Architects are working...please stand by

Last week, Bosley and Howie dropped on me that they want me to be part of the proposal team for a cancer center project happening just this side of Wheatlands, just over the Colorado line into Kansas.  The presentation is this Friday morning, so we're having to work like crazy to get the presentation tight and clean and clear by Thursday morning so our poor, beleaguered graphics guru in marketing has time to make final changes.  Then, we have to get up at the buttcrack of dawn to drive out to this little town and present to them, and hopefullyhopefullyhopefully they'll pick us to do the design.  Unlike the last job we went after, this has a definite project and budget and timeline that has to be followed, so if they pick us, we have to get started pretty quickly.

Added to all of this is a sudden explosion of meetings and work for me to do this week.  So, I'm gonna be kinda busy for the next few days.  Stay tuned.

I adjusted my gross income and it's still gross

Guy and I are gathering up our records in one place to do our taxes again this year, and I finally took a good look at our W2s.  I'm usually hesitant to do this, though there's no reason in the world I should be.  Despite the fact that I'm sharing my life with this tall, furry Yeti who understands building codes and drives a motorcycle, I still feel, well, like his money is his business and mine is my business and ne'er the twain shall meet.  I also know that it's 2009 and we're both adults, and if I'm going to feed him applesauce in his wheelchair in forty years, we ought to know what our money is doing and how much we're making.

I think part of it is I also hate being smacked in the face with how much more he makes than me.  My 2008 W2 reveals that, including my li'l bonuses in a down year, I made a hair over $60,000 gross (I brought home way less than that due to taxes and medical contributions as well as putting 8% in my 401(k), bear in mind).  Guy, on the other hand, cleared a little more than $15,000 more than I did for his gross.  To his credit, he too brought home way less than that, due to taxes and maxing out his 401(k) contributions.  This would explain part of why we don't look like we make what we make--Guy makes bank, but his rapper name would be Sir Save-A-Lot.  And his hit single would be "Baby Got Cash."  "I like big funds and I cannot lie / You other brokers can't deny/ When a girl walks in with some itty-bitty debt / and an 800 FICO score / You get SPRUNG / Baby got it goin' on / She likes to buy low and sell high / Well short me short me / call the SEC and re-port me--"

But I digress.  Where was I? Oh, income disparity.

I may have mentioned this before, but the two best ways to get a decent increase in income as an architect is to a) get licensed and/or b) change firms.  Guy did both over the course of four months in 2006.  So, not accounting for being paid less due to my gender (which may have happened but I'm disqualifying that factor for right now because the thought of it makes me angry and the economy reeks so bad that I can only be so angry at one time), Guy got a 15%-20% raise to go to Acme Architects, and he's been paid well and rewarded even better for his performance.  And you don't have to be a financial planner or a math major to know that if you start out ahead, you'll likely end up ahead as time goes by and you get raises and whatnot.  So looking at Guy's W2 elicits a deep frustration in me, like I'm being cheated and being taken advantage of due to my loyalty to Design Associates.  

I realize, on the other hand, that in this craptacular economy, I have actually been rewarded by not being laid off.  Well, my loyalty plus my professional abilities have kept me employed, it seems.  DA has historically not laid people off, and I know it was bad when they laid off anyone, much less laid folks off in the numbers they did.  I also know that, as a healthcare architect with 8+ years of experience, I'm pretty hireable and employable as far as architects go.  Granted, there's not a whole lot out there right now, but if I were to be laid off, as soon as something came back, I'd be one of the best candidates.  Plus, I'm comfortable with writing, teaching, and public speaking, so I still have some universal job skills that don't limit me to just drawing hospitals all day.

But, as someone with a Master's dregree in Architecture and 8+ years of healthcare experience, I'm pretty underpaid.  Most architects are.  I suppose I'd rather be underpaid than overpaid, or there goes my job when the time for layoffs come.  

Quiz Time: How Much of a Tool Are You?

The following quiz was in the February 2009 issue of Money, in an article called "Fireproof Your Job."  It has "six smart, field-tested strategies" that "will help ensure you don't get burned by cutbacks at the office."  Mm-hmm.  The following quiz was originally titled "How Vulnerable Are You?", but I get a whiff of toolishness when I read it.  Here's the quiz: all answers were to be yes/no and are written here in bold, followed by my commentary (mostly relating to my own myopic workworld view).

