Fall Fashion Week!

It's Fall Fashion Day at the Blazing Sun, that time at the end of summer when school starts, and we look at current trends and fashions among the graduate architecture school community.

Watchword for the season: sustainability! But not just the green kind anymore! From recycled materials to welfare-commerce, we architecture students can't get enough of expensive accessories that subtly highlight our commitment to the environment/social equity.

The Messenger Bag 
Chrome has supplanted Freitag as the new it bag. As some of my long term readers may be aware, when I was in Paris, I picked up a Freitag bag. Freitag bags have been very popular with gen-y yuppies, because (A) no two bags are alike (B) there's a heavy graphic component to the bag (C) its a messenger bag, which is the only approved way to carry things among the gen-yY, and (D) its made of recycled materials and more importantly, it highlights the fact you care about sustainability. In all honesty, they are good bags, overpriced, but simple good design, and weatherproof.

However, some enterprising people in San Fran, the epicenter of gen-yY culture, said hey, if you're going to blow $140 on a messenger bag, make it damned near indestructible and waterproof, and at lets at least give people an extra strap so it doesn't slide around their backs while bicycling, which is really the biggest fault with messenger bags. They also hold a lot of stuff, like a large backpack worth of stuff. Saori has one and its funny how many people come up to her in studio and ask her how she likes it and how they're thinking about getting one too, but that they're really expensive. Expect to see rising numbers of these across graduate and undergraduate schools across the country, especially in fields sensitive to design and cultural trends.

The Watch

We're seeing a lot of old favorites floating around this year- the stainless steel Skagen watch is still a perennial classic- incredibly thin, understated, and the brushed stainless steel or titanium case and woven mesh band fall in the category of watches that at first glance look like a mid-priced watch, but then you look closer and it seems more expensive, but in actuality, they're not that expensive, but a little more expensive than a mid-priced watch.

Also in that same category is the simple black Swatch watch, plastic band and case, with clean Swiss graphics and design. Utilitarian, rugged, goes with anything. (coincidently, I have both of these watches). We're also seeing a little more exuberance with the introduction of Alessi watches. 

The Metal Water Bottle 
A standard item now for everyone, undergraduate, graduate, and faculty alike, these metal cannisters, either aluminum or stainless steel, come in all price points and graphics. Setting the standard is still the Sigg bottle. Leave your beat up Nalgene bottles at home, and if you're drinking from a throw-away PETE or PET bottle, you might as well be drowning endangered species in an oil spill.



The Travel Mug
The defining mark of the graduate architecture student is the spill-resistant insulated mug, either in brushed stainless steel or neutral recycled plastic. These mugs travel everywhere with the students, keeping their coffee (or yerba mate) warm for those three hour seminars and long nights in studio.

The Casual Shoe
With all the recycled products on the market today, demonstrating a commitment to sustainability is as easy as  taking the light rail to Target. But one problem that has traditionally plagued the design community is the difficulty in conveying a sense of social consciousness. There are work arounds, like the Habitat for Humanity tee shirt, but its difficult to pull off a casual and subtle sign that you Care. Well, no longer! Peek under your studio desk and you'll be confronted with a wide array of Toms peasant shoes. This retailer donates one pair of shoes a child in need with every pair sold, and come in materials ranging from organic cotton to hand painted vegan burlap. They actually look pretty comfortable for hanging around in studio, although we wonder how they would hold up outside.

Eyewear
No surprises here- black, chunky plastic frames keep the spotlight this year. Whether you need them or not, ever since Le Corbusier, nothing says "Architect" more than thick black frames.

The Mid-Sized Firm

This monday will mark my last week of work. Since technically we're on a shortened week, it will really be my last four days. It's been a great job, and thinking about not working makes me think I'll miss working there. Honestly, when I first saw the place I'd be working as a summer intern, I felt a little deflated. 

