“everyone’s a critic”

According to Google (i.e. the answer for everything), the phrase “everyone’s a critic” was quoined on the award winning show Frasier (one of my favorites) and it’s an awesome phrase because we are all critics. We all offer our own two cents (or buck fifty, if you’re me) on any number of subjects that we probably shouldn’t. This is no different in architecture and studio critiques.

Recently I was at the U of A (University of Arkansas – Go Razorbacks!) taking photos and verifying some field measurements at what is currently the Architecture building. When I was done, and this being my first time to the campus, I decided to be a Nosey Parker and peek inside to see what was what.

And, as luck would have it, there happened to be a midterm critique getting ready to start for a number of the studios (SCORE!). I quietly mozied around the peg boards for a bit, raising a queer eyebrow at some and giving the patented archi-nod to others as I waited for the first reviews to start. The projects, I could tell, were in the early stages of development. There seems to be a growing theme in archi-academia to focus on and create a building shell before fully investigating the building program. I find this incredibly annoying, but hey, it’s not my class, so whatever. :-\

I happened upon one set of projects just as the jurors were sitting down and decided to start here. The students were in Studio 6, which I assume is somewhere around 3rd or 4th year. As they began their presentations, first giving the broad strokes and trying to build up to something, I remember thinking back to my own studio years and commenting personally on how far I’ve come since those first awkward presentations to today. That confidence in our work that is key to any successful presentation really can only come from experience.

This sentiment was evident when I snuck over to the 5th year students who were giving their presentations at the middle of their final year. Presentation styles were much different. Much more relaxed, confident and composed.

All in all, I was impressed with the work (if a little annoyed at the over-use of the laser cutter for model making – CHEATERS!!). I really wanted to just pull up a chair and see if I could make someone cry, but I resisted. Maybe next time.

I shot a few photos of some of the works. Enjoy.

Daily Prompt: Houston? Come in, Houston

This is like 3 days late….but whatever. :-\

How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?

When you think of “architecture” or “architect” the first things to come to mind are most likely your favorite or most often seen buildings, rolls of drawings, or Keanu Reeves from that movie The Lake House. What probably doesn’t come to mind is a guy in a suit standing in front of a projector screen giving a presentation to a group of old white guys or at a construction site with sleeves rolled up arguing with a contractor about one thing or another. But let me tell you, this is much closer to the truth.

The first and last thing we do, as architects, is communicate. It is the first and most often used tool in the Architect’s repertoire. And we’re not talking just verbal communication here either, though that is incredibly important. We must also communicate visually with hand sketches, models, drawings, specifications and even random, insane looking hand motions.

And how you communicate, whether via email, speech, drawing, sketching or frantic waving of hands, is just as important as the information being communicated. There needs to be a consistency in your delivery. If you’re all over the place and can’t keep things moving smoothly then chances are you’re not getting a ton of call backs or referrals.

At the end of the day an Architect needs to be consistent in their communication, no matter the medium. And we should be ever improving ourselves in this skill in order to provide better service to our clients, build more solid relationships with engineers and contractors and ultimately aid in building a better world for future generations.

Daily Prompt: Decisions Decisions

How are you more likely to make an important decision — by reasoning through it, or by going with your gut?

Architecture, like life, is made up of a series of decisions. Some good, some successful. And some….not so much. The process by which these decisions are reached is significant and varies for each designer and each architect. I myself use a combination of the two: reason and gut.

When designing a building for a site, or when renovating an existing structure, the first thing you want to do is get familiar with it. This usually requires a site visit. You need to see, smell, touch and feel the space or property you’ll be designing. You want to know where the sun is, where neighboring buildings are, how tall are they, is there a highway nearby, etc. All of these things will impact your design.

Next you want to look at the building plan or site plan and, depending on what the program calls for, you begin to take all of that information you’ve gathered and begin to make decisions. Some of them will be gut – they’ll just make sense. Others will need to be thought out and reasoned – this usually feels like a game of Tetris. Especially with existing buildings.

the design process….