1. Do you work from home more than three days a month?  Why? Do you need a ride?  Look, me working from home doesn't make a damn bit of difference unless you're one of the people for whom it's all about "face time."  When I work from home, I turn "face time" into "productive time", which tends to make the company "money" and makes me "happy."  Next question.
2. Has the number of meetings you are invited to dropped off noticeably from six months ago?  Yes, especially since I started mocking my coworkers for ending prepositional phrases with a preposition (duh, it's 'number of meetings to which you are invited').  Actually, yes, the number of meetings I've been invited to lately has dropped off because we have no work to meet about.  Next question, puh-leeze.
3. Are you late for work more than once a week?  No, just on the days I have to hit the methadone clinic for a latte and a booster shot.  I seriously hate this question.  I roll into my office every day at 8:15 and I leave at 5.  Sometimes I work through a little lunch, sometimes not.  But you know what? In all my years at DA, no one has ever mentioned my technical-so-called-tardiness in a performance review because for the 7 hours and 45 minutes that I am there, I Get. Shit. Done.  Which reminds me...
4. Has it been more than a year since your last performance review?  Depends on if you count the one I got in Swank last month (very extremely NSFW)--that review of my performance was that I was sure to go places in the industry with my supporting role in "Debbie Does Frank Gehry's Whole Office."  Can we move on, please?
5. Has it been more than a month or two since your boss asked for your advice or opinion on pressing business?  Not at all!  Just last week he asked me what we should do about the lack of work in the office, and my helpful and professional advice was "get the effing banks to loan our clients some effing money and then get some effing work." Does anyone have a boss that asks you for advice or opinions on "pressing" matters?  "Which shoes would look better with this outfit, Pixie, these or these?"
6. Do you earn more money that co-workers who have the same title or job responsibilities as you do?  Okay, finally there's one of these that almost doesn't annoy me.  But still, how many people actually know what their colleagues make?  Don't companies keep a super-tight lid on that sort of thing?  Though I guess you could get your colleagues roaring drunk and get them to fess up.  We do that at DA; it's called Tuesdays.
7. Are you getting assigned fewer high-profile projects to work on lately?  *sigh* are we still on this topic?  Again, if there's NO WORK TO DO, are there gonna be a lot of high-profile assignments?  Oh no, Liz got asked to clean up the code book collection and I'm building medical equipment in Revit: I'm doomed!!
8. Do you leave before your boss more than once a week?  Not really.  That bastard is in at 10 and out by 3 or 4 because THERE'S NOTHING TO DO.  And, I might also add, many of our bosses have laptops and can write proposals and do work at home, where we probably won't bother them and they can concentrate better (see question #1).  And furthermore, what's with this obsession with time?  I know that good work takes time to do, but if you can do a fantastic job in less than 8 hours, then why stick around and bother everyone (see question #3).
9. Is your immediate supervisor the only person who can vouch for the quality of your work?  Yes, and now he works at Safeway spraying the produce with a garden hose because he made more than me and did the same job.  Actually, this one almost doesn't annoy me either.

Okay, let's check your score! If you said yes to:

• Two or fewer questions: You are a belt sander.  You make a lot of noise, throw a lot of dust around, but when you're done, whatever you worked on doesn't actually look that different, just a little prettier.
  
• Three to six questions: You are a circular saw.  You definitely make a difference in what you work on, but you're loud and dangerous.  At least one person who has worked with you has lost a finger due to something you've done.
• Seven or more questions: You are a hammer. You're not a power tool, but you can only do one thing and you break more stuff than you actually fix.

(Thanks to Eric at S7g Architects for contributing to this post.)

Things are tough all over

Fellow architect and job captain Liz and I commiserated in the ladies room yesterday about how unnerving the quiet is around the office. Not only are there fewer of us around, but there's not a whole lot of work to do. She and Jacqueline have a dark-humored competition on who can get the most billable hours in a week--usually that's only two or three hours, spent helping someone with specs or shop drawings or something. Guy heard through the grapevine recently (and from a pretty reliable source) that if Design Associates doesn't get some more work in the next couple of months, there will be more layoffs in the spring. Which leaves me wondering, who the hell will do the work? They've laid off probably half the interns and even some licensed folks. If they lay off the rest of us, who will do the drawings and meetings and shops as cheaply as we will?