Consider, you spend two years as an architecture student, coming up with wild ideas, and you get this vague idea in your head about what an architecture firm is like. Since studio focuses on fast-paced, creative exploration and expression, you get this idea that firms are fast paced, cutting edge, fun environments, with either creative mess everywhere or uber-minimalist sleek coolness where everyone wears slim black ties and rolled up sleeves. While firms like that do exist, and get occationally get some attention from the press, the reality is that most architecture firms are just that; firms. They gots biz to do, and furthermore, the vast majority of architecture that gets built is not the cutting edge, Metropolis cover shot. 

Anyway, when I came to my office for the first time, I saw cubicles, I saw people hunched over computers, I saw a small corporate firm that seemed to be producing a lot of very not-Metropolis-worthy architecture. I was kind of expecting something a little more, design-y.This is the first post where I mentioned working in my blog, way back in May of 2006 as an intern:

Today I rose and showered before 7 AM. I wore pleated pants and a belt. In my minivan, I fought the morning traffic to downtown. I wore a tie. I sat in a cubicle and attended an office meeting. I drove home through rushour traffic, in a minivan.

These are new things to me.

 A year later, when I approached graduation, I was asked by the head of HR if I wanted a full-time, salaried position there. It was a time when the Phoenix economy was still booming. It was a time of bounty when architecture workers were jumping from one firm to another since the pickings were so sweet. I'd worked there long enough to know the kind of work they did, and what other firms in the valley were doing.

I decided to take the job anyway, despite my initial misgivings about working in a firm that did civic and educational projects. The working environment was good, I was learning a lot, the people were low-key and friendly, and the salaried offer was very generous, along with the benefits and paid vacations.

In the three years of working full time there, I'm really glad I made that decision. Personally, and professionally, I saw a lot of growth. The firm's commitment to education (they call it "stewardship") pushed me to see all the different aspects of the business of architecture. I was invited to meetings with clients, product representatives, consultants, and contractors. I was taken out in the field. They sent me on field trips to other buildings, to conferences. They paid for me to take a 3 day Revit class, and told me not to worry about coming in during those days. I worked on projects from programming through construction administration, which is pretty rare for an architecture firm of our size. I got to design, which is why I got into this field in the first place.

More ambiguously, or ambivalently, work has changed how I view architecture; its nature, its role in the world, what it can or should be. My view of architecture is colored by what I've done and seen. It would have been different if I'd been working at a national corporate firm, or at a four-person firm. I think my design philosophy has also changed. I'm a lot more aware of building systems, of structure.

And of course, it goes without saying that taking that position kept me employed throughout the recession. I saw people in the firm being let go, in various waves of layoffs. The first round was hard, and they had to keep letting go of better and better people. But my firm was nothing to hearing about the gradual bloodbath in the industry. Scores of small boutique firms just dropped off the face of the earth as the cutting edge (read by clients as "expensive") design disappeared. Work in general pretty much dried up, and our firm would probably not have been able to make it had it not been for the fact that have 60 years of experience with a core group of large, well-funded clients. The municipalities and universities that gave us the civic and educational work that I initially was reluctant to accept was just about the only kind of work left, which was a lesson in itself.

But I'm ready to move on. In order to find the right kind of job, and to continue my education as an architect, I need to see what else is out there. I want to spend some time working for the huge corporate firms, where there is a constant revolving door of architects and designers who are basically used like plug-in commodities (or so I hear). Ditto for the small firms, where you work for a single architect/owner who is never in because she's out finding work and you have to do all the work (also, so I hear).

I think I'm kind of rambling here, so I'll conclude.

Basically, it was a fantastic job where I learned a lot, and now I'm ready to move on.
But I will miss the easy life, the money, and the sleep. Definitely the sleep.

That's INTERN ARCHITECT Perkins, to you

I finally got to take a look at the presentation that my office presented to the ASU graduate students, and I actually was able to pull some of the photos from it. In no particular order:

The website photo of the office. Unfortuantely, some of the people in the photo (including the photographer) are no longer in the firm. However, I was bemused to realize afterwards that the principals tended to congregate at the back, and they pushed the young guns up to the front. 