Architectural Design is not a straightforward or linear process. It’s usually a mess. If most clients saw everything that goes into designing a home or an office building or even a kitchen….they’d probably go mad. Architects are mad already, so it’s ok. In the end, to design a good building you have you use all of the tools available to you. Your gut and your head.

the ARE and the title

test schedule – 2 down, 5 to go

Over the last several years I’ve talked a lot about the profession of architecture and of architects as an outsider, as one who has not earned the title “Architect”. Sometimes I’ve been on the side of Architects and sometimes I’ve been on the side of the unlicensed designer. I’ve spoken often against NCARB and the ARE as an arbitrary and sometimes ridiculous set of hurdles that we are forced to navigate. But, at the end of the day, there is nothing, and I mean nothing, more important to me than to earn that license – to finally be an Architect.

I’m not there yet, but I will get there, and soon. As I’m testing this Thursday, April 11th, I’m sure I’ll be posting a healthy rant about my testing experience. Stay tuned. We’re two down, one scheduled and 4 more to go. Booyah!

sometimes I get giddy

As many of you know I recently changed cities, changed jobs and changed drafting platforms. It’s been a very stressful and challenging few months. So it’s no surprise that in all of this change the strangest things make me just….well, giddy. Like a little school girl. Giddy.

In learning Vectorworks and BIM it’s been a turbulent road. The learning curve is not constant. There are sharp rises, very low valleys and some long plateaus in between. It certainly makes each day interesting and recently (about 2 minutes ago, thus prompting this blog post) I discovered a new tool which I wasn’t sure was going to work the way I needed it to, but actually turned out to be a saving grace.

Bring on the giddy, school girl squealing and screeching.

image by: haiiro-no-tenshi.deviantart.com

The tool - 3D Extract

Oh what a wondrous invention on the programmers part. But first a little backstory is needed. For our office we purchased just the Vectorworks Architect software. We didn’t go for the extra bells and whistles with Renderworks which would have made this whole post moot, but that’s another story. Without Renderworks you can’t assign textures which makes rendering impossible and elevations…..difficult. But we make do with what we have.

So, after trudging along in 3D long enough it was time to begin setting up plan and elevation sheets for the client to really start moving forward. This is where one of those sharp rises on the learning curve come in. Plan, no problem. Elevations, no problem. Annotating notes, no problem. Assigning hatch patterns and rendering materials, big problem. At first I discovered that I was most likely going to have to hatch each 2D elevation on the sheet. This was upsetting.

But, now after about a month I’ve finally figured out the 3D extract tool, which is a savior. It allows you to select individual wall faces (or any object face for that matter) and basically create a copy at it’s present location. You can then assign a hatch, color, whatever, to that surface in 3D space. This will then translate to your 2D viewports on your sheet files, so you don’t have to hatch each and every elevation in annotation mode.

Hallelujah!

In addition to this, and I’m sure I’ll find this valuable in the future, you can also extract 3D Loci (3D points) that can be snapped to when you need to draw objects in 3D space and can’t snap. And there are some other functions that I’ll learn as I go, but these two are the most beneficial right now.

Vectorworks is really a sweet tool. It has it’s limitations like any other platform, 2D or 3D, but the amount of productivity you can squeeze into a very short period of time once you understand some basic tools is beyond amazing. How BIM hasn’t taken off decades before now I’ll never know. But it’s here, and I am grateful!

Daily Prompt: Impossible Things

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – the White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

The White Queen – Alice in Wonderland

Come down the Rabbit hole with me, won’t you?

1. Clients will never negotiate your fees because they believe in the value of your work and the expertise you bring to a project.

2. Clients will always tell you to set your own schedule and take as much time as is needed to put together a well thought out and complete set of construction documents.

3. It’s ok to be a little over budget. The client will still build it the way you designed it. Refer back to #1.

4. The contractor will never try to substitute cheaper, inferior products for the ones you specified because, like the client, the contractor values your work and the expertise you bring to a project.

5. The contractor will read your drawings and specifications and build the project as designed.

6. Architectural practice is exactly like studio.

Feel free to add your own to the list.

Daily Prompt: Comfort Zone

What are you more comfortable with — routine and planning, or laissez-faire spontaneity?

I don’t always adhere to the “letter of the law” when it comes to these daily prompt posts….and today is no different.

As architects and design professionals it is easy to get comfortable, to stick with what you know, to take the road often traveled. By this I mean it’s easy to stick ourselves in a category and never venture beyond our self-imposed bounds. And in years past, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you got a few similar projects, you quickly became very good at a select market sector. And if you did good work for those clients, word spread and suddenly you’re the “strip mall guy” or the “urgent care guy” or the “hospital guy” or the “residential addition guy”, so on and so forth ad nauseum. But if history teaches us anything it is that a good thing can not last forever.

