Category: Architecture

I was listening to an interview of Seth Godin as he talked about his online courses.  One of the key features is that the participants are getting and giving feedback to each other.

He said that participants often said there was more interaction among students than in all their years of college. I hand an epiphany about what made the architecture and art studio education so special. The studio is a place where everyone’s work is on display in progress. Beyond the theatricality of the big critiques, daily interaction is the rule whether you like it or not.

I noticed this disconnect when I started at Rice. I did so little architectural design in undergrad that I was routed into the long program, starting with the non-architecture students.  I quickly realized that I needed to dial back the way I talked about other’s work. Coming of age in the myopic architecture studio during your undergraduate years certainly has some detrimental effects on one’s maturitation as an adult, but being unaccustomed to interaction among the cohert is not one of them.

Indeed, this is one of my concerns about the modern digital age.  From what I hear, studio culture is dying as people do their work at home on laptops.  While the excesses of  studio culture has a tendency to brainwash the participants, the loss of nightly interaction with one’s cohort would eliminate one of the key aspects that makes this education so distinctive from other fields.

Yesterday I was lucky to see one of my architects submit her first set of drawings with her stamp.

Technically I’ve done so once myself, but it doesn’t really count cause it was a homeowner builder set that anyone off the street could have done for their own never ending house remodel.

When you think of how many people start in architecture school but change majors, and then how many graduates leave the profession, and then how few get registered, and then how many fewer still end up in a situation to stamp drawings….

So yeah, pretty darn cool to be there for that, for my project no less.

My recent kick of making my entire iphone homepage Apple Shortcuts was an interesting exercise to reframe my mind in terms of actions.  Coincidentally, I am working on plan check comments and I realized that I have been developing a technical language which I need to make explicit in future review letters.

Items specifically requiring changes to the documents
Revise / Remove / Add : Straightforward, proceed as directed.
Clarify : Revise the drawings to clarify a point of confusion, usually to provide additional information.
Coordinate : A variation on “Revise” but specifically about internal consistency within the documents.

Items that might not require changes to the formal documents
Verify : Double check this item and verify it meets the requirements noted in the comment.  Revisions to the documents may be necessary, or it might only require a confirmation in the plan check response.
Explain : Provide an explanation in the next plan check response.
Ensure : This item brings up a point of concern that might not be necessary for the current submittal phase, but is a request for it to be explicitly addressed in a future submittal.

I’m certain more items will come up, and I may come back and edit this post as they arise.  The idea would be to limit the action verbs in a letter to just these few words.

a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness and then slowly returning to its original state over a few months.

Dictionary definition of Nova

I think my friend who described Veldon Simpson architecture was actually trying to call him a nova, something that suddenly came up big and then burned out just as fast.  Excalibur, Luxor, the Adventuredome at Circus Circus are all in his portfolio.

In 2014, his website was still up, but now all you can find of him is an archive.org screenshot of his website. The rumor was that he worked cheap, worked his people cheaper, pocketed a bunch of cash, and flamed out.  He would be a cautionary tale in our industry, if he was remembered at all.

I used to have a really long rambling description of my aesthetic preferences on boardgamegeek and I’ve been wanting to cut it down to the simple statement:

I like asymmetry.

But yesterday, I just realized that is not exactly true.  I do indeed love asymmetry as the most heroic of aesthetic gestures. But I may actually have a greater appreciation for tightly constrained variety, such as Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the literary style exercises of the Oulipo group, and boardgame designs like Coloretto or Container.

There was one other word I wanted to slip into the short statement – elegance.  But it is a very slippery term which needs explanation, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it elegantly.  Maybe its better to just let it sit unspoken in the background.  So for now I think I’ll go with:

I like asymmetry and systematic variety.  A saber and a box of chocolates.

Less pithy, but a bit more picturesque and maybe a little more accurate.

 

I find that I spend my self repeating lots of aphorisms, here’s the whole lot of them.

If you don’t get a promotion in two years, it’s time to find another place.

People will take all the free work they can get.  I’m gonna also.

You have to protect yourself and your time.  It’s your choice to do anything.

It’s your job to tell your manager what can be accomplished given the constraints.  Let them decide how to allocate your efforts. The logical extension is that sometimes you got to threaten to let a project fail, because the alternative of sacrificing yourself for the sake of a project.

When you work overtime you are getting a lot of experience, even if you’re not getting paid.  44 hours a week is 10% more than the regular joe and the learning compounds fast. On the flip side, if you’re willing to accept slower advancement in the profession, it might not be worth working OT.

Architects get paid in money and experience. Make sure you’re getting your fair share of one, the other, or both.

Don’t let yourself be comfortably miserable at a job.

We don’t make as much as other professions, but it’s better than a lot of the other alternates out there and I really enjoy the work.  But if you hate the job, for god’s sake we don’t get paid enough for the stress and long hours.

