Somebody once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. While that is 100% true (whatever it means), I only bring it up because it sums up the extent of my knowledge of architecture. That and the shit I see in the movies where some guy with a shoulder bag more expensive than my car meets Jennifer Aniston in some ridiculous mating-ceremony fiction. Oh, and George Costanza wanted to be one.
My friend here is a successful architect. She’s married to another friend of mine, so I’m not going to comment on the the size of her rack because that would be sexist.
SBTVC: What is an architect? I don’t think I even get it. You draw a picture of a building and then it gets built? Why is that such a big deal?
An architect is someone who is responsible for planning, designing and overseeing construction of structures and spaces. The projects an architect works on can vary between skyscrapers, retail stores, office spaces, parking garages, residences, nightclubs and restaurants. It’s incredibly broad. I specialize in consumer environments (retail spaces mostly), so in addition to the basic definition above, I also find myself doing a lot of consumer behavior research prior to even putting pen to paper.
That sounds like a lot of work. No thanks.
Anyone can draw a picture of a building, it’s ensuring that the building is contextual, and that it meets all of the goals and needs of the client, and subsequently how well it is designed and detailed that relies on an architect’s training — well, at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Then there are the star architects who crumple up a ball of paper or recycle a watered down version of an iconic building as the so-called design, charge a client millions of dollars, ignore any type of program or function that is supposed to take place in the building, and then wonder why the client is dissatisfied at the end and why people complain that the building is contextually irrelevant.
The big deal and the whole reason we are licensed professionals is that an architect affects public safety. We’re responsible for making sure no one is hurt in the spaces that we design by meeting the building code and accessibility requirements.
Do people generally have no idea what it is you do?
I’ll tell you what an architect doesn’t do: An architect does not do anything that you see them doing in a movie. Very few architects sit at their drawing board with their pencil and pen in the office of their incredibly beautiful custom built, tricked-out all-glass home in the woods that they designed for their young nuclear family, and then throw a drawing tube over their shoulder after kissing the stay at home mom goodbye to run off to a presentation for their client. We work in offices on computers and we email our designs to the client. I typically only use my pencil to tie my hair up in a bun. And architects live in fixer uppers. Very few of us make the money to design our own home, and we do the best we can by trying to breathe new life into homes way past their prime. And those homes are always under construction because we can never make up our minds as to what the final design should be because we’re always sure that if we tweak it a little more it will be perfect. The whole perfectionist thing is also why we’re frequently working at all hours prior to a deadline.
What do you literally do all day? Walk me through a basic day? What’s a good day like? A bad one?
So most of my day doesn’t actually have to do with what I described above. I’m an account manager for our major retail/consumer environments national account clients, and I typically spend my day coordinating work with our clients and directing our teams as to how they should move forward: setting deadlines, dealing with personnel issues, reviewing resumes for new hires when we’re busy, writing proposals, reviewing drawings to make sure they are detailed and organized correctly and meet our design intent, advising people on how to deal with sticky situations, wondering why I went to design school when I spend 90% of my time making spreadsheets, counting to ten a lot….
A good day is when I actually have the opportunity to draw or make a solid presentation to a client who actually sees the value in the good work that we do. A bad day is when I have to take a bullet for another person’s mistake. Middle management is a thankless place to be in, no matter whether you’re an architect or an accountant.
What sort of firm do you work at? Is it called a firm?
I work at a mid-sized architecture firm — I guess it’s better to call it a firm than a zoo -– that specializes in retail and restaurant design, academic buildings, commercial buildings, multi-family residential and workplace design. We’re different than a lot of architecture firms in that we’re made up of about half interior designers, half architects, and we really integrate the two practices together.
Who are the worst people you have to deal with? Contractors who build your shit? Do you deal with those dudes? How many of them are crooked?
I know it’s going to be a bad day when a new contractor on the job calls about one of my jobs and starts off with “Listen sweetheart, I need to speak with the architect.” There’s usually an uncomfortable silence right after I icily respond that I am in fact the architect. You name a derogatory term for a woman and I’ve been called it either on the phone, behind my back or to my face on a job site by a contractor. After I correct them, I usually get a new name. I have come to wear the term bitch with a sense of pride on a job site. That’s not to say they’re all bad. I’ve worked with some fantastic contractors who have treated me with nothing but respect. But I almost always have to work twice as hard and as long as my male colleagues to earn that respect.
In terms of your last question, let’s just say if I wanted to start over and pick a profession where I could make a lot of money and not do a hell of a lot except for complain about how I need more money because everything’s taking me so long and there was no way for me to tell how long it would take when I priced the job, I’d come back as an electrician.
How much school and training do you have go through to get to be a doctor of architecture or whatever it’s called?
You have to either complete a five-year Bachelor’s of Architecture degree or else complete a Masters of Architecture degree after an undergrad in another field in order to be eligible to take the licensing exams to be an architect. During architecture school you learn important skills like how to not cut your hand open with an x-acto knife while making a scale model at 3 A.M. after being up for four days straight prior to a final critique where you will be told that your entire idea for the project was flawed in the first place. By the way, you’ll never use those finely-honed model-making skills ever again for the rest of your life. You also learn “archi-speak” which is basically being able to regurgitate architectural catchphrases to make your designs sound deeper and cooler than they actually are:
“We must strive to subvert the dominant paradigm by exploiting the temporality of spacial experience.”
Sometimes we just make up words that sound good too. This skill is actually useful in real practice. If you confuse the client, you can more often than not get them to agree with you.
Where do architects fall on the pretentious scale from, say, performance artists to, I dunno, some non pretentious person who makes things… I’ll have to fill in that joke hole in post-production.
We’re a pretty pretentious group, and rightly so, no? I’d say less so than performance artists, but more so than, say, scientists. I come from a family of musicians, and I definitely beat them in the pretentiousness game.
What do architects think about when their husbands go to strip clubs for bachelor parties by the way?
That their husband was pretty damn lucky to land an architect and he better think twice before pissing her off again.
The architects everyone has heard of are like, Frank Lloyd Wright, and uh, the dad on the Brady Bunch… Who else is famous? What’s so great about that waterfall house anyway?
Well, the dad on the Brady Bunch never did figure out how to solve the basic problem of building an addition so that those kids could have some privacy in rooms of their own. I’m not sure how much architect-ing he really did.
The waterfall house, “Fallingwater,” is pretty famous mostly because of how well it was integrated into the particular site. It’s famous because you recognize it not only for the house, but also for the waterfall that ran below it. It’s remarkable for the harmonious integration of the two. However, Fallingwater also is known for being extremely leaky and for nearly collapsing into the waterfall (both issues are related to design and construction issues; Frank never really got those flat roofs detailed properly), though it’s nothing that millions of dollars in grants couldn’t fix.
One more thing: What the fuck is taking so long on rebuilding the Ground Zero site? Has every architect in the country taken a swipe at that thing yet or what?
So you know how I talked about how the more agencies and committees were involved in approving something the worse the design ended up being? That works for how long it takes to get built too. The more approvals that you need, the longer it takes. Multiply a regular building times about 4 billion and you get the mess that is the ground zero project. It’s a giant parade of bureaucracy.
Originally published on Street Boners and TV Carnage
