Y'all recall that I made associate at DA a few years ago. I clawed my way to middle management for this shit? But something darker dare I use that term began to reveal itself in the big meeting room with all the partners and associates aka middle management and senior leadership. I was excited to finally join this group and help DA on its new path of thoughtful leadership and management and evolution into an awesome 21st-century firm.
I was finally going to help make a difference. I was finally able to see how decisions are made. I was finally able to watch the interactions and the dynamics between members of senior leadership the partners and between the senior leadership and the middle managers associates and some senior architects.
With his unwarranted and unprovoked explosions at colleagues, not paying attention to whoever is speaking or even flat-out leaving the meeting before it was over, Bosley was a bully. Howie was a jittering, pushy, micromanaging bully.
Audrey, whom I once thought was a great role model for women in leadership positions, turned out to act like a passive-aggressive, hypocritical micromanaging flake. Molly, an associate partner whose arrival had also given me hope for DA was, simply put, a fucking nightmare for my colleagues and me; a master manipulator with poor listening skills and even poorer senses of boundaries and propriety, she was Bosley's syncophant for as long as it helped her get ahead and avoid blame for any project gone wrong.
Other partners popped in and out of meetings to deliver their own flavor of seagull management fly in, make a lot of noise, crap on everything, and then leave. I would sit in the meetings and watch the other partners bulldoze over Sven, one of my favorite partners, and Patty, an associate partner I had long worked with and admired. Sven would sit back quietly in his chair, and Patty would sigh and look down with her head in her hands after being shot down by Bosley and Howie yet again.
After my experience with the St. Ermahgerd project, I vowed that this truly would never happen again. As a somewhat leader at this firm, I needed to make it work, if not for me then for the others who weren't able to be in this room to defend their interests.
I decided to study how to make projects work better so I could show the partners and help them improve the firm's employee satisfaction and maybe even its bottom line too. So, with the help of a colleague with a great deal of experience setting up research projects and surveys, I complete the first round of an in-depth research project and presented it at a national conference, where it was received with great enthusiasm and almost delight.
After I presented, I lost count of the number of times someone said something to the effect of "Your firm is so smart and brave for doing this sort of self-study.
After getting bumped off the agenda for nearly three months, I finally got to present my research to the partners and associates however many felt like showing up that day. I went through the data, explaining my methods, and then I got to the punchline: my research showed that the most successful project teams were the ones that had only one partner or no active partners on the project. This was not going to be good news for Howie, Molly, and Bosley, who for some incomprehensible reason insisted on having two of them or even all three on a project.
At the end of my presentation, I was met with It was as if no one knew what to do with what I'd shown them. They began discussing amongst themselves in such a way that I sensed they didn't really get it: should we share this with our clients? If we get to the design solution faster, would a lot of these stresses go away? My inner Lewis Black rose up in my head: you're not listenin', asshole: the main problem on your projects is your fucked-up behavior.
You want to be a partner, but you also want to be designers and planners and architects, and unfortunately those things are mututally exclusive of being a partner.
You either get the work or do the work. It's my job to do the work, so go get the work and then get the hell out of my way and my colleagues' ways. The emporer was naked, and no matter how many times or how loudly I shouted it, the emporer wouldn't even go put some fucking shorts on.
I recounted some of this to my dear friend and advisor, Vinnie, while hiding out at 3pm one afternoon at the Cruise Room for a glass of wine or four. They say they want to give everyone autonomy and opportunities for growth and all that, but their behavior says they want things to stay as they are but just want the staff to do more. And when you speak up about the delta between what they say and what they do, you get gaslighted, like maybe it's your fault that you can't do an unreasonable amount of work over and over and over.
Howie tried to give me room on my next project, but he keep fucking with my staff on a project that was already. Further I noticed Howie and Molly treating my utterly competent and professional colleagues like they barely knew how to be architects.
They were giving me a wide berth, and Bosley literally hadn't spoken to me in six months--because of my meltdown and my survey-delivered hand-slap? So you'll continue to treat my colleagues like shit because they haven't had a massive meltdown yet?! Is that what it takes to get this firm's leaders to hear us? It was during yet another micromanaging moment from the partners one day in May that I had the strangest feeling settle over me as one of my most senior colleagues told me not to make my staff surveys so "nit picky and getting so into the details.
You don't really want me to give you true information--you want to keep living in an echo chamber. Well, you'll be living in it without me. I left work early that day, went to a coffee shop, and started writing my resume and assembling my portfolio. Guy brought my resume by hand to his boss, and apparently his boss went into a semi-orgasmic convulsion to hear that a highly-experienced healthcare planner and architect with research and speaking experience as well as a pleasant personality and good if indecent sense of humor might be interested in changing firms.
Every few weeks, I'd have lunch with a new person from MegaARCH's national design specialties group--Guy's boss, the head of architecture lady, the head of healthcare, and the healthcare marketing guy.
And lunch after lunch, I felt so strangely light: conversations with people who are interested in what I can do and know how to do and are so excited about the stuff I want to research and do and so on I finally realized that maybe, just maybe, I had skills to offer the world that really were well-honed skills, that maybe my work was valued somewhere by somebody.
