This Old Architect

This Old Architect

Recently, my wife and I were fortunate enough to visit the set of This Old House, which is to say, the active work site of a home renovation in Westerly, Rhode Island.  I won a contest as a member of what they call the "Insiders".  It's a yearly subscription where you get access to every show produced, plus a digital version of the magazine, plus New Yankee Workshop.  This is not a commercial but seriously, if you are fan, check it out.

I was extraordinarily excited to put it mildly.  My daughter heard me talking about the upcoming trip and hit me with the "Nerd" label.  Whatever...! I was stoked.  I watched the show as far back as I can remember. You watched what was on then and there were only 12 channels to choose from back in those days, but as my studies and career led toward architecture, I continued to watch.  Even with the flood of home improvement shows of the last couple of decades that concentrate on the entertainment rather than the education aspect; or the shock value rather than the shop value, This Old House was always my go to program.
  

My wife and I watch every Saturday morning with our coffee, whenever possible.  We watched together before we even owned a home.  In fact, she will be the first to tell you that it was because we would watch this program together and then launch right into a Penn State football game on a Saturday morning, that it first occurred to me to ask her to marry me.  Well...It didn't hurt.

Yes, the trailer really does show up on site.

The trip from Southeast PA to Rhode Island was not going to be an easy one, we knew.  It is about 300 miles but can take anywhere between 5 and 6 1/2 hours, depending on traffic in the greater New York area.  We had to brave it in a torrential down pour, too.  We left the night before the shoot in order to be on site by 11 AM on a weekday.  We got to our hotel at about 11 PM.  The following morning, our hotel room electronic lock decided to malfunction while we went to breakfast.  I think I may have scared the young lady working the desk at our hotel after her efforts to open the door went nowhere after about 40 minutes.  I believe I demanded a locksmith, another room to shower in, and threatened to tear to the door off the hinges in order to get to the show.

Eventually, the door opened, but we were warned not to shut the door unless someone was inside to reopen it.  We only had a short 15 minute drive to the job site.  We even had a couple of minutes to spare and drove around the neighborhood and to the shoreline, which was only a mile or so away.  Unfortunately, the rain the night before had flooded the shoreline streets, so we had to turn back.

The project house sat at the back of a cul-de-sac bristling with activity.  We parked a little way away to keep out of the hustle and bustle of the various work trucks.  Other cars started showing up and looking for a place to park like we did.  After a while, everyone started migrating over to a pop up tent that looked to be our welcome center.  A young man with a huge smile stood at the entrance into the cul-de-sac to greet us - his name was De'Shaun Burnett and we came to learn he was one of the newest apprentices along with Kathryn Fulton.  They were so engaging and happy to see all of us, that by the time we had to leave the site, I wanted to adopt them!

Current apprentice De'Shaun and former apprentice Mary McGuire Smith.

As the other winners of the contest assembled, we found that there were about 15 winners and 15 guests coming.  Most of the visitors were husband and wife and most of the winners looked to be retirees.  So my wife and I pulled the age demographic down - I think there were 3 couples in our age range (40's) and one couple in their 20's, but the rest seemed to be in their 60's.  Then I saw the host, Kevin O'Connor walking around the site!  I resisted the urge to point and shout, but his presence was definitely noticed by all the other visitors too.

It was an active job site indeed.  My wife was in the residential home building industry for a decade, and she commented that she missed the smell of fresh sawn lumber - there was definitely real work being done.  At the appropriate time, all of the guests were ushered into a second floor bedroom to watch a very small monitor of the opening shot for the day.  There were about 30 folding chairs facing a screen about 24 inches wide.  It was kind of funny and Chris Wolfe, who is the Executive Producer and General Manager of all the This Old House Productions television series, made light of the fact that they pulled out all the stops for our visit.  It was Chris' job to entertain us all until the production team was ready downstairs.  The group was very engaged and asked a lot of questions, and Chris was reprimanded on one occasion for making us laugh too loud.  Questions mainly pertained to the process of how they pick the project houses, at what stage is the design in when they do, how long the process is, etc.  The Q&A section could be a long post in and of itself.

Huge screen, eh?

The house was essentially fully framed but drywall had not yet started, so from where we sat, we could see the entire floor through the open studs.  Obviously any noise would travel down the open stairs to where the team was shooting.  They started with the "long open" shot, where Kevin O'Connor arrives on site and walks through the house and happens upon whatever work is happening that day.  This day happened to be installing a coffered ceiling detail.  We learned later that it was supposed to be installing some doors, but the rainy weather required the team to reorganize the day at the last minute.  We obviously had to hush during camera rolling, then between takes, Chris would described various facets of production.  During the long shot shooting, we learned that there really is no script, just an outline.  Kevin will assess the progress on the house since the last day of shooting and talk with the show runner and crew about what he might say.  I think the long shot took about 3 takes and each time Kevin would edit himself and make the shot smoother.

Sara Ferguson, Coordinating Producer, kept Chris from being too funny.

