The band is back together, and we're going on tour

The recession was hard on a sister, and on Design Associates as well.  We laid off a lot of good people, and to their credit DA has hired some of them back.  Elliott was brought back as soon as we could get him, and then Kellye was rehired back in early 2012.  And now, we have the final piece of our team in place: Jimmy Ray.


Jimmy Ray left Denver back in 2007, as I was just starting this blog.  He moved to the Midwest when his wife got an amazing promotion that they couldn't refuse.  Fast forward to 2012, and her company was bought by new owners who laid her off (as well as everyone else who made as much as she did).  Suddenly buoyed by her new freedom and the realization that her job had been making her miserable for several years, she decided to go back to school to become a therapist.  Guess where some of the best schools for her particular kind of therapy are? Yup--the Mile High.


So, a few phone calls later, Jimmy Ray has a job with Design Associates again.  He started last week and will be moving his wife out to the Mile High sometime this month.  And guess whose project he's on?  Yup--St. Ermahgerd, with yours truly.  This is a huge relief to me, as Jimmy Ray knows how to put a hospital together, and I need help making some stuff happen on a deadline as tight as ours.  Jimmy Ray is a solid dude--smart, funny, gives a damn about his job, and easy to get along with.  


This is gonna be fun.

Cash money Pixie

So I realize that this raise thing is huger/more huge than even I thought at first. I continue to marvel at what's about to happen to my paycheck. Tax brackets and all aside, getting a 16% raise and being at salary is a huge deal.

But Pixie, I can hear some of you saying: you're going to be hourly now, which means no more overtime pay. Doesn't that bother you that you're going to be robbed of the time-and-a-half pay? It's a valid concern, but the answer is: no, not a whole lot. The reason for this is twofold. One, I'm still eligible for bonuses, which are based on performance and based on the profits made by the project. Now that I'm back working with Howie, who is very good with managing his projects' budgets (almost to a fault), I'm not worried about the bonuses.

The second part of my lack of trepidation is that I still stand to make more on salary than I did as an hourly person. In 2011, all my straight time plus overtime plus bonus was only a few hundred bucks more than my 2012 salary is about to be. Whether I work 35 hours or 45 hours or 60 hours, my take-home paychecks stand to be the equivalent of my 2011 50-hour week paychecks every week. Most of my workweeks these days are 40-45 hours a week, given my new responsibilities. And neither my bosses nor I are worried about this, because they know that I get a lot of shit done in 40-45 hours every week. This is partly due to the fact that I know what I'm doing after 11 years in da biz, and it's also partly due to the fact that I'm no longer a production person: I'm a manager. Eight hours of my time spent redlining a set of drawings keeps two people busy for 40-60 hours each. Fifteen minutes spent discussing a layout for a surgical suite with me gives an intern good direction for three or four hours of drawing in Revit. My job is more and more about directing other people's efforts on the work rather than producing the work myself. Because I'm not producing it all the time, there's no point in me showing up on Saturday and Sunday to help with the drawing and detailing of a project's DDs or CDs. And if I'm not in every Saturday and Sunday doing those drawings...there's no need for overtime.

Yes, there will be times (like right now, actually) where we have two or three deadlines in a short span, and I'm going to have to work a few nights and weekends (LOL at Scarlett's desciption of this as the "Sprint Plan: 2 cents a minute all week, nights and weekends free"--BAAHAHAA!!). But overall, the bulk of the time--the production time--on nights and weekends is spent by other people these days. Further, I'm getting to work on the things I really like doing: programming, facility planning, laying out departments (and sometimes even laying out the rooms in the departments). Doing the stuff that you really really really like to do makes a difference, regardless of what your paycheck says.

Not that I'm not going to enjoy that paycheck....

I don't like to repeat gossip, so I'm only going to say this once

So while I've been whining and caterwauling about how tired and busy I am, stuff has been happening at and around Design Associates. First of all, we got a bunch of new work. Most of it was healthcare, but there's been some additional projects that came in regarding multi-use/multifamily as well as some commercial work. This means that we are one of a handful of offices hiring again in and around the Front Range, so we're not having to advertise too much to find people--we just let the interns in our office know, and they get the word out for us. One of the biggest pushes we've made is hiring people that we laid off in 2009 and 2010. Anyone that got laid off during that time, so it seems, is someone we only let go of because we couldn't afford to keep them. Hence, once we had the work to keep them busy and to pay them again, we hired them back. This includes a few interns and an architect or two...including Elliot. You remember when Elliot was laid off, right? Well, Elliot had been working at Acme with Guy for about 6 or 7 months, when Howie went looking for him. Seems Howie has a lot on his plate and has a project that he needs Elliot to just flat out take over and run with, and Elliot accepted the offer and came back. Here's funny(ish) part: he's making less than he was at Acme, but more than he was when he was laid off from DA in 2009. Well played, sir, well played. (This also gives me ammunition for a discussion regarding my own income discrepancy, but I digress.) Howie is also much happier back at DA--his boss at Acme was a total tool, such that even when Howie is at his micro-managing worst, he's still better than where Elliot was. Again, well played, sir.

Meanwhile, Wayne, who was let go at the same time as Elliot, has been only mildly employed during this time. He hooked up on a contract basis with an old boss of mine from DA, but the rest of the contract employees for that boss got the boss to fire him, as he wanted to be Mr. Managey McManager all the time and not actually draw or do anything. Recently, Guy found out that he interviewed at Acme for a contract position and was offered a job but had not yet accepted. Evidently, he was trying to get another job at the same time and wanted the other job more, so he was stringing Acme along just in case he couldn't get the other position. Acme got tired of it and gave him 72 or 96 hours or something to shit or get off the occupational pot, so he has to make a decision either today or tomorrow. I asked Guy what he thought of the whole situation, andhe just sighed and rolled his eyes. "Well, it's for a contract position, so if they hire him and see what a waste he is, they'll know that contract was the right way to go. Or maybe he's mended his ways...well, probably not."

Also, the new crop of interns we've been hiring have given me new perspective on folks I used to know. Mikhail, an intern that was let go in early 2008, was perhaps not as sharp as I'd thought before. He certainly acted like he cared and wanted to learn, but according to the interns I've been working with recently on Uber MOB who went to school with him, he wasn't that good. He just didn't have it to be an architect. I suppose it wasn't a total loss that he's evidently now into construction management or accounting or something similar. Architecture is like sushi--it's not for everyone and sometimes it'll make you sick.

