I'm a Landscape Architecture, applying to M.arch programs for Fall 2009. The prospects of working for an architectural giant in NYC have always fascinated me....until I moved here. I've met so many miserable architects, slaving their lives away for sweat shops that disguise themselves as architecture firms.
Example:
I have a friend who works for a certain NYC starchitect and is living a pretty ridiculous life. Work hours are from 9am - 11pm (that's right folks - 14 hours!) and she works 6 days a week, taking only Saturday off. It's obviously illegal to require that many hours, but the word is that the CAD monkeys are afraid to leave and want to stay all night, every night to impress their starchitect boss. She has admitted to finishing her work by 6 or 7pm and then undoing and redoing her drawings just to appear busy and dedicated.
Naturally the man in charge is in demand, speaking around the world, writing books, collaborating with other world-famous starchitects, etc., so he's NEVER in the office. He makes an occassional appearance to trash a model, rip apart a conceptual design or throw a napkin sketch on someones desk, but other than that, he's a ghost. His wife is the "office director" and has been basically writing his latest book for him. His wife is known to give directions to staff and act as a stand-in for her all-star hubby.
I'm finished, just had to vent. Has anyone had a similar experience? Any firms to stay away from when interning or seeking full-time employment?
Wouldn't it be better for Friend to say, 'Hey I'm finished, do you have more!' at 6pm than to pretend to work until 11? Maybe she should spend more time on Archinect.
Funny! It's not just her, the office has nearly 200 employees, and most of them subject themselves to this insanity. She did mention that people typically terminate employment after a year or so, which is encouraging.
I'm suspecting that you're referring to Daniel Libeskind's office. Based on the specs.
This is the typical situation in most of the starchitect offices in NY. Part of that's New York. I worked for a minor starchitect who has a main office in a provincial city, and a second office in NY. I had to go to the NY office for competitions and projects occasionally, and I was AMAZED at how much more the NY office worked than the home office.
And part of it is just that it takes a hell of a long time to design good architecture. It's hard to design a good building in a 9 to 5 shift on a schedule that most clients would demand.
scribble, if your friend worked for me, i would fire her. that has to be one of the dumbest, most unproductive and dispiriting things i have ever heard.
yeah, working such long hours would suck. i wouldn't do it for libeskind, but that's a personal bias. i might do it for someone like sanaa or herreros or even diller or one of the netherlands gangs. just for a while. only because it'd be good experience. i hate that this is part of our professional cultural lifestyle.
do it the plot (and ten the BIG) way...
join a starchitect, meet other people, say hey look we can do this and make a bomb of money and hire these more monkeys!
I think Helmut Jahn is one for sure, he's been regularly featured in major architecture magazine articles, short listed on various design competitions and has several books written about his work.
i think that if ur actually asking yourself is it worth it or not make it pretty obvious you dont want to and you wont be happy if you do so.... u have satanized already that kind of practices by calling them "STARchitects" and seems u dont agree at all with the amount of hours spent normally in that kind of offices, my advice, dont do it, i can see is not for you.
But Chris! Design isn't just "design," i.e. it's not just what you do on a napkin at a restaurant. That's just the first little idea. Real design is everything that happens afterward, from the first sketch through little baseboard details to picking the final paint colors.
My point was that design takes a fuck of a long time and is extremely complicated. What Gehry or Libeskind does -- squiggles on napkins -- is about .01% of the design. Then their underpaid, overworked staff figure it all out. Flashing, parking, accessibility, bathrooms, materials, details. The staff are the ones who "design" it, usually under great stress and with not enough time.
if you already know what it is the design should be, what is the point of the designing?
in other words, where is the development? if you have it all figured out at the beginning, then in effect, you are at the end.
i know that some (many?) architects work this way. that is, that the sketch IS the design and everything else is just making the documentation meet the sketch. but this is not the only way to work. it is certainly not the way we work in the office. there is such a thing as an emergent design - where the clarity of a solution becomes clear only over time - and in the process of designing. that is to say that design is not the elaboration of a complete idea at the beginning, but the evolution of a possibility within the process of designing. in simple terms, we don't know at the beginning what it is we will end up with at the end.
trust me, this is not about a lack of knowledge or ability, but rather a conscious methodology of working with the project (and process) rather than imposing a pre-determined solution on each and ever project.
farwest and dlb, chris just works different, guys. i wouldn't argue it. i would get NO joy out of working the way he does, but he's argued in the past why it works for him, so...