The offer came in late July. I got approval to start on January 2nd of I got the what I thought was insanely high salary I asked for, and they didn't even blink.
I even got a signing bonus, for which I didn't even ask. I nearly started crying when I got the offer and showed Guy. I waited a couple of days, for what reason I'm not sure. It was a big deal to leave Design Associates Even if it went poorly there, the fact that they would want me there enough to give me everything I wanted meant that I could still go somewhere else.
I remembered my sister Kitty and I walking away from Dad's family after he died and they started acting like unrestrained dipshits. I had known them for 21 years, and I shared DNA with them. And I walked away, and I haven't spoken to them in almost 20 years.
And I have no regrets. It was only fitting to pair New York City 's infamous cocktail with van der Rohe's iconic Seagram Building, featuring a dash of modernism, some sweet vermouth, whiskey, bitters, and a cherry with a twist of orange zest. Enter the world of the industrial revolution under the plate glass and cast iron roofs of Paxton's sprawling Crystal Palace, and sip on an Old Fashioned featuring a cube of sugar, bitters, and whiskey, mixed over ice in an appropriately old glass garnished with a lemon peel.
Picture yourself on the island of Capri on Italy 's southern coast sipping on a Negroni , one of the nation's famous aperitifs. The two are both pink, Italian, and on the rocks, but only one features a delectable combination of gin, campari, and vermouth with club soda.
Immerse yourself in the glamour of Cannes with a Bellini on the Mediterranean, featuring a bit of bubbly mixed perfectly with peach puree, served in a champagne flute. An ideal location to relax, the orange bubbly architecture of Palais Bulles perfectly mimics the Bellini. Read more about their previous work featured on ArchDaily, here. And please hurry, it sounds like my life might actually depend on it.
So here it is — my Tassimo T55, and what might end up being the ticket to my survival and, more importantly, to coffee infused, happy and productive employees. So with fingers crossed, I opened the box and set it up ten minutes with everyone watching my every move.
Because this is a smart system, you have many more options than just coffee or tea although those are pretty good — latte, cappuccino, crema, espresso … all sorts of hot beverages. You put the T Disc in, the machine scans the bar code and determines how to make whatever drink you desire. After I hooked up the machine i. In fact, it smells like how all architecture offices should smell … like a coffee fueled design spectacular! Since everyone in the office is now drinking coffee like crazy, I thought it would be fun to see the coffee mugs that people brought up to the office.
I think your coffee mug is important and can tell someone a lot about who you are …. So take a look at your coffee mug and see what you think it tells others other than you never properly wash it and have most likely owned it forever. Here are ours:. Yes, I know. Sounds about right. People think that? I couldnt imagine how massively nuts of a vocabulary designwise materials, codes, standards, etc you'd need to be a good architect. Still time to blog about no time to--wait, wasn't there some architect guy in Atlas Shrugged?
I know Ellen Page had a lot of natural talent and all, but I don't think any of the team thought it was easy. Why would they have to go all the way to Paris if it was easy? Plus, the test can be brutal. What is your reward for your knowledge and experience? Being treated like a whore by developers and bankers! Mutt at PM on August 15, [ 1 favorite ]. Yeah, but if you don't like the resulting building, as the architect, you are legally entitled to blow it up without being punished if you can give a good enough speech to the courtroom, of course.
Sometimes I consult on architectural projects and let me tell you- there are plenty of reasons to drink. Like the time a giant I-beam was rushed from the US to Asia overnight on a private plane at a cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars for a massively behind-schedule project just so they could meet an arbitrary deadline.
That I-beam sat in a warehouse for 6 months. Meanwhile they "value-engineered" out things like spare fixtures and mounting clips. It means the integrity of your project has "passed away" or is "with Jesus now". So waterbugs and mosquitoes infested Or the sporting goods chain that opened a meeting with a famous British designer by showing him Larry the Cable Guy's TV special. But in between those times, meetings are boring, billable hours suck, micromanagers abound and your favorite project is canceled.
Maybe a blog isn't the best format since it amplifies the day to day irritations by requiring frequent updates and misses the bigger more absurd circus of building buildings.
And yeah, I don't know anyone that thinks it's easy So this is the architect equivalent of yelling "What, you think this is easy? I know you're joking, but the prospect of Ayn Rand novels being taken as legal precedence is a frightening one indeed. Because, probably much like your job, or anyone else's, those things are largely a result of what the client was willing to pay for.
In architecture, that's generally also mixed in with a little bit of what code will allow. The CA post rings pretty true, though. I didn't know this very amusing item about the movie: Rand demanded that the entire speech that Howard Roark gives at the end of the film be read exactly as in her original screenplay. Vidor initially agreed, but when shooting commenced on the scene, he decided to tighten it up a bit.
Upon hearing this, Rand called the head of the studio demanding that the whole speech be filmed. In the end, most of the speech was put in, but some parts that were in the novel were omitted in the film.
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