5 Lessons Learned From My First Architecture Job

This past August I started a new architecture job. After two years at my old one, I felt that it was time for a new experience. Looking back at my first two years in architecture, I wanted to share 5 lessons learned from my first architecture job, just a few of the many things I learned and am bringing with me into this new one.

The new firm I’m working for provides Engineering, Architecture and General Contracting. The General Contracting branch is a new addition to the company within the last year, and their project workload was expanding rapidly. I’ll be primarily working on this side as well as the architectural one. With the project management experience, I gained from my last firm, working in the GC gives me a chance to see things from the other side. The current and future opportunities are exciting, and in a few months, after a couple hundred more hours, I will be a licensed architect.

Architecture is a journey, and being an architect means continually learning. The two years at my previous firm were my first job after graduate school. I’ve talked about this before, but architecture school does not prepare you for the realities of practicing. It is a sink or swim situation. I was thrown into ongoing projects with the urgency to make a meaningful contribution. I had never used AutoCAD or SketchUp in grad school, but had to learn them immediately if I was to be of any use.

Other than the obvious learning of software, there were a lot of smaller things I learned over the years, whether directly or indirectly, through experience or from others. In starting a new job, I think it’s natural to feel some form of impostor syndrome. Ultimately, I did learn a lot at my previous one, useful things, both design and non-design oriented, that I could bring to my current job.

Here are five of the many things that I learned:

1) Managing clients is probably the hardest aspect of the job.

For many clients, this is their first time going through the construction process. It’s personal, and they are spending large sums of money, and how clients react to that can manifest in different ways. Sometimes I felt more like a therapist than a designer, managing their emotions in addition to the project.

Something else that needed to be managed was boundaries. If expectations on availability aren’t set early, clients will take advantage, thinking they’re entitled to your time whenever they feel like it because of the money they are spending. It’s a delicate balance because you want to be available, but not everything needs to be an immediate response.

2) You can’t know everything.

There are so many things an architect needs to know that it’s impossible to know all of them. Codes, zoning, structures, MEP systems, materials, construction methods, accessibility, permitting, contracts, detailing, software, and the list goes on.

There’s value in relying on people with more experience. Knowing when to ask someone who has more experience can save hours of trying to figure something out on your own.

That also means building a network of people you can reach out to.

Sometimes the person who knows the answer isn’t someone you work with every day. It might be a former coworker, a friend, an engineer you’ve worked with before, a contractor, a consultant, or another architect who has dealt with a similar situation. Architecture is too broad for any one person to know everything.

Hopefully, with experience comes more knowledge, and I can become one of those people that someone else can call. The things you once had to ask someone about eventually become things you know well enough to help someone else with. You are constantly learning, through the questions you ask, but also through the continuing education hours necessary to keep licensure.

3) Design isn’t linear.

It’s easy to think you start with a concept and then, as the concept progresses, you have a more refined result. And while that is definitely true, there’s a whole middle area where you go back to earlier designs, go forward, go back, rethink everything completely, show something new, decide on a concept only to go back to a previous iteration.

A lot of this is due to the complexities of designing in the real world, codes that restrict what you can do, clients budgets that take away from what you want to do, and the realities and integration of other trades (HVAC, plumbing, structural). All of these things may not be apparent in the initial stages. The engineers usually don’t come on until later, and these things can impact the design and the final outcome.

4) The last 10% of a Construction Document set takes the most time.

When you feel like you have all the big stuff done, the plans, the sections, it’s the last 10% that takes the most time.

The details, the callouts, the elevations, the coordination, and the thoughtfulness behind how the building will get built and how that’s communicated always takes significantly more time than expected. When you come to expect it, it’s always surprising how much time it takes.

5) Good design is difficult to price.

It can be difficult for an architect to properly price their own work. Clients can be hesitant to spend money on architectural services, yet seem much more accepting when a contractor presents them with a large bill. Part of the problem is that construction has a much more tangible relationship between the work being done and the money being spent. Architecture is different.

The design process is inherently iterative. You may tell a client that you are going to present three options, but those three options can quickly turn into six. One idea leads to another, a client reacts to something differently than expected, or you discover a solution that wasn’t apparent at the beginning. Before you know it, you’ve spent several more hours working through possibilities and have gone beyond the hours originally budgeted for that phase.

Those additional hours can be what leads to the best design. Architecture isn’t always about stopping when you’ve reached the agreed upon number of hours. Sometimes the fifth or sixth iteration is the best one. But how do you properly charge for that? Do you stop designing because you’ve reached the end of the budget, even when there may be a better solution waiting to be discovered? Or do you continue working and risk doing hours of unpaid work?

There is an inherent tension between the business of architecture and the process of designing a building. As an architect, you want to produce the best design possible, but you also have to recognize that your time has value and that a project needs to be financially sustainable. It’s a balance that I think many architects find difficult to figure out.