I'm curious how others decided on architecture. Here's my story.
In 1984 I was drafting for a small architecture firm for $5.50 an hour. That was pretty good money then. There was a newly licensed architect there who was making about $10 an hour. We were doing a small addition to an office (an old house, actually) and the principal let me try my hand at designing the addition. I came up with all kinds of wacky designs that didn't work. The $10 an hour architect came up with the perfect solution - copy the house! I was awed that an architectural education could do that for you. And double your salary!
Long story short - I became an architect so that I too could do nothing imaginative for $10 an hour.
i think the only reason your wacky solutions didn't work was because nobody wanted to spend the time making them work. even boring stupid unimaginative life sucking brain numbing idiotic designs don't work when its just a blank sheet of paper...they have to be drawn through,....right?
When I was about 12 my grandmother saw some of my sketches and said "you should be an architect." I didn't think much of her comment until 6 years later when I was sitting in the Chemistry placement exam for engineering school. After discovering that I didn't know one single problem on the test I began to look around at all the other kids frantically making their way through the test. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to spend 4 years amongst all those stiffs. So I remembered what my grandmother had said and decided to tour the Architecture school and try it for one semester. It was the best decision I had ever made. I was doing more school work than I had ever done in my life, but I was also making better grades than ever. I actually enjoyed what I was studying. Anyhow, call it luck or grandma's intuition, or whatever. Needless to say, I've found my calling. Mundane drawings @10 bucks and hour included.
when i was 8 years old, my uncle who was an electrical contractor took me to AT&T building construction site. there was this old guy with black round glasses trying to convince people why building's top should be flat. it wasn't my place but i said "building's top should be just like my grandpa's clock". there was a long silence and the guy with round glasses pointed the finger at me and said "you'll never work for me" and left the meeting.
the rest is history and i am not invited to phillip johnson's 98 birthday.
I know it wasn't what I thought I'd be doing today. But growing up I was always drawing , building stuff , playing with lego and erector sets. I hated college, just couldn't be bothered with it. I was doing poorly at my local University and ended up in techincal school drafting and liked it .Although it was mech drafting I went through with it. Then I was dating this girl who was majoring in Arch. She looked like she was having so much fun. I switched to a different school and got my degree. I laugh sometimes cause I remeber that I actually wanted to be an accountant when I started college
and those build-your-dream-home magazines you could pick up in the grocery store check-out line. I used to buy them all the time when I was like 10 or so, take them home, look through them for hours, and decide that I could do much better
in fact I'm pretty sure that at least until I made it to high school I thought architecture was limited to designing big houses for rich people. ugh.
I was completely dispassionate about anything architectural, hated lego, did not like to sketch or work. I retain the above, but now I can pretend its irreverence and most lap it up. Any more baby geniuses who were dreaming up great buildings as they lay dormant in their cradles?
"The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, naturally, but sometimes with lavish abundance bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace and ability, so that, whatever he does, every action is so divine that he distances all other men, and clearly displays how his genius is the gift of God and not an acquirement of human art. " Vasari
Seriously -- I first wanted to be an architect after seeing "Towering Inferno" as a small child (7 or 8), where the hero-architect fights to save the people trapped in his building. I also was in love with the writing -- something about the all-caps and the jaunty straight lines that got me. Also loved the legos, the building sets. Learned to play D+D in junior high, and soon abandoned the rest of the game for designing castles on grid paper.
A while ago... watching my father decide to uproot his family and move to the other end of the planet. Call it nostalgia for home, closer bonding with the supposed family roots and all that stuff you see on "Behind the Story". Moving into a half completed house without electricity and plumbing and an uncompleted second level which was fair game for an impromptu soccer match (Plus hurling rocks at the pesky neighbors....yea.. fun times). Nonetheless...I begged my father to avoid putting shingles on the roof of the second floor once the rafters were up.The amazing patterns that graced our driveway for months were deliciously awesome...plus you could see the skies, clouds and sunsets through them. He quipped "Very Interesting...maybe you should think of Architecture as a career".
Of course..he never mentioned the 10 bucks an hour and all the manual labor.
I still have a Lawsuit pending against him in court!! Mom included.
