Chief Vs Autocad

[Sydney23]

Interesting thread. I wish I had qualified as an architect, I might find my work easier now. Maybe. Or more likely I'd be working on bigger, commercial and more innovative projects. But as an adult I can't take 7 years out on no/minimum wage, so it's a non starter. Combined with the fact that architects in the UK don't earn what I do as a 'designer' for a good few years post qualification... It's a painfully undervalued profession and the only ones that get any attention are those that create absurd, over-budget, unusable, barely liveable, ego-led flights of fantasy. Or so it seems.

Only about 1 in 20 customers even thinks to ask if I am qualified. Of the handful that have, only once has anyone expressed any concern or disappointment (he wanted to add a sloped roof to his existing garage!!). A couple of weeks ago a customer invited me round after a phone call because I 'knew more than all the other guys' - qualified architects. Granted I doubtless know less about Doric columns or if beige is the new black, but he didn't ask about those, strangely enough. Last week I chatted with a phone caller about planning law for ten minutes before she revealed she was a property lawyer and booked me in to quote for her design project. I have senior planning consultants I can turn to in extremes, but can they design a building? No. Or know building regs? No. Etc, etc.

Do I have a degree? Yes. Do I have a professional post-grad qualification? Yes. Just not in architecture. Do any of my customers ask for buildings that look like they melted (as opposed to melting things around them like the architect - or was he a 'designer'?! - in London did last month)? No. I wish they did, could be fun, but no.

So I have to be good (or at least competent) at design, costing, planning law, building regulations, photography, writing, software, joint venture business plans - it's a lot. There are professionals in each one of those areas, but on small residential (up to 30 flats) for the builders, private individuals and property developers who are my customers, the jelly mould is out and CA is in. I went for a drink with an architecture graduate friend recently. He said his three years was basically an art degree. I envy his future, but right now I couldn't afford to take him on even for free - he is so green when it comes to my world. And when he does, he won't be as good at some (relevant) things as my non-architectural education has made me. Ultimately, would I rather have his training to do my job? Probably, yes. But I stagger on with the tools I have and who I am... For smaller projects, without the budgets to pay for art, a generalist realist is very much not second best according to my customers. I'll never design the shard, or the dome, or the cucumber or whatever they call those teenage doodles in London, nor even a glass pyramid in Paris. I guess my prosaic career will just develop suited to the prosaic me that I am. That's OK.

Bottom line, if one of my children said tomorrow they wanted to design buildings - I'd tell them to train as an architect. And get a job on a building site.

(Takes cover...)