Category: Architecture

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

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

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

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

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