I respect and appreciate the way you work, Chris. I've worked that way in the past, in other offices. But are you designing from concept through the end of construction administration and final inspection? Because that takes years in some cases. There's no easy way to do it. It's much more than just a quickie sketch.
If the end-goal of architecture, as a profession, is to get something built, then someone somewhere is going to have to spend a LOT OF TIME designing the little details, working with the contractor, doing the specs, etc. This process, for a small building can take a year and a half. For a large building it can take three to five years.
So I don't really believe that architectural design is quick and easy -- doing conceptual renderings can be, however. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
it seems to me that the steadfast method of working towards fitting all into the initial idea generally works well when the road from conception to realization of the design within the team is relatively short, or in other words when quite few people are involved on the design side. from reading your posts chris, it appears as this is your case (correct me if i'm wrong).
it gets less feasible when the operation grows, design team gets bigger and most of all project gets more complex.
i'm currently on a 10+ people team designing a major project in london that goes on since some years and although it might not be the very smoothest of processes for many other reasons, it would be absolutely mad to think it somehow possible to just crank out details and whatever from that original napkin sketch years ago. same goes for complying with building regs; granted, the regs in the uk are allegedly a lot stranger than in the us but it's still hardly a matter of just reading up on them an afternoon and that's it.
the emergent design process is the inevitable way a large project must evolve. i don't believe a big firm (rather than actual size, by big is intended capable of taking on larger projects of a certain complexity that might go on for years on end) can successfully pull off sticking with the "initial sketch rules"-method an entire project through without seriously limiting the design's evolution into something more refined in detail. also, the people involved will be less enthused as they're merely tweaking solutions and cranking out drawings to meet the original design (although i do second the comment above on some tasks being seriously better suited for low-skilled draftsmen rather than trained architects as is often the case). anyway, i guess my point is that there's probably a "method" for each size of practice and/or commission and they are never one and the same.
about the dumbest thing you said teeter was that code is straightforward. talk to two or three code officials, in the same office, during the same day, and you'll find that interpretation - yes interpretation - changes as often as the weather changes on the plains. the code, and it's various state amendments, is probably the single most annoying part of this job, but one i spend careful and copious amounts of time in slowly digesting.
I often get projects at this stage: "The project is a 7 story building with underground parking. Go for it kid." I then produce an SD package complete with floor and roof plans, building sections, parking, proposed engineering systems, a concept landscape plan, 2-4 exterior renderings, 1 interior rendering, and outline spec, and preliminary code plans. It takes all of about 20 minutes.
Are you serious, Strawbeary, when you say 20 minutes? I'd say the MINIMUM you could spend on the amount of work you mentioned is three days to a week for a single person, assuming an eight hour day. And that's extremely schematic.
It takes me about 30 seconds to design an award winning building, meet a supermodel at the opening, get her pregnant (though that can last up to 5 hours if I so choose) and then get the child a pritzker prize. I used the napkin at all stages.
actually gehry is very involved in the designs at his office
this is how it works: he visits the site, then draws a sketch of what it should be like. then his staff makes something similar to the sketch. frank comes and critiques it, then the staff edits it, then he critiques it more. its a constant back and forth. my favorite part though is that if he's not satisfied, the old man comes in by himself on a sunday, pulls out the gluegun, throws some blocks of basswood through the bandsaw, makes a model to show those underlings what the building should be. i'd like to see rem do that. (even if cctv is way cooler than anything gehry ever did).
uh
i bet rem hasn't personally designed a building in 10 years
and while 80% of gehry buildings are nasty, let's not turn this into a gehry bashing thread. a lot of the newer oma stuff is rather soulless/bland... so who actually is doing exciting work these days?