I got a comment recently on this post about how the layoffs affect especially interns. The commenter, one of several named "Anonymous" on that particular post, summed it up with "Architects eats their young. There are a lot of great careers out there - this isn't one of them."

Hm. Well. I agree to a certain extent.

Having spent nearly nine years in this profession, only the last 2.5 as a licensed architect, I've had the opportunity to see both sides of the Licensing River as well as get a view from the upper rungs of the bottom of the ladder. What I learned is that architecture hazes its interns, its new people, the fresh thinkers and good new minds. Architecture pays interns crap and provides (by and large) few benefits real or imagined. Architecture works these interns extremely hard for a very long time (many interns' incomes are based on a 45-hour or 50-hour week) and sometimes won't even give them the experiences they need to succeed and to be good future architects--like actively engaging them in construction administration, involving them in contracts and bidding, and taking them on-site to see how what they draw really matters. Some firms are quick to dump employees, usually from the bottom. Guy mentioned a few firm names this evening here in Denver that dumped folks as early as 18 months ago and have a reputation for being layoff-happy. And the bosses of these firms are people who just want to draw beautiful buildings and know jack squat about payroll and marketing, and so their firms--their businesses--often flounder under their crappy management. And let's face it, architecture school does nothing to prepare its graduates to deal with basic business matters. And between the layoffs and the bad pay and the mistreatment and disrespect and bad management, we lose interns along the way, some of them really good. Some of them quit to go do related careers, like computer modeling or animating or even architectural photography. Some of them go off to start new, unrelated careers. And it's not cool.

Having said that, allow me to speak to all two interns that might read this digital tripe I call a blog: it gets better. Getting licensed allows even a moderately decent architectural professional to see a decent jump in pay, and getting licensed plus changing firms gets you more cash. The firm at which I work, Design Associates, slowly got rid of people last year and saved the two big layoffs for the fall, when everything really went to hell, and it wasn't until the last big round in November that they got rid of a substantial number of licensed folks. (I should mention here that DA has a reputation in da Mile High for being loathe to lay people off. We knew the economy was in the shitter when they laid off more than 4 people at once.) And sadly for interns, even really good ones, being licensed saves your job because a licensed job captain can draw in CAD and Revit like an intern, but he or she also has the experience to meet with clients, edit specs, and run projects like a project manager and do it all for a lot less than a project manager.

But hanging over all of these points is, frankly, the economy. Newcomers to WAD may not know that we hourly folks at DA have been asked to go to 36 hours a week. We've voluntarily taken a 10% pay cut to keep our jobs, and it turns out that even the higher-ups, the associates who are on salary, have taken 10% pay cuts as well. Consider the many new members of our white-collar workforce--all the lawyers and accountants and teachers and even software designers--who suddenly find themselves under-employed or unemployed. And working, alas, at Target.

Architecture as a profession is one of great risk and great rewards. It's like a growth stock: If you can stomach the risks, then you may indeed reap huge benefits. Or not. It's a profession that relies greatly on the economy, and right now, with banks not lending and bond issues not passing and the bond market being in the toilet and nothing going on, we have nothing to do and many firms have either laid off like crazy or are going under. Just like scads of restaurants and consulting firms and stores and all kinds of other businesses right now. So we're socking away some cash, crossing our fingers, and thankful we have what we have for now.

Pillow talk is hell

[Scene: early Sunday morning at the Happy Kitten Highrise. Guy and Pixie are procrastinating getting out of bed. Maddy and Hazel yowl from the other room that it's time for treats.]

