A very stressful week of dealing with bosses, contractors and clients and listening feverishly to the latest Radiohead album have caused me to do a lot of thinking. And one question has kept reoccurring in my mind, today especially:
What truly warrants being a good architect?
No one is perfect, but what causes a person to design Fallingwater and what causes a person to design the local 7-Eleven? It is a vision of perfection and design genius, a "Howard Roark" among men? Is it a good client? Is it luck? Or is it the fortitude and persistence to tough out the hard times, and fight for what you believe in? Even though you may mess up the location of a steel beam, or caused the fireplace to be off-center by a mere 3 inches, is it enough to be considered good? Am I good enough? What will my "videotape"** be? When I am gone, how will people remember my work, and me as an architect?
Or is my work irrelevant? Perhaps my stature as a "good" architect has more to do with the relationships that I make with clients and contractors and that bringing a quality of happiness and satisfaction to a life that was previously not there before. Perhaps it is not about whether or not I detail a baseboard flush or recessed, but it is more about the way I can make a client feel when she sees the tarp pulled back, the full height of her two-story glass wall seen for the first time, it's massive span striking us both speechless.
Being an architect is much more complex that I had ever imagined. Even those who at one point seem all knowing and infallible show their weaknesses sometime, and you are left alone, searching for an answer that is nowhere to be found. Never would I have thought that I would be figuring out how to build a complex chimney and dealing with needy clients and contractors in the same day.
*I apologize in advance for the scattered nature and briefness of my post, as I am still reeling from the days events. A more coherent post will hopefully follow.
**reference to "Videotape" off of the In Rainbows album by Radiohead.
