to start a firm

larationalist
Wed, 02 May 2007 20:09:10 +0000

“la…you may or may not discover why the practice of architecture doesn’t light your fire”

I have… part of it is that I’m really GOOD at technical stuff, but don’t enjoy it. Architecture seemed like it would be a good place for someone with a balanced creative/technical mind (me), but this is actually not the case. It is actually much easier for someone who is more only one or the other, because then their role in the process is clear both to them and to their employers. Because I have the capacity to develop a great amount of technical knowledge and skill very quickly, I get assigned so many technical tasks that I don’t have time to design. I don’t attribute this to my sex because I see other women in the opposite situation- getting design opportunities because of their lack of technical skills (which, btw, really burns me up- they’re getting an opportunity because of what they CAN’T do instead of what they CAN do?!), and this situation has been more common in my experience. This is a battle that I would have to fight my whole career in architecture, wanting to do design and having a lot of talent, but the moment some urgent shop drawings come in or we’re having a problem with our structural engineer, guess who ends up working on it, because numerically there is simply a greater demand for technical personell. The number of hours in a day prevents me from doing an equal amount of design work. I also don’t enjoy the centralization of design, as opposed to graphics where it’s common to see several top designers have total or almost total control of their work in the same firm, because the projects are smaller and more manageable by a single person or a smaller team. Which leads me to the other reason… short attention span! I go CRAZY when I’m on the same project for 8 months on end, and don’t even want to know what would happen if I were expected to stay on one for five years, as is common with the larger projects which I find programatically more exciting. I hope that’s not a female problem, I’d like to think that my fellow women have a better capacity for long-term projects than I do, but I would defer to any sort of research that is out there on that one. Anyway, enough of my rambling, but I felt it was very important to learn what it was that was wrong with architecture for me before I chose what to move on to, because I feared making another bad choice if I didn’t take the time to figure out what I didn’t want in a career.

Sorry to the architecture kidlets for the detour here, but hopefully it can help you learn something about architecture- lots of people leave the field for a great variety of reasons. Don’t worry about it, find what makes you happy, if you get in there and don’t feel like it’s the right thing for you, you’re not proving anything to anybody by staying with a field that isn’t right for you. But hopefully, it will be. = )