Pixie: So how's your new project team working out?
Guy: You know Mackenzie?
Pixie: Yeah, nice enough gal. What about her?
Guy: We went to lunch the other day, and she's Jewish, and her husband's...I dunno, some kind of Christian, and neither of them will back down, so they're gonna raise their kids as both and let them choose which they wanna be when they're eighteen.
Pixie: Hm. Uh-huh. So they're, uh...
Guy: Man, I knew religion wasn't for me when I was nine. Fuck waiting til I was eighteen.
Pixie: Indeed? How did you know when you were nine?
Guy: I asked my mom what was the deal with Catholicism. Did it all basically come down to faith? And she said yeah. And that's when I knew it wasn't for me, when the bottom line is, "Just trust me, just believe me, and go along with the rules we think are the best rules."
Pixie: [thoughful] Hm.
Guy: I mean, if that's all there is to it, then it's no better than Dungeons and Dragons.
Pixie: [sitting up off her pillow] What?! Baaahahahaa!!
Guy: Seriously. You get dressed up in special clothes to go to a ceratin place to behave under a very specific set of rules for an hour or so, but at least when you leave your buddy's basement after playing D&D, you know it's all a game and it's back to reality.
Pixie: [falling over onto Guy's chest] BAAAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!
Guy: What? Are you laughing at me or the analogy?
Pixie: I'm laughing at--so, instead of water in the baptismal font--
Guy: --there's a twenty-sided die. You roll it and it tells you what pew to sit in. Then you roll a six-sided die and multiply the number you get by five, and that's what you put in the collection plate.
Pixie: [still laughing] I love the notion of walking into church with a two-handed dwarven axe--
Guy: If you walk into early service with a two-handed dwarven axe, you get plus-five Jesus points.
Pixie: BAAHAHAAA!! So I guess the priest has to have plus-ten mage points or he can't run the service that day?
Guy: Right.
Pixie: [wheezing with laughter] ...and your penance at confession is to do the Dragon Canyon run without magic armor and an orc-detecting blade... [still laughing] ...two-handed dwarven axe...
Guy: [shrugging and absent-mindedly playing with Pixie's hair] It's not any weirder than a virgin birth and the resurrection.

This is my favoritest essay on architects. Ever.

Annie Choi is a writer in New York City, and this essay/open letter of hers was originally published in the Vol II, 2007 PIDGIN, a publication of the graduate students of Princeton University.   And I wish I had written it, because it's absolutely brilliant.

Dear Architects, I am sick of your shit.

Once, a long time ago, in the days of yore, I had a friend who was studying architecture to become, presumably, an architect.  This friend introduced me to other friends, who were also studying architecture.  Then these friends had other friends who were architects—real architects doing real architecture like designing luxury condos that look a lot like glass dildos.  And these real architects knew other real architects and now the only people I know are architects.  And they all design glass dildos that I will never work or live in and serve only to obstruct my view of New Jersey.

Do not get me wrong, architects.  I like you as a person.  I think you are nice, smell good most of the time, and I like your glasses.  You have crazy hair, and if you are luck, most of it is on your head.  But I do not care about architecture.  It is true.  This is what I do care about:

Burritos

Hedgehogs

Coffee

As you can see, architecture is not on the list.  I believe that architecture falls somewhere between toenail fungus and invasive colonoscopy in the list of things that interest me.

Perhaps if you didn’t talk about it so much, I would be more interested.  When you point to a glass cylinder and say proudly, hey my office designed that, I giggle and say it looks like a bong.  You turn your head in disgust and shame.  You think, obviously she does not understand.  What does she know?  She is just a writer.  She is no architect.  She respects vowels, not glass cocks.  And then you say now I am designing a lifestyle center, and I ask what is that, and you say it is a place that offers goods and services and retail opportunities and I say you mean like a mall and you say no.  It is a lifestyle center.  I say it sounds like a mall.  I am from the Valley, bitch.  I know malls.

Architects, I will not lie, you confuse me.  You work sixty, eighty hours a week and yet you are always poor.  Why aren’t you buying me a drink?  Where is your bounty of riches?  Maybe you spent it on merlot.  Maybe you spent it on hookers and blow.  I cannot be sure.  It is a mystery.  I will leave that to the scientists to figure out.

Architects love to discuss how much sleep they have gotten.  One will say how he was at the studio until five in the morning, only to return again two hours later.  Then another will say, oh that is nothing, I haven’t slept in a week.  And then another will say, guess what, I have never slept ever.  My dear architects, the measure of ho hard you’ve worked and how much you’ve accomplished is not related to the number of hours you have not slept.  Have you heard of Rem Koolhaas?  He is a famous architect.  I know this because you tell me he is a famous architect.  I hear that Rem Koolhaas is always sleeping.  He is, I presume, sleeping right now.  And I hear he gets shit done.  And I also hear that in a stunning move, he is making a building that looks not like a glass cock, but like a concrete vagina.  When you sleep more, you get vagina.  You can all take a lesson from Rem Koolhaas.

