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Why Be An Architect

This document discusses many potential motivations and rewards for becoming an architect. It covers: making a decent living and lifestyle choices as an architect, the potential for social status and connections as a respected professional, achieving fame and recognition for exceptional work, creating structures that can achieve a form of immortality, contributing to and shaping culture, helping and teaching others, intellectual fulfillment through creative problem solving and aesthetic achievements, enjoying drawing and design work, fulfilling one's own personality and preferences, and having the freedom to be individualistic in one's work.

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127 views3 pages

Why Be An Architect

This document discusses many potential motivations and rewards for becoming an architect. It covers: making a decent living and lifestyle choices as an architect, the potential for social status and connections as a respected professional, achieving fame and recognition for exceptional work, creating structures that can achieve a form of immortality, contributing to and shaping culture, helping and teaching others, intellectual fulfillment through creative problem solving and aesthetic achievements, enjoying drawing and design work, fulfilling one's own personality and preferences, and having the freedom to be individualistic in one's work.

Uploaded by

PinkyMaeVillarosaQuiñones
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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AR 428/Regular Architectural Practice

(Advisory Grading)
Lecture 1

WHY BE AN ARCHITECT?
Why be an architect? Deciding to become an architect should be a positive decision predicated
on positive expectations. What then can one expect? What are the rewards and motivations that
lead men and women to invest five to eight years in rigorous university and professional
education, two or more years in apprenticeship, and subsequent decades pursuing architectural
practice, teaching, scholarship, or research?

MONEY AND LIFESTYLE


 Income is one of the things that any career or profession should provide. (survival to affluence
earnings)
 Each earning level offers corresponding lifestyle choices.
 Architects are frequently associated with high life-style circumstances, so people assume that
architects are affluent, well to do, big income professionals.
 Income in the profession of architecture is solidly middle class.
 Architects begin careers as wage earners to associates or principal owners.
 Larger firms provide larger incomes compared to small firms.
 Those who earn large incomes may live very well compare to wage earners.
 Some architects have discovered other means, outside architectural practice to sustain them
financially.
 Earning money (adequate compensation) can be a serious problem for architects.
 Architecture is not a field to enter to become rich by today’s standards but can earn a descent
living at it at most time.

SOCIAL STATUS
 Society assumes that architects are educated, artistically sensitive and technically
knowledgeable.
 Society knows that architects create monumental designs, as a result may be well respected or
admired.
 As professional, architects generally associate with other professions, with people in the creative
arts or with people in business or government.
 In many culture architecture is among the most respected of all profession.
 The possibility of belonging to the so-called establishment status having close connections to
business and government interests—being seen as among influential peers of the local realm.
 Establishment means:
o Having your name recognized by people you don’t know.
o Being asked to serve on boards and committees.
o Being sought periodically by the press.
o Knowing what’s going on behind the scenes—insider.
o Involve among the power elite.

FAME
 Fame may even come without wealth, in architecture it often does.
 To become publicly recognized if not celebrated, can be an end in itself above others.
 To be famous usually requires exceptional deeds; it may be constructive or destructive, as long
as they are exceptional and noteworthy.
 Most architects become famous in a gradual way by doing work which eventually gets recognized
for its excellence.
 For architects fame and recognition come through the publicizing and publishing of what they do,
say or write.
 Not only designing and building projects, but also:
o Winning awards for projects
o Lecturing and writing
o Being talked about by others

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o Winning or judging competitions.
 Being famous is a form of public certification, a validation of success and a salvation from
anonymity
 Fame usually produces a desirable side effect—more clients and commissions.

IMMORTALITY
 What a better way to live forever than through the creation of potentially ageless and permanent
structures and buildings, and even future ruins, might tell future archaeologists, historians, and
cultural legatees the story of who we were and what we did.
 Architects can leave behind architecture as memorials to themselves.
 Most creative individuals desire to make at least one thing which could last forever
 Only architecture seemed to provide the opportunity to create something lasting and immortal.

CONTRIBUTING TO CULTURE
 Good architects see themselves as more than professionals rendering services to fee-paying
clients.
 Architecture is an expression and embodiment of culture, or cultural conditions.
 By designing and building, architects know that they may be contributing directly to culture’s
inventory of ideas and artifacts.
 Search for appropriate cultural achievement is an important motivation for architects.
 Architects contribution may be:
o Unprecedented—new style, technology, or method of design.
o Reaffirm or refine already established cultural icons.

