Old Architect Myth
Thought given to be an architect? Really? Don’t cry.
It is a cold spring morning
War rages yet in #Ukraine
Leaders of war are men without #commonsense
Followers of such men show their #ignorance
Be unlike the #leaders
Be unlike the #warriors
Build a better world now
Don’t make the #architect cry
8:19 AM · Apr 29, 2022 @earth_architect tweet: Twitter for iPhone
It was 1970, I was in high school. I listened to a fellow student deliver a speech in an auditorium classroom about architecture. I’d like to think of this hour as the ‘inception hour’ where a seed was planted and began to grow. The seed was a notion of learning a pursuit, a desire to become an architect. That seed germinated and it took 20 years for it to flourish, namely into what the State of Ohio would call a “registered architect”.
As with any seed, it has been saved, packaged and stored, coming from a place in the past. Although the inception moment was the beginning of the fertilization, the actual packaging was determined years before that auditorium speech.
Our father, who had been in the Army Air Corps, later known as the Air Force, armed services, had been transferred many times in two decades leading up to 1970. I often say tongue-in-cheek, I was in the military for 17 years. With very short military haircuts and my “yes sir” “no sir” responses to our father, disciplined lifestyle, seemed somewhat like being militarized without the uniform.
In any event, in late 1963 there was my mother traveling transatlantic, with five children under her wings moving the family to the latest assignment. I the eldest, at 10, led the charge throwing up in the supplied paper bags, in the last row of a C47 passenger Air Force plane. We were on the move to Laon, (pronounced lone) France where my father had been stationed several months prior at Laon Air Force Base in northeast France.
As a 10 year old child …
The reason I mentioned this trip is because it was the beginning of seeing European architecture. Architecture that had been in the ground a millennia and sometimes two millennia or more, built. As a 10 year old child , I saw the city of Paris, the Reims Cathedral, and medieval architecture galore. I was even confirmed in the Laon Cathedral (13th century) by the French Bishop of Soisson, with a slight tap to the cheek as was customary for that sacrament at that time. I saw castles and monastic buildings centuries old and hamlets with the narrowest of streets.
I attended an American dependents school at the base but our life outside of that was in the French community (Laon) playing with French children, sharing their lives with chocolate baguette sandwiches, with our white bread, mustard and bologna. It was only a short generation away from World War II, and we were not allowed to play in the bombed out ruins surrounding our five story walk-up apartment complex. For whatever the reasons the French President de Gaulle decided to close all the American air bases in France.
Before that happened, our father was transferred to Aviano Air Force Base in Italy. Again, we did not live on the base although we attended the American dependents school. We lived in a small community called Cordenons, Italy, about a fifteen minute bus ride from the airbase. When we were not in school, we were in the Italian people’s community. The bus stop brought us to the front gates of an ancient gated Italian villa. In my current neighborhood where I live today, it would’ve been similar to a post colonial farmhouse surrounded by a 640 acre tract of land, that eventually gets broken off into the back 40 and developed, or divvy-up to the off-spring.
As an 11 and 12-year-old I ventured with the family on the weekends to Italian cities; Venetia, Vincenzo, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples, collecting a patch and storing memories. We took a long trip to Calabria, specifically to NiCastro, to the homeland of 1/2 our paternal family ancestors, of which some had immigrated to the United States. In all of the cities, towns, and communes, I saw the architecture. I experienced the great works of art Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Raphael, Botticelli and da Vinci. As of the great works of architecture, Palladio’s influence was interspersed with the other renaissance architects.
I know all of these visual experiences were stored in an impressionable mind. Visiting antiquity in the ruins of the floor of the Colosseum were quite striking near the Roman Forum. Experiencing the sounds of the modernized medieval neighborhoods, bustling with contemporary machines, yet I was afforded with the aromas of food preparations dating thousands of years old, truly breath-taking.
Seeing a marriage of two Spring birds singing songs in the trees about history.