What else? Oh, at one point in the downturn, Gregg, Guy's old boss and Wayne's protector at DA, decided he didn't want to buy in as a partner, which Howie is in the process of doing. However, Gregg got to keep his assigned parking space, which infuriated a lot of people, and rightly so. Partners and associate partners get assigned parking spaces in our lot so that they don't have to search endlessly for a parking space when they return from meetings. But keeping his space would have made Gregg the only associate with an assigned parking space...an amenity which several higher ranking non-partners wouldn't have had. When someone mentioned that Gregg was going to get to keep his space, Orville (who is a delight to be around but hard to work with when you have a fast-paced deadline) then commented brilliantly, "No one here has the balls to tell him no, and he doesn't have the ethics to turn it down." When I hear this, I spit coffee. Oh, but now that work is picking up and things are getting better, guess who's ready to buy back into the company, hmm?

Further scuttlebutt as conditions and energy warrant. I have yet another deadline at the end of June, which will leave me good and wrung out just in time for the July 4th weekend. I'll do my best to muster up some energy for a decent post or two--patience please, and any suggestions/ideas for posts are always appreciated.

Hey, architects: Don't cheat me, bro!

Okay, in all fairness, I found this on Lulu Brown's blog for architecture interns, but as an architect I love it. This guy/group of people/whoever has started a blog that calls out architecture firms that advertise unpaid internships. Here's the thing about internships: if you do work from which the firm directly benefits and that firm is not a nonprofit, you have to be paid--it's the law. Architecture firms will occasionally try to hire interns to do drafting and/or 3D modeling for them and not pay them, under the guise that "any work is some experience to put on a resume", but in most cases it's illegal. (If you get college credit for the work, then hey don't have to pay you. Other rules apply--check the Department of Labor's website for details.)

While work is slowly coming back for us architects (some places slower than others), I'm still a little fearful for my colleagues, especially the newest among them. When they need just a few more months' worth of experience hours to sit for the ARE, they'll be sorely tempted to work for nothing just to get those last hours of experience. And why do my fellow architects even do such a thing as ask interns to work for free? Is it avarice? Is it not charging enough for their time and expertise in the first place? Is it thinking that the architect is so amazing and skilled that the newest of our profession should be leaping at the chance to simply bask in the light of the architect's countenance? I imagine it's a combination of all of these and maybe more.

Architecture as a profession has a weird culture, seemingly based on the Taliesin model set up by Frank Lloyd Wright. In Wright's model, the apprentices were paid little to nothing and lived in tents on the architect's property (at Taliesin West, anyway) and barely got by in order to sit at the Master's feet and absorb his (and always a his) philosophy and skills. Wright himself was a brilliant designer and engineer but a piss-poor businessman, always seemingly going into, coming out of, or on the brink of bankruptcy. It seems as if even those of us architects that might revile Wright's work still live in his shadow when it comes to the business side of our profession. We undercharge for one project in the hopes that it gets us another project with that client (or with a bigger client), and perhaps that second project will pay for the first one...but it seems that payback never comes. We can barely bring ourselves to ask for additional services when asked to do work outside of our contracts, saying yesyesyesyesyes ofcoursewecandothat anythingyousayOmasterwiththecheckbook without reminding ourselves now and again that we do live in a capitalist society and money is a form of respect due its members for skilled services rendered. As my friend Eric over at Blue Architecture says, "Architects are so focused on helping the world and 'being noble' that we forget that being able to pay your bills and make a decent living is 'noble' too."

What it's actually like to be an architect

I'm shamelessly stealing this from Lulu Brown over at her rather well-edited and decently-educational blog. I laughed my ass off at this.

From the frying pan into the pizza oven

I got news today from another partner at Design Associates that we got a new project in which I was to be heavily involved. It's an MRI at a research facility that will be a pretty fast-paced project--the equipment has to be up and running by the end of 2010. The partner who involved me on this project, Will, is a delightful and charming and very talented fellow who looks much younger than his fifty-something. And I don't mean younger as in had-some-work-done or oh-that-devilish-look-in-his-eye or even hasn't-he-held-up-well; I mean he just looks barely 40. Anyway, Will asked me and another associate in the office to be involved in the sudden phone interview for this project, and evidently we did well enough that we've been given the project. Even better is that we snatched it away from a firm that's been snatching a lot of projects from us over the past couple of years. Boo-yah.

Will came up to me late this afternoon to give me the good news in person and to high-five me, which is always a nice reaction from a partner. Will adjusted his glasses and said, "Now, we need to get realistic about your workload. Your presence and involvement on this project is vital, and it's a very fast project, so it'll take a good chunk of your time. What else do you have going on?"

I explained that Gestalt's first floor project is a bit feast or famine--one day, there won't be much to do, and then the next I'll be eyeball-deep in RFIs and shop drawings. I also told him that I don't mind working more than 40 hrs a week, but I'm not able to do 60 hrs/week for four months straight. Been there, done that: I'm not productive at the volume anymore, as my mood of late has shown. Then, I got a lovely idea.

"You know what would help free up my time?" I asked. "If I could share the AIA seminar coordination duties with someone. You know, we just hired back Saralee this week, and she used to coordinate them, so maybe she and I could share--"

Will interrupted. "I think we should take that completely off your plate, Pixie. You've done a great job of revitalizing them, of getting them really organized and together, and I think it's time to pass that back to someone who will have the time to do it."

What's funny about this is that it was Will who asked me to start managing these back in February. I'm glad, though, that he can see what it takes to do the job right and that I'm just too damn busy to do it well anymore. We talked to Saralee briefly about it, but we'll have to talk it over with Norman, for whom she's working. On the one hand, it'll be nice to get rid of this godforsaken, thankless task...but I'm about to be crazy-ass busy, just at a time when I really need a break.

We can rebuild it, we can make it stronger, faster, cheaper...

Yesterday morning, our receptionist called Howie to the front. I heard him say over the phone, "Who's here? Huh...? Oh...oh! Yes! Okay!" He went to the front, I heard a female voice, and then he returned with a young woman: Tara, an intern I worked with for a couple of months back in the summer of 2008 but was laid off in that same fall. Evidently, with Intern Timmy and Liz moving on to bigger and better things, Howie suddenly found himself in great need of good but inexpensive help on a sudden rush of small projects. Tara, to her immense credit, had worked mostly with Jann during her few months here, and Jann emailed her one day recently to ask if she had any availability to work with us again. Tara jumped at the chance to get back on track with getting her internship hours, now that she just finished grad school.