Once he got to the work area inside the house at the end of the long shot, Tommy and Jeff were positioned to talk about the mock-up of the wood trim detail that would become the coffers on the ceiling.  It too started with an initial conversation with the show runner about what the viewer would be looking at and what was important to talk about.  This shot was more technical and took quite a while to shoot, each take was a more condensed and streamlined version getting to the essence of what needed to be conveyed.  It was very interesting.  After the initial shot at the work table, various B roll shots were taken for close ups of the work.  Care had to be taken in order to make sure there was continuity with the overall shots previously taken.  Questions were posed by the show runner, like "weren't you holding that with your other hand in the other shot?"  As a viewer, you don't often think about these issues - if the show is done well (obviously, This Old House is).

Production shots: ceiling layout on the floor.

Once they left the work table shot, they prepared to shoot in the living room where the coffers were to be laid out, so the group was allowed to go downstairs and watch the shot in person.  Tommy and Jeff used a layout stick to mark the floor of the room and those marks would later be transferred to the ceiling using a laser.  This part was really cool because we could see not only the "shot" but all that goes into the shot.  You can see show runner John Tomlin talk to the hosts and ask them to redo a part of the scene, or the camera operator crouched on his knees or how the "extras" walk through the shot the same way every take.  Up until this point, the only regular cast members we had the chance to see were Kevin, Tommy and Jeff - and that was all we were expecting to see.  But during the end of the shooting for the morning, I turned my head and was surprised to find I was standing right next to Richard!  He saw me do a double take and smiled, and after I pointed at my camera and then at him, he nodded with a sly grin.

Don't you just want to go have a beer with this guy?

After shooting, Richard took us outside to talk about how special the septic system here was.  As exciting as that subject seems, I really don't remember what he said about it, but he actually became my favorite story teller of the cast.  He genuinely seemed like he wanted to talk to 30 strange fans and even answer one guy's oddly specific and detailed sewer questions.  He talked about how his sons came to decide to work with him in the business, how he took over for his own father in the speaking roll on season one of This Old House 40 years ago after his father got tongue tied and passed those duties on to him in his early 20's, and finally about how Tommy pranked Kevin the very first time they met by nailing his tool box down to the ground.  I left there thinking about applying for a job at his shop!  While we were outside, I caught a glimpse of Mark, the masonry expert.

Richard telling all sorts of stories, including those about sewage.

After we talked about sewage for a good long time, we were ready for the barbecue that was part of the contest winnings.  They set up tables on the deck and through the house, luckily the weather changed and it was sunny and delightful outside.  There was a big buffet of really tasty food.  While in line we chatted with a really nice couple who was very close to our age and got tips on where to go on our planned vacation to Rhode Island a month later. we got the skinny on which Newport mansions to see, where the best beaches were - what luck!

We ended up sitting down to eat at a table with Jeff Sweenor, the builder they recently collaborated on with the Net Zero house season, and were working with him again.  Chit chat included a discussion of the special wood trim being used, called Solid Select.  It is an exterior grade trim that comes from New Zealand that is treated for outdoor use and comes pre-primed.  It is so straight and defect free, they not only used it for exterior trim, but used it throughout the interiors as well.  Sadly, no one carries it outside New England - yet.

After we finished eating and wiped all the barbecue sauce off our hands, I got all the cast that was there (pretty much everyone but Norm and Roger) to sign my copy of the recent This Old House book.  I don't care if that makes me look like a dorky fan-boy, when else would I get a chance like that?  After that, the crew in charge of the Insider contest winners coordinated a lot of photo opportunities which made their way into a very nice article on the day here:  TOH Westerly Article

One last photo.

As the day came to a close (for us anyway, at about 2 PM), one final photo op was organized in front of the project house with Tommy, Richard and Kevin.  So summarize, we drove about 6 hours from Lancaster, PA in a downpour to a hotel, got locked out of our room, couldn't get close enough to the ocean to even see it, spent about 3 hours on site, and then drove back about 6 more hours to get back to our kids.  Totally worth it.

How Hip Hop Took Over the World, and Quite Possibly Can Save Architecture in the Process

In the old school days...

If you polled my classmates in 1991, a good many of them may have voted me off the studio.  You see, prior to the iPod or iPhone containing a huge library of music; prior to you even having access to a computer in the studio which could also play your music, architecture studios were essentially boom box battle zones.  My boom box was among the biggest and hardly anyone else liked my kind of music.

I like a lot of music.  Truly.  But, for all that is holy, I can only stand so much Brown Eyed Girl or, Lord help me, Best of Billy Joel.  Certain people in my studio pirated the airwaves with that junk all day long while professors were mulling around.  Either all they had was that one CD or they were too lazy to take it off of "repeat".  It didn't matter because it was the banal stuff that would offend no one.  It was, however, all I could do not to grab their boom box and throw it out the fourth story window onto the unsuspecting engineering students below.  During the day, my kind of music was taboo.  But as soon as night fell, I pressed 'play".

One of my favorite album covers.  Maybe because the artist was an architect, Matteo Pericoli.
Check him out:  Matteo Pericoli

I showed up to college in 1991 with a crate of rap and hip hop cassettes and CD's.  There was no streaming music back then?  Remember Columbia House Records?  You got 10 CD's for $1, then you had to buy so many for regular price over then next 37 years.  It was a total scam but I had Public Enemy, Ice-T, Big Daddy Kane, Beastie Boys, NWA, Digital Underground, Eric B & Rakim - you get it.  I had some punk and what would be called alternative stuff too, but in order to drown out the Chicago Greatest Hits for the eighth time that day, I went to something like Ice Cube.  And loud.  My friends hated me, but I was 18 and intent on offending those around me whom I had decided had offended me with their oppressively uninspired and stale taste in music all day.