Was it just me, or did anyone else find legos limiting. I mean.. I spent half my time digging through a huge chest of legos looking for a piece. Then, everything had to be built at right angles. Personally I enjoyed flooding our sandbox with water and molding all sorts of buildings with water way canals, cars & trucks, and Gi-Joes. I never really liked any of the other building like toys either. Lincolin logs were ok...but still very limiting. Now we have Max so I can create any shape i want in a matter of seconds...ahhh freedom.
note: My legos were mostly the old school yellow red and blue ones... not the fancy crap they have today.
well, in hindsight (after studying Mies) I still like a good angle or two...to each his own I guess. I'd prefer froebel blocks over legos... but nothing beats a good mud castle. I'm with you on the brady bunch though. We actually used to spy on the sunbathing high school girls through the fence near the sandbox... those were the days
1. Lego, from about the age of 3
2. When I was about 10, my parents bought this huge house. It was nothing special but it had these rooms downstairs that had absolutely no purpose and I used to delight in having that feeling of just occupying a silent, meaningless void....
3. I applied for architecture school, and was accepted (I had never drawn or taken art, but had philosophy etc.) but in a fit of spontaneous conservatism, I went to business school instead. A week after starting the semester, I was woken up by the radio blaring an advert for late entrants into the architecture school I had gotten into. I took it as a sign, and ditched business for architecture...
1. LEGO
2. I really loved making sand castles. Especially growing up in the Caribbean there were plenty of beaches to exercise my creativity.
3. 5 years of art school (whilst still in highschool)
4. Living in a house (formative years) with open timber shingles, seeing the light come in, had my own studio outside that looked like a folly or relic from the plantation era.
played with the legos since i was about three or so...still have them somewhere i think.
played with licoln logs too, used to cut angles into them so i could join them at a 45.
but the most important event which made my decision forever was when i was about age 3 my grandmother took me to nyc for some shopping. the only thing i remeber is spending the entire day looking straight up. i still do.
The Council of Vocations came on the first day of spring, and they sat in the great hall. And we who were fifteen and all the Teachers came into the great hall. And the Council of Vocations sat on a high dais, and they had but two words to speak to each of the Students. They called the Students' names, and when the Students stepped before them, one after another, the Council said: "Carpenter" or "Doctor" or "Cook" or "Leader." Then each Student raised their right arm and said: "The will of our brothers be done."
So I awaited my turn in the great hall and then I heard the Council of Vocations call my name: "Anatomical Gift." I walked to the dais, and my legs did not tremble, and I looked up at the Council. There were five members of the Council, three of the male gender and two of the female. Their hair was white and their faces were cracked as the clay of a dry river bed. They were old. They seemed older than the marble of the Temple of the World Council. They sat before me and they did not move. And I saw no breath to stir the folds of their white togas. But I knew that they were alive, for a finger of the hand of the oldest rose, pointed to me, and fell down again. This was the only thing which moved, for the lips of the oldest did not move as they said: "Architect."
I was studying philosophy in france, and ended up doing a thesis on Foucault, prison architecture and urban planning/spatial control in california. I think it was because Discipline and Punish was the first full length philosophy book I read in french, and I was so blown away I read it again and again... anyways, I was working on my master's but not getting much accomplished, and though I wanted to go to film school (my thesis was partly on a documentary called Titicut Follies about a prison for the mentally ill, a very interesting movie if you ever get to see it), so I moved to NYC to work at a horrible B-movie company, thinking I would stay there for a while and figure out what to do for grad school (since I couldn't imagine staying in france and becoming a philosophy professor, way too hard). At some point, I had visited a friend from high school in LA who had just started SCI-Arc (back at Marina del rey). I remember thinking it was a cool school, because they had a dark room and a wood shop. Ended up I hated my job in NY, quit and finished my thesis...while I was working on it, I figured out I was more interested in the architecture part than the film part - how space was created through editing, used to control the population, etc. I read city of quartz and was once again blown away. I also had a stack of applications to grad school in the US- for film, philosophy, law, maybe even forensic psychology or something like that. Turned out SCI-Arc had a summer program and would consider me for the MArch 1 if I did "well", even though I had missed the deadline and didn't have an portfolio. So I went, knowing nothing about architecture, and found that I was immediately sucked in and suckered into spending hours upon hours trying to draw perfect rectangles in as light of a pencil line as possible with a perfectly sharpened lead. My friend dropped out after a year and works on movies now. It wasn't until I had been in architecture school for a while that the surpressed memories of a drafting class I took in the summer when I was 12 or so and the vinyl do'it'yourself interior design kit that i made my mom buy me for my 13th birthday came back to the surface. Still wonder if I should have gone to film school, but I do love seeing stuff I work on built.
