i heard he isnt the nicest of guys

I met someone recently who was working there. He was a nice guy but he said the pay was awful. Not good when the office is in Manhattan.

i've heard rumors about the awful pay, i guess this semi-confirms it. what about the beijing office? any thoughts? are they straight up production or do they design as well?

mdler, I had dinner with him and thought he was really sweet. I was there with good friends of his though so maybe it wasn't what he was like professionally. One of them, however, had worked for him and it made his career. He is one of the most successful architects I know now. I don't think he's obsessed with making tons of money like Gehry or someone - profit isn't the best reason to work for him.

buckity is more or less right.
money making is definately not the focus of the office.
all immersing design is.
there is quite a lot to learn there...if that's what's important to you.
(and if you can support it - realistically speaking).

not sure if you are being fascetious or not old fogey, but there does seem to be lots to learn there, and it IS a big frickin deal (if you can afford it). i know only one person who worked in the office some time ago. that person now runs own firm, design led and succesful (on several levels). i think said person also treated the job as extension of education rather than regular job. maybe in that sense not sustainable, though i never heard a complaint of that kind.

me i figger it beats the living hell out of more commercial firms, where education is about how to fit into the hierarchy...

I have had personal experiences with him being a dick

i would have to assume that if the pay is bad in the states, then the pay in china prolly aint too good either.

Wondering how these guys sleep at night. Knowing there getting published and traveling the face of the globe and not being able
to pay the people working for them a respectable salary. Starting to think this is really kinda like slave labor. These guys aren't charging
less than the average firm and I would believe they are often grabbing a bigger piece of the pie than most commissions. So what gives? I have a hard time believing it takes them any longer to pull off a design and construction documents than the average firm.

I have never met Mr. Holl but I would belive you could do a Holl of a lot better.

snooker> i think america is a free country, no one is being force to slavery i assume!

for those who work for starchitect for free/low low pay, may be they should ask themselves why they feed into such system, hasn't the 5 year undergrad + 2 year grad school education teach them something about humanity in general?

i remember someone told me that for those who worked for le corbu, they were only fed with bread and red wine... kind of worst than a dog i think.

i could never afford to work for starchitect, and now am not interested...

i really don't know what to make of the way they remunerate staff. but when i think about it for a moment, and i KNOW for a fact that people are coming to Ito's office (for ejemplo), scholarship in hand to work for free, and seriously talented AND motivated...and their ain't just ONE such person but several a year...so many that he turns them away in fact. what would YOU do? I think that is where the slippery slope starts, that and the fact that in Holl's case he had no work for the first ten years and couldn't afford to pay people to work...

it is def immoral on starchitect's part, and working for free is kinda dumb from a normal point of view. but life is short, and if ya got the means to work for low wages and learn a few things about how to do world-class design from a different perspective than the SOM's of the world can give...well, why not?

but i thought after grad school, u surpose to have ur own thinking about architecture like peter cook said, after u finished columbia/barlett/AA, the interesting ppl are the ones who go out and do things differently instead of being a follower of the stararchitects??

my point is there shouldn't be anything about design u need to learn from starchitect rather to get down to business and start learning how to get things built.

true enough, but you learn from the projects you work on. and the projects you do for steven and the projects you do for corporate schlockmeister will absolutely affect the kind of architect you will become, unless you got some powerful motivation. depends what you want from architecture i think.

i have only been doing this thing for 17 years now and the first 6 or 7 years out of school were a very intense learning process...first few years of that were spent unlearning my uni education, then spent another few years to get the new (practical) education out of my system and start doing work that is really my own again...and that is only recently. figuring out how to be an architect is a lifelong learning sort of thing, and environment is def a big part of that...

maybe. seems that way to me right now anyway...

i bet you'll find that many that work in these kinds of offices are foreign students from Asia and Europe, and have wealthy parents. another thing you'll find too, and this from a professor, is that many of their rich parents will often pay the architect for the opportunity of their kid working for free. now that is sass. in the end the question of why we do this is more a rhetorical one, does anyone ask why people are into S&M or do we just accept the fact that some are into one kink or another?