Does Gehry really build some of his own concept models? I take back any slander I've ever made about him. If it's true, even if he only does it once or twice a year, he's gone up in my estimation.
It is good that he does some of his own models, but (though I can't speak for the last 3 years) Rem has always been extremely involved with every stage of every project. At that alone I was shocked. He is the most ridiculously hard working person I have ever known of. I'm not saying every building he has done has been great but the guy has the rare thing that is instinct for good design. You may not like all of his work, but each one has at least one interesting thing in it.
Also, best not to hope for a non-bashing of one architect is you then go on to bash another...
teeter, where on code would you ever summarize? i mean i know there are expeditor's in NYC for a reason, it isn't because it's balck and white, it's because of money - payola - and because, it is a document deliberately designed to obfuscate and require officials to interpret and hide behind.
the code should move from prescriptive, to a performance based document, that might shift it from gray to b/w...
the braggadocio is getting thick around here. your claims are pretty big, you're not registered, you say you're doing it by yourself, and you've got no work on your site as evidence that you've got the schematic-to-done-in-one-step thing worked out.
if you've found a way of working that works for you, cool. i'd leave it at that.
I worked for a 2nd tier starchitect who was very involved in every design for a few years. We did get to work on some unusual projects and on bigger, faster paced projects, responsibility was up for grabs. I'd say that there really is something to be said for good design coming out of lots of redesign - as opposed to sticking with what kind of works the first time out. Also, so much of our time was devoted to making what was designed look polished for presentations - both to the boss and to clients.
There were people who loved to pull all nighters on a regular basis though. And honestly, if you looked at what was produced I'm not sure if you'd be able to tell them apart from the people who left at 7. Some also goofed off the most during the day. The "fresh out of college" group did the most all nighters, and their work was the most out of order. Let's face it, the occasional all nighter can be necessary and fruitful, but many times it just results in mistake laden zombie time.
And when you spend 14 hours on something, just for the boss to waltz in, look at it for two seconds and say its not what he wanted, when its exactly what he asked for, you have to try and figure out a smarter way to work!
In the end, many interviewers are impressed, the collaborations with big name engineering firms, and the overall experience in high quality work....
helmut was on the cover of gq in the 80's for godsake. i'd call that star power...oldenvirginia if your starchiterection lasts for more than 4 hours call your physician...
Having your judgement clouded by a position of power works both ways. You seem to suggest that I'm seduced by starchitecture. However, though I may enjoy Rem's design decisions at least it's an honest affection, rather than your blind hatred of anything considered 'popular' which leaves no room for individual interpretation or opinion.
If your starchi-flaccidity lasts much longer, I'd call someone too.
Working for a Starchitect - is it worth it?
I'm a Landscape Architecture, applying to M.arch programs for Fall 2009. The prospects of working for an architectural giant in NYC have always fascinated me....until I moved here. I've met so many miserable architects, slaving their lives away for sweat shops that disguise themselves as architecture firms.
Example:
I have a friend who works for a certain NYC starchitect and is living a pretty ridiculous life. Work hours are from 9am - 11pm (that's right folks - 14 hours!) and she works 6 days a week, taking only Saturday off. It's obviously illegal to require that many hours, but the word is that the CAD monkeys are afraid to leave and want to stay all night, every night to impress their starchitect boss. She has admitted to finishing her work by 6 or 7pm and then undoing and redoing her drawings just to appear busy and dedicated.
Naturally the man in charge is in demand, speaking around the world, writing books, collaborating with other world-famous starchitects, etc., so he's NEVER in the office. He makes an occassional appearance to trash a model, rip apart a conceptual design or throw a napkin sketch on someones desk, but other than that, he's a ghost. His wife is the "office director" and has been basically writing his latest book for him. His wife is known to give directions to staff and act as a stand-in for her all-star hubby.