In those very busy three years in and on the European continent, we traveled to other countries; Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the to the edge of the then known country of Yugoslavia at Trieste, Italy. We were steps from, yet not in it, as it was an iron curtain country and visitation was disallowed. Each country was unique and architecturally significant from the modernity of Brussels, and the seaport of Antwerp, to chalets of Switzerland, or in the salt mines of Strasbourg, to the magnificent valleys of Berchtesgaden. All the places were unique, the art long lasting, and for me, beautiful to see the seed package was sealed.
Even then we as a family spent another three years in the plains of Oklahoma right after Italy, insights though, without the visual building artifact history, other cultural amenities, appeared. The rodeo and Native American reservation were added as separate seed choices.
Then with five years of schooling, with some very professional and prominent professors, Ching, Dybiec, Tice, Laseau, Nishi and the first year professor who worked in Le Corbusier’s office. Life long relationships were developed with fellow students, Matthews, Petras, Wobser and Berg. The groundwork was laid for the subsequent years to master a discipline that rarely arrives fast. Indeed it was is in February 1990 I would receive notification of passing a series of tests, having sat for in the previous years, thus becoming a licensed design professional.
What I had not expected from those years when the seeds that germinated in the making of an authentic profession, were all the accouterments that come with the modern day version of the practice of architecture. Several things are readily apparent, promoting an idea is something very organic, it does not just happen, it’s developed from a concept to a strengthened thought, to affirmed drawings visually replicating the idea, that is, then executed. There is so much involved within a design that the word architecture is hardly recognizable.
The architect composes the work, bringing the varied parties to one common outcome. Depending on the scope of a building, the scale and area and volume, is where a work of architecture can be realized. Together, there literally are many disciplines and thousands of decisions, each tasked, each that must be accomplished.
For instance, specifications are written, which are often placed in the project manual. This manual is a book that accompanies a set of drawings containing floor plans, building elevations, building sections and details.
There too is it initial cost estimate, when refined and eventually published for purposes of financing a project, projects near exact dollars required to build a building.
Let’s not forget the construction schedule that follows the design schedule. Science and architecture mingle and become fine arts.
Have no worries.
Each and every process in the design needs to meet a standard of care. Field tests are required of the various trades used in modern day building, by inspections and lab work. No matter if the building is residential, commercial, industrial or other kind of facility, and there are many kinds of facilities, all are subject to rigorous building codes and an individual, in all circumstances, needs to be held accountable, the design professional of record.
Just design disciplines alone require mechanical, plumbing, electrical, civil, communications, fire suppression, landscape architecture, geotechnical engineering, acoustics and specialty consultants to make a building design come to fruition. Good documentation accounts for correct interdisciplinary trades coordination, depending on layouts, materials specified, and notations on the plans and in the specifications.
Not to bore you with an exhaustive list of necessary building trades, but we can list it including the site work. Followed then by the foundations, generally concrete, oh but not always, depending if the structure sits on say, wood piles. Think next of masonry, metals, carpentry, the thermal enclosure that is the our building’s necessary protection, doors, windows and skylights, finishes, specialties, equipments, the furnishings you sit on, special constructions like the greenhouse, and conveyances like lifts, escalators, or elevators, unless there will be moving walkways. Great design rewards its users with biophilic amenity.
A zoetic message
Thought you wanted to be an architect? Certainly one does not be ‘one’ ]for the money. You will find your sufficiently undervalued monetarily when compared with other professional types like doctors and attorneys and rockstars and influencers, unless of course you are what is known as a signature Architect.
I am an architect of the Poche. Most architects are. They work quietly for the well-being and safety of the end-users of buildings, that is you. Sometimes they create works of art known as Architecture.
Like you, I am saddened by the horrific terrorism found today in entire country of European Ukraine. The images of war should make everyone want to be an anti-war activist.
Ask yourself, “I as an architect want to view my life’s work as bombed out skeletons of their former selves?” Let us strive to outlaw war, learn and teach ourselves to be pacifists. How simple!
Then would not the architect cry tears of joy?
A unique juxtaposition of architecture, activism, and a military childhood! A good combo for producing a peacenik!
Great piece Michael. If you build it, they will come!