Working out of the Box is a series of features presenting architects who have applied their architecture backgrounds to alternative career paths.

Are you an architect working out of the box? Do you know of someone that has changed careers and has an interesting story to share? If you would like to suggest an (ex-)architect, please send us a message.

Archinect: Where did you study architecture?

Bill Ferehawk: Yale School of Architecture.

At what point in your life did you decide to pursue architecture?

BF: Ever since I was a child I wanted to be an artist, a sculptor really, so my interest in architecture was very natural, very easy. In college I had a girlfriend who was in architecture school, or the School of Environmental Design as it’s called at Berkeley. We lived together for a few years and through her I was introduced to the architecture world. It sounds pompous to say today but I went to architecture school because I thought it would be more rigorous than art school.
 

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When did you decide to stop pursuing architecture? Why?

BF: In retrospect, architecture was my way to hedge my perceived risk of being an artist. When I was in my late teens, early twenties I was profoundly ignorant of what professional artists really did. I came from a family of scientists where art was alien. Years later, just out of architecture school I worked for Alice Aycock in New York and she turned me on to the actualities of art and gave me a new drive to do my own work. It also turned out that I had some talent in architecture but was thoroughly deficient in the necessary passion that the culture of architecture demanded. After a few years working as a designer at Roche Dinkeloo (Saarinen’s old office) I found a job working as a professional model builder and sculptor in Los Angeles. Sculpting maquettes and constructing miniature sets for Dr. Suess Land at Universal Studios really opened up my eyes to the world of commercial art and the different ways I could use my background in architecture and sculpture.
 

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Over the next ten years, I worked in both architecture proper and commercial art, always preferring my jobs with other artists. During this time, I also had intensely troubling doubts about the nature of architecture and sculpture: I wanted to tell stories directly but the physical world tells stories in passive and mute ways. In 1994, I began a performance piece with Erik Oldham titled Accelerated Episodes . The piece was about accelerating my body and my mind in pure landscapes as a means to perceive the divine. It was a study in what I called super-abundant mortality. It was also the first time I used direct narrative, film, and audio as part of my art and it changed my life. The film I produced for Accelerated Episodes isn’t a particularly outstanding piece, but it’s important to me as a marker of when I decided to move into the medium of film. When my first documentary film, Lustron: The House America’s Been Waiting For , was in production, I was working through a two-year contract with the rightly disparaged Disney Imagineering as an art director, developing dimly lit interactive theme parks and complicated 3D interactive rides. By the time I finished that film, I was blissfully and completely on my own.
 

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Describe your current profession.

BF: Dylan Robertson and I have a documentary film company in Los Angeles called Radiant Features. The first project we completed together was a couple of web videos with Frances Anderton for a public radio program she produces called DnA (Design and Architecture ) on KCRW. During those shoots, I learned that Dylan had a love and knowledge of architecture, although he didn’t formally study it, he grew up in a family that has a deep understanding and appreciation of architecture. A lot of our work is about architecture and design, in fact we are currently in post-production on a film about Japanese Buddhist temples in Hawaii.
 

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I’m also involved in a new organization called SMIBE. The background to that is for the past several years I imagined the need for a non-profit, all volunteer organization to support moving image arts about the built environment. About a year ago, this vague plan started coming together: I found a few like souls and we created SMIBE, Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment . It’s clear to us that the story driven moving image is taking hold in the design fields and our plan is that SMIBE will be an open, free forum where this genre can be shared and discussed. Although SMIBE is still in its infancy, I am proud of what we have accomplished in less than a year: We have a few sponsors and partners and are currently holding our first annual, free-to-enter, online, SMIBE moving image competition with the theme, “Story about a Place.”
 

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What skills did you gain from architecture school, or working in the architecture industry, that have contributed to your success in your current career?

BF: A large part of what I learned in architecture I had to unlearn in order to function normally outside the field. But I would say a valuable skill architecture gave me was the process to systematically organize and develop creative ideas. The core of that process, in my view, is rigorous self and peer review. These are process fundamentals I use every day in documentary film.
 

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Do you have an interest in returning to architecture?

BF: Not really. I love the people I work with and the stories I am working on. This is the happiest I've been in my life and I am deeply thankful for it.



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