I suppose I'm not surprised that Howie would hire someone like Tara to help him out. He's got a lot of stuff to do, plus he's not the easiest person to work for, so he really needs youngish interns because a) they bill cheap on projects but know how to use lots of different kinds of software, and b) especially right now they're not in a position to push back when he leans on them (work harder! faster!! more!!!) I asked Tara how much/long she'll be working with us, and she said Howie hadn't really told her. I mentioned that we'd all just gone back to 40 hours a week, and she said she might have it to do--evidently, Intern Kimmy told her that she'd worked nearly 80 hours last week and more than 50 a week for several weeks so far this year. I suddenly thought that perhaps I could have been helping her, but then I remembered: Howie needed cheap help.

Either way, it was great to see Tara again, and frankly it was nice to see a new employee. Seeing anyone get hired here lately made us breathe a little, though we know that no one's really publicized the hire. Still, nice to have her back and to see Kimmy get some help.

Back from Georgia, more to come

I just got back from Georgia and have some great pictures to share when I get a moment. I had a pretty good experience overall doing a guest lecture for my sister's colleague, though I had a weird teacher moment when I think I might have been a bit too in-your-face for the kids. I told one class that I was in town specifically to do the lecture for this professor, and if it weren't for this class, I'd be back in Denver working on hospital designs. I meant that because I heard that this particular class had a few in-class texters, and I wanted to make it clear that I was here for their benefit and had come a long way to do this (usually the prof does this. but she had to step out briefly during the time that she usually did my intro). However, I think I kinda freaked them out a little bit--instead of getting them involved and excited about having a guest speaker, I think I made it sound like I would rather have been in Denver. However, it was the right-after-lunch class, so maybe they were in a carb stupor or something. (I'd be interested if anyone's had experience with this...) At least the morning class was exciting and interested and interactive.

Anyway, photos of interesting old houses and bad details coming soon!

You have got to be freaking kidding me.

We had yet more layoffs on Friday at Design Associates. Only two people, that any of us can confirm anyway, but still two fewer people. And it was who was laid off that was insulting: an architect in his 50s who had been at DA for about 8.5 years and was working on Gestalt HMO with me and a couple of other guys, and an intern who was an absolute Revit whiz and the closest thing we had to a CAD/Revit manager since Sarge was laid off in 2008. This came on the heels of news of two other office departures: one, a youngish licensed architect (like me) was moving out of state; and two, one of our associates (an older licensed architect who was salary and got a bigger portion of the profits than us hourly folk) accepted a position with a consulting engineering/contractor/developer firm. I guess DA figured that with four people gone in the first quarter of '10, we could hold out a while longer. But really? An intern and an architect, both hourly people who actually did the work? Were they making so much that it would make a difference if we laid them off? Of the 40+ people that DA has laid off in the past 18 months, they've only laid off two higher-ranking salary people. So who's going to do the work when it comes back? Or are we just gonna figure that out once we get there?

I'm not as perturbed as I should be about this: Maddy's impending trip over the Rainbow Bridge tends to put all else into perspective. But I am somewhat annoyed by this latest move, which I can't even pretend to explain. This move is truly affecting us workwise--Norman, a longtime friend and colleague of mine (and an associate) was alarmed to find out that the Revit-guru intern was let go. "I'm working on a deadline with him for next week!" he hissed as he knelt in my desk/cubicle area. "I was helping out his team, and I'm barely capable in Revit--we were counting on his help to make this deadline!" I too felt the frustration--the architect that was let go was to be working on the renovation project of one of the floors of the Bierstadt building for Gestalt--and had just been at an OAC/planning meeting last week--so now who's taking over his work?

Furthermore, as a result of these little layoffs, I have inherited one of the most time-consuming and thankless tasks in the office: I am the new office coordinator for the AIA continuing education seminars/Lunch-n-Learns. The intern who was laid off was the latest person to do this, and as he handed me everything and showed me where to find all the presentation schedules and stuff online at the AIA and on our server, he said, "Pixie, I'm really sorry to dump all of this on you--it's not fair to do this on such short notice, and it's not fair for the partners to ask you to do this." I assured him that this wasn't his fault and not to apologize, and he gave me his home email account in case I had any questions on it. Then he said ominously, "This is going to take up way more of your time than you ever imagined."

"Isn't there a billing code for time spent doing this?" I asked.

The intern laughed. "If you find one, I wish I'd known about it."

Fuckety.

So now I have to make sure I get done everything that I need to do on Gestalt, hop on TCMC occasionally to check, find, or fix something, be the front person for an ED remodel that's just starting up, and then be available to organize the seminars and meet the presenters and get them set up and then sit through presentation after presentation and then file the seminars with AIA and muck through their website...all in 36 hours a week or less. And did I mention that the last five people who coordinated the AIA seminars have been laid off?

I'm going to go sit in the closet with Maddy and Hazel. There seems to be a lot less stupid in there.

The curious case of forced free time

It was announced at an office meeting last week that Design Associates would not be giving out raises again this year, plus we have to take six unpaid days off: the day after Thanksgiving and the week between Christmas and New Year's (Xmas Eve + four days before Jan 1st). Also, we had to take all of our vacation days by the end of the year, and we couldn't take those days during the furlough day spans and use the furlough days elsewhere between now and December 31st--they had to be separate. Ouch. Audrey was the one who made the announcement, and as the words fell from her lips, the room got a little quieter, stiller, chillier. As we all stood up to leave the meeting, Liz murmured, "Y'know, being at 36 hours all year, we've been on furlough."

The mandatory time off leaves me with mixed emotions, mostly because I have a job to work on, and that job is for Howie. When the time comes that I have to take off my vacation time before the furlough starts, will Howie remember that it's mandatory and neither I nor anyone else is going to work for free? Remember folks--the majority of employees at DA are hourly, not salary, so we only get paid for time we work and conversely one is hard pressed to make us work hours that we're not paid for. As fees on projects have been compressed and we're all handed the typical white-collar cliches--worker smarter not harder, do more with less, optimize procedures, etc.--Howie has told us that "things have changed." Projects require that we find ways to maintain quality but don't use as much time (and therefore fee) as we used to use. Fair enough, but at some point we've squeezed out all the air. It takes what it takes to make a project solid, thorough, and well coordinated. There's no optimizing our strategic input--it takes what it takes to check four pages of interior elevations on a 20,000sf hospital expansion. But there's quality, and there's Howie quality. Quality is doing one or two sets of redlines; Howie quality is doing four or five sets of redlines that take up your entire eight-hour day working on a 6,000sf project with a super lowballed fee. We can do quality work, but if you want to fuck around with the floor plan for a whole day, it takes time...time that I have to be at the office but aren't supposed to be because I can only work 36 hours a day and have to take some of my vacation time soon. And that time translates into fee that we don't really have, do we? And we can't always be doing micromanaging maniac-style quality when we have $12.35 left in our budget. As you've said, Howie, things have changed.