Life is hard for me, please understand.  Architects are an important part of my existence.  They call me at eleven at night and say they just got off work, am I hungry?  Listen, it is practically midnight.  I ate hours ago.  So long ago that, in fact, I am hungry again.  So yes, I will go.  Then I will go and there will be other architects talking about AutoCAD shortcuts and something about electric panels and can you believe that is all I did today, what a drag.  I look around the table at the poor, tired, and hungry, and think to myself, I have but only one bullet left in the gun.  Who will I choose?

I have a friend who is a doctor.  He gives me drugs.  I enjoy them.  I have a friend who is a lawyer.  He helped me sue my landlord.  My architect friends have given me nothing.  No drugs, no medical advice, and they don’t know how to spell subpoena.  One architect friend figured out that my apartment was one hundred and eighty-seven square feet. That was nice.  Thanks for that.

I suppose one could ask what someone like me brings to architects like yourselves.  I bring cheer.  I yell at architects when they start talking about architecture.  I force them to discuss far more interesting topics, like turkey eggs.  Why do we eat chicken eggs, but not turkey eggs?  They are bigger.  And people really like turkey.  See?  I am not afraid to ask the tough questions.

So, dear architects, I will stick around, for only a little while.  I hope that one day some of you will become doctors and lawyers or will figure out my taxes.  And we will laugh at the days when you spent the entire evening talking about some European you’ve never met who designed a building you will never see because you are too busy working on something that will never get built.  But even if that day doesn’t arrive, give me a call anyway, I am free.

Yours truly, Annie Choi

Eschew obfuscation

So, first of all, it would appear that my readers are more erudite than I thought.  However, the case may also be that I should have waited to post people's comments to the quiz passage until a day or so had passed so as not to taint the jury.  Or again, maybe I just have really smart readers.  I hope it's that I have smart readers.

And here's why I hope that: because I literally had to read the quoted passage four times in order to understand what the guy was saying.  He's making a good argument, which is that...*sigh* wait, let me read it again...

oh, okay.  He's saying that lately all the "really good" architecture is being produced as a result of a huge influx of cash and and based on unreliable systems to support its existence, namely extreme laissez-faire capitalism, dying industries like oil, and tourism.  The second paragraph pretty much makes fun of Frank Gehry, which is to say that in order to express the newness of the system we're building for, starchitects (like Gehry or Rem Koolhaas, as 2H described) came up with this amazing software (like BIM, as Spencer mentioned--thanks for commenting and glad to have you!) to make these impossible-looking buildings just 'cuz we can.  Making those buildings is a really expensive process, and when the reason for their existence doesn't match up to the actual building, they lie nearly-empty or unused.  The third paragraph...I dunno, y'all.  I like the ghost ship imagery, but his point sort of leaves me.

The point that leaves me is that I have to wade through a lot of text to tell y'all what I just told y'all in the above paragraph.  One of the reasons that some of us architects drink is that the rest of us love to use big $20 words at every opportunity in order to sound really advanced and smart.  Problem with that is that it leaves a huge chunk of society out of the conversation, and we need everyone--preachers, doctors, accountants, claims adjustors, mall cops, small business owners, teachers, sheet metal fabricators, everyone--in on the conversation.  We as a profession need to find clear ways to explain complex problems so that everyone understands why we don't need another remote suburban neighborhood and its requisite strip mall.  But when I say clear, I don't mean dumb it down.  We're all adults here.  What I mean is stop saying shit--and I very much do mean shit--like "Displays of beyond-human formal complexity drop out of the computational design systems employed in the search for exoticism and difference - a difference that was demanded by the market pluralism of ultra capitalism" and instead say "Buildings that look physically impossible to build were the result of drawing and modeling software that allowed architects to draw impossible things so they could actually be built.  And it had to look impossible and unlike anything that came before it for two reasons: 1) just because they could make it so, and 2) because the client had the kind of vision that comes with obscene amounts of cash to spend".  Granted, my explanation is probably longer then the original, but is it easier to understand?  And does it capture the gist of the first statement?

We've all heard businesspeople use "task" as a verb and talk about "optimizing our procedural objectives."  This is the same thing but with an architecture degree.  It's archispeak.  And it makes. me. drink.