selophane.blog

So this posting by noon thing is getting harder, especially when I have morning meetings. But, work takes priority over this blog.

This morning I had a meeting in Bethesda to interview an accountant for my design firm. This was a really interesting experience for me, because for the first time in my professional career I was not the one trying to sell their services, but instead the prospective client. It has made me understand something that has been a subconscious motivator for many of my previous life decisions; I want to feel that I am being treated as a potential investment not just a future client.

Interviewing an accountant is very similar to choosing a university, it is a decision that will affect your professional life for years to come. When I chose my university one of the major motivating factors was not a rational factor like class size or endowment or even the location of the school, instead I felt the need to go someplace where I felt welcomed and wanted. Now, I was in a unique situation, I could not afford to choose any school, I could only afford a school If i was getting a significant merit based financial aid package. In the end my decision came down to Tulane and Brandeis, both had offered me comparable scholarship and both were comparable programs, but they differed greatly in my personal interaction with the admissions staff and the department faculty. At Brandeis I had a hard time making an appointment to see anyone in the admissions office for what would have been at most a 15 minute chat even though I had already been awarded one of their top scholarships. It made me feel like my presence was putting them out and that I should be grateful for the opportunity and prestige that they would be offering me. My interaction with Tulane was completely different. I had received a number of letters from their admissions office and phone calls from an admissions counselor, one of the Tulane College academic advisors and the chair of their classics department. This personal attention not only made me feel important, but it made me believe that the scholarship they were offering me was an investment. They wanted me to come to their university so that someday my name would bring them prestige and opportunity. This simple reversal was all that was needed to make my decision.

This anecdote is not intended to brag about my education, instead it is intended to highlight the fact that when choosing an accountant I need to find someone who will look at my business as an investment and not just as a source of present revenue. Sure we may be small and just starting out now, and as such we will have to use their budget services or whatever “Starter business” package they have. But, one day we will have a much larger client base and bring their firm not only a good revenue stream but some prestige.

[Image via poetpainter.]

Poetpainter has a great post entitled: Why I Am Not A Manager. That’s where I found the above image.

This image really speaks to me. I think it illustrates the greatest problem in architecture practice. The hierarchy of offices are set up mostly as managers and “managees”. There really is no place for collaboration or any challenging of the status quo. Sure offices say they value the opinions of the interns and non-managers, but the whole hierarchy leads itself so that their ideas have to be greatly filtered before they reach anyone who can make any decisions. Now this is partly good, many interns don’t know their proverbial ass from their elbow when they first join an office, but I fear that a lot of stale architecture is made because the firms designing the buildings are top-down. The principals work with a lead designer who has a vision and then everyone else works to craft that vision. Studio Managers take direction from the designer, and in turn direct project architects, who craft red lines and cartoon sets so that the interns can generate drawings. All those layers are like the children’s game of telephone, in every step the designer’s ideas get diluted by management, and in the end even if the design was steller the final product is usually mediocre at best.

Now to envision a more leadership driven office would take a whole different outlook on architectural practice. Designers would be embedded in studio groups and taking the role of the leader. They may generate the basic program and idea, but a system of valued employees should be able to flush that idea out without having so much dictatorial direction. Granted there will be employees who know less than others about the mechanics of architecture, and they would be helped by their teammates and leader to reach the goal. Trial and error, especially with a safety net, leads to better productivity than examples of the correct solution without any knowledge of the wrong ones. This type of structure could still allow for an upper ring of leaders/principals, but it would mean a more cohesive project team instead of the fractionalized teams so often seen in today’s offices.