to start a firm

cheers
Tue, 08 May 2007 21:30:27 +0000

I’ll let you PM the mods to find out why those posts were deleted by mods, la…but I will clarify my position about CAD skills–and ‘luck’.

I was lucky but only becuase I put myself in the position to be lucky. I’ve had a very unusual career because I’ve made up some of my own rules along the way.

Now that I am twenty five years into it, I don’t think my success was such an accident. This fun career didn’t land at my feet due to fame or anything resembling fame. My gut feeling is that I’m not so special. If I can do it–so can a whole lot of other architects. It’s not nano-science. In my opinion. Some people may have differing opinions, obviously.

Regarding CAD. When I hire young interns, I need, have to have, phenomenal CAD skills*. I worked for a two man firm for a year when I was very very young and I learned my exquisite drafting skills from them. They had been in business for a year. They were, you guessed it, 27 and 28 at the time. Anyway, those drafting skills got me in the door and slightly up the ladder at all the subsequent offices I worked in–including the two famous New York offices.

FWIW, that early experience was a terrific business experience too–because I saw how those two young guys started up their firm. I saw how much cash they made and how they controlled expenses. Believe it or not, we were doing small mall-based luggage shops when one of the largest department stores in the country literally walked into the teeny tiny basement office and gave them a $30M department store job. For a three person office–(the third person, yours truly, was making a whopping $3 an hour and thrilled to get it, LOL). Later that year, an East Coast shopping mall developer gave them a $80M mall–which the three of us produced in six months. In any event, I absorbed the financial lessons of ‘lean and mean’ and I’ve never forgotten them.

They got that job because one of guys had been a designer at a larger firm and the department store design team had taken a liking to him during a previous project. I went back to that firm when I finished school but an influential ‘famous’ friend came in, saw the nice but slightly pedestrian design quality and told me that I was wasting my time and needed to do internships in the top offices. (Not unlike Rouse telling Gehry he should stop doing Rouse malls).

I had no idea how important those top office internships were–until I opened up my own office(s). Those ‘brand name’ internships still bring work into our office, twenty two years after the fact. It’s crazy. I could have never guessed that at the time.

Notes
*With a huge new project released for initial design, I’ve been thinking about switching to Catia/DP. Our modelmaker is a Catia guru and I think I see the future of the profession–and my career. In the next year, I hope to be looking for young architects/3D draughtsmen with phenomenal Catia or 3D experience. Fingers crossed, by the end of the year, 2D CAD documents will be a by-product in my office, only.