhere near delirium, but at least not so late as to pull a dreaded all-nighter. I might have been a bit more disgruntled, as I packed up my things and tiredly made my way out the door. But, I knew, behind me, my studio managers still carried on, the end to their night not even close in sight. Because, for them, ambition was still fueling them along, still telling them that there was time – time for decisions, contemplation, revisions, and new ideas.