I'm finished, just had to vent. Has anyone had a similar experience? Any firms to stay away from when interning or seeking full-time employment?
Wouldn't it be better for Friend to say, 'Hey I'm finished, do you have more!' at 6pm than to pretend to work until 11? Maybe she should spend more time on Archinect.
Funny! It's not just her, the office has nearly 200 employees, and most of them subject themselves to this insanity. She did mention that people typically terminate employment after a year or so, which is encouraging.
to each their own but i think your friend is a fool... undoing and redoing work to appear dedicated? sheesh.
Your friend, at about age 35, will look back at this period of her life and say, "Wow, I was an idiot."
And she'll be right.
or she'll be the new dean of an architecture school. one or the other;)
yea i don't get the undo-ing and redo-ing the work part...
wouldn't that just make you seem slow?
and has anyone actually gotten fired for not staying late? what's the precedent?
I'm suspecting that you're referring to Daniel Libeskind's office. Based on the specs.
This is the typical situation in most of the starchitect offices in NY. Part of that's New York. I worked for a minor starchitect who has a main office in a provincial city, and a second office in NY. I had to go to the NY office for competitions and projects occasionally, and I was AMAZED at how much more the NY office worked than the home office.
And part of it is just that it takes a hell of a long time to design good architecture. It's hard to design a good building in a 9 to 5 shift on a schedule that most clients would demand.
Oh, dear God, not the five-foot Pole himself!
Ten years ago I found myself in one of his studios surrounded by students (and aspiring minions) who wet themselves whenever he entered the room.
He's still collecting devotees? Now THAT is a cult.
It's a successful business, like it or not.
In any large firm the partners are going to be absent much of the time, just part of doing big business.
scribble, if your friend worked for me, i would fire her. that has to be one of the dumbest, most unproductive and dispiriting things i have ever heard.
Not the least of which for being an incredible waste of billable hours.
yeah, working such long hours would suck. i wouldn't do it for libeskind, but that's a personal bias. i might do it for someone like sanaa or herreros or even diller or one of the netherlands gangs. just for a while. only because it'd be good experience. i hate that this is part of our professional cultural lifestyle.
Work there for 6 months then leave, the name on your resume will be worth it.
do it the plot (and ten the BIG) way...
join a starchitect, meet other people, say hey look we can do this and make a bomb of money and hire these more monkeys!
6months and then on is best!
she doesn't even show up till 9 am? slacker...
im curious if there are any starchitects in chicago...
Jeanne Gang?
Helmut Jahn?
Ralph Johnson?
Adrian Smith?
where is the line between starchitects and not starchitects...
I think Helmut Jahn is one for sure, he's been regularly featured in major architecture magazine articles, short listed on various design competitions and has several books written about his work.
...the ability to suggest a project like this and not get laughed off the stage...
i used to really respect jan. i think he's losing it.
i think that if ur actually asking yourself is it worth it or not make it pretty obvious you dont want to and you wont be happy if you do so.... u have satanized already that kind of practices by calling them "STARchitects" and seems u dont agree at all with the amount of hours spent normally in that kind of offices, my advice, dont do it, i can see is not for you.
But Chris! Design isn't just "design," i.e. it's not just what you do on a napkin at a restaurant. That's just the first little idea. Real design is everything that happens afterward, from the first sketch through little baseboard details to picking the final paint colors.
My point was that design takes a fuck of a long time and is extremely complicated. What Gehry or Libeskind does -- squiggles on napkins -- is about .01% of the design. Then their underpaid, overworked staff figure it all out. Flashing, parking, accessibility, bathrooms, materials, details. The staff are the ones who "design" it, usually under great stress and with not enough time.
although Murphy/Jahn is a large and published office calling Helmut Jahn a starchitect is pushing it imo.
if you already know what it is the design should be, what is the point of the designing?
in other words, where is the development? if you have it all figured out at the beginning, then in effect, you are at the end.
