Architorture

I went to two different schools for my B.S.A.S. and my M.Arch, and at both schools, my major was referred to as “architorture.” At my graduate school, the local chapter of the American Institute of Architectural Students (actual organization, by the way) made up ”Architorture” t-shirts featuring an emaciated figure sporting a riveted metal mask and straitjacket with a T-square tucked under one tightly-wrapped arm. Actually, it looked like a rip-off of a Quiet Riot album cover. [banging head and playing air guitar] And I doooon’t knoooow why!

BaxterWatch’s post reminded me of this phrase, and interestingly enough, my schools were not alone in the use of this word. The alma mater of my husband, Mile High Guy, also used this particular nomenclature for those in his major. Fellow coworkers from every corner of this strip-mall-covered republic we call the United States have used “architorture” as a synonym to “architecture,” and there’s good reason for this. I alluded in my inaugural post to the fact that it’s a tough major, and it is indeed. Students stay up late into the night and next morning drawing, detailing, and building models of their projects. They cantilever, exhausted, over their drafting boards, elegantly tracing thin ink line after line onto mylar, a plastic drafting sheet medium that ran at least $12-$20 for a 30” x 40” sheet back when I was having to buy it. They hunch intently over thin twigs and slices of basswood, painstakingly gluing the pieces together with Zap-A-Gap, a type of cyanoacrylate (clear super glue). They watch the sun set. They draw. They glue. Someone’s making a run for coffee; does anyone want some? They draw more. They glue and hold two twigs together to make sure it takes. The coffee arrives. Some nurse it; others slug it like a shot of whiskey in an Old West saloon. They glue. They erase a line they just drew, dammit. They watch the sun rise. They go to the restroom and change shirts so they can go to class because it’s Thursday now. And they’ll do it all again tonight, because good design takes time and this shit’s due Friday at 2 and it’s got to be something you’re proud to stand next to and show your classmates and professor at pin-up time.

Meanwhile, one doesn’t escape the architorture just because one gets a degree and starts working. I’m presently balancing my time between a project I worked on from start to finish—my project—and a project that’s more like a despondent gaping maw of a vortex than a building. Wheatlands Hospital* in Kansas, my hospital, is about halfway done, and at this point in the process the questions from the field become fewer. I have a good contractor who saw most of the problems coming early on, so we’ve already solved the big stuff. Since I can manage Wheatlands in about 10-20 hours a week, I’m helping out on the massive hospital project to which I referred in my last post. Pomme de Terre Hospital* is a massive project in Idaho that will ultimately cost nearly half a billion dollars and end around 2012. I wish I could say I made that up for the blog, but alas, truth is stranger than fiction. I started out just laying out one department for them, but now I’ve laid out two floors in the new building and three floors in the renovation portion of the existing building. I really, really, really need MCRI to start soon before I get sucked into getting neck-deep in this project and forgetting my own name, left only to drool and occasionally mutter, “The doctor’s lounge has to go somewhere!”

When I do, rest assured I’ll be wearing a metal mask and a strait-jacket.

Though I don’t know why.