I feel really bad for the interns that are left at DA. Interns Timmy and Kimmy, for example, are very fast at drawing and rendering and doing things in Photoshop and Illustrator and so on, and they bill cheaply to the client ($60-$70/hr, whereas I'm more like $100/hr). Hence, project managers are constantly keeping them busy and dragging them back into the office when they're supposed to be gone (to stay at 36 hours) to work on stuff for cheap, so then they have to keep a running tally of that time and take it later as comp time, but then yet another manager keeps them late one night and drags them in on another day they're supposed to be off, and they can never seem to take the comp time. So here these interns are with a bunch of comp time they can't take, along with a bunch of vacation time they have to take, and oh, yeah, they have some unpaid days coming up too.

The whole situation sucks. And yes, I know the city of Denver and many state employees as well have had furlough days this year, and I know that there are people who are still on unemployment after a year or more. But the fact that people have been starving in Cambodia for thirty years doesn't make the more-recently starving Somalians feel better. So it is with my colleagues and me. Guy and I are figuring out how to make the missing week's worth of pay work out for us, and I'm sure we'll get by fine. The real challenge in all of this for me is this: how do I make sure I use my forced free time for writing and working on my upcoming presentation and not spend it cleaning the grout in the bathroom floor tiles? That may be the biggest problem that I'm up against, even more so than the lack of fundage. If the guilt over my productivity doesn't kill me, the sudden unfamiliar rush of procrastination just might.

I think I have a few writers out there in teh interwebz--how do you avoid housecleaning and get your writing done instead?

Architect pay, professional pay...same difference

A reader recently emailed me to ask if the pay for architects is truly as abysmal as it sounds. The succinct answer is yes, it sucks for the first few years, but getting licensed and/or changing firms can help increase your income. However, everyone getting out of college for the past several years—regardless of their major—is getting paid crap compared to the cost of living. It just hurts architects more because of a) the professional costs of continuing education and professional dues and testing and so on and b) the business costs of all the special software we have to buy and insurance we have to have in order to practice. I have two previous commentaries on what architects make here and here.

Another question I received recently regarded how much it’s worth slogging through architecture if the pay is crap and you have behemothesque student loans. First, let me say that again, like everyone else, your student loans are out of scale with your out-of-school income. Again, it’s the whole cost-of-living thing. Second, and more importantly, how much it’s worth it depends on what you put into it. There is indeed some luck involved in how well you do in your profession; for example, if you get out of school and join a firm that lays you off after six months and you spend the next fifteen months on unemployment (which happened here in Denver a great deal), then you suddenly find yourself behind in the game with regard to getting experience so you can get licensed faster. But that’s if you even come back to the profession at all—this economy is going to make architecture lose some pretty good people. But if we set aside luck and the nature of the economy, you really only get out of architecture what you put into it. I’ve seen interns and architects thrive and do well in nearly the same environment as other interns and architects who are barely hanging on and self-medicating every night at home out of misery and disappointment.

So, the short and simple (but not easy) answer about architecture as a job, a career, and a profession is: it depends. Which is probably true of a lot of professions. Is it true of yours?

Okay, so here's the deal...

Let me just say that I've been invited to an industry conference to speak about the intern mentorship I do at Design Associates. This is highly highly cool on many levels: I've thought about doing this kind of thing for several years, but only now do I have the experience to speak on his topic; I'm excited to speak to my industry on behalf of interns, who often get ignored; I like talking in front of groups and am not frightened at all by doing so; and I feel like I'm finally in a place where I have some authoritah, or at least some cache and leverage at my company and in my field.

As I've watched my office's population dwindle and my colleagues walk out the door one by one with two weeks' severance and all their stuff in a copier box, I've wondered how it is that I continued to dodge the bullet through four-plus rounds of layoffs. You bet your sweet bippie that as soon as I got the email saying that I was accepted to present at the conference, I sent out word to all the partners and higher-ups at DA to tell them about it. (I won't hit them up for a travel stipend until a couple of months before the event--I want to see how the office's finances look, but see here, they're getting free publicity and I'm doing all the work, so somebody need to peel off some cabbage roll for a Shorty.) I wanted to remind them that the work I do around there isn't just limited to the awesomeness of my daily work on projects, and it's not just limited to the clients that literally ask for me to be on their projects, but it's also the extra things that make me valuable.

It's also a little something in my head that gives me some comfort as I tolerate the occasional bad bit of behavior from a manager or colleague. I realize, slowly but surely, that if I confront someone on their particular brand of assholery, no one's going to fire me. I'm not the kind of person who blows up at people--I know how to confront without being confrontational--but even the thought of setting limits with others (especially those in charge) in this crappy economy has nearly driven me to drink because I kept thinking that I shouldn't be rocking the boat. But that, it would seem, is hardly the case. First of all, there's plenty of evidence in my office that you have to really suck to get fired. Second, I'm still here because I'm valuable to them in some way or another. And third and most recently, the very value that seems to have kept me employed has now gone a step further what with speaking at this conference, and that value would look very good on my resume, whether it's my resume at DA...or another firm, if they were foolish and petty enough to fire me/lay me off because I dared to set limits with someone's unreasonable requests or unprofessional comportment.

Even though I have two deadlines next week, I feel better already.

If you a engineer, thow yo hands up

I talk a lot about the projects I work on, but it's rare that I discuss the other people in my neighborhood: the engineers. We call them consultants, but most of them are engineers. (I guess we call them consultants because they don't drive trains or wear striped bib overalls.) They occasionally make architects drink, but overall they're good people who have lives that are just as hard as the architects do.