For a recent job, I made it clear in the first interview that with a young family I was not interested in doing overtime.  It almost certainly affected my negotiated salary, but my boss was really good about making sure I would not be overloaded.  It was the best decision I made for that four years run.

The architect is a symphony conductor but he also has to play his own instrument.

Every email you send has a lawyer attached to it.

It’s not a problem unless you have a solution.

If you aren’t recovering from the previous recession, then the next recession is around the corner.

An architect’s job is to manage expectations.

And don’t forget to write meeting minutes.

My friend shared a arch daily list of definitions about architecture. Most of them are academic pabulum, but a good amount seemed was worth cutting, pasting and sharing:

Pithy sayings
12. “Architecture is an artificial fact.” – Mario Botta in Perspecta
30. “Architecture is the petrification of a cultural moment.” – Jean Nouvel in Newsweek
57. “Architecture is bashful about reality.” – Wouter Vanstiphout in Archis
75. “Architecture is a history of style written by the victors.” – Herbert Muschamp in New York Times
87. “Architecture is the pathology of the contemporary era.” – Forensic Architecture

As Compromise
32. “Architecture is a muddle of irreconcilable things.” – Juhani Pallasmaa in The Architectural Review
36. “Architecture is most often a victory over the process of creating architecture.” – Sam Jacob in Log
42. “Architecture is capable of absorbing anything, and hence tends to dissolve into everything.” – Ole Bouman in Volume
67. “Architecture is expected to carry too much weight in many cases.” – Patricia Patkau in Globe and Mail
117. “Architecture is the sum of inevitable negotiations.” – Felipe Mesa in Domus

A profession to make things better
21. “Architecture is about improving conditions: environmental, social and sometimes also political.” – Arjen Oosterman in Volume
68. “Architecture is not a goal. Architecture is for life and pleasure and work and for people. The picture frame, not the picture.” – William Wurster
83. “Architecture is both an art and a practical pursuit, and the profession has always been divided between those who emphasize the art, that is pure design, and those who give priority to the practical.” – Paul Goldberger in New York Times
102. “Architecture is not about the creation of newness but rather about the fulfillment of needs and expectations.” – André Tavares in Forbes
109. “Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.” Harry Seidler in the Sydney Morning Herald

I think this as close a summation of what I try to do.
112. “Architecture is about giving form to the places where people live. It is not more complicated than that but also not simpler than that. – Alejandro Aravena in his 2016 Pritzker Prize acceptance speech

In my favorite podcast, On Taking Pictures (#192) there was a question about getting into “modern art” on otp192 and I thought I’d jump in with my own thoughts since I had an interesting struggle with art a few years ago.Movie Passengers (2016)

Even though I was never really big into art per se as a kid, I went to college majoring in architecture and slipped into a heavy emphasis on the visual arts, but I think a lot of it was just on the joy of making stuff in an an intense studio environment. But I did also enjoy going to the SF-Moma on a semi regular basis.

In grad school (again in architecture) I had some more theory shoved into my brain and I had also become much more cynical seeing the art industrial complex merely as an outgrowth of conspicuous consumption by the rich and powerful. Between this cynicism and the additional theory which put TOO much context in my art viewing experience … I went blank. I completely lost the ability to appreciate art. Pretty much any kind of art. It was total information overload.

The big, big turning point for me was in a video arts class I had with a quirky teacher. We ended up not meshing very well in the end, but early in the class there was a moment for which I will be forever grateful for. During a class discussion I talked about how I had gotten to the point of just not giving a shit about art. I must have mentioned that I like making art, but I find all that BS surrounding high art just uninspiring to the point of boring meaninglessness. And he responded “Ahh, but don’t you realize the viewing art is also creative experience?”

And something clicked. Not that day…but a couple months later. I was in an art museum (primarily to check out the building by Renzo Piano) and started looking at a Rothko (one of the two colors abstracts with brown on top and white below). And I decided “fuck it, I’m going to enjoy looking at this piece…even if I look at it in a way that I think would have made Rothko puke”. so I stared…and at the edge between the two colors, where the brush strokes had a bit of their own definition, I started to see an arctic landscape with an overcast sky and an igloo in the distant horizon.

And I was delighted! It was juicy to revel in such a transgressive pictorialist viewing of the work of such a prominent Ab Ex painter. For years I had looked at art as the outgrowth of various external forces…as case studies for my own current project…as a commentary of society…as a polemic within the critical dialogue of the period…but this time I just enjoyed the art for what it brought out of me. It was the first time in forever I actually just enjoyed art.

All that education was great, it put everything in context, it helped me understand the theoretical value and significance of a lot of these pieces that I had been plopped in front of. But really, this wacky moment was what brought me back into truly appreciating art –realizing that once the artist released the work, they were out of the picture. And with me standing there, I (not the artist, not the zeitgeist, not the art historian) had the right to take this image and take it wherever the fuck it needed to go. The viewing of art is my creative experience and I had the right (responsibility?) to make the most of this moment.