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2020_DF
2020 – Looking Back
Seems while everyone else is doing their ‘year in review’ it hardly seems worth the effort for this dismal dumpster fire of a year. Popular theme, but well deserving. Life has come to a long pause, and people are out there, suffering loss.
Unemployment + Self-Employment
For the second time in my life, since the age of 16 – I find myself divorced from the workforce and from functioning society. It’s not at all what I would consider fun. The broader powers that be have deemed my profession ‘non-essential’.
No matter what stage you are in the career path – you can build a fervent argument against that finding, but here we are. I’m fighting back on that idea, but the bills still need to get paid somehow.
That said, a couple weeks ago I picked up a project from my old firm – to develop as-built conditions for a beach resort in North Carolina. That went pretty well & they received a fully functioning Revit model of 250,000 GSF of resort. They’ll use that starter to develop into design and construction documents. I also left a list of all the drawing errors and ‘things to look out for’ with field verification.
I can still crank out the documents and 14-16 hours a day with the music going and torturing Revit into submission is rooted in my muscle memory.
I also got a chance to overlay some of the template tools that I had developed for my stuff… so the same things I’ve always had to fix with the stock company templates were done in a few minutes instead of a couple hours.
Getting Social + Back to Self-Taught Skill Development
This has granted a few outside opportunities that I wouldn’t otherwise have.
1) Return to social media to connect back with people in the industry. I used to be fairly active (let’s face it – I lurked) on social media, but about 8 years ago, I just purged social media. I sucked at Twitter, didn’t do much on Facebook, and LinkedIn just seemed like self-promotion, and I’ve never been comfortable doing that.
2) I’ve managed to connect with some of the people that I’ve been fans of for a while. Marcello Sgambelluri @marcellosgamb , Aaron Maller @twiceroadsfool, Evan Troxel @etroxel & Cormac Phallen @archy_type, the CEO of BIMBox, Buck Davis@BIMBoxUSA, and various others in the AEC Sphere and I’m hoping to get deeper into it in the coming year.
3) All this ‘free time’ has allowed me to make it home to re-landscape my Mom’s yard, close out & winterize the family cottage, reconnect with friends that I never have time to see…
None of those things are usually possible, given that I’m usually under deadline and cranking out 50+ hour workweeks, while playing guerrilla BIM manager for the office.
I’m hoping and praying for my career trajectory to return, but in the meantime – I’m tackling all those things that I never had time for before.
In January, I’d gotten ‘permission’ to start playing with Dynamo as part of the workflow at the office. By March, I’d developed 15+ graphs for expediting tasks, and was working toward more.
I was still left out of the firm-wide efforts to start developing these tools because I was asking questions like ‘which version of dynamo?’ and ‘shouldn’t we have some kind of style guide if we’re building out these graphs?’ Trying to lay out the frame work so that everyone had a way to navigate the spaghetti. Yeah, uh… Odd Man Out.
Previously that had all taken a back seat to production and project management. Now, I’m heading for the deep end of the pool with that, with grasshopper, python, and whatever else that I can cram into my grey matter – with a style guide in place, and a framework for where I’m trying to go with all of this.
Next Year
So, coming in the New Year…
I’m working toward linking up all my architecture books & reviewing them as I go to help source some tools you might not otherwise have – just to share some resources, and endeavor to see if the Amazon affiliate program actually works. So far, nada.
My Revit Template will get posted, as well as blocks of the hospitality families that I’ve created for the hotel brands.
I’m also researching architectural business models in an effort to explore why the architecture profession is perceived the way that it is, and to help change that perception.
So, I’ll be exploring the career – offering insights into what comes after this when the dust settles, and where life may go from here.
At some point I’m going to hit the YouTube tutorials, and might start live-streaming a ‘help line’ for live advice & means and methods for anyone who wants to talk design. I miss charettes and a shared studio experience.
Add to that a basic services package including redlining documents and specs, bespoke Revit family creation, template retooling, setups, workflows, as-built documentation, adaptive reuse, renovations, new construction and much design for just about anything.
If anyone lands on this page and has any suggestions on things that you wouldn’t mind learning about, or seeing covered or might need help with – hit me up.
So, there’s 2020 – and a battle plan for 2021. I wish you all a Happy New Year, and “may she be a damned sight better than the last year.”
Stay safe out there, cheers.
John