Career Advice

A few months ago I took a day out of my schedule to volunteer at a summer camp Penn State offers to high school students each July.  Students interested in architecture, landscape architecture, engineering or construction can immerse in the field for a week, living on campus and attending studio sessions.  I had known about the program for some years, but this was the first opportunity for me to get involved.  If nothing else, I felt it was a worthy cause to prepare high school aged students, who haven’t already committed to a particular line of study, for what might really lie ahead.

The students arrive on Sunday to register and settle in, but they were also subjected to their first studio session immediately.  They were to cut a sheet of cardboard up into 11 pieces, without really knowing what they were to do with them later.  They would return to these pieces on Tuesday, because on Monday, they took a field trip to Fallingwater and Wright’s lesser known house in the same general area, Kentuck Knob.  Understandably, the field trip was very popular.  Tuesday is when I showed up, and not knowing exactly what I was to do, found myself walking around the studio, watching the students work on their cardboard.  They had all been together for a couple days by now with their college student counselors, so I felt a little out of place at first, not really knowing what advice to give them immediately. When the groups split up just a little while later, I chose to accompany the group who was going to visit a local engineering firm; a firm where I knew almost everyone, as they are our consultants on many, many jobs – Reese Engineering, Inc. (REI), located just a few minutes ride from campus.

The tour would be interesting, I thought, since my office designed their building, and it would give me a chance to get to know some of the kids a little better in familiar surroundings.  I was able to chime in during their tour of the building, providing an architect’s vantage point as REI was our client on their own building, as well as the MEP designers.  Unfortunately I think a lot of the kids focused on the fact that the central kitchen space in their office; not only did it look cool, but they learned that the office served lunch to their employees many days throughout the week.  Also, the fact that they have an onsite fitness room was very impressive to the students.

After that another engineer provided a rather in depth look into design tools and programs, including software that could pinpoint temperatures and predict breezes inside a virtual building that was designed to utilize natural air circulation.  I have to believe it was a little too much for 10^th and 11^th graders.  It was too much for me, that’s for sure.  After our lecture there, we got back on the bus to go back to the University to have what was billed as “lunch with a professional”.

This was actually one of the more enjoyable parts of the day.  While waiting for lunch, I had time to catch up with my thesis advisor from when I was in school, Dan Willis.  But when it came time to sit down, we needed to split up so that as many tables as possible had an actual professional at it.  I sat down with a couple kids and I was really impressed with the questions they came with. I got the obligatory “How much will someone make” questions, which I can’t blame them for asking.  When I see that the yearly tuition at Penn State is over $16,000 (in state, without room and board), you have to be able to justify your major.  None the less, I was able to provide them with average starting salary range of someone coming out of school, granted it had a lot to do with location, etc.  We touched on the fact that new graduates have had a lot of trouble finding jobs in the last several years, but I was able to report that our office is very busy and has been hiring, including several summer interns.  Summer interns turn into full time employees, like I did, almost 20 years ago at my firm.

Many of the young people were interested in knowing how to prepare for college and getting into their college of choice.  I was impressed with how prepared some of the students were.  Many students not only had college prep courses in math and science, but also in a wide variety of artistic pursuits.  In my own past, I think of how more useful it would have been to have learned how to weld rather than learning to draw an isometric drawing of a screwdriver in high school drafting class.  My only real suggestion to them was to learn how to communicate well, and I stressed how much correspondence there was in the business of architecture, beyond knowing how to draw.

After lunch we returned to the projects the students had set aside before the field trip.  They had a choice of combining those eleven pieces of cardboard into a beach house, a church or an airport.  Depending on the project, the concept of scale was very important obviously.  Entry and site lines were stressed as well.  Once the project developed to a point, trees were to be fabricated out of metal wire in appropriate sizes to reinforce scale and connectivity to nature.  Perhaps based on their trip to Falling water, one of the projects actually was organized around a huge tree.  There were a lot more churches and beach homes than airports, perhaps because it was a more comfortable scale.  But in the end, as in school, it wasn’t really about the project.  It was about the learning experience.

I had volunteered to help the students because I felt it was a worthy endeavor.  I think I got a lot more out of the day for myself than I expected.  Certainly, I asked questions of various students about their projects, maybe nudged them into one direction or another.  I may have suggested that architects (at least the ones I know) never use calculus so maybe consider some other useful coursework if you have the option.  The students’ attitudes and energy gave me a reminder of why I was who I am.  I thought that this program, had I been able to take part of it as a high school student, would have been a tremendous transition from college prep in high school to architecture school.  As we all know, architecture school is different from most courses of study.  Most first year students in other majors do not have three quarters of their very first semester dictated by architecture prerequisite credits.  They have time to take general education classes, adjust to living on their own for the first time and find their way before they get into core curriculum. 

The immersion the students felt of showing up on a Sunday afternoon and already starting to cut cardboard by Sunday night is a good parallel to First Year Studio, as I remember it anyway.  I had to wait until the end of my first year to see Fallingwater, which was an essential, spiritually charged experience for which I credit giving me the ambition to fully pursue this career path.  After that day with the students I thought back, for the first time in years, to my moment standing on the bottom platform of the stairway that ends in the stream at Fallingwater, convincing myself to go on to Second Year and try to excel.