Businesses, any business, that do not position themselves to adapt and grow or change with the times will fail. It is no longer a matter of “if” but rather “when”. Architects, design professionals and architecture in general are no different. I even venture to state that Architects are not meant to be pigeon-holed into any specialty. We are Master Builders, and this is our calling. It is not our calling to be hospital designers, or home designers, or mini-mart designers. An Architect can do all of these things once the right team has been assembled. And that is the way it should be.

So, I challenge all my fellow architects and designers out there, stop pigeon-holing yourself. Get out of whatever comfort zone you’ve put yourself in, or been put in by others, and get out there. Design something different, design it well and more clients will come. Our specialty should be architecture. Period.

Daily Prompt: 180 Degrees

Tell us about a time you did a 180 — changed your views on something, reversed a decision, or acted in a way you ordinarily don’t.

In the field of architecture, you lead two lives. These lives are not simultaneous, nor do they overlap. There is an order to them – one must come before the other. And the former will not prepare you adequately for the latter. These two lives that we lead in architecture are education and practice.

Eichberg Hall – Architecture Studio – Savannah College of Art and Design

In education we are taught how to design, how to craft space and light, solid and void. We are taught the precedents of history and then taught to ignore them. We are taught that anything is possible, though leaving out the two most important factors to that statement – Time and Money. We’re taught that anything can be built with a miraculous material called Anti-gravitonium, glass in a universal building material with magical structural properties, and polished cast in place concrete is the only acceptable opaque material that can be formed in ANY shape conceivable…again, irregardless of Time and Money.

In education we explore the sometimes completely unrealistic limits of architectural design and theory. Our imaginations are stretched beyond their limits and sometimes beyond the limits even of Hollywood. We come to think, after years of this experimentation, that life beyond academia will be “just like studio”.

That life abruptly ends day one, minute one of our first internship. Our life takes a 180 and we crash headlong into the face of practice. The practice of architecture is not even really a 180. It’s more like you used to live on Mars. Now you’ve come back to earth where things actually have to make sense, fit within budgets and schedules, be buildable, and most importantly they have to stand up. Because in the real world where cyanoacrylate is not your major joining compound, buildings really do have to work, to stand up. Otherwise they will, and do, fall down. Usually with people in them. And that’s bad.

an architects office – life of an architect (looks way too clean)

Our life in architecture begins with education. This life quickly dies upon graduation and is reborn in practice. This, for me, is real life, real education, real architecture. These two lives are not simultaneous, nor do they overlap. There is an order to them – one must come before the other. But in practice, this is where the real fun begins.

architecture and construction

The further along I get in practice and the more projects I’m involved in that actually get built – this is more rare than you might think – the more I see a disconnect in the profession between the process and practice of architecture and the realities of construction. And while there are many reasons for this, there are two that I see as having a big impact on this phenomenon: technology and contracts.

yep. revision cloud. makes total sense.

Technology, since the dawn of time, has allowed us to further the cause of human existence first with the invention of cutting tools that allowed us to build the first post and beam structures and lean-tos to the modern tools and conveniences we have today that allow us to build monuments like the Freedom Tower, Taipei I and II, and so on. But with increasing technology, I think, has come a decrease in construction knowledge on the part of the architect. And unfortunately this trend begins in school.

The last crit that I sat in on I continually asked the questions “what is that material?”, or “what do these lines represent?”. And more often than not I got blank stares or vague archi-speak answers that made little sense and gave no concrete answers to the original question asked. In practice buildings really do have to stand up, because if they don’t they will fall down. And that’s bad.

Boy, sure wish someone would have caught that one….

The obvious answer to this should be more comprehensive education in construction and detailing, but I don’t see this happening anytime soon. A friend of mine is trying to push just this issue over at InSB. You should check it out.

The second issue is contracts. Ah, contracts, how I love thee. Let me count the….never mind. Contracts, as most of us know (or should) define our roles and responsibilities on a given project. Increasingly I am noticing the Architect and designer being completely phased out of the construction process. I’ve talked about this before and I’ll say it again here – during construction is when you NEED your architect or designer on site to make sure that the contractors are constructing the building as designed. A good design, quite frankly, is easy. Any of us can make something look good on paper. It’s in execution and the coordination of all the pieces and parts that make a truly successful building. Your architects is the one who is supposed to help make that happen for you.