-lincoln logs 5-7ish
-lego and popcicle stick model house 7-10ish
-cousin living with my family in architecture school 10-14ish
-helped my father build mine and my sis' bunk bed, dog house, chicken pen, bench, remodel house, etc.
-high school friend taking drafting class and had really cool stuff (i.e. lead holders, lead sharpener and electric eraser, etc.) 15-17
-another cousin entered uc berkeley 17
-18 decided to go into architecture
and archinect didn't exist in '91 when i graduated from high
school...so i didn't know architects don't make any money either...
i somehow managed to be oblivious to this until '96 when we had
that 'professional/practice' class when they brought in all the
architects from surrounding pennsylvania towns...these are the
guys they should have brought in in first year to get people out of
the profession..some of the most depressing people you'd ever
meet...
that's probably because they had not had their morning martini yet, or gin, bourbon, rum, whatever gets them going for the day...such is the fate of us all...
hmm
Growing up in a developing neighbourhood got me interested in construction. but it was not tilll after high school that i joined architeture school. Twas rough though, sketching still life while all you knew was arithmetic chemistry and physics.
Well i think it rubbed off the professors.
I never thought i would be an architect. Neither did my studio master in my first year!
Jul 15, 04 9:57 am ·
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Why Architecture?
I'm curious how others decided on architecture. Here's my story.
In 1984 I was drafting for a small architecture firm for $5.50 an hour. That was pretty good money then. There was a newly licensed architect there who was making about $10 an hour. We were doing a small addition to an office (an old house, actually) and the principal let me try my hand at designing the addition. I came up with all kinds of wacky designs that didn't work. The $10 an hour architect came up with the perfect solution - copy the house! I was awed that an architectural education could do that for you. And double your salary!
Long story short - I became an architect so that I too could do nothing imaginative for $10 an hour.
i think the only reason your wacky solutions didn't work was because nobody wanted to spend the time making them work. even boring stupid unimaginative life sucking brain numbing idiotic designs don't work when its just a blank sheet of paper...they have to be drawn through,....right?
Yes, you're right. Designs have to be detailed. It's very amusing to me now, that I was so inspired by something so mundane!
When I was about 12 my grandmother saw some of my sketches and said "you should be an architect." I didn't think much of her comment until 6 years later when I was sitting in the Chemistry placement exam for engineering school. After discovering that I didn't know one single problem on the test I began to look around at all the other kids frantically making their way through the test. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to spend 4 years amongst all those stiffs. So I remembered what my grandmother had said and decided to tour the Architecture school and try it for one semester. It was the best decision I had ever made. I was doing more school work than I had ever done in my life, but I was also making better grades than ever. I actually enjoyed what I was studying. Anyhow, call it luck or grandma's intuition, or whatever. Needless to say, I've found my calling. Mundane drawings @10 bucks and hour included.
1 word infinite possibilities - LEGOS
when i was 8 years old, my uncle who was an electrical contractor took me to AT&T building construction site. there was this old guy with black round glasses trying to convince people why building's top should be flat. it wasn't my place but i said "building's top should be just like my grandpa's clock". there was a long silence and the guy with round glasses pointed the finger at me and said "you'll never work for me" and left the meeting.
the rest is history and i am not invited to phillip johnson's 98 birthday.
I know it wasn't what I thought I'd be doing today. But growing up I was always drawing , building stuff , playing with lego and erector sets. I hated college, just couldn't be bothered with it. I was doing poorly at my local University and ended up in techincal school drafting and liked it .Although it was mech drafting I went through with it. Then I was dating this girl who was majoring in Arch. She looked like she was having so much fun. I switched to a different school and got my degree. I laugh sometimes cause I remeber that I actually wanted to be an accountant when I started college
legos, yes...
and those build-your-dream-home magazines you could pick up in the grocery store check-out line. I used to buy them all the time when I was like 10 or so, take them home, look through them for hours, and decide that I could do much better
in fact I'm pretty sure that at least until I made it to high school I thought architecture was limited to designing big houses for rich people. ugh.
same here.. LEGO
i start playing and building when i was 3..