Your main engineers on a project are:

• Civil: makes the building site run water away from the building, runs utilities up to the building (within 5 feet), and works with the landscape architect to get the sidewalks and parking lots in place (sometimes).
• Structural: makes the building stand up and hold up under all the loads put on the building (live, dead, wind, snow, seismic, etc.).
• Mechanical: figures out how to get hot and cold air in the building and specifies the units and systems that put that air in the building.
• Plumbing: frequently the same as the mechanical engineer, runs water and gas pipes in the building, specifies plumbing fixtures, and runs waste lines out of the building and roof drain lines off of the roof.
• Electrical: specifies the lights and figures out the power systems in the building and powers all the equipment that the architect and some other engineers put in the building.

One would imagine that engineers would be a stodgy, cranky bunch, always trying to shoot holes in the architect's divine vision and taking a metaphorical poo on every cool-looking aesthetic idea we have. My response is that engineers are like any other group of people--some winners and some losers, but the vast majority of them are just doing the best they can with what they have. Having spent the better part of nine years with them, however, I have the following stereotypes based on my experiences, and I'd love to hear from any engineers that read this blog for a reality check. (I'd also LOVE to know what makes engineers drink, especially about architects. I know we're a bunch of merlot-slurping pains in the butt.)

The few civil engineers I've worked with have been anything but that. I get my drawings late and/or incomplete, and it seems like they're completely misunderstanding the scope of the project or what they're actually required to do. They seem the least comfortable around other people, which is odd because they seem to do the least amount of calculus. Having gone to Georgia Tech and spent four years around nothing but engineers, it always seemed to me that an engineer's social skills and social comfort were in inverse proportion to their familiarity with and frequency of performing calculus. Also odd is that the women civil engineers I've worked with were the opposite--they kept in frequent contact with me, got me their stuff on time (or called when it was going to be late), and had their stuff generally right. I know I have a new or semi-new reader who is a civil engineer out in D.C--what am I missing, dawg? Have I just been burned by a couple of bad apples? Holla!

Structural engineers are the guys most responsible for the building not falling down, yet most of the ones I've met are the ones most likely to grab a keg if a building does indeed fall down. As the building shreds itself under the weight of gravity and its own mass, they're the ones recording it for YouTube and hitting each other on the arm and yelling "Ohhhman! You gotta watch this, dude, no seriously put the shots down, it's worth it!" I think they're super-friendly because you kinda have to do what they say--you move and fold around them, whereas most other fields have to move and bend around the architects. Because they know they run dis beeyotch, they're buying you liquor to ease the pain of knowing that you're just going to have a column in that hall, unless you redesign your clinic space. Sigh. Have another shot, dude, it's worth it.

Mechanical/plumbing engineers are hit and miss. One that I've worked with on and off for about six years is super-good at what he does and is pretty easy to get along with. He knows when to push back, and he knows when to back down, and I like that in an engineer in general. He and I heckle each other in a way that almost sounds like we went to high school together; he almost sounds like a structural engineer. However, I've met a few mechanical engineers that won't do their job and won't call me back. Dammit, I'm a Southern lady, and if you don't call me back, there will sweating-in-Valdosta-in-the-summer hell to pay.

Electrical engineers are generally pretty easygoing, and I tend to do very well with them for the opposite reason of the structural engineers. Most of what electrical is running through the building can fit in less that 1 1/2" of conduit, and it can bend around just about anything, so as long as you give them a 10' x 12' room near where the utilities come into the site, they're happy. They also tend to be most likely to work weekends, because their work depends on everyone else's work being done. They need to know where I'm putting the exam rooms and which walls are getting the computers and where the CT scanner is going and what mechanical unit is going on the roof and are we actually putting a chiller in the project and where are you locating the CRAC unit and so on. Furthermore, they tend to have the most esoteric senses of humor and are the most likely to send me hilarious construction-related and nerd-related email forwards or recipes. Electrical engineers like to cook, for whatever reason. I should mention that of the three women electrical engineers I've worked with, one was fantastically awesome, one acted like a shy mechanical engineer, and one seemed to have utter disdain for my very existence. Turns out though that she treated all women this way on a project, so I didn't feel so bad. (And she was my age, too! WTF?)

Here's the thing, though: I have a special place in my heart for engineers. To keep my job, I need one to three projects going on at once, but in order to keep their jobs, engineers need like eight to twelve. I might be exaggerating, but they need more projects than we do because their part of the project is smaller. I also know that they're all depending on me to have my shit together so they can do their jobs, and that just makes me feel sorry for them. You're depending on me? Well, good luck to ya, pal. Engineers know a lot about a couple of things, while architects know a couple of things about a lot. We know just enough to be dangerous, and that's why we hire engineers--they keep us from being too dangerous.

Engineers, I raise my crystal Tiffany wine goblet full of Riesling to you. You make me drink, but overall, it's in a good way.

Am I in a war zone? Because I just dodged yet another bullet.

Design Associates had another round of layoffs today. We've gotten a few smallish and mediumish projects recently, but it wasn't enough to sustain us. And for the first time since we started letting people go last year, finally in this fourth or fifth round of layoffs, they finally let go of two senior staff members.

They laid off two interns, two architects, two landscape architects, an interior designer who was an associate, and an architect who was a senior associate. I was okay with the interior designer going--I did my best to get along with her, but she was a tough one, and many of our clients complained about her (and how she stayed so long is beyond me). The only person y'all would know is Dash, the landscape architect who worked on Wheatlands with me. He's a good dude, and I (and many others) hated to see him go.

We all breathed a little after the final email went out about who was let go. It's a bit of a guilty feeling for going "okay, thank God it wasn't me, I'm safe for a few more months", but it's natural, I suppose. Norman, Intern Krissy, and I then surmised who might be next. This layoff was truly a cash dump--half were staff members from Vincent's team (he's gone after a lot of work lately, but we keep just missing the cut), and the other half were older folks with lots of experience and a high salary to boot. Healthcare has been pulling in a few jobs over the past few months, but will it be enough to protect us for the rest of 2009? Would they dump some more senior folks? After all, if you dump any more at our levels, who will be left to do the drawings? And which senior staff members do you send home? The really old guys? The guy with terminal cancer? Would they dare?

The contractors have also started the bloodshed. I got a call from Billy Ray (my superintendent on MHRC) saying that he and about 40 others had been let go from his company. I gave him a few leads and asked him to stay in touch. This is the beginning for the contractors; they're about six to twelve months behind us. We design the project, then they build it, so while our work dries up they're still building stuff. Eventually, they get to where we are. That eventually appears to be now.

