The Sagan Series

I could spend all day writing about Space or finding and posting about cool images and videos that I find online, but I don't think that the world needs that right now, and I also don't think that's what's going to help me be a better Architect.  However, as with the recent anniversaries that we've endured, I feel that on occasion there are things that are too important to not interrupt our irregularly scheduled programming.

Today that interruption comes to us in the form of two videos from what's being called The Sagan Series, which feature modern, seemingly hi-definition video of our world and the Space Shuttle set to the calm, thoughtful, nigh-immortal words of Carl Sagan.

I encourage you to take 7 minutes and watch these videos and listen to his words.  The message is really very simple, it costs so little to explore, and learning about the unknown is truly what human beings do best.

Daily Planning

Amongst the things my boss mentioned to me at my review back in December was that some people in the office set goals for what they want to get accomplished in any given day so that when they get there they can get right to work.  This is was not a new idea to me and is something that I had been doing and still do, but apparently he didn't think that I did.  Last Friday I showed up to work with two tasks that I definitely wanted to get done and felt that the small amount of work on my other project wouldn't keep me from completing the other two.

I had to make one phone call to my client to clarify something that was going on with another member of the design team and it got out of control and became a shit show that consumed the rest of day entirely.  My boss and I talked about me calling the client to talk about the situation and instead of just picking up the phone and calling him like I probably should have, I decided to email him and ask when he'd be free.  He runs a company so it made sense to me find out rather than to just surprise him with a call.  He responded fairly quickly to say that he'd call me in a half hour.  That was fine with me, it gave me time to work on my two main tasks of the day (incidentally not a part of this clients projects).  Giving him that half hour sealed the fate of my productive day.  In my email I mentioned to him what I wanted to discuss, and I find out later that hadn't been paying much attention to this particular issue and in that half-hour he was able to look into it and to get himself pretty worked up about it.

He called me from the road and started right off on the offensive and shouting into the phone about the problem and how it shouldn't be his responsibility, nor should he be on the hook for the cost, and even further that he was the one coordinating the project when it should be my company. This isn't remotely true, we've coordinated more than he realizes, and it's only when he's struck with an additional cost that he accuses others of not doing their jobs.  Regardless, he was upset and came at me with such a fervor that I couldn't respond, I was caught so off guard that I didn't know what to say to him, which is exactly what he wanted I'm sure.  Clearly I don't react well to being yelled at, never have in my life, and unfortunately this project has seen me being shouted at on multiple occasions by the client, the GC, the designer, and less directly, by my other boss at my review.

But I digress.

Aside from the fact that I had a lot of damage control to do, this conversation so flummoxed me that I couldn't recover for the rest of the day and made no progress on my other tasks.  And its not as though I sat around moping all day, there was a lot of management-type work to do on this project to keep the client happy.  I feel as if I've been talking for the last two weeks and not actually getting any work done. This project has had a series of deadlines set first by the GC, and then by the client, and now the GC has set another for this Friday, so I once again feel that I need to get through this week and everything will be fine - again.  I hope this time is really it and that 95% of the remaining project close out work gets done this work so theres less to be yelled at about.

Even once this project gets done I'll still have to deal with the fact that I'm going to get yelled at by people who want to have control and the upper hand in a situation.  That's a real fault of mine and one that is not conducive to leadership.

I need to work on this. 

Columbia

On this date 8 years ago I was awoken by a phone call from my father, who told me that the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry and that all hands were lost over Texas.  It took me a few minutes to understand what he was saying and why there was absolutely no hope of seeing seven parachutes carrying the crew to a safe landing.  I held some hope anyway and it wasn't until after I saw the footage of those faint contrails in the blue sky that I truly accepted that the crew was gone. 

As the years have passed I've thought of that day often, and I realize that I mourn the loss of the vehicle as much as I do the crew, which is not the case with Challenger.  This probably has something to do with my age at the time of the accidents, but also because Columbia was the first Space Shuttle, I watched her first lift-off, saw the "Hail Columbia" IMAX film in 1982, and even featured her in my thesis.  Columbia was the first, and in my opinion, best of the fleet and I was sad for her when I found out that she was too heavy to reach the International Space Station's orbit, thus reducing her usefulness in the post-ISS world. 