Me and my coworker, Brad, who actually went to the ASU presentation. It seemed like a lot of the office photos were the two of us. I like these photos: they make me look semi-professional, like I'm some kind of hotshot designer. (I do actually get to do some design work, which is more than I can say for a lot of my peers, but 90% of the time, I'm doing other stuff than designing. But thats true of the profession in general).

Here's Alec again, working on a design charette (quick study) for an ASU residential community. I don't remember why I'm dressed in jeans and a tee shirt. I think I actually wore a sweater to work that day, and it happened to be really hot in the conference room. Anyway, of course the photo is relatively staged. Nobody can un-self-conscientiously present while people are snapping photos. 

I'm not sure why this photo was included. Maybe they were looking for something they could caption: "Collaboration" or "Teamwork" or "Empowering the design of young professionals." Or "Casual Day." I also like this photo since it looks like my desk (its not my desk really) has a huge stack of rolled drawings. It also looks like Brad isn't listening with his headphones on. 

Poster Boy

My coworker that I've been helping with the park and ride was also pulled to help one of the company principals give a presentation at ASU. I idly wondered what it was all about, and my coworker disappeared for the morning while I finished up some minor stuff for the park and ride and headed out to the client meeting.

Just before I arrived, I got a funky text from a friend of mine who is in the ASU architecture masters program, to the effect that today he learned that I'm the poster boy for the company. Apparently, due to the fantastic architecture market, it should be little surprise that there are few internships available in the valley, if any. So, ASU's architecture program offers a 2 week professional practice substitute, where industry professionals come in and speak. One of our principals was there today, along with Eddie Jones of Jones Studio, and it is my hunch that his calender is wide open, too.

How bad is the market for architects? A former coworker got hired by a small boutique firm that slowly laid everybody off except for him and the principal. And then they cut their hours back, and finally, he had to be laid off and the firm closed. Two architects who owned and leased a strip mall finally tossed in the towel and opened a coffee shop in uptown Phoenix called "Urban Beans." The vast majority of the students I graduated with either left town, changed fields, or are unemployed. The good news is that things are finally starting to look a little better.

Personally, I've been astronomically lucky. I've swum in the center of concentric rings of luck. I was lucky to get an internship at this firm, I was lucky that when I was ready to find work, they were hiring. I was lucky that the firm has been working in the valley for 60 years and so had a pool of relationships wide and deep enough to sustain their business. I've been lucky to work on a lengthy profitable project, while many people in my office who did not have the luck to be attached to a major project were gradually let go as their smaller projects finished and were not replaced. I've been lucky to have worked with excellent coworkers and supervisors who look out for me and who say nice things about me.

By choosing to go to college now, and leave this position, I don't feel like I'm abusing my luck, since my position will probably be filled people already at the firm who really need the billable time. Luck isn't totally random either- there's a saying:

Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity.

 It suggests you can effect your own luck. It also suggests that there are two types of unlucky people- people who are either unprepared for opportunity, and those who are prepared, but for whom the opportunity doesn't come.

When I was traveling around Europe with my friend Chase, we seemed to be surrounded by an aura of incredibly fantastic luck. Despite frequently showing up at the wrong train stations, we made every single train we intended to catch, sometimes with minutes to spare. The one day we bought a subway ticket was the day that the subway police checked it. We thought we'd missed a night train out of Berlin, but we hung around the train station thinking about what to do for the night, when the train conductor came running after us. On an unscheduled detour to Budapest where we had done no research on where to go or stay, Chase happened to run into the English-speaking city director of tourism. I was almost to the point where I started looking around for Chase's "guardian angel." I think now that really, Chase was just very, very open to opportunity, and flexible enough in the backpacker mindset that we were prepared for almost anything.

I think that's really one thing I love about travel- its not so much a trip outside of your home as it is a trip outside your mind. Some people don't really travel this way- the ones that go to Hawaii every summer, mentally, they never leave home, the old mental roadblocks are always there, and the wiring is fused tight. Travel shakes that up for me. It rewires my brain, makes me a different person that I enjoy being. At risk, in danger of opportunities, open minded so that everything is new and nothing is strange.