i know that some (many?) architects work this way. that is, that the sketch IS the design and everything else is just making the documentation meet the sketch. but this is not the only way to work. it is certainly not the way we work in the office. there is such a thing as an emergent design - where the clarity of a solution becomes clear only over time - and in the process of designing. that is to say that design is not the elaboration of a complete idea at the beginning, but the evolution of a possibility within the process of designing. in simple terms, we don't know at the beginning what it is we will end up with at the end.
trust me, this is not about a lack of knowledge or ability, but rather a conscious methodology of working with the project (and process) rather than imposing a pre-determined solution on each and ever project.
farwest and dlb, chris just works different, guys. i wouldn't argue it. i would get NO joy out of working the way he does, but he's argued in the past why it works for him, so...
I respect and appreciate the way you work, Chris. I've worked that way in the past, in other offices. But are you designing from concept through the end of construction administration and final inspection? Because that takes years in some cases. There's no easy way to do it. It's much more than just a quickie sketch.
If the end-goal of architecture, as a profession, is to get something built, then someone somewhere is going to have to spend a LOT OF TIME designing the little details, working with the contractor, doing the specs, etc. This process, for a small building can take a year and a half. For a large building it can take three to five years.
So I don't really believe that architectural design is quick and easy -- doing conceptual renderings can be, however. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
it seems to me that the steadfast method of working towards fitting all into the initial idea generally works well when the road from conception to realization of the design within the team is relatively short, or in other words when quite few people are involved on the design side. from reading your posts chris, it appears as this is your case (correct me if i'm wrong).
it gets less feasible when the operation grows, design team gets bigger and most of all project gets more complex.
i'm currently on a 10+ people team designing a major project in london that goes on since some years and although it might not be the very smoothest of processes for many other reasons, it would be absolutely mad to think it somehow possible to just crank out details and whatever from that original napkin sketch years ago. same goes for complying with building regs; granted, the regs in the uk are allegedly a lot stranger than in the us but it's still hardly a matter of just reading up on them an afternoon and that's it.
the emergent design process is the inevitable way a large project must evolve. i don't believe a big firm (rather than actual size, by big is intended capable of taking on larger projects of a certain complexity that might go on for years on end) can successfully pull off sticking with the "initial sketch rules"-method an entire project through without seriously limiting the design's evolution into something more refined in detail. also, the people involved will be less enthused as they're merely tweaking solutions and cranking out drawings to meet the original design (although i do second the comment above on some tasks being seriously better suited for low-skilled draftsmen rather than trained architects as is often the case). anyway, i guess my point is that there's probably a "method" for each size of practice and/or commission and they are never one and the same.
about the dumbest thing you said teeter was that code is straightforward. talk to two or three code officials, in the same office, during the same day, and you'll find that interpretation - yes interpretation - changes as often as the weather changes on the plains. the code, and it's various state amendments, is probably the single most annoying part of this job, but one i spend careful and copious amounts of time in slowly digesting.
seriously though, anything that takes 10 minutes to design is probably worth about 2 minutes of my attention...
I often get projects at this stage: "The project is a 7 story building with underground parking. Go for it kid." I then produce an SD package complete with floor and roof plans, building sections, parking, proposed engineering systems, a concept landscape plan, 2-4 exterior renderings, 1 interior rendering, and outline spec, and preliminary code plans. It takes all of about 20 minutes.
i your friend can get laid at an architecture event just by mentioning who they work for, it is totally worth it
Are you serious, Strawbeary, when you say 20 minutes? I'd say the MINIMUM you could spend on the amount of work you mentioned is three days to a week for a single person, assuming an eight hour day. And that's extremely schematic.
No, I'm not serious farwest. I was quite kidding.