Unfortunately its hard not to view the tragic end of the STS-107 mission as the beginning of the end of the Shuttle program, and for the short term the winding down of our country's human spaceflight program.  Longtime opponents of Shuttle saw the damage to the heat shield as an inherent weakness that threatened to call into question the Shuttle program right down to its fundamentals. 

The Deep Beam disagrees, and in fact sees the Space Shuttle as one of the pinnacles of human achievement, that provides a unique and important capability that has no peer, and sadly no replacement.  OV-102 Columbia will be sorely missed, as will her crew.

Commander Rick Husband

Pilot William McCool

Payload Commander Michael Anderson

Mission Specialist 1 David Brown

Mission Specialist 2 Kalpana Chawla

Mission Specialist 4 Laurel Clark

Payload Specialist 1 Ilan Ramon


Hail Columbia!

Challenger STS-51L

Twenty-five years ago today Orbital Vehicle 099 Challenger exploded just after lift-off with all hands lost.  Seven souls gone, seven lights extinguished and never to light this world again.  It was a stunning day, and one that is hard to put into context of life in 2011 when politicians are shot at supermarkets, and we here almost daily of suicide bombers and police officers shot in the line of duty. 

What strikes a cord with me is that the crew of Challenger didn't put themselves in danger to save lives as police, fire and military servicepeople do.  Astronauts put themselves in danger for the pursuit of science and exploration, ideals that are very different than protecting life or democracy.  Science and the pursuit of knowledge are not ideals that everyday people tend to think of as things that are worth laying down ones life for, but every Astronaut, Cosmonaut and Taikonaut does.  Putting your life at risk so that others may benefit is as close to a definition of "hero" as I can think of, and so I honor the crew of Challenger as heroes. 

Commander Francis R. Scobee

 Pilot Michael J. Smith

Mission Specialist 1 Judith A. Resnik

MS2/Flight Engineer Ellison Onizuka

Mission Specialist 3 Ronald E. McNair

Payload Specialist 1 Gregory B. Jarvis

Payload Specialist 2 Sharon Christa McAuliffe

Godspeed

Remember

This is the Spaceflight Memorial Patch that NASA has created as a way to memorialize the lost crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.  Brave heroes all, all lives lost in pursuit of Space Exploration.  We enter an odd time on the calendar, the Apollo 1 crew was lost on the launchpad on January 27, Challenger on January 28, and Columbia was lost February 1. Three grim anniversaries spread out over decades, yet all fall in the space of one week.

NASA has designated the 27th as an agency-wide Day of Remembrance, and will also include the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 in their memorials.

The Deep Beam remembers.

Communication (1 of ?)

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.  

Stress

For some reason while I was driving to Consultants office the other day I had an imaginary conversation with someone about my job.  I have no idea why, it was one of those mental exercises that happen when your mind is particularly idle.  I don't really know who the person was, but it seems like she was waitress, and she asked me what I did for a living.

I told her that I was an Architect.

She asked if I liked it, and I responded yes wholeheartedly, but when she asked what it was like my response was:  "Stressful."

And then it occurred to me, I would like my job more (on a day to day basis) if I liked stress.  I know there are people (probably some in my office) who really thrive on stress and like to be in the middle of it solving problems and making other peoples stresses disappear, but I've never been like that.  I've always shied away from stress, as I have responsibility and other sort of "adult" aspects of life.

But now that I think about it, my job has been pretty stressful for about the last 2 years.  It started around the time that one of my coworkers left the firm and I took over the lead on the project we had been working on.  We went into pricing and construction documents, then more pricing and finally into construction, when things are supposed to get easier - which they didn't  My stress level has had all kind of ups and downs, at times getting close to unbearable, yet never really getting down to zero.

Last week I actually filed for a building permit (something that Contractors do all the time, but Architects rarely do), and getting that ready was really stressful.  But then, not long after this conversation with the "waitress" I walked into the building department and turned in the drawings and application paperwork.  Turns out I didn't have everything I needed, which was clear about 30 seconds into the conversation with the woman on the other side of the counter.  Shortly though, I realized that even though the city has questions, I also have the answers.  And that's a good feeling - I mean dear god, I'm an Architect - I do know a little about buildings.  Especially the one that I spent the last 6 months drawing and describing in a technical narrative.

Today there were more questions, and some clarifications on that project, and the other one has a punch list (to-do list really) that's getting shorter.  Either the stress is getting reduced, or I'm getting better at dealing with it.

Not sure if I like it yet, but I'm sure time will give me a chance to find out!