I was completely dispassionate about anything architectural, hated lego, did not like to sketch or work. I retain the above, but now I can pretend its irreverence and most lap it up. Any more baby geniuses who were dreaming up great buildings as they lay dormant in their cradles?
"The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, naturally, but sometimes with lavish abundance bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace and ability, so that, whatever he does, every action is so divine that he distances all other men, and clearly displays how his genius is the gift of God and not an acquirement of human art. " Vasari
Seriously -- I first wanted to be an architect after seeing "Towering Inferno" as a small child (7 or 8), where the hero-architect fights to save the people trapped in his building. I also was in love with the writing -- something about the all-caps and the jaunty straight lines that got me. Also loved the legos, the building sets. Learned to play D+D in junior high, and soon abandoned the rest of the game for designing castles on grid paper.
Legos and the Brady Bunch; damn Danish and hot girls on TV
A while ago... watching my father decide to uproot his family and move to the other end of the planet. Call it nostalgia for home, closer bonding with the supposed family roots and all that stuff you see on "Behind the Story". Moving into a half completed house without electricity and plumbing and an uncompleted second level which was fair game for an impromptu soccer match (Plus hurling rocks at the pesky neighbors....yea.. fun times). Nonetheless...I begged my father to avoid putting shingles on the roof of the second floor once the rafters were up.The amazing patterns that graced our driveway for months were deliciously awesome...plus you could see the skies, clouds and sunsets through them. He quipped "Very Interesting...maybe you should think of Architecture as a career".
Of course..he never mentioned the 10 bucks an hour and all the manual labor.
I still have a Lawsuit pending against him in court!! Mom included.
Can we make this a class action suit? My dad IS an architect!
Was it just me, or did anyone else find legos limiting. I mean.. I spent half my time digging through a huge chest of legos looking for a piece. Then, everything had to be built at right angles. Personally I enjoyed flooding our sandbox with water and molding all sorts of buildings with water way canals, cars & trucks, and Gi-Joes. I never really liked any of the other building like toys either. Lincolin logs were ok...but still very limiting. Now we have Max so I can create any shape i want in a matter of seconds...ahhh freedom.
note: My legos were mostly the old school yellow red and blue ones... not the fancy crap they have today.
defenestrator, had you been studying Mies at age eight, you would have seen the virtues of the limits of Legos.
well, in hindsight (after studying Mies) I still like a good angle or two...to each his own I guess. I'd prefer froebel blocks over legos... but nothing beats a good mud castle. I'm with you on the brady bunch though. We actually used to spy on the sunbathing high school girls through the fence near the sandbox... those were the days
Why is everyone calling Lego, Legos?
Anyway, for me it was:
1. Lego, from about the age of 3
2. When I was about 10, my parents bought this huge house. It was nothing special but it had these rooms downstairs that had absolutely no purpose and I used to delight in having that feeling of just occupying a silent, meaningless void....
3. I applied for architecture school, and was accepted (I had never drawn or taken art, but had philosophy etc.) but in a fit of spontaneous conservatism, I went to business school instead. A week after starting the semester, I was woken up by the radio blaring an advert for late entrants into the architecture school I had gotten into. I took it as a sign, and ditched business for architecture...
hmm
1. LEGO
2. I really loved making sand castles. Especially growing up in the Caribbean there were plenty of beaches to exercise my creativity.
3. 5 years of art school (whilst still in highschool)
4. Living in a house (formative years) with open timber shingles, seeing the light come in, had my own studio outside that looked like a folly or relic from the plantation era.
played with the legos since i was about three or so...still have them somewhere i think.
played with licoln logs too, used to cut angles into them so i could join them at a 45.
but the most important event which made my decision forever was when i was about age 3 my grandmother took me to nyc for some shopping. the only thing i remeber is spending the entire day looking straight up. i still do.
lego, and the fact that my granny wanted me to become a civil engineer. and i hated granny.