Oh Captain, My Captain

William Arthur Ward said, “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails”.  If one considers our clients, bosses or colleagues as the captains of their respective ships, it is obvious which captain would be most desirable to serve.

The pessimist can act in a number of ways under duress.  Probably the first reaction from these types of personalities is to assign blame before fully investigating the problem.  This is probably because pointing fingers is so much easier than rolling up your sleeves and looking for solutions.  Sometimes so much time is wasted in the blame game, both by the act of blame and then the obligatory defense of those blamed, that the problem can spiral out of control.  One only has to think back to a hurricane named Katrina to support this theory. 

The optimist is too quick to throw in the anchor.  Inaction is their course of action, with the expectation that higher powers will set them on the right course eventually.  While the winds are blowing, the safe thing in their minds may be to sit tight.  This may be the right thing to do in a typhoon (think if Gilligan and the Skipper had dropped anchor during that three hour tour), but when in competition with other ships, this inaction may -put too much space between you and your rivals.

The realist takes a good, hard look at the wind and adjusts their course of action with their original destination in mind.  Blame becomes irrelevant and the thought of stopping never crosses their mind.  I think back to Apollo 13, when the astronauts’ vessel did not have enough power to return to Earth, the crew used the gravity of the moon to sling shot it back home.  Hundreds of people pulled together with the common goal to get Tom Hanks and those other two guys home.

            

The Strong, Silent Typewriter

The Strong, Silent Typewriter

Garry Cooper was the strong, silent type.  I think he would have done well in business.  When it comes to writing it is almost always better to use fewer words to express a thought rather than more.  This is especially true in business writing and the same can be said for presentations and speaking.  That is not to say that one should haphazardly remove words, or force sentences to their minimum lengths, but a well thought out paragraph should remove extraneous phases and redundancies.  As all things relate to Seinfeld; this is not a suggestion to gloss over the body of the story...

But this takes some time and thought, as does improving anything, and that is why it seems to seldom happen in business correspondence.  To illustrate, below are some of my favorite quotes on the subject:

Thomas Jefferson quipped, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

Blaise Pascal said (in French), “I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

This last historical example I will use is not only clever, but ironic.  In Hamlet, Polonius states “brevity is the soul of wit” in a long winded explanation as to why the Prince is mad.  The Queen then interjects, “More matter, with less art.”  Quite possibly the most elegant way to say, “Get on with it,” that I have ever come across.

If I can be indulged with one personal example, I was working with an engineer on faucet specification.  Exciting, no?  There was a major difference between the faucet the facility manager suggested and the type we typically use.  First I received a ten minute phone call from the engineer explaining why the one faucet was specified and how they differed, the details of which are not relevant here.  Then the same engineer sent me the product cut sheets along with a very lengthy email further explaining the situation.  My task was to distill all this information to get a decision from the Owner.

I was able to shave 1/3 of the word count from the original engineer generated email and send it to the owner for a value-based decision.  I believe it was clear, concise and yet courteous.  I actually got a note back from the engineer thanking me for sending out the question because, as he put it, my correspondence was what he was trying to say in his head, it just wasn't coming out that way.

The Gettysburg Address contained 270 words, roughly 200 less than this article.  Lincoln’s Address was not the only speech that day. Edward Everett gave a two hour eulogy prior to Lincoln’s two minute talk and no one remembers the former’s content.

For the record, the owner responded the way we hoped he would and used only nine words to do so.  

The Cardboard Portal

In third year of college, our class was given the task of recreating the Laurentian Library portal, designed by Michelangelo, in corrugated cardboard.  For about a month we stole boxes from dumpsters of all the local businesses in the area under cover of darkness.  Looking back, that wasn't really responsible of the professors, assigning us petty larceny.  However, we did and just stacked an entire corridor full of the broken down boxes, like five feet high.  Another good example of careless instruction from professors – go store hundreds of pounds of combustible materials in this egress component. But Frank Gehry was making furniture out of cardboard at the time so it had to be okay.

The construction was a huge task and we were given just a weekend to complete it.  Friday afternoon we began by laminating layers of boxes with wood glue and creating templates.  Once our building blocks had dried, we cut them in the model shop on band saws and table saws.  There was so much to do (the thing was full scale and ended up being sixteen feet tall) that we started off scheduling four hours of sleep per person per day.  That sleep quickly evaporated as the work consumed us.

People were half dead by Sunday, using power tools on University property on a class assignment.  We were lucky no one lost a finger or worse.  I carry a scar on my forearm from that weekend as a result of a run in with a hot glue gun.  The end result was utterly amazing when I think about it.  About thirty kids accomplished quite a feat in a single weekend.  None of my friends in other majors could believe the kind of boot camp us architecture students went through.  On the weekends, they had fraternity parties and bar hopping.  I think it may have even been Homecoming Weekend.  Meanwhile, we were fabricating full scale buildings out of refrigerator boxes.  The only regret I have is that it was almost impossible to photograph due to the location we were instructed to install it.

