If you knew me – you’d have expected this.
The intended outcome, would be to obtain employment and use that to fuel communication about the ‘day in the life’ and ideas that I meander thru on random posts in here… at least that’s always been the intended approach to this.
I missed the target a little, because hey – I’ve got work that needs doing.
The path took to get to where I currently find myself, was not clean.
It involved trying to launch something on the freelance/indy side, while re-pathing my network to see what other side work that I could pick up at various firms, either locally or remotely.
The decisions that I had to make on a compressed timeline had a range from simple pro/con lists to… do I even want to be in the profession anymore, and where the hell am I going to live.
I went from anonymity in the profession to scoring multiple interviews at a range of firms in a range of places. I’ve become a part of numerous Slack channels and social media platforms all revolving around the AEC and UI/UX approaches to design.
I had to balance EVERYTHING on the head of a pin and make a singular choice. As is my tendency, I chose a small, locally operating firm that I could help in big ways.
Fighting burnout is a drag, and I’ve experienced a colossal level of burnout. So much so that I’ve still got a burnout hangover.
As a reaction, what I told myself that I really wanted was to stop drawing everything. Well – if you’re a sole proprietor firm – guess what? Someone’s doing the drawings and it’s going to be you.
If I was moving toward a firm position, what I was seeking was a design/manager spot where I could play with Dynamo, guide interns toward the ultimate design and deliverable goal, while pulling the entire project together. Call it a BIM/Project/Design Manager role. Just me being me and doing all the things that I was interested in and passionate about.
What the positions ended up being were silo-based spec writing and redline services, Construction Administration, and/or working on remodeling retail stores, or other singular project types. Now one can find something cool to play with in any project type (which is why I’m still doing this), but remember – I’m still making this decision while hung over.
What I found out, is despite having a low-energy reaction (what, this again? Dammit…) to the idea of being a cog in a machine churning out projects full of incomplete thoughts to kick the can down the road to CA – I still have that visceral response to crappy drawings, bad tools, and poor communications processes. Whatever kind of OCD that I possess, it doesn’t have an off button.
I get a kick out of producing clean & concise drawings, and smooth communications for all parties involved in each project. There’s this internal competitive thing that I have that drives me to want to do better work. Designing tools & process while designing projects.
In the endless hunt, the remote opportunities sort of evaporated. They still exist out there, but the availability was sparse at best and tended to lean toward this systemized task-rabbit approach to a larger corporate experience… and that is NOT me.
I broke a personal rule with my last source of employment. Desperation and poverty was driving that decision. Typically, I tend to steer clear of the giant alphabet corporate firms. I’m not big on internal politics. When 75% of the company is your boss and the rest assume they can tell you what’s what – well I find that a little limiting. Frankly there are too many insular levels between the project and the people who are actually performing the work.
I’m also just not comfortable with big company grand standing and reading press releases touting greatness. Especially when you know the project being advertised was a mess of process and the story is mostly a polished version of what really happened. There’s never a mention of a portion of the team screwing up so hard that lawsuits were narrowly avoided or that the project resulted in entire disciplines no longer being allowed to work on certain project types.
Now to be fair – I don’t know how the heck one would scale a company and also avoid all the “extra”, but I’m a fan of simple and effective solutions. I didn’t want to have to choose sides during the great debate of ‘doer vs tech team’ over the proper development of effective workflows. I’d rather invent cool things.
Its been a LONG time since I worked for a place that had a greater sense of purpose and character… a soul of you will.
Now irrespective of my ultimate decision, I still fight with the ‘Why do I even want to do this anymore?’.
All firms, and I do mean ALL firms have their nuances – and that’s the fun part about starting a new position. While finding the edges of a new environment, you can learn as much about the new situation as you can about yourself.
Its the similarities in Architecture (as a profession) that I struggle to comprehend sometimes and leads to the above question.
During my interviews, I got a little insider information on the architecture world as it is in this area, as well as some common issues with places that were higher on my wish list of opportunities, primarily due to the stigma surrounding them and some of those self-proclamations that I mentioned earlier. A lot of that is a facade.
The common problems that I’ve seen in the industry usually come right down to myopia.
All firms have this intense focus and energy on everything under their own logo – without the ability to recognize that what they’re struggling so hard to achieve might just be a bad idea. (Yes, even mrlw)
The “Powers of Ten” from Charles and Ray Eames comes to mind here. (Evan Troxel & Cormac Phalen’s fault really) check out Archispeak Podcast. firms
Changing lenses between working for the firm and on the firm is one thing… The ability to see both at the same time is rare.
