Rigorous Pursuit in Architecture
By Samuel G. White ’60
f you had spent the last thirty years exploring the outer regions of the solar system, you could be forgiven for approaching any discussion of your own “rigorous pursuits” without a flicker of intimidation arising from two words: Steve Jobs. His life story appears everywhere you turn, while his accomplishments and his level of rigor set the bar so high that the world seems to be divisible into two lots: Steve Jobs and the rest of us. But Steve Jobs was only the most recent of extraordinarily focused and accomplished individuals who have had a profound impact on the trajectory of modern life. The rest of us represent a substantial crowd, from backsliders to Nobel prizewinners and, in my
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case an architect who tries (and occasionally succeeds) to improve a few very small corners of the world. I was in graduate school when I heard a story about a famous architect—I think it was Mies van der Rohe but it could have been anyone. Speaking at a conference, Mies observed that there was some interesting work being done by a group of young architects, which is nothing remarkable in itself except for the fact that the young architects in question were all in their fifties or sixties and Mies was about eighty. It takes a long time to be an architect. You go to college for five years or graduate school for three. School is hard, not because the work is inherently difficult, but because you are expected to reject easy or pre-conceived solutions in favor of discovering more difficult, hard-won answers. You stay up all night for a week trying to unpeel some conceptual onion in order to discover the essence of a design problem, and then you defend your conclusions to a skeptical jury. It sounds like masochism, but there is an upside. Nothing can match the level of intellectual immersion and camaraderie of the design studio. For the first time in your academic experience you are surrounded by peers who share your principal interest, who are willing to talk about it endlessly, who will spend a weekend driving to see “Falling Water” and who are staying up as late as you are. Everybody in your studio is committed to architecture, and the atmosphere is intoxicating. Once you graduate and start to work, you are in an apprentice program leading to licensing in two or three years. Your training exposes you to the specific phases of the architectural process (design, working drawings, construction) but not necessarily to less well-defined facets of architectural practice such as getting the job, keeping the client happy, running a business, motivating the team, getting your work acknowledged, and landing the next job. Where you go from there depends on your interests, your abilities, and a certain amount of luck. You can continue to work for a firm, or you can go out on your own, which a few intrepid people actually do intentionally and I did somewhat by accident. After about one year in an office I had commis-
Armstrong Exterior.
30? •? Saint David’s Magazine