"Goethe called architecture 'frozen music.' That's one way to look at it, though the music is often made from conducting an orchestra of unruly contractors."
I wanted to be an architect from childhood. To this day, I am not sure what prompted me to have that dream. Whatever it was, my family and teachers took it seriously. My fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Miller, who reprimanded me for speaking out in class by sitting me behind a piano, recommended Taliesin West, the Frank Lloyd Wright school and studio as the place I should go to study and train. In those days, there was a standup piano in every classroom.
Being an architect has been a lifelong pursuit, filled with the challenges that love-inspired dreams often possess. It’s been a passionate and frustrating practice, rewarding and, of course, disappointing at times. I suppose I’m not the only architect who feels the same. Like all great loves, it taught me how to look at things, about life, and myself in detail. It taught me how to conceive ideas and realize them; how to invest in a meaningful enterprise over a stretch of time, and how to sacrifice for beliefs—a burden not always easy to carry. It’s showed me how to make critical decisions under pressure, whether on a construction site, choosing a job, or a project to develop.
From the beginning, my career took numerous turns from office practice into construction management and then real estate development. It has taken me to places that I never imagined: pilgrimages to great buildings and work on three continents. It’s shaped my thinking about almost everything. I remember the opening lecture in a first-year structures’ class at the University of Arizona. The professor instructed us to look left, then right, ahead, and behind, and note that there was a good chance those people would not practice the craft in a conventional way. At the time, I dismissed it. He turned out to be right, at least for me.
I started my career by being laid off from well-known Los Angeles firm William Pereria Associates, who hired me prior to my last term at the University of California, Berkeley. A few weeks before my starting date, the office called to inform me that forty percent of the office was being let go. On the rebound, I was lucky to be asked by a friend’s father if I could redesign and renovate a house he had just purchased for an investment. Not being sure how I was going to pull that off, I said yes, of course, and agreed to room and board in his very nice house a $500 per month fee. The course of my career was altered from day one.
A year later, after completing the house, I enrolled in SCI-Arc to obtain a five-year B.Arch. degree so I could get on with licensing as soon as possible. SCI-Arc, in its early incarnation was riveting, filled with the excitement of a ideas on the frontier. Upon graduating, work in LA was still hard to come by. So, I spent a year designing television and movies sets in Hollywood. But sets weren’t for me. They lacked the space and form I wanted to create. After a year there and nine months traveling, I landed me in New York City, where I finally started working in an office.
Three years working on low budget not-for-profit projects while interacting with difficult clients, I pushed back on, made me consider a general contractor’s offer to help them bail out a project of theirs that was way beyond because the uptown architect who had designed it was giving them a hard time. Having been a client’s representative, comfortable on site from my first project, and wanting to build as well as design, I accepted it with an 80% increase in the salary. This woke me up to the reality that my career would be very different than the one I had planned.
Fortunately, the calling to design, that had always compelled me, has been answered over the years in projects for occasional clients and those that I developed. Design remains a primary focus in everything I do. I’ve found that building sites and pro formas were places I felt home in too. I came to understand that they were aspects of the design too. Working back and forth between a drawing and a spreadsheet while value engineering became an advantage in making design decisions.
Goethe called architecture “frozen music.” That’s one way to look at it, though the music is often made from conducting an orchestra of unruly contractors. Seeing the “music” emerge from that composition of disparate players, coordinating their work, has always been a dynamic and challenging part of the job. In keeping with the analogy, developers are generally thought of in the same vain as music producers, as people who exploit their performing artists. In this case architects and contractors. However, they, like many producers, have another side, and a creative drive. Choosing a site, investigating it and determining its best use, conceiving of a program to fulfill it by investing their time and money to realize it is a substantially creative effort.
Over the years I’ve compared my experiences as a design driven developer with those of my architectural friends and colleagues who have stayed the course, including my brother, an architect with a design-build office. It seems that I’ve enjoyed more freedom and diversity in the career I’ve constructed. While I’ve sacrificed designing more in comparison to a practicing architect, who can after all design multiple projects in the same time span that and developing one project takes, I am content with the path I took.
When we step onto the traditional path, we’re told to focus on the process; that if you follow it, it will lead you to the promised land of architecture. But if you look at how that process actually functions, you realize the path is designed to serve the masters of the architectural profession and the clients they attract—with less creative, financial, or professional reward than is fair for the hard work and dedication required to become a good architect. From the very beginning of the licensing process, this becomes obvious. Compare the standard licensure experience of an architect to other major licensed professions:
Each year, approximately 6,000 architectural hopefuls sit down to take their first ARE (Architectural Registration Exam) series. The average overall passing rate is a grueling 55%. On average, it takes 12.9 years from the time a student enters college to the day that she or he receives an architecture license.