I've done my bit for a micro-star and have to constantly remind myself not to send resumes to those people and to remember my own personal plans and goals.

How is working for a little cometchitect being less of a follower than working for a starchitect?

For the first few years you're somebody's bitch somewhere.

no argument from me on that point in general old fogey. dismissing steven holl just because he is a starchitect is i think slightly too far though.

i am working now with a starchitect on a project and i got to say the scope of things said starchitect is up to amazes me.

I have/had a great mentor for the professional world of building things who is as far from starchitect as you can imagine and i respect him a lot, but there is such an eormous difference in how my old boss and the starchitect gets things done that i am seriously agog. it is an eye-opening education. in some ways it comes down to learning how to hustle and shmooze creatively, but it is also about learning how to get impossible things done in creative ways too. and that is not something that happens in many other firms...maybe not at steven holl's either. but he ain't famous for nothing.

and, to be honest, if you are working on getting the doors done for something like st ignatius chapel, for example, the door schedule would be quite a blast. i did some nice custom doors in the offices i worked in, but nothing like that. would love to have had the opportunity when i was still in my 20's. can you imagine taking that level of work for granted? wow.

I am always up for selling my soul to the devil.... because hell is a lot mor fun than heaven.

I worked for a "star architect" needless to say he had an ego and could be an asshole... BUT to date it has definitely been my favorite job and the place where I had the most fun. And talk about a great step for your career. Sweat it out for a year or two and get the kickass experience then you can write your own ticket. It is definitely worth it.... unless you have ten children and a wife or husband to support.

Corporate SUCKS!!!!

"Corporate SUCKS!!!!"
i'll second that, and i'll never go that route again.

design at starchitect firm then
project administration at corporate firm.

then ur invincible. i hope.

"true enough, but you learn from the projects you work on"

perfect example of this ^

SANAA worked for Ito

Both do amazing work.

I "know someone" who worked there.

The pay straight out of school not too long ago was low, i.e. below 30.

The hours are long. Saturdays are expected, and if you leave before 7:30 pm, you're usually the first one to leave. To much scorn from everyone else.

Steven is prickly and a know-it-all.

That said, it's like boot camp for design, in a good way. In a year or two there, you can learn a lot about how to conceptualize a project, how to design, how to present. You'll be working on projects around the world, with budgets and freedoms that you don't get almost anywhere else. Consider it an extension of your education.

Your ability to really design there depends on how much Steven likes you. If you stay on his good side and are smart and speak a little bit of his lingo without trying to outshine him, you'll probably do well.

If you have the opportunity, do it for a year or two. And, for what it's worth, having that firm on your resume does make a difference. In architecture circles, everyone knows his name and admires his work.

OU did you get an offer at SHA?

tzenyujuei, got an interview. no idea how it went.

ah well keep me informed, there is chance i might be there too

I saw that they have been hiring a lot lately. Are you guys heading to the New York office? But do everyone really work closely with Steven?? How about the office environment in general... just curious.

It's an intense office, and rewarding in the sense that the projects are interesting and the design very good.

Oddly, when I was there, some of the model builders were the ones who had the closest interaction with Steven (and in some sense, the most ability to design.) He tends to "see" through models, so often the designs will form with him working closely with the modelbuilders.

He tends to have a stable of favorite employees. To some extent, these are guys who present themselves as sophisticated, pretentious, and global (whether it's true or not.) You have to not strike him as an idiot -- he doesn't suffer fools -- and you have to engage with him.

The people who were more shy or nervous about interacting with him ended up drawing parking lot details. The ones who weren't afraid to take their lunch into his office ended up being his confidants.

It was the perception of a number of us that the blatant kiss-asses made it the furthest in the office. Guess that's true anywhere.

How long have you worked there? I was quite surprised when I read that their office is pretty small, only about 40 ppl...but they are able to pull off projects as such scale... quite amazing.