Thinking out Loud,


I remember sitting in design lab and being given the impression that once we graduated and eventually became architects, that we would have months to sketch and develop our designs.  While that may be true for some and I would assume that would be for large firms with million / billion dollars projects, it isn’t even close for this one man office.  As stated before, I work mainly for contractors and developers.  I do have a fair amount of “standard type” clients, but not as many as the clients in the building industry. Although this doesn’t happen to me all the time, something similar to it happens more often than not, so let me share a story with you.


First I was working with a client who was submitting for a site plan.  Down here in NC, they have started requiring building elevations.  I have an issue with that, but that is another post for another day.  I had asked the client if they were going to be required to submit elevations and he said “No”.  Then I get a call about 5:30 PM that same day and I am told, “Well yes the civil was mistaken we do need an elevation”.  I told him that was fine and asked him when did he need it?

“We have to have it by eleven O’clock tomorrow morning, is that a problem?”.  I told him I thought I could get it done, but I needed a question answered - “What does it look like?”.  I had not seen anything on this project.  I did not even know what the footprint looked like and here I was asked to draw up an elevation for the following morning.  The elevation I provide are drawn in AutoCAD, then plotted to a PDF, and then they are put into Photoshop Elements and rendered with texture patterns.  So in 17 hours I had to come up with some kind of preliminary floor plan that I could generate some kind of elevations on and then render it.  Shooting from the hip I would be quickly selection brick, EIFS, and glass colors.  Inserting sky backgrounds, trees, buses, cars and people.  For all you older architects, remember that 12 hours design portion of the architectural exam, we “It’s back……”  I stayed up till early morning and sent the client the rendering.  Apparently it was good enough.  Now the odd thing to me is once that elevation gets approved that is what the city requires us to build. So those months of preliminary  design and design development, not in my world!   The satisfying thing about this process, although not necessarily a desirable way to design, is that I get to make all the decisions because we do not have the time for anyone to disagree with me.  They just never told me about this part of architecture when I was in school.