Here’s how lawyers and doctors fare. Lawyers typically spend 7 years in school and proceed immediately to the bar exam if they choose. Apprenticeship is not required. Their passing rate hovers around 60% to 70%. It takes doctors generally 8 years before they sit for the USMLE (United States Medical Licensing Exam). Their passing rate is consistently above 90%. After another 3 years of residency for general or emergency medicine (longer for specialization), doctors can set up independent practice.
In the decision to become one, most architects believe in the architectural mythology of making the world a better place and of creating beautiful, healthy and meaningful places to live, work, and experience higher thoughts as in a museum or cathedral. I did. This is reinforced by the literature and the schools, which portray the sacrifice required to achieve that goal as the price of entry to a prestigious, highly valued, and meaningful profession that will contribute to society. But the high value referred to: the professional status, and tantalizing creative satisfaction, is often devoid of the appropriate material compensation while doing mostly commercial projects driven by business demands at the expense of the architecture.
When you look at the standard income comparison in the United States, the financial ceiling of the traditional career becomes painfully obvious:
Note: These are general averages to highlight the income disparity between these professions.
Compared to non-licensed professional like a regional sales manager or a private developer, professions that do not require an average of the 13 years it takes for architects to credential and combine that with the profound legal liabilities of the construction, architects come out poorly. Unfortunately, this is the reality of the conventional path. Our time, energy, technical capability, and design intelligence are treated by the commercialized system that most architects are dependent on as a low-margin commodity.
As my structural engineering professor hinted on that first day in class, practicing architecture in a conventional way is not the only option. There are alternative paths that provide more agency, value for your effort, and bridge the gap between traditional office practice and other forms of practice or business.
While time and money are not everything, they are fundamental measures of job satisfaction and success. As importantly, the imperative to work the way you want, with the people that you feel are most compatible with your values, alongside the other goals you have as an architect, are the daily measures that provide for both the professional and personal enjoyment from your work. That should be the goal, achieving all of those in the most appropriate method that suits you.
I knew early on that the other aspects of the building industry—construction and real estate development—were things I wanted to explore. I thought that they would open up different opportunities that the traditional architectural path would offer me. What I didn’t know then was that by choosing an alternative route I would live and work in culturally dynamic, unusual places, and achieve a direct influence over the outcome of the work I was engaged in. Being in the trenches, making touch decisions, from napkin sketch to key in the door, gave me job satisfaction in a way I never dreamed of as a kid.
Now, after our four decades-plus, working in the multiple fields of design and development in multiple countries, I am happy with the way things went. I’m glad that I didn’t pursue a standard architectural practice. Though I sacrificed designing more I was compensated by in many other exciting ways.
I wrote this essay to offer an alternative way to look at and model a career path, This is possible to consider at any stage, even at a time when other people think it is too late to make a change. This is where the "Gap" referred to in the title of this website becomes the critical place to look at options and other possibilities.
There is a moment before a decision is made or action taken, when choices are formed, that ultimately determines the course of our lives. Neuroscientists call this the Prefrontal Window—the space where conscious choice lives. Most of us react automatically to the constituent parts that formed us: childhood, family background, culture, environment, our natures. We often act or should I say react from a source of ready-made conditions and responses that dictate our choices. The only way out of this trap is challenging those by pausing to examine them with courage and an open mind.
The question that arises in any situation, in any career juncture is whether our direction is a real choice based on a calm, critical assessment, or a pre-conditioned reaction based on what others expect of us or what we have expected of ourselves. In the absence of taking a moment, however long, we often choose paths that do not always align and truly provide what we want or reflect who we are. The "gap,” as I call it, the deliberate pause, to look at and consider next steps, is the place where we become aware of this.
This essay is intended to raise that question and offer a different framework for career thinking. It suggests alternatives to consider and to critically choose the path you want to be on, whether you are entering the field, navigating a midstream transition, or wanting to explore more possibilities as a later stage.
We all have dreams. In ancient religion and culture, dreams were thought of as messages from the gods, the fates, or the divine future. Not so different than how modern psychology interprets them: as revealing subconscious hidden truth, desire, or vision. However, interpreted a dream represents something we must wrestle with to live our truest lives. In that case, refining the dream that truly defines and expresses the life we want, the work we want to do, and how we want to go about doing it, with whom, is key to living our best reality.