I got home tonight, ate dinner, and then walked over to the grocery store to pick up meds for my cat. Despite her dire diagnosis, she's still alive and doing okay. She felt poorly the last couple of days my Mom was here, but she perked up last night and asked, nay demanded that I give her mooshy treats NOW, and the vet reupped her meds for two more months. So as I paid for her meds for the tenth month in a row, I did breathe a prayer of thanks that she's still around and that I have the resources to buy cancer medication for an 11-year-old cat. And I still have those resources.

Half an architect is no architect at all

It would seem that my recent post on booger-headed designers struck a chord (or a nerve) with my readers. First off, I didn't even know I had eight readers that weren't my mom or sister, so many thanks for that, my people. Second of all, I feel as if I should expound on the designer/architect issue, which I've kvetched about a little even before this post.

You can, in many jurisdictions, design buildings without being a licensed architect. It's just that a licensed architect must eventually stamp the drawings, preferably having reviewed them first. The problem lies, as I mentioned the post on startchitects and their designer minions, in the project delivery process that has one firm known for amazing-looking designs doing the initial design and handing it off to another firm, who will see the design through to completion of construction. Now, I've been on the giving end and the receiving end of the design architect/architect of record process, as has Guy. Ultimately, it is the architect of record (Guy's firm, in the case from last week) who has the responsibility of making sure that the building complies with all codes and figures out all the details (how does the brick intersect with this glass wall, how do we frame this door into this 12"-thick wall, etc.). However, I don't see where this lets the design architect (Scooby Doo & Associates, in Guy's case) off the hook for giving a design that at least mostly works.

Up until the 1900s (give or take a few decades), architects were extremely intertwined with the contractor on their projects. They would spend a great deal of time at the job site to answer questions and solve problems. This, as I understand it, is half of why old sets of drawings are so thin--they didn't need to spend 30 pages drawing every single detail, because they'd be right there to tell you where to put what. (The other part of having thin sets of drawings is that labor was a little more highly-skilled, but that's a post for another time.) When building the Brooklyn Bridge, architect and engineer Washington Roebling was injured while on site, so he got an apartment that overlooked the construction site so he could still watch its progress. His wife continued his work, monitoring progress at ground zero and ferrying messages back and forth. Architects, up until the last 50-100 years, were craftsmen and scholars. We understood theory and practice. The fellows who designed medieval cathedrals would come up with a design and work it out on the fly, but they always had that overall vision in their heads while they worked, in the field, day after day until their death, when the job of designing and supervision would be passed on to someone else. And so it would go for a couple hundred years until it was finished.

While architects now rarely have as much structural knowledge as they did 100 years ago, we are still taught it some in school, and we are tested on it as part of our licensing exams. Though we are more specialized in what we do, and we don't spend near as much time as we used to in the field, we still have to know something about it. We also have to know about how the other systems affect what we build--if I'm putting lots of crazy equipment into my building, does the electrical engineer know that? If the building is required to be heavily pressurized through the mechanical system, will my front doors pop open a couple of inches every time the air kicks on? I mentioned that Emily Roebling was the go-between for Washington and the rest of his field engineers; she did this for 11 years. Throughout the course of her helping him, Washington taught her about math, structural design, and material capabilities. Emily learned about how a structure goes together by working under the guidance of a skilled professional and going to visit the site where what the pontificated on was being built. And that, my friends, is the crux of the issue. Being an architect is knowing how what you design gets built. There is no substitute for watching someone build what you drew and then reveling in or being embarassed by the outcome. And because some (or many) of these poor designer souls that work in the starchitect offices never get the benefit of that education, they remain half-architects to me.

I can hear the designers out there reading this or hearing it at a party: "Well, look pal, the world has enough strip malls and McMansions and bad design. Someone has to improve the aesthetics of the American landscape and push the envelope and introduce new concepts into the dialogue of our built world, and it might as well be me." Fair enough, Coolio. But time and again, high design takes a knock on the head because of poor detailing. Gehry's Stata Center at MIT cost $450/sf and can't keep water out. And yes, I'm knocking on Gehry again, but he's not alone--Liebskind's new Denver Art Museum addition was leaking and having roof issues within a year of completion. Those are two of many examples, I'm sure, of high design that can't keep water out or keep the building comfortable. When high design is hard or impossible to detail properly, it reinforces the very argument against high design: it can't be done. Look, people say, we paid a huge wad of cash for a building that looks cool but we can't control the humidity in it and protect the contents. The roof is leaking and we're about to have mold growing in it. Geez, that nice design was too expensive to build, and now it's too expensive to maintain. Why did we ever spend all that money?

To put it in coarse but plain language, when you design something you can't detail properly, you fuck it up for all of us. No one wants to pay a little extra for some really cool metal wall panel because they've heard about the Denver Art Museum, and isn't that metal panel too? It's titanium, we respond, and it's a different system. This is Dri-Design, and it's a rainscreen. It works great. No, they say. It's metal panel, and I don't want my building to leak. Use stucco--mm, that looks nice. And then we sigh because they're paying the bills, and we design stucco on the outside of the building, go home, and uncork a bottle of cheap merlot.

Designers without construction knowledge, you are one reason why architects drink.

Getting Work 2: Electric Boogaloo

After the getting work post, I got the funniest and yet most poignant email from a marketing coordinator at an architecture firm in Canada. Ontario, as we’ll call this poor, beleaguered marketing person, had some really interesting insights about getting work, many of which explain why architects drink. Ontario summed up the problem with RFPs as they are these days as “…a highly politicized process and more of a formality than an actual adequate and fair means of gauging one firm’s qualifications against another.” Very well put—it is indeed hard to separate oneself from the pack when all the firms are sending you different cover versions of the same song, which is “Pick Us Because We Are Experienced In Your Building Type And A Great Group Of People To Work With, and We Care About Your Company And Its Vision For the Future.”

