it was one of those weeks full of extremes, the really good and the really bad, the hot and the cold. nothing luke warm. i think subconsciously, i tried to relive final’s week in the real world. it was horrible. okay, not horrible, but by far the most work-induced-stress-related week yet…a whole 65 hours of it. and i got to thinking, half of my waking hours are spent “on the clock” and i have but one post devoted to such happenings. ta da…no. 2.
aside from last week, i can boldly state, i love my job. i wouldn’t go as far as saying i wake up excited to go to work. after my initial fight with the snooze button, it doesn’t take much to get me moving. our office operates much different than many architectural firms. we don’t work in teams or on one single project at a time. during any given week, i’ll have 5-10 projects run by my desk working with 3 different project managers. most of the work we do are smaller, community type projects which keeps my attention. i get bored easily on large, highly coordinated ones. the following a few consuming my time lately:
galichia heart hospital: ct remodel, or remodel, er addition
i love healthcare projects. it’s not because there contain huge opportunities for “Architecture”, but because the spaces i create and coordinate have such a huge impact on human life. i feel i can help people the most in healthcare type projects. but this one is a messy one. to build a hospital is one thing. to remodel it is another. moving patients, making nose, creating dust aren’t exactly welcomed in sterile environments. and talk about coordination. each week 12 of us [i the only female] sit around a conference room discussing the progress of the seven different phases. words like med gases, rad room, pixis machines fly around my head.
i’m getting better at understanding…slowly.
bcs/skt ventures: relocating office to remodeled old town building
my first job as a project manager. the client is an up and coming internet/phone company with a modern sense of style. they have never gone through a building process before with an architect and to my surprise, totally trust me. [oh, if they only knew!] they love the fabric of old town and want to preserve it as much as possible. however, it’s hard to do when you open up walls and realize they are supporting twice as much weight as they should in addition to having no shear support. this building, once three separate pieces, has a narrow corridor which runs down the middle. the old outside walls and windows are now inside…this is my favorite space. i’ve learned a lot about construction administration on this one, one of my great weaknesses. i’m not a commanding kind of person, so asking a contractor to move a wall