HELPING AND TEACHING OTHERS


 Since architecture can both render public service and serve as public art, architect can easily
fulfill the desire to help or teach other people
 Even when designing commercial projects for profit-motivated clients, architects believe that they
have an additional, equally important client—the public.
 They feel an obligation to all who may use, occupy, or see the building they design, both in the
present and the future—an obligation not only to provide shelter and accommodate activities but
also to instruct and inspire.
 It’s very fulfilling for the architect to know that the client and public appreciate and benefits from
his or her efforts.
 Public-spirited architects contribute other than designing buildings:
o Adept in matters of organization
o Coordination and advocacy
o Assisting needy individuals, communities and special-interest groups to develop projects,
preserve buildings, or save neighborhoods.
 Like fame, doing for others elevates our ego and validates our sense of achievement.
 Teaching offers the dual satisfaction of professing and conveying knowledge to others.
 One of the teaching’s greatest rewards in fact is to see their former students successfully
applying what they have learned.

THE REWARDS OF CREATIVITY AND INTELLECTUAL FULFILLMENT


 One of the most convincing reasons to be an architect is the purely intellectual and emotional
gratification which surrounds creativity.
 For the architect, creating buildings can be a moment of elation.
 Creating something beautiful or aesthetically composed—a work of art—is the primary goal of
many architects.
 Meeting both performance and aesthetic objectives simultaneously is architecture’s greatest
creative challenge.

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 Sometimes just getting a project built is a victory, but when it’s good architecture, the victory is
relished even more.
 Specific aptitudes or talents that contribute to mastering and enjoying the discipline of
architecture, prerequisites for intellectual fulfillment:
o Graphic and visual skill. The ability to see and to express things in graphic form.
o Technical aptitude. Proficiency in mathematics and scientific analysis.
o Verbal skills. The ability to read, write and speak, to organize or analyze effective verbal
expression.
o Organizational skill. The ability to create order and direction out of disorder and chaos.
o Memory. The ability to store and recall information or ideas.
o Compositional talent. The artistic ability to compose aesthetically successful visual form
in two and three dimension.

LOVE OF DRAWING
 For many architects drawing is an extremely satisfying and stimulating use of time and energy.
 If you like drawing per se, then you may grow to love it as an architect, if you find it tedious or
difficult, then architecture may not be the right choice.
 In many ways passion for drawing and the drawing techniques which architects develop and
master are unique to the profession of architecture.

FULFILLING THE DICTATES OF PERSONALITY


 Attributes of personality are of great importance in shaping architect’s careers.
 Anyone contemplating architecture as a profession should seriously take stock of his or her
personality.
 Since there are so many personal attributes and so varied in everyone’s personality, a sampling
follows:
o Self-confidence and ego strength. Believing that you are capable, able to compete,
perform well, and succeed.
o Ambition. Wanting vigorously to accomplish and succeed.
o Dedication and persistence. Committing and sticking to a cause or task, with a
willingness to work hard at it.
o Resilience. Coping well with setbacks, criticism, and failure; being able to bounce back,
to overcome.
o Amiability. Being able to affiliate and get along with others, to collaborate and participate.
o Charm and poise. Behaving so others see you as well-mannered, witty, thoughtful,
friendly, and comfortable to be with.
o Leadership. Being able to persuade and inspire others to follow you or embrace your
proposals, and to make decisions.
o Courage. Willingness to take risks other shun, to experiment, to venture into new
territory, to lose as well as win.
o Passion. Capacity for intense and emotional feelings about people, ideas, places, or
things…easily taken for obsession.

FREEDOM TO YOUR OWN THING


 Many architects do live up to their image, exhibiting idiosyncrasies in the way they dress, talk,
and work, or in their beliefs.
 They strive to be individualistic and nonconformist, if not radical
 There is a kind of ego satisfaction and reassuring feeling of exceptionality which comes from
being unique and different, from standing out, getting noticed and being remembered.

FINALLY, there is another reason for being an architect…….


 Many architects really know how to have a good time, to let go when necessary.
 Starting as a students indulging in absurdities in school.
 Architects have always found imaginative ways to relieve the pressure of architectural work.
 The fun comes through being whimsical, creating visual anecdotes or puns, and designing
fantasies, as well as through more conventional recreational means.
 But the good times and amusing diversions are needed for still another purpose.

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