Proposal calls from clients can often be downright ludicrous. One example of this is a medical system just saying “We’re planning to do a patient tower addition to our downtown campus. In the RFP, provide experience with healthcare facilities and sustainable construction. “ Okay, well, first off, are you adding up or out to your downtown facility’s patient tower? And which of your three patient towers are you doing this to? What’s your timeline? What’s your budget? Are you going after any unusual sources of funding, like stimulus money, CMS or FQHC grants, fundraising? How big of a patient tower? Are you going to have to keep the existing tower (whichever of their three towers it is) operational during construction? These are examples of information that helps a firm decide if it has the experience it needs to do the project right. Sometimes, when firms email or call for this info, the client will respond that they don’t have that info right now and really, it’s not material, we just want your qualifications right now. Well, I’d call that assertion retarded, but that would be an insult to all the wonderful, heroic participants of the Special Olympics. Of course it’s material to the RFP! It helps us tailor the info we give you to something that will actually be of use to you, so you can compare apples to apples! There are lots of healthcare firms all over any state that would be glad to go after that work for you, but if it’s under $20 million, some firms will bow out. If it’s over 100,000sf, some smaller firms may want to partner with another firm so that they’ll have the resources and manpower to get the job done. It makes all the difference in the world, punkin. Tell a Shorty.

The next thing is the format of the RFP. The description of a few of the RFPs that have gone out of Ontario’s firm lately made me spit coffee onto my monitor. One RFP wanted the firms to cover project understanding, project approach, workplan, schedule, and resumes of all the project team members…in five pages. FIVE?! How the hell do you judge anything in five pages? Moreover, how thehell do you pack in al of that info into five pages?! You’d be lucky if you could do it any justice in 20! As Ontario says, “Might as well of just asked for a sticky note.” On the other end of the spectrum, an RFP Ontario worked on required, essentially, that the firms provide in nauseating detail everything they’d do. Ontario says it best here:

“At the other end of the spectrum, some clients request that we provide CVs for each and every member of our team and his mother, and sister, and long-lost relative…..And they want us to describe every nauseating detail about how we’ll hold their hand throughout the entire process, from project kick-start to final occupancy. One proposal I did exceeded 100 pages! No RFP response should ever exceed a Master’s thesis; that should be criminal. What do they think? That paper grows on trees?”

Another ridiculous requirement is asking us to describe what our subconsultants will be doing on the project. Again, Ontario puts it best: “Well, what do they think Structural Engineers do? Teach Kung Fu?”

The worst part of RFPs, really, is the lack of transparency regarding final selection. We see this happen with public and private institutions alike. An institution (.com, .gov, or .org, whatever) will send out a proposal request to a bunch of architects or even publicly post it where anyone can see it and answer it. But when it’s all said and done, everyone can tell that they already had the winner picked; the RFP process was a formality, and any interviews (if there were any) were just about going through the motions. When other firms call to ask why they didn’t get it, the client’s reply is often some variation on “So-N-So Architects brought more to the table/really seemed to click with our selection committee, and they’ve done work with us before/are familiar with our campus due to previous work here.” Ontario has pressed these people for further elaboration and asked what could be done to make Ontario Architects better in future endeavors, and I know at our office Veronica has done the same thing. Even with this pressing, the refrain is, “So-N-So Architects is more familiar with our facility.” Fair enough, but then you knew that going in, so why dangle the carrot in front of the rest of us if there’s no chance? Just sign a contract with So-N-So Architects to be your architectural services provider for the next 2/3/6 years and make them your go-to group.

Now, my firm will sometimes do these RFPs and do interviews when they make the shortlist for these lost causes, and the partners’ reasoning is that if the client ever gets annoyed with So-N-So Architects, maybe they’ll remember us. Again, fair enough, but even our office does about 80% repeat business. The RFP process has become a lot of unnecessary work most of the time, but occasionally we’ll get a job out of it, like Wheatlands or FCH. Psychologists call this the law of intermittent rewards. It’s the same principle that gambling addiction is based on.

Getting work: it's harder than it looks

I've had the (mostly) good fortune lately to be involved in the process of getting jobs along with Bosley and Howie.  During May, Bosley spoke at a few office-wide seminars regarding how we get work, and we even went through a few RFPs and interview slide shows and talked about what worked and what didn't.  During those conversations, Bosely shared with us the changes in getting work over the past almost-thirty years that he's been practicing.  

Up until sometime in the 1990s, architects never advertised (and there were actually some laws in place for a while that kept us from doing so), and we got work by knowing people or having a client find us through a reference from another client.  We had lots of steady clients who would just call up one of the partners and say, "Hey, you mind coming by to talk about a women's care suite we're thinking about doing?"  Many healthcare facilities would have us present at their long-range planning meetings because we could provide some valuable insight into the physical manifestation of their policy and practice plans.  However, things began to change in the 1990s.  We were allowed to do a little advertising, though usually you see architects "advertise" by sponsoring some sort of nonprofit activity or radio or TV programming.  I think there was a bit of a rise in number of firms as the economy slowly got better, so suddenly there were lots of small firms out there to do the smaller commercial and residential work, and the larger firms grew such that they could take on larger projects.  Also, the nature of facility mangement changed: there was a lot more turnover at higher admin levels, and financial management of companies made it such that those companies wanted bids for the work, not to just hand a job over to someone.  This especially proved true in healthcare, where smaller hospitals and healthcare facilities and systems were taken over by larger HMOs or care systems (e.g., HealthONE and Catholic Health Initiatives to name a few).  So, we had to start doing RFQs, RFPs, and interviews.  

RFQ stands for Request For Qualifications; it's a document that you send a potential client to tell them a little about yourself and show that you are qualified to be involved on their project.  RFP stands for Request For Proposal; it's document that you send a potential client to tell them more about your experience and how it relates to their particular project, and sometimes it involves telling them what your fees are for certain kinds of work.  The interview is just that--you show up at the client's offices and talk to a group of their reps and elaborate on some of the stuff you talked about in the RFP.  Usually the order in which the process happens is RFQ, then RFP, then interview, but many clients skip the RFQ and just invite a handful of firms to send in RFPs.  They then narrow that list down for the interview.

We're doing an RFP (due in July) for architectural services for a small health system in west central Colorado, but this week Bosley, Howie, and I have been working on our interview presentation for a surgery suite renovation in a hospital near Wheatlands.  The client had someone do a little sketch of how they could do their surgery department renovation, and they gave a PDF of that plan to all the firms interviewing, along with a PDF plan of their existing department.  Part of our approach will be to note a few issues with their plan and then show a few options of our own.  Yes, Virginia, that means we're doing some work for free in order to get this gig.  What we hope it shows is that we're thinking about their project already and we're really interested.  We've been told after the interviews for some gigs we didn't get that we didn't talk much about the potential client's project, their facility, their needs, etc., so we're trying to address that as well.