I won't do it for libeskind
It takes me about 30 seconds to design an award winning building, meet a supermodel at the opening, get her pregnant (though that can last up to 5 hours if I so choose) and then get the child a pritzker prize. I used the napkin at all stages.
actually gehry is very involved in the designs at his office
this is how it works: he visits the site, then draws a sketch of what it should be like. then his staff makes something similar to the sketch. frank comes and critiques it, then the staff edits it, then he critiques it more. its a constant back and forth. my favorite part though is that if he's not satisfied, the old man comes in by himself on a sunday, pulls out the gluegun, throws some blocks of basswood through the bandsaw, makes a model to show those underlings what the building should be. i'd like to see rem do that. (even if cctv is way cooler than anything gehry ever did).
Unfortunately, Rem is too busy designing buildings that are actually good...
uh
i bet rem hasn't personally designed a building in 10 years
and while 80% of gehry buildings are nasty, let's not turn this into a gehry bashing thread. a lot of the newer oma stuff is rather soulless/bland... so who actually is doing exciting work these days?
Does Gehry really build some of his own concept models? I take back any slander I've ever made about him. If it's true, even if he only does it once or twice a year, he's gone up in my estimation.
It is good that he does some of his own models, but (though I can't speak for the last 3 years) Rem has always been extremely involved with every stage of every project. At that alone I was shocked. He is the most ridiculously hard working person I have ever known of. I'm not saying every building he has done has been great but the guy has the rare thing that is instinct for good design. You may not like all of his work, but each one has at least one interesting thing in it.
Also, best not to hope for a non-bashing of one architect is you then go on to bash another...
good point, ov. i'm glad to hear that rem is much more involved with the design process that i've heard. i guess nasty rumors spread quickly...
and yes gehry definitely builds many of his own concept models, according to my good friends who work there.
you must be a star
hey
look me over
tell me do you like what you see?
hey check it all out
baby i know what it's all about
before the night is through
you will see my point of view
even if i have to scream and should
everybody say, nothing come too easy
when you got it baby, nothing come too hard
teeter, where on code would you ever summarize? i mean i know there are expeditor's in NYC for a reason, it isn't because it's balck and white, it's because of money - payola - and because, it is a document deliberately designed to obfuscate and require officials to interpret and hide behind.
the code should move from prescriptive, to a performance based document, that might shift it from gray to b/w...
i wouldn't push it, chris.
the braggadocio is getting thick around here. your claims are pretty big, you're not registered, you say you're doing it by yourself, and you've got no work on your site as evidence that you've got the schematic-to-done-in-one-step thing worked out.
if you've found a way of working that works for you, cool. i'd leave it at that.
I worked for a 2nd tier starchitect who was very involved in every design for a few years. We did get to work on some unusual projects and on bigger, faster paced projects, responsibility was up for grabs. I'd say that there really is something to be said for good design coming out of lots of redesign - as opposed to sticking with what kind of works the first time out. Also, so much of our time was devoted to making what was designed look polished for presentations - both to the boss and to clients.
There were people who loved to pull all nighters on a regular basis though. And honestly, if you looked at what was produced I'm not sure if you'd be able to tell them apart from the people who left at 7. Some also goofed off the most during the day. The "fresh out of college" group did the most all nighters, and their work was the most out of order. Let's face it, the occasional all nighter can be necessary and fruitful, but many times it just results in mistake laden zombie time.
And when you spend 14 hours on something, just for the boss to waltz in, look at it for two seconds and say its not what he wanted, when its exactly what he asked for, you have to try and figure out a smarter way to work!
In the end, many interviewers are impressed, the collaborations with big name engineering firms, and the overall experience in high quality work....
helmut was on the cover of gq in the 80's for godsake. i'd call that star power...oldenvirginia if your starchiterection lasts for more than 4 hours call your physician...
Get back to trolling, vado.
Having your judgement clouded by a position of power works both ways. You seem to suggest that I'm seduced by starchitecture. However, though I may enjoy Rem's design decisions at least it's an honest affection, rather than your blind hatred of anything considered 'popular' which leaves no room for individual interpretation or opinion.
If your starchi-flaccidity lasts much longer, I'd call someone too.
yeah, i would have guessed hemut as well!
, but no doubt the artist suffered as well.
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