Most of the firms that I’ve been part of have struggled at one or the other, and sometimes both. Project-focused work tends to leave you in a state of chaos without a common voice or language among the firms participants. It’s generally a collection of people dragging tools and methods from one firm to another that collide under a new logo.
Small firms don’t have the capital to invest in new tools. The ‘proper’ tools can be cost-prohibitive. Autodesk alone costs a fortune for a licensed seat of anything, no matter how they bundle it.
Larger firms willingly cede control to a pile of plugins they just buy, partially implement, and don’t train on – just to say that they have them.
The trick is to be profitable, nimble and have enough left in the bank to explore new tools that add value to the project and speed up the process.
Investing money, time and energy into developing this skill set will actually set you apart from the competition who are engaged with glossing over partial victories as marketable expertise making claims that get built on vapor.
We live in the age of communication. Why is it still so damned difficult to convey ideas and keep a record?
Well, part of that is Myopia under the (logo).
“We” don’t do that here. No one asks “Well, why don’t we?”
The story behind why is usually worth hearing. There’s something found in every drawing set that stems from a story and a hard lesson learned. Everyone in the profession has that at some point. Somewhere in your template, exists a “C.Y.A.” (Cover Your Ass) general note somewhere in bold that was the result of a misunderstanding in the process.
What kills me is when the “We don’t do that” leads to crappy work and things left to interpretation in the field, 90% of the time these solutions would/could be better if they were thought thru as part of the process, before they got installed 400x.
If your office has a weekly project walk-thru or a “Design Share” and it causes you to cringe because something was built without design intent (and not covered anywhere in the documents, cuz reasons)… well that’s on the architect for not telling the story correctly, as much as it might be on someone else for not asking for help on an acceptable solution before just providing one.
The entire act of designing and working thru the construction of a building, is about communication.
Generally speaking – it falls short.
Adherence to any sort of “standard of care” is seldom a standard and often times is the result of not thinking things thru during the design of the building.
Myopia leads to how (Logo) does things, and it’s an organic process driven by the last project and learning from what not to do. Hopefully the lessons aren’t large or painful enough to delete the logo. A little research, a little extra effort in the drawing set and someone asking “Well, how do they build ______” Can solve a LOT of problems.
What do you think leads to the demise of start-ups like Katerra or WeWork? Myopia leading to hubris.
I’ve researched the ever-loving hell out of firms in this pursuit of trying to find a position. I heard a phrase when I was a kid that’s stuck with me and seems to echo in my ears sometimes…
“I want to be different (just like everyone else)”
It’s pretty common nowadays, but back then it was strong enough to provoke a reaction. I was introverted enough as it was, but wearing my weird on the inside became an element of my personality.
In the marketing realm of providing identical ‘standard of care’ (still not a standard outside of the contract)
Marketing is the exercise of creating a separation between you and the 20 other firms in your area that do the same type of work. Maybe they’re better at it, maybe they’re worse – but those are all stories told by people involved inside the process and not shared publicly. We all have them.
If they were shared, there might be fewer firms – but it would probably raise the quality across the board.
The inevitable conclusion of this exercise exists in the quote. I have scoured thousands of corporate architectural websites to discover the words
So much so that I actually wanted to figure out a way to create a word cloud based on all architecture websites to quantify this. Given that it’s a space infected with hackers, I’ve elected not to even try.
Synonyms are also included. When everyone else is collaborative, you need to find another word to provide separation. This leads to a similar pile of emotive buzzwords to describe what it is that architects do, without actually describing what it is architects do.
The differentiators are designed to win work away from the firm across the street, but I get the feeling these days that people are going to trend toward more tangible things.
Now not everyone is the greatest firm ever. Not every firm is the greatest place to have ever merged with an engineering firm to provide services. But everyone is so far down the rabbit hole of believing that, that when the idea gets challenged – people get upset.
There’s nothing wrong with identifying certain projects as challenged by budget, use case, building type, site constraints, etc. Each and every project has its challenges, and they’re always slightly different challenges. There is merit in solving them and explaining how that happened.
Maybe I’m too much of a realist to sign on to a hype train, which might be my hubris. Either way – it leads to homogenization. Different, like everything else.
