In these dark and heady times, we must remind ourselves that while our profession may subject us to the harshest of economic winds, it could be worse: we could have chosen to become Bankers.

I for one, like many of you face certain unemployment, especially after graduation. But is this the end? Should I retreat to my parent's basement, doomed to spend the next half-decade playing video games on my awesome flatscreen I bought cash while comfortably employed? Should I retreat to the food-service industry, and become a barista or should I give up building altogether and become an insurance salesman? Well I have an answer to these questions:



HELL NO!


Think, with an architecture degree and the skills it provides I can do a great many things. I can work for an industrial design firm, as I know Rhino like the back of my hand, I can work for a graphics firm as the entire adobe suite is second nature to me, I can build furniture or cabinetry as the hours I've spent drawing cabinetry details and working in the school shop practically makes me a carpenter (seriously, besides contractors, carpenters and architects who else knows what the hell a dado joint is?). Some of you have spent hours and hours scripting and animating in Maya and Max, you could go work for Hollywood or the video game industry. Hell, some of you may even have a background in CATIA and generative components, why not go try to build airplanes?

This is not the End, my friend, but a New Beginning. A chance for us to step back from our current vision of our profession and envision it anew. Maybe when enough of us are tired of being at the beck and call of our client's banks we'll take matters into our own hands. We can start more design-builds, take advantage of people's priority shifts and begin to offer design solutions with the mantra "More is A Bore." We can begin to offer products, not services and in the process claim a little bit more of the pie for ourselves.

Arch grads of '09 and those in practice fear not the future for it is ours for the taking. This will not be like 1991, nor 1929, what we are in now is uncharted territory. The Crash will generate a New World in which old orders will fall, and new orders will take their place. We can choose to die with old order or reinvent ourselves in the new order. Put frankly, for a profession that has been seeking relevance for the last century and a half, we may finally be at a turning point in which we can call the shots, or we can wither away with the rest.