Shock value?  Sure.  But contextual too.  This was one of my first hip hop albums.

I was nearly alone in my affinity for the genre.  They all scoffed at my "Hizzouse" music and they were all sure it (hip hop) would never last as a viable musical category.  I did get a few friends together to see Public Enemy, Ice-T and House of Pain at Rec Hall with me in 1992.  It was a steal for a $20 ticket!  But as Chuck D looked out on us (the audience), I believe he called us "Quaker Land".  Predominately, it was a sea of white kids at Penn State, as it was my studio.

Fast forward almost 30 years.  Hip Hop basically took over the world, as we all know.  Beyonce, the Kardashians - they all married into hip hop royalty.  All of my friends were wrong, and I was obviously right.  And today the AIA is literally dying to get some diversity in the profession of architecture.  Still.  They talked about this 20 years ago.

A couple years ago, a then graduate student in architecture, Michael Ford, blew up the architecture scene with a compelling program called Hip Hop Architecture Camp.  From their website:

The Hip Hop Architecture Camp® is a one week intensive experience, designed to introduce under represented youth to architecture, urban planning, creative place making and economic development through the lens of hip hop culture.

Learn more about Hip Hop Architecture Here:  HipHopArchitecture.com

Beautiful.  How do we get young architects with diverse backgrounds in the pipeline?  College is too late.  High school is too.  Take the message to them early.  Make it seem cool and like it can make a difference.  Music and architecture have always had this symbiotic relationship.  I remember our first year instructor Don going on and on about Mozart's compositions and how you could have "too many notes" and all that.  Did that resonate with 17 and 18 year olds in 1991?  Not a bit.  Well - maybe a little since I remembered it 27 years later but - Don was no Grandmaster Flash, that's for sure.

Early hip hop spoke about the environment, the real environment, in which the artists lived.

Ford introduces kids to architecture within the context of contemporary messages.  Bad environments can produce bad social/economic situations for those who live there.  -Of course.  Good environments can promote social equity.  -There's the solution based problem solving we need.  Architecture is contextual, just as there is a regional component to hip hop.  It started as a battle between the Boogie Down Bronx and Queens, but as rap spread, it became East Coast vs. West Coast.  Then it became even more regional, so today we have such selections as Dirty South, Crunk, Miami Base; there's a Chicago scene, a Twin Cities scene, St. Louis, Atlanta...you get the picture.  If a certain type of music makes sense in certain place, doesn't it make sense that maybe the architecture should reflect that too?  Ford will personalize his hip hop to the location of the camp.

Photographer Glen E. Friedman took this photo on his own roof.  He did album covers for many artists across many genres.

Hey, it is no coincidence that the rappers I was listening to in the late 80's / early 90's are now popular cultural icons with proven acting careers like Ice-T, Ice Cube, LL Cool J, Will Smith, Latifah, Mos Def, Common, etc. The list goes on.  These people had something to say, and once our demographic became the one with all the money to spend, producers and sponsors took notice.  Now half the commercials on TV have hip hop scores in the background.  And by now we've all heard that Ice Cube was studying architectural drafting if that whole NWA thing didn't pan out.  Kanye wants to "architect" things.  The interests are aligned.  Sir Mix A Lot now fronts the Seattle Symphony.

Even Canada has their rapper.  Yeah, Toronto!

While I may have tried to force my musical preferences on those around me in studio by cranking my box to "11", it took someone smarter than me to harness the power of hip hop to reach out to youth that maybe wouldn't have ever considered the career path of architecture or design.  If you don't get what the kids are listening to, they probably know something that you don't, and maybe never will.

The Non-traditional Route

Being an architect, I have a lot of architect friends.  I don’t think this is atypical.  My wife and I went through architecture school together in the same class.  In fact, in our class of 22 graduates, there are 3 couples who got married.  25% of the people in our class married other people in our class.  And they/we are all still married!  And, except for my wife and me, both of the other couples have an architecture business with their spouse.  The relationship percentage from our class is even more perverse if you counted all the relationships that started between classmates that didn't end in marriage - but that is a totally different story (and one that has to be much more delicately told).

Where luckier kids than us now go to architecture school at PSU.

But then I started to think about all of my former classmates, co-workers and colleagues who finished their degree and either immediately or eventually left the profession.  Or those who still practice architecture but have a significant foothold in other professions.  Again, from my class of 22, I could immediately think of more than a handful of people who now make a living doing something other than architecture.  When I think about the investment we all made to graduate from architecture school, and some of us the further investment to pass the Architect Registration Examination (ARE) tests (9 of them when I took them), I began to wonder if it was the profession itself that spurned recent graduates and forced them to consider other professions.  Or is that architecture school has the ability to produce people who are capable of doing more than just architecture?