The Council of Vocations came on the first day of spring, and they sat in the great hall. And we who were fifteen and all the Teachers came into the great hall. And the Council of Vocations sat on a high dais, and they had but two words to speak to each of the Students. They called the Students' names, and when the Students stepped before them, one after another, the Council said: "Carpenter" or "Doctor" or "Cook" or "Leader." Then each Student raised their right arm and said: "The will of our brothers be done."
So I awaited my turn in the great hall and then I heard the Council of Vocations call my name: "Anatomical Gift." I walked to the dais, and my legs did not tremble, and I looked up at the Council. There were five members of the Council, three of the male gender and two of the female. Their hair was white and their faces were cracked as the clay of a dry river bed. They were old. They seemed older than the marble of the Temple of the World Council. They sat before me and they did not move. And I saw no breath to stir the folds of their white togas. But I knew that they were alive, for a finger of the hand of the oldest rose, pointed to me, and fell down again. This was the only thing which moved, for the lips of the oldest did not move as they said: "Architect."
ag, you crack me up
ag that's just what they told you at your thesis review
I was studying philosophy in france, and ended up doing a thesis on Foucault, prison architecture and urban planning/spatial control in california. I think it was because Discipline and Punish was the first full length philosophy book I read in french, and I was so blown away I read it again and again... anyways, I was working on my master's but not getting much accomplished, and though I wanted to go to film school (my thesis was partly on a documentary called Titicut Follies about a prison for the mentally ill, a very interesting movie if you ever get to see it), so I moved to NYC to work at a horrible B-movie company, thinking I would stay there for a while and figure out what to do for grad school (since I couldn't imagine staying in france and becoming a philosophy professor, way too hard). At some point, I had visited a friend from high school in LA who had just started SCI-Arc (back at Marina del rey). I remember thinking it was a cool school, because they had a dark room and a wood shop. Ended up I hated my job in NY, quit and finished my thesis...while I was working on it, I figured out I was more interested in the architecture part than the film part - how space was created through editing, used to control the population, etc. I read city of quartz and was once again blown away. I also had a stack of applications to grad school in the US- for film, philosophy, law, maybe even forensic psychology or something like that. Turned out SCI-Arc had a summer program and would consider me for the MArch 1 if I did "well", even though I had missed the deadline and didn't have an portfolio. So I went, knowing nothing about architecture, and found that I was immediately sucked in and suckered into spending hours upon hours trying to draw perfect rectangles in as light of a pencil line as possible with a perfectly sharpened lead. My friend dropped out after a year and works on movies now. It wasn't until I had been in architecture school for a while that the surpressed memories of a drafting class I took in the summer when I was 12 or so and the vinyl do'it'yourself interior design kit that i made my mom buy me for my 13th birthday came back to the surface. Still wonder if I should have gone to film school, but I do love seeing stuff I work on built.
-lincoln logs 5-7ish
-lego and popcicle stick model house 7-10ish
-cousin living with my family in architecture school 10-14ish
-helped my father build mine and my sis' bunk bed, dog house, chicken pen, bench, remodel house, etc.
-high school friend taking drafting class and had really cool stuff (i.e. lead holders, lead sharpener and electric eraser, etc.) 15-17
-another cousin entered uc berkeley 17
-18 decided to go into architecture
i didn't think i'd make any money as an artist...
and archinect didn't exist in '91 when i graduated from high
school...so i didn't know architects don't make any money either...
i somehow managed to be oblivious to this until '96 when we had
that 'professional/practice' class when they brought in all the
architects from surrounding pennsylvania towns...these are the
guys they should have brought in in first year to get people out of
the profession..some of the most depressing people you'd ever
meet...
that's probably because they had not had their morning martini yet, or gin, bourbon, rum, whatever gets them going for the day...such is the fate of us all...
hmm
Growing up in a developing neighbourhood got me interested in construction. but it was not tilll after high school that i joined architeture school. Twas rough though, sketching still life while all you knew was arithmetic chemistry and physics.
Well i think it rubbed off the professors.
I never thought i would be an architect. Neither did my studio master in my first year!
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