We're doing a lot of graphics, sketching, and flat-out work to make this interview and presentation clear and outstanding.  Next week, we'll work on the words on the PowerPoint slides and what we're going to say with each slide as well as who speaks when about what.  The last time we worked on some slides together, it took a lot of work to get Howie to thin the words off his slides.  He likes to use his slides as his notes, and that's a really bad idea.  According to brain researchers, the same part of the brain handles spoken and written words.  So if you're reading slides, you're boring and insulting your audience.  If you're talking a lot while there are a lot of words on the slide behind you, then your audience can either read the novella on your slide or listen to you talk, but they can't do both.  Either way, you're wasting effort in one place or the other.  

I think I'm going to be involved in this interview, but I'm still not 100% sure.  I presume I am because I'm being involved in the meetings and conversations.  After a somewhat contentious meeting with Bosley today to show him what we have so far, Howie turned to me with an odd smile after Bosley left the room and exclaimed, "Man, that was great!  Really good!  I'm psyched!"  I wondered silently if he was trying to convince me or himself.  It was one of those where Bosley would shake his head after Howie said something and then almost spit, "I have no idea what you just said."  Again, at what point are we all going to agree as a culture that "It's not personal" is no longer an excuse for rudeness and obnoxious behavior?  We wonder why the world is so rude, why kids flip you off on the street and people curse and honk in traffic and telemarketers call you during dinner.  It's not the TV, people--it's us.  TV is just catching up to our crappy behavior.  When "it's not personal", "no offense", and "don't take this the wrong way, but..." are used to excuse rudeness and nonsense, we become inured to insult, and naturally it seeps into the rest of our culture.  

However, I'm a professional and an adult, and I will continue to behave as such as a model to some and as a mirror to others to reflect their behavioral inadequacies.  And if you find my deportment snobbish or abhorrent, you can kindly go fuck yourself.  Nothing personal.

What does it take to be an architect?

I recently got an email from a reader who asked the following:

I randomly found your blog by searching for the Pros and Cons of being an architect. I am interested in becoming an architect, I'm just not sure whether or not I will be good at it. I have no experience, no clue as to where to go to school or even have the courage to pursue it. Your blog has given me some insight to what it's like, but I am curious as to how you became interested in pursuing architecture. Did you know at a young age that you wanted to be an architect?  Have any advice that would help me figure out if I would do well in architecture?

Where do I begin?  Well, the first place to go would be my very first post on WAD, which gives you the basics of the tangible requirements to becoming an architect.  I also think this link does a good job of going more in-depth as to what your options are regarding schooling and what the schooling means for your professional career.  She also has a link here describing what the ARE (the licensing test for architects) is like these days--it's changed since I took it a few years ago. It's a good site overall, by the way.

Other than that, though, how do I describe what it takes to be an architect?  Let's start with this little fact: while I've known I wanted to be an architect since I was twelve, it's not required.  When I was about eleven or twelve, my dad ordered some house plans from Southern Living and hired a contractor friend from high school to build the house after he bought a parcel of land.  As I watched the house go from CMU and concrete foundation to wood studs to finished product, I pored over the blueprints and tried to figure out why the architect did what he did.  Why is the kitchen so small and the bedrooms so big?  The triple-height living area was so elegant, but did he realize that it was going to get so freaking hot up there?  I found Dad's amendments to the plans intriguing; he trimmed and chamfered a few of the outdoor decks so that he didn't have to cut down so many trees on the site, and he sank the living room.  Most impressive was how he had the contractor put a phone line in the master bathroom, as he used to say that he only got important calls when he was on the can.  (I have found this observation to be true.)  But having said that, my husband didn't think about ever being an architect until he was out of the Army and doodling around in suburban St. Louis and met someone who knew someone who was having a house built.  Guy saw the house while it was under construction, looked at the plans, and thought, "Huh, I could do that."  And he can do it; he does it very well.

Something everyone should know about becoming an architect, especially in terms of school: you do not half-ass architecture school.  I've only ever met one person who was able to do architecture and something else: a guy in my grad school who pursued his M.Arch and a degree in Sports & Entertainment Management.  I was amazed by people who could do school and hold a part-time architecture jobs at the same time.  We have interns that do that now or have done it in the near past, and it continues to blow my mind.  In general, though, if you go to school to be an architect, that's what you're doing.  Very few people can do architecture school and a sport/Greek organization/rap career.  Yes, I had a high school intern think he was going to do that;his goal was to be a rapper and rap/music producer and have architecture as a "career to fall back on."  Listen, punkin: in order to actually make a living at architecture, you're gonna have to give a lot of focus and energy to it, especially early on.  Architecture has a long learning curve.  I tried to do stand-up and improv as well as write a book when I first started out in this field, and I just didn't have the energy.  It takes a lot of energy to learn and retain skills every single day.  Be willing to put the time into it.

The good news though is that there's room for just about every kind of personality in architecture.  People who are detail-oriented and introverted have a place as the technical gurus who know how to put a building together inside and out and can almost quote building code from memory.  People who are more "big-picture" or extroverted may be great at master planning or marketing and getting work.  Folks with an eye for design can take a building from ho-hum to holy-moly-that's-gorgeous, and folks who aren't great at making things purrrty can just make them work.  I have a tendency to be a real rule follower, but I'm also friendly and a good problem-solver; my skills are in code research and space planning, and I'm good to be on a project from start to finish as I have no problem relating to clients as well as contractors.  I'm also [deep breath] one of eight people on the planet who is practically unable to procrastinate.

Regardless of what kind of person you are, you do need a few general skills to be a good architect.  You need to be able to task switch and be able to flow with changes.  Some days you'll work on two to four differernt tasks on a project or even that many projects.  Owners are always changing their minds, jurisdictions are always adopting new codes and procedures, projects are forever going on hold or schedules get accelerated.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that you should like or love change, because those who love change get really annoyed with having to work on the same project for more than a few months (which most projects in architecture do).  Being able to subvert any tendencies to procrastinate is also important, as is being able to prioritize tasks and get stuff done.  Other people rely on you getting things done in order to get their jobs done, and they need to you to have your stuff done and done right so that their stuff is done on time and right.

Like many other professions, architecture requires that you be a good communicator.  Sadly, like other professions, there's very little training for this.  Take a class, get good role models, whatever: just get good at speaking clearly but without hostility and writing clear emails.  Architecture also requires that you be able to handle criticism without internalizing it or taking it personally, which is easier said than done.

Flexibility, communication skills, commitment to learning; those are the main things I can think of.  I know I have some architects who read this blog; what would you add?