By cutting your architect out of the construction process you do two things: First you give complete control over to the contractor to build as he sees fit. Building codes and construction standards outline a MINIMUM to maintain the Health Safety and Welfare of the public. Most architects do not design to a minimum standard (not if they can help it). They design to YOUR standard and it’s a part of the architect’s responsibility to ensure compliance with the standard as designed. The second thing you do by taking the architect out of the construction process is you devalue your building. All the fees that you paid your architect in the beginning to give you that set of pretty pictures are worth less than what you paid if the architect is not also in charge of monitoring the outcome during construction.

Sometimes they just CAN’T WAIT to put those windows in….they’re so excited! O_o

So, this writing out of the architect during construction has led to less architects fighting to stay involved with their clients and their projects through to construction, thereby making it harder for the architect to keep up with construction standards, practices, materials and methods. This in turn makes it more difficult for architect to convince future clients to keep them on through to construction and project completion.

It’s a Catch 22. One doesn’t come without the other.

So what is a practical solution? In an economy where every project we can scrape together matters and every billable hour is crucial, do we have the luxury to DEMAND that we be kept on through the construction process? I say yes. But why would a client reasonably go for that, you ask? Because we’ve expressed to the client in no uncertain terms that we’re worth it.

Daily Prompt: Happily Ever After

happiness is in your hands

“And they lived happily ever after.” Think about this line for a few minutes. Are you living happily ever after? If not, what will it take for you to get there?

This is usually a question that gets asked of us by our spouse. “Are you happy?” “Are you ok?” “Does this dress make me look fat?” Wait, that’s not right…. Either way, “happiness” as defined by my good friend Webster is “a state of well-being and contentment”, or “a pleasurable or satisfying experience”. These are rather vague and esoteric definitions and can mean just about anything to and for anyone else. Today we’ll try and keep our focus centered on the realm of professional happiness in Architecture. What does it take, what does it look like and where can it take you – these are the avenues we’ll travel down together.

Now, obviously if the Webster definition of happiness is purposely meant to be vague, than it stands to reason that professional happiness in Architecture also will be vague. And this is mostly true. Professional happiness is going to be different for all of us. None of us are wired the same and we all take pleasure from things in different ways.

What it takes:

What it takes for me to be happy in my professional career can be summed up in two areas: first, feeling a sense of worth and value at my workplace; and second, being challenged often at what I do.

The feeling of worth and value can come from two places as an Architect. First from your boss (unless you are the boss in which case I would hope you value yourself) and second from your clients. If your clients do not value your services then they will not refer others to you and by extension you will most likely not be very successful. If you’re working for a firm it can be difficult to feel that sense of value. Most times you will need to do something to stand out from a crowd, to prove yourself continuously in order to gain trust and eventually value. This is not an ideal situation and usually leads to finding new positions elsewhere.

Being challenged can also be challenging. Not all projects are glamorous…well, lets be honest, few projects are glamorous. But all projects, if seen from the proper perspective, offer unique and interesting challenges and problems to solve. Solving them efficiently and effectively is, in my mind, key to a sense of professional happiness. Something as simple as a bathroom renovation within an existing home can be very simple, but also very challenging in it’s execution. Perhaps the home sits on a slab and breaking that slab would kill the budget. How then do you deal with the placement and rearrangement of new fixtures? Small issues like this, which occur on all projects both large and small, allow us to flex our creative muscle and devise new and interesting solutions to mundane problems. This, sometimes above all else, makes me happy, and maybe even a little giddy.

What it looks like:

What does professional happiness look like? How does it work in practice? Well, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve already seen the answer – it’s up to you to find joy in your professional career rather than waiting around for either your boss or clients to give it to you. It has to be sought after, pursued and snatched from the air. In this country we have a right to pursue happiness, not a right to happiness itself.

If, as an Architect or designer, you can’t find joy in the mundane of professional practice you’ll never be truly happy even when those glamorous projects do come around because you’ll be bitter and resentful and more importantly BORED.

Where can it take you:

If, however, you can find the kind of joy in the mundane and monotonous, then you can do anything, create anything and build anything. Your boss and your clients will value you because you value yourself and your work. This will lead to new projects, new responsibilities, new challenges and new happiness.

In the end, happiness, both personal and professional, is in your own hands. You can choose to be happy and find joy in what you do and the people around you, or you can choose not to in which case….well, I feel very sorry for you indeed.