I am sure that all professions have their share of ‘defectors’, but I would think they are the exception rather than a full third of a graduating class as was the case in ours.  And it has nothing to do with gender, really.  As much as the architectural profession laments about attracting women to the profession, the genders in our class were split nearly 50/50.  Of the eight people that I can count from my original graduating class who have left architecture, only 3 are women, so from my graduating class, there are more women still in the profession than men.

So where do these people go and why did they leave?  Do they do something related to architecture or completely unrelated?

I looked to my classmates, friends and former co-workers for answers.  Of the people I surveyed, two are in the film industry (one in visual effects and one in set design – no adult film stars that I know of, sorry).  One worked as a product designer for a major ceiling product manufacturer. Two work for the federal government.  One works for a large retirement community and helps new residents layout their new homes and sell their existing ones.  One is a jewelry designer and sculptor who sells her merchandise in museum gift shops and craft shows all over the country.  One person now engineers and builds millwork and cabinetry.  One classmate owns and operates a needlework business.  Last but not least, one colleague now runs a catering business and gourmet shop.  Notice there is no stay at home mom or dad listed.  While some may have also done this job IN ADDITION to their other job, it isn't as if these people have picked up their ball and gone home.  They are contributing to the work place in other ways, some related to architecture, some not so much.

I thought about this and asked each person I know in this position to answer a fourteen question survey.  As to be expected, some surveys took a very long time to get back (architects are notorious procrastinators).  Some I am still waiting on.  I hold no ill will, but they are off the Christmas Card list for sure.  Actually we are so bad at getting Christmas Cards out, we have changed them to New Year’s Cards.  Also, I do none of the work on the holiday card front for my own family.

I tried to get an idea of why each person in the focus group went into the study of architecture, when he/she felt like they might want to change professions, how architecture school may have prepared him/her for other endeavors and if he/she would do it differently or what suggestions might be useful to those pondering the profession.

In terms of when the decision was made to enter architecture school, most of the respondents indicated fairly late in high school.  I don’t know if that is unusual.  My own answer to this question is 7^th grade or so. One person indicated a very young age (before 10 years old), and two actually made that decision after college orientation or after a full year of college.  Our class had a high percentage of students that were older, from 20 to 30 years old, rather than 17 or 18 like the rest of us.  I am not sure of the reason for this but it didn't really matter other than when it came to buy beer.  I would guess that the dropout rate for the traditional freshmen was about the same as those entering architecture school with a few years under their belt.

When asked if there was any point that they felt entering architecture school was the wrong one, answers were all over the board.  Some had doubts in school (of course we all did in some way due to the pressures of studio).  One person actually left a message for their adviser in order to start the process of switching majors.  The adviser never called back and he ended up sticking it out (see above for ‘procrastination’).  One woman kept a pink ‘Change of Major’ slip pinned in their work space every year.  Another indicates that every semester was plagued with doubts.  Several respondents settled into the program as we all did, perhaps after the first couple of years of indoctrination.  And lastly, one man didn't have doubts until he received his first paycheck and saw the amount of overtime he was working.

When asked if they intended to seek employment outside of the profession immediately following college, most responded that they sought traditional work for architectural graduates.  Only one intended to pursue work in a related field (architectural preservation).  Many found traditional work.  Only one person I polled fell into another profession while looking for traditional work; the video gaming industry.  In fact when he started in the gaming job, he states five of the six people on his team were either architecture school graduates or licensed architects.

Only one of the respondents is currently a licensed architect.  He left the traditional office job based on having positive relationships with those in the government he worked with while completing projects with or for them.  As a result, he left the private sector to work for the government agencies he had worked with in the past, more in an Owner’s representative position for construction projects.

Another former coworker also got a job with a government agency in a field directly related to architecture.  But when it became clear that a transfer from his current city was eminent, he found work in another department looking for someone in graphics and web design.

My classmate Jake has a very unique resume.  After graduating with us in architecture, he ended up traveling around a bit, trying to decide where to work.  In doing so, he passed through San Francisco and thought how cool it would be to work somewhere like Pixar.  When traditional jobs did not immediately pan out, he found himself working in the video gaming industry, contributing on several games in the Star Wars series for Lucas Arts and Marvel Nemesis for Nihilistic.  Eventually he made his way to the other side of the planet, working for Weta Digital as a Layout Technical Director on films like Avatar, X-Men: First Class, and the Hobbit trilogy.  Jake attributes his current skills like spatial layout, 3-D problem solving, art history and managing stressful deadlines to his architectural training.

In perhaps one of the most unique results of my survey, one respondent actually came back to work at an architectural office:  the one I work for.  Jim had worked for us a little over ten years ago and eventually found employment with a major manufacturer of ceiling products, where his wife also worked at the time.  He worked in several positions over about a decade from research and development of ceiling products, to working with architects and designers to produce specific solutions for their design needs.  While his positions were maybe more traditionally filled by industrial engineers, the problem solving aspects of working in buildings perhaps benefited him during his time there.  It happened that when I contacted Jim to answer my survey and catch up for lunch; I gave him a tour of our new office space.  A few weeks later and Jim rejoined us.  Yes our office is that cool.

My friend Melissa runs a business creating handmade jewelry and other objects made from industrial and recycled materials, see:  StubbornStiles.  She worked in an office for about ten years before making that move.  And if there were anyone I would have expected to do something outside of architecture, it was Mel.  Not to say she wasn't talented and couldn't have excelled in an office, but I expected her more than anyone else I knew from college to create her own professional path.  I visited her once in San Francisco many years ago where she was working in a firm, and it was very strange for me to see her step out of the office where I met her, dressed the part in every way.  What she does now totally fits her.  (She was the one with change of major slip at her desk in college).

My wife worked for a very small architectural firm doing mostly residential work for a short time, but left to work for a nationally known home building company.  She liked the residential aspect of the work and she needed to pay off student loans, and this job was better than where she was.  She went on to move to where I was living in Lancaster, PA (and we still live there today) and worked for two different regional home builders.  She went part time after our first child and eventually quite all together after our second.  She never fully intended to leave the work force, and continued to work on some drafting work freelance.  Eventually, an opportunity arose to work through one of her freelance clients to become what is termed the Transition Specialist for a very large retirement community.  She meets with clients who will be moving into the retirement community, measures their furnishings that will be going with them, and lays out the furniture plan for them in their new apartment plan.  She also provides tips for selling the home they are leaving.  It is still a profession very related to architecture.

I know or know of others that have gone into designing and building furniture, culinary and catering endeavors, and even a needlework shop and business.  It is clear that all of these changes in profession have one thing in common:  there is still an aspect of design and/or art relating to them all.  When asked how their architectural education benefited them in their non-traditional professional field, the answer returned was unanimous from the focus group:  the ability to problem solve.  It is a different kind of problem solving than the engineer or mathematician.  The problems presented to architects and even to students in school are open-ended and never only have one answer.  We are taught to think in terms of options.  Which solution is best for Client A is almost certainly not the best solution for Client B.

The architect must work between what the client thinks they need, what the codes require and what the engineers need to do.  I have always thought that being an architect requires, almost above all others, the ability to compromise.  The best solutions can answer questions that weren't even asked.  Architecture school teaches creative thinking to spatial problems as well as time management skills.   It also teaches how to take criticism.  Does it ever…

Most of the people in my limited survey also know others in their fields who studied architecture or were architects.  The last couple of decades have seen a few deep recessions.  Architecture was one of those majors everyone was warned against very recently, see:  Degrees to Avoid.  Getting a job in architecture has been difficult at several times over the course of the last 20 years, which can influence some to abandon the traditional route and go into something else.  There are also several famous folks who at least started an architectural education before going off to become famous for other things.  See:  Career Paths. Some actually got their degrees and practiced before going into acting, singing, even royalty…good work if you can find it.

Several respondents suggested they didn't know what they were getting into.  There are a lot of programs today targeting high school students that didn't exist when I considered a college major.  I actually have volunteered for the program at Penn State.  See:  Career Advice.  This would have been extremely helpful to me as a college freshman and would have provided for a good transition from high school to studio.  It turns out there are dozens of these programs over the summer from one week to six weeks.  See:  Summer Programs.  I would tend to think that incoming students at least have the opportunity to know what they are getting into.

Most of the people I polled believe that the education of an architect, while certainly not completed with a degree, can provide one with a set of skills that is transferable to other undertakings.  Of course to be licensed, there is the Architectural Registration Exam to contend with, along with the NCARB internship requirements.  But that is a discussion for another time.  Architecture school is not for everyone, considering my year barely graduated 25% of the original first year class.  Even my colleagues who are in fields that have college programs tailored specifically to them (like animation and stage set design) discover aspects of the architectural program that inform their work.  Needless to say, a Bachelor of Architecture or Masters of Architecture is the most direct path to becoming a practicing architect.  But an architectural course of study is able to translate to a wide variety of career pursuits.

Gingerbread 2013 Part Five: Postpartum

Publicity and Dumpsters

From conception to birth, pardon the analogy, it was a journey of about three months.  Starting with our first organizational meeting in September to the Client party in December, to tear down the first weekend of January.  For an ephemeral display, that is a significant amount of time.  The display was officially "open" from December 11, 2013 and was set to be torn down on January 4, 2014 - just over three weeks from completion.  Many who tour the display ask what we do with it once the holidays are over.  Honestly, it is without much guilt that we respond like an umpire at home plate: "It's outta here!"

I imagine it is somewhat like the float builders in Mardi Gras or the Rose Bowl.  Granted this is a simplistic analogy, but we all go into it knowing that the creation will not be permanent.  Or, for the architecture nerds, Aldo Rossi's 1979-1981 Teatro del Mondo, which was built to float across the Adriatic and intended to be dismantled once it reached the other side.  But we still have our piece of Aldo in the china closet in that espresso maker that is too nice to muck up!

We labor on the display knowing full well that its destination will be in the dumpster in a few weeks' time.  But we labor none the less.  As Aldo so poetically put it (I paraphrase here):  the built environment provides a stage for life to occur.  Instead of icing and gingerbread, he used painted plywood and a zinc roof.

But until its demise, mileage, we shall get from it.  Immediately after the Client Party, the local news will come for a live look in on us (starting at 5 AM, lucky for the guy showing up for that!), and a couple of local publications will come to snap a few photos.  We also open it up the next three Thursday evenings to the public.  

And does the public come.  Thank goodness for the new office because we had over 200 people on the fist night, over 300 hundred on the second night and, on the last evening (the day after Christmas) we had almost 450 people.  They waited up to an hour and a half in line.  For some time, some had to wait outside.  We opened the doors to the public at 5 PM right after work and technically they were open until 7 PM (although we didn't turn any latecomers away).  Then it took almost 90 minutes for those last visitors to make it from the front door and out again.  Once a visitor got to the display, it would take between 10 and 15 minutes for those people to get the whole way around.

My apologist comment to the folks coming in was , "I sure hope it was worth the wait."  Most people, either sincere or very good fibbers, seemed to think that it was all worth it.  We used to allow people to come look at it whenever they came by during business hours, but it became so disruptive over the years, that we had to set something up outside the work day.  In three days this year, over 1,200 visitors.  

I think, and I mean this sincerely, that the mobile phone has exasperated the wait times in "modern" times.  People come in with Cellphones, iPhones or iPads and they begin to make a documentary of their visit.  I literally saw people trying to take detailed pictures with a flip phone this year.  And the whole selfie thing is, well, let's just say it held up the line far too much.  I hope someone proves me wrong and we end up in some HBO documentary or something, but I highly doubt it.  No one looks through their own eyes anymore, always filtered through a screen...

After that final public night, it is just a matter of time before we have to dismantle the display.  The first Saturday in January we will typically meet for a few hours, maybe ten or twelve of us.  It really only takes a few hours.  Mostly, there is a lot of banging, tearing and smashing, followed by a lot of vacuuming.  No craft here:

Actually there can be quite a bit of sawing and cutting, just being careful enough not to cut the lights and extension chords woven into the underbelly.  That icing gets really hard.

And just like that there are hundreds of man hours tossed in a cart, being hauled off the the dumpster.  I was able to pluck off several characters I had made out of fondant that will dry rock hard and can be used in the future perhaps.  I saved my kids gingerbread boats (for now).

While it looked pretty cool and might have been able to bust some ghosts, this backpack vacuum wasn't so good at pulling up candy from the carpet.

And this became the final resting place of the 2013 Gingerbread display.  So full the lid wouldn't shut.  In the old office there was a sense of relief to get our much needed table tops back.  This year the display didn't usurp any space that we desperately needed back, but it didn't really dampen our enthusiasm to remove it.  After seventeen of these, at least for me, it is just another stage in the development of the display.  Tear down.  Without it, we can't have another one next year.

Gingerbread 2013 Episode IV: Why We Build

The Client Party

Aside from "How do you do this?" one of the most heard questions around the display is "Why do you do this?"  Honestly, it started long before I started at the firm.  I remember visiting it when I was a young student in architecture school in the early 90's.  As I said, we've been doing this gingerbread thing since 1987.  I started in 1997.

It started out as something fun for the guests at our Client Party to look at.  The first couple of years it was a few gingerbread creations set on the table top.  By the time I got to the game, the stakes were raised.  The entire design studio was usurped for the display, there was a complicated voting arrangement, and the display covered more than 100 square feet and used LOTS of candy and icing.

The Client Party is a nice way to say thanks to our Clients and see them in a social setting right before the holidays.  The display itself has become the center piece to the party, we create a fairly in depth ballot for the Clients to vote on their favorite creations.  What do we win, you ask?  Bragging rights, that's what.  It's all for fun.

New office, new twist - we lit up a message on the exterior of our office as seen above.  Have to admit, this was pretty cool.

Above you can see Great Room filling up Clients in the photo above.  We had LOADS more space this year, the previous displays were very tightly woven into the interior of our office layout.  This year's display allowed ample viewing and it never felt overwhelming.  Clients had the opportunity to circle around the display (it was an island) and check their three favorite houses and three favorite accessories.  A motor scooter served as the ballot box.  At the end of the evening, we break open the ballots and start counting.

We had over 200 guests so we probably counted close a thousand votes total.

During the party, staff circulate to greet the Clients.  I have seen, I won't name names, voting persuasion going on during the party.  I think we may begin asking for photo ID for the votes to count next year.  There was both a beer bar and a wine bar, and senior staff took shifts serving the Clients, which is fun.  Below, Scott got into the Italian theme, Sopranos style, while serving a Peroni.

The Client Party dies down about 8 PM.  It was a great turnout this year, as I mentioned.  Some drove several hours on a week night to visit us.  Around this time, the food and beverages are available to the whole staff and it is a chance for us to celebrate finishing the display one more year.  Below you see some of our handsome Architects swapping stories.

Once we eat a bit and drink a bit, we get to counting votes.  We typically recognize the top three vote winners in each of the two categories.  It is competitive, let's just leave it at that.  I've never won first place.  I've place in the top three, but never have won.  You really need to think about why people vote the way they do.  You need a gimmick - something to set you apart.  When I figure it out, I will let you know.

Once we go home on that Wednesday night, we need to start thinking about the publicity that awaits us in the days to come.  We have TV, newspapers and yes, the open house nights for the public to plan.  Those will be described in the next episode.

Gingerbread 2013: Part Three

Why Do We Do This Every Year, Again?

Every year, there is a week long push to really get the display to come together.  Basically, groups of people start staying late in the evenings after work and all day on Saturday and Sunday.  (See football game on the wall in the background).  Usually, Monday and Tuesday are more or less touch-up and clean up.  The last couple days are when you see the opportunity for a few of the funny accessories.  They kind of happen once you see how everything lays out.

At a certain point, we need to start mass producing the little things that enliven the display.  This happens once most of the people are done with their houses.  People and animals make the scenes come to life.  Bikes, cars, trees and carts fill in the gaps.  In the photo above, there are tons of little things created to go "somewhere".  Birds come together with some Good & Plenty's and gum, Rabbits and dogs come from a bit of colored fondant.  Some things we kind of know where we want them to go, others are just for fill in.

The centerpiece of the display was a monastery.  So i figured it should have some monks.  Since they wear cloaks, they weren't too hard.  For some reason, I felt they should all have male patterned baldness, maybe a reflection of the maker?  And who else was in the news?

The Pope, of course.  This was Italy anyway.  And he was coincidentally named Time's person of the year about a week later.  His hat is a rigatoni.  He is in a Volkswagen, because I mistakenly thought lost so people would have heard this same joke I had.  Q:  "How do you fit the Pope in a Volkswagen?"  A:  "You take off his hat."  Well, I gave him a convertible, and I was really dead wrong about others having heard the joke.  NO ONE heard it before.

Eventually we get close to done.  We hung clouds, which looked great and were back lit.  Someone had the idea to make a moon, which led to someone making an astronaut standing on the moon, and someone gave the astronaut an RLPS flag, then I had the idea to make a man looking through a macaroni telescope on a rooftop.

There he is on that pink octagonal building.  There's even a bit of meaning behind that octagon, as it is one of RLPS' trademark visual elements we like to use in our projects.

All told we used 60 sheets of gingerbread, 30 gallons of icing, 80 pounds of candy. pasta, cereal and crackers.  All of this stuff had arrived only two weeks prior.  And it all leads up to the Client party on Wednesday night.  Oh yeah, that party is the entire reason we do this every year.  That is how it started and who we actually do it for.  I've been around for 17 of the 25 years it's been done.  My next post will finally address the finished results.  Tune in next time!

Fixing the Flux Capacitor

It’s difficult to convey to a Client that a set of documents representing their new building or renovation is a delicate ecosystem.  The plans live in a subtle balance of structural framing and mechanical systems, not to mention the life safety components such as egress and fire protection.  Just as in nature, if one facet of the ecosystem is altered, it can very quickly affect all of the other systems within that environment.  

Or a more colorful comparison that comes to my mind is that changing a design once too many decisions have already been made is a bit like time travel.  Depending on which theory one buys into; whether there are parallel cosmic timelines (alternate universes) versus loops in spacetime, there may be some arguments to the finer points.  Let’s just say we subscribe to the concept that history is plastic and subject to change, and that changes to history, while seemingly insignificant, can impact the time traveler, the entire world, or both.

Imagine a Client wants to change the environment we are creating for them.  They want to change the door locations, move walls, combine spaces.  That’s fine, of course.  It is also what the design development or schematics phases are for, but I digress.  Moving doors can affect egress paths.  Moving walls can affect sprinkler layouts.  Combining spaces may affect occupancy loads.  And each of these first layer changes can require additional changes to other systems, and on and on and so forth and so on.  In time travel this is called ‘resulting paradoxes’.  In building design this is called ‘additional services due to design revisions’.  Either way, you have to pay for the changes you incur.

The easiest illustration of this concept is the Back to the Future trilogy.  There are others like Doctor Who or stories by those like Ray Bradbury, but I am most familiar with the beloved science fiction comedy from 1985.  In the film, Michael J. Fox’s character, Marty McFly, ends up in a point in time where he is presented with his parents as teenagers before they had began dating.  Any move Michael J. Fox makes seems to change the exact sequences of actions from the way they happened the first time, creating a significant ripple effect that changes time and impacting the future.  Simply the fact that Marty exists in the point in time is enough to make some changes.  Think about how the girl who becomes Marty’s mother (Lea Thompson’s character) is attracted to him instead of his father George while they are both teenagers.  Creepy enough for you?  But this fact alone creates a paradox that can bring Marty’s world to a sticky end.  If Marty changes the series of events that results in his teenage mother and father getting together at the perfect moment, Marty ceases to exist!

Just as Marty needs to repair the damages he created to his parents love story throughout the rest of the movie, the Architect must repair all the ‘damages’ generated by the Client altering the delicate universe we have created.  The ripple effect is often not immediately visible.  Often, additional necessary changes are uncovered as you work your way through the first set of changes, and each consultant that needs to react may discover supplementary revisions they need to sort out which again affects the architecture in a seemingly endless loop.  All this work is an effort to get back to a world where everything is okay again (Marty’s version of 1985).

Ultimately it is the Architect’s job to keep the Client happy, and this will include allowing them to change their mind even when it is late in the process.  We as the design professionals, however, are obligated to inform the Client of the ramifications and help them understand that some changes become a vehicle to additional services. And while these are never is as cool as Marty’s time traveling vehicle, the DeLorean DMC-12, we must not create immovable roadblocks because of the changes.  Because unlike the film, ‘Where we’re going, we DO need roads!”  We just need to fix the flux capacitor and get back to 1985.