For some reason, the classes after ours did not participate in such a cardboard charette.  There was never any formal explanation, but my assumption is that some faculty member gave a second thought to the liability.

Design For Every Age

The Poor-trayal

It is some sort of conspiracy.  I blame the media.  This job, the profession I've chosen, has a serious public relations problem.

Again, some guy wrote an overly complicated law, fessed up and said it was intended to fool us, and instead of calling him an ECONOMIST or a POLITICIAN, they called him (what?) an ARCHITECT.  Why, why, why???

So Called Obamacare Architect:  Jonathan Gruber

You cannot, by PA State law, call yourself an architect if you do not meet a certain set of predetermined requirements.  This is a good thing as the main responsibility of an architect is to defend the health, safety and welfare of those that are served.  So why is it that anytime someone gets their hand caught in the cookie jar, the press renames the scoundrel “the architect of greed”.  You remember Enron, don’t you?  Or do you remember them simply as “the architects of fraud”?  Or Adolf Eichmann, who is often referred to as the “architect of the Holocaust”?  Even Adolf Hitler’s real architect, Albert Speer, went to jail for twenty years charged with war crimes.  Where the heck are the architects of good things?  Where is my Mahatma Gandhi, the “architect of peace”?  At this point I am looking for anything; Mother Theresa, “the architect of empathy”?

The Quintessential Image of the Architect

It doesn't stop there, of course.  It bleeds into popular literature and film.  Most architects are portrayed as fiercely egocentric figures, like Howard Roark (The Fountainhead) and Stanley Kracklite (The Belly of an Architect).  If architects are not portrayed as tragically self-absorbed characters, they are shown to be buffoons.  Certainly some sitcom writer dropped out of architecture school after about six weeks, went into writing and made some real money.  Early on in the television rendition of Dagwood Bumstead in Blondie, Dagwood is a bumbling architect, working for the overbearing J.C. Dithers.  Move to more recent presentations in According to Jim, Jim Belushi (a contractor) rides roughshod over his brother-in-law, Andy (the inept architect).  Think about syrupy sweet Mike Brady (The Brady Bunch), desperate romantic Ted (How I Met Your Mother), or sorry Woody Harrelson as David Murphy, who couldn't keep Robert Redford’s character from scoring on his wife in Indecent Proposal.  Even the forlorn yet lovable character from “Sleepless in Seattle” (Tom Hanks) gets outsmarted by his nine year old son multiple times throughout the movie (and he lives on a boat).

Sappy Tom Hanks Architect

With every rule, however, there are exceptions.  For some reason, those in the information technology industry have taken to the term of “architecture” as the series of complex systems that runs their digital landscape.  I get this from one point of view, but they should really have their own title.  This concept of architect as creator was complete, when Bill Gates donned the title of Chief Software Architect.  It must be like a Medical Physician when he or she sees "Dr. Rooter, The Plumber" advertised on TV.  To me, it is a little unnerving.  I think of when Neo of the Matrix movies meet his landscape’s creator, The Architect (as he is known) explains away his lack of compassion by simply stating, “What do you think I am – Human?”

The Architect who Messes with Neo

As a postscript, another alarming fact is that all of the characters mentioned above, real or otherwise, are exclusively Caucasian and male.  This shall provide fodder for a future lesson learned.  One notable exception is Wesley Snipe’s character in “Jungle Fever”.

Lasagna Battery

Photo Credit: www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/lasagna/

Sometimes, very complicated and technical rules may boggle the mind, but sometimes they can be demonstrated very easily in the average person’s kitchen.  One such “experiment” demonstrates galvanic corrosion, which is the reaction certain metals exhibit when they make contact with each other in the presence of an electrolyte.  More simply stated; when metals get rained on and overlap each other.  This rather tedious sounding process can be explained in a very tasty way, in fact.  

The demonstration is commonly known as the lasagna battery.  Try cooking a delicious (and salty) lasagna in a steel baking pan, then cover it with aluminum foil.  In a few hours, you will see small holes developing in the foil where it is in contact with the food.  You will also see spots on the food where the aluminum has apparently dissolved. The two metals are placed into an electrolyte (lasagna).  Since the aluminum is lower on the electrochemical series, or less noble than the steel, the foil actually ionizes due to a rapid chemical reaction charged by a small electrical current.  This is why you have to be careful when you have one metal on a roof or wall in contact with a different metal composition in the presences of an electrolyte (rain water is enough).  Value Engineering metals can be hazardous to a roof's health!

But don't feel bad.  Even Gustav Eiffel got it wrong.  Over time, the shellac between the copper skin of our Statue of Liberty failed over time, allowing the iron pins to come into contact with the more noble copper.  Maybe old Gustav knew this would happen over time and, as the relations between the two nations cooled, Lady Liberty began to disrobe.  Our government fixed the problem, replacing the shellac with Teflon, properly insulating the two metals.