Hell, most buildings these days all look the same regardless of their function.
Experimentation and invention are sadly underutilized as differentiating factors, and that should be so much more common in seeking new projects & clients. The willingness to explore new avenues is a positive.
Again – I don’t know how you scale without splitting things up into departments, but another commonality to the AEC sphere is over-specialized practice.
I tend to shy away from this, and it’s a cornerstone of the large firm. Here’s my why.
As a young architect, I worked briefly for a firm that ONLY did school projects. I watched a referendum vote wipe out 75% of our backlog in one night of voting. That firm doesn’t exist anymore.
I have been burned multiple times by a myopic approach to a singular building type, the most recent of which was working for hotel developers when everyone stayed and worked from home for a year.
For everyone in the cheap seats – there’s nothing wrong with doing bread and butter work to keep the lights on, while still chasing passion projects. BUT
Putting all your eggs in one basket for the express purpose of carving out a niche market and chasing a sliver of the overall marketplace leads to problems.
Remember 1%. Architects touch 1% of the built work in the U.S. Whittling that possibility down even further and trying to fight for a spot in the mosh pit of practices, gets progressively more difficult. Then comes the fee shaving.
One firm, only does corporate workplace. People are migrating away from the office, so much so that they’re quitting jobs in favor of more flexible circumstances. One firm only does multi-family in a world where the voter base wants rent control. A singular client base isn’t any fun. There’s no room for cross-pollenating design ideas when you’re doing cookie-cutter projects.
Its the small, nimble firm with the wide experience base that stays alive in these circumstances. 99% of the places that I interviewed had a specialized, silo’d, or task-oriented approach to the practice of my (still) chosen profession.
One of the other things that have always bothered me to no end… is the seemingly ENDLESS discussion of minutia.
Example: “How should we, as a firm, detail this one item, installed over this other material – that never gets installed the way we detail it?” (Usually, because there is a newer material that has become widely used that negates the entire conversation.)
“This needs to be our standard” (which will be revisited & changed on the next project).
Don’t get me wrong, these are worthy discussions to have if they stay on point. They seldom stay on point.
Stuff like this gets an eye-roll from me. If collectively as a profession would take that wasted hour arguing over sealant and apply it to doing that missed detail that caused the cabinets to all be installed wrong, we might be further ahead.
And yes, even in my firm. It’s better to have a well-outlined framework than rigid hard-and-fast rules.
I talk to myself & try to think thru the minutia, BUT I leave space for a solution instead of trying to solve the entire problem, only to have to change it repeatedly.
This is a problem that I’ve run into, countless times, and at every firm no matter how large or how small.
Basic Training.
Revit, as a tool, is an instrument that requires finesse and a level of understanding. It’s finicky, frequently out of tune, and in the wrong hands can lead to total chaos.
The same kit bashing that worked in Autocad is not going to fly in a transition to BIM.
Develop a solid drawing set to point at as a reference.
Shortcutting the drawing set isn’t a way to magically create less work for yourself. Generally, it translates to more expensive discussions and problem-solving later in the game. If 15 minutes now can save you $4k on the project arguing over a soffit detail in the field – do the detail. Someone in the office should have oversight on process to teach everyone else how and why that’s a good idea.
My firm? Always open to new tools, ideas, and learning new and better ways of accomplishing things. Granted, my exposure to them is rather limited. I’m currently retooling my entire package to more closely apply to my new role in an effort to influence and merge some ideas to the new place and raise their game.
Now, I’m up against it. I went from a hyper-corporate multi-national firm to a small practice. I went from having to understand large markets, a vast array of ordinances, building codes, and developers from all over the country – without having any local contacts or relationships with the industry.
I went from an environment that over-promised on deadlines without really backing me up with a team, so I was constantly working to one that has my hours capped because they can’t really afford me to go on OT.
So after 20+ years in the game, I need to carve out a space and get up to speed again on newer building types, establish relationships and learn to play in a different key.
The new firm has its own nuances, its own collection of myopic tendencies that I hope to influence for the better.
I’m balancing that with my own firm’s nuances and still open to alternate revenue streams under my own (Logo).
Like I said at the beginning – I’ve been absent from here because like everyone else these days – I’m still going thru it, but hey – I’ve got work to do.
And now on multiple fronts. I’ll do better to share more, because more communication is warranted.
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