An American in Paris

While in college, I was lucky enough to study in Italy for a semester.  It was one of the defining experiences of my life (I found my wife there, too).  However, at the end of my studies in Italy, I was able to backpack to several other counties on the train.  I loved Italy, but while many aspects of Italian life are “modern”, their architecture is relentlessly classical.  On the train ride it was obvious that the further north we got, the more modern the buildings were.

Paris had a scale and a blend of styles that I had not seen in months.  As a young student, I made it my mission to see as many “famous” buildings as possible with the time I had.  One stop I had to make was the American Center in Paris, designed by Frank Gehry.  At the time, Mr. Gehry had little of his public acclaim earned by his later Guggenheim commission in Bilbao, Spain.  He was; however, quite well know in architectural circles.  The American Center was his largest and most famous commission to date, and I had to see what all the fuss was about.

The building was not located anywhere near the center of the city, but on the outskirts along the river with many other modern buildings I could only assume were corporate office buildings.  The façade was not as pristine as it had been in the magazines, either.  It was dirty and several of the thin, stone veneer panels were kicked in, exposing the insulation behind.  I thought maybe that the French were none too pleased with this American presence in Paris (I will dispense with the comparisons to the much different attitude in Paris during 1944).  However, the building was anti-contextual, taking no cues from the surrounding environs.  The sweeping and curved forms related to absolutely nothing I could see from my vantage point.  I couldn’t imagine how that exterior translated into any kind of reasonable interior.

When I entered the main lobby, I found that most of the curved exteriors were part of a vast and complex atrium.  Then I noticed that there was hardly any one in there with me.  Come to think of it, I still don’t know what the main function of that building was.  I snooped around as much as I thought I could without getting cursed at in French.  The most telling investigation came when I found a bathroom.  I couldn’t open the door to the 90 degree position.  I found the obstruction to be the toilet itself.

I left feeling a bit jaded.  This exorbitantly expensive and controversial building had failed to deliver.  I’m not saying I kicked in any stone panels on the façade, but I now understand why there were so many.  A year later I learned that the Center went bankrupt and closed it doors, at least they closed them as tightly as they could given any obstructions.

Full Disclosure:  When I wrote this, the building was still standing vacant, as it did for 9 years.  Since, however, the building was rehabilitated into a center of history of cinema, with very little change to the outside.

Mom's House

Of the decisions I have made as an Architect, I think the smartest one I have ever made was to refuse to get involved with the house my parents built on their retirement lot.  My parents had owned several desolate acres in New Mexico for years, always intending to build a house when they retired.  I have only ever seen it in photographs, but it looks like the photos Viking sent back from Mars when I was a kid.

Of course when it came time to start designing their house, they started asking for free advise.  They didn’t pay for my tuition, so they couldn’t hold that over my head, but I didn’t mind until I heard a few things that sent up warning flags in my head.  First of all, I was not too familiar with the climate in which they would live.  Although they were to move to New Mexico, it was not desert.  Their property was in the foothills of the mountains.  While it still goes up to 120 degrees in the summer, nights would get rather cool.  In the winter, it can actually snow quite a lot there.  In fact they got much more snow there than we did here in Pensylvanian this year.  My step father had ideas of installing a coal burning stove and a swamp cooler in the house, neither of which I had ever seen as primary heating and cooling.  I didn’t want to be responsible for them freezing to death in their sleep.

Here was the big warning flag, though:  my step father had visions of a log cabin.  Did I mention their property, nor none in sight, had any trees what-so-ever?  The biggest vegetation there would be considered as weed-like shrubs here and cut down in short order.  No matter how hard I tried to explain to him that his idea was ridiculous and probably cost-prohibitive, he would not admit that I knew better than he did.  I saw the way things would go.

So I gently explained that it would be much easier on everyone if they would meet some local builders on their next trip out and see what they had to offer.  They knew the climate, the permitting process, as well as the local building materials.  The builder was going to build it anyway, and probably wouldn’t follow the directives from some moron from back east anyway.  So that is what they did and they currently reside in a respectable stucco house with a clay tile roof, heated by a traditional furnace.  They do have a swamp cooler instead of a traditional air conditioner and it works quite well, as I understand it, and I am still on speaking terms with my parents.

Hold the Starch

What do an electric iron and a set of presentation drawings have to do with each other?  Quite a bit if those presentation drawings we mysteriously and mistakenly crumpled and tossed in the trash.  One day, before a fairly important presentation, a frantic search began for the drawings around which this presentation was going to be centered.  Finally, the renderings were discovered in a recycling receptacle, and they were not in very good condition.

Time was limited, so the possibility of rendering the drawings again was not an option.  The solution; go to Kmart, purchase an iron (with a  steamer), lay out the crumpled up renderings on the floor, and iron out the drawings like a wrinkled shirt (without the starch).  Up close, the drawings were still pretty wrinkled, but from 10 feet or more, the wrinkles were not really recognizable.  Apparently, the presentation went well enough.  It just goes to show you, presentation drawings only need to look good from presentation distance.