Despite what you may believe, designing buildings is not what Architects spend most of their time doing. It's hard to put really accurate figures to it, but I'd say that only about 30% of our time is spent designing, and the remaining 70% is spent communicating that design to others. Initially we have to communicate one persons early design to others within our office so that it can be refined and expanded on, then to the Client and/or Interior Designer for their collaboration and approval, then to consultants (structural engineers, HVAC engineers, etc.) for further refinement, to builders for pricing, and then to municipalities for the final legal go-ahead. This communication is done through drawing, and then a lot of talking. (Sometimes we get into physical model building to communicate a design, but I find thats less common these days.) It seems like the all we should have to do is draw, but really, we spend far more time talking about a building than we do drawing it.
The types of projects that I work on tend to be complex, with a lot of detail, and a lot of people on the Design Team. It's myself, one or more other people from my office, the client (sometimes that's two people if it's husband and wife, but there's interesting variations that I'll get to in another posting), Interior Designer(s) and then depending on the topic a consultant. Once construction has started we have to add the GC (project manager and/or site supervisor) and then whatever subcontractor may be relevant. This leads to a long list of people who may need to be in on any given conversation. It's tough to get that many people in the same place at the same time for a meeting, and nearly impossible to get them all on the phone at once. This is why we've embraced email so fully; you can send one message to that entire group and everybody is suddenly on the same page. If there's an issue, everybody is made aware, if theres a question, everybody can get the answer all at once.
That is, until someone forgets to hit "reply all" when responding. Nothing can kill a rapid fire exchange of ideas faster than that. I know we've all been copied on emails that seem like a waste of time, and agree that we need to use or best judgement on when we copy a whole bunch of people, but if someone asks you a question, and you only respond to the one person on the list that you think needs to know then you can have a lot of frustrated people who feel like you've dropped the ball on something.
The example that's on my mind is the with the Interior Designer (ID) on a project that is nearly complete and has a huge deadline this weekend. There's a ton of questions for the ID, that the GC has highest priority to know so that he can build/paint/buy the right thing, but the Client and the Architect need to hear the answers too so that at the very least we know to stop pestering the ID about them, but also to make sure that the answer the ID gives makes sense and is feasible. This particular ID does not to "reply all", possibly on purpose, and so today when the client had a question about a paint color, and I dug back through last weeks emails to find the one with the answer in it that the GC forwarded me as courtesy, the ID flipped out when I re-sent that email to entire team (including the client). It was something that they had all seen already, so I don't fully understand what he was upset about, but this ID is also very sensitive, and has been difficult to manage, but there will be more on personalities another time.
By "flipped out" I mean an angry voicemail to me and an angry phonecall to my boss before I had had a chance to return the first call. My boss was on my side with this, but as always we see the larger picture and try to keep people calm and the process moving forward. I ended up explaining myself to the ID in an email, not apologizing but still sounding apologetic, trying to be the bigger person. There's been no response from him on this yet, but I don't expect there to be, he's rarely responded when there's been similar blow-ups in the past. We'll see.
Turns out the client doesn't like the paint color the ID picked out, so that's sort of a selfish bookend for me on this one.
The types of projects that I work on tend to be complex, with a lot of detail, and a lot of people on the Design Team. It's myself, one or more other people from my office, the client (sometimes that's two people if it's husband and wife, but there's interesting variations that I'll get to in another posting), Interior Designer(s) and then depending on the topic a consultant. Once construction has started we have to add the GC (project manager and/or site supervisor) and then whatever subcontractor may be relevant. This leads to a long list of people who may need to be in on any given conversation. It's tough to get that many people in the same place at the same time for a meeting, and nearly impossible to get them all on the phone at once. This is why we've embraced email so fully; you can send one message to that entire group and everybody is suddenly on the same page. If there's an issue, everybody is made aware, if theres a question, everybody can get the answer all at once.
That is, until someone forgets to hit "reply all" when responding. Nothing can kill a rapid fire exchange of ideas faster than that. I know we've all been copied on emails that seem like a waste of time, and agree that we need to use or best judgement on when we copy a whole bunch of people, but if someone asks you a question, and you only respond to the one person on the list that you think needs to know then you can have a lot of frustrated people who feel like you've dropped the ball on something.
The example that's on my mind is the with the Interior Designer (ID) on a project that is nearly complete and has a huge deadline this weekend. There's a ton of questions for the ID, that the GC has highest priority to know so that he can build/paint/buy the right thing, but the Client and the Architect need to hear the answers too so that at the very least we know to stop pestering the ID about them, but also to make sure that the answer the ID gives makes sense and is feasible. This particular ID does not to "reply all", possibly on purpose, and so today when the client had a question about a paint color, and I dug back through last weeks emails to find the one with the answer in it that the GC forwarded me as courtesy, the ID flipped out when I re-sent that email to entire team (including the client). It was something that they had all seen already, so I don't fully understand what he was upset about, but this ID is also very sensitive, and has been difficult to manage, but there will be more on personalities another time.
By "flipped out" I mean an angry voicemail to me and an angry phonecall to my boss before I had had a chance to return the first call. My boss was on my side with this, but as always we see the larger picture and try to keep people calm and the process moving forward. I ended up explaining myself to the ID in an email, not apologizing but still sounding apologetic, trying to be the bigger person. There's been no response from him on this yet, but I don't expect there to be, he's rarely responded when there's been similar blow-ups in the past. We'll see.
Turns out the client doesn't like the paint color the ID picked out, so that's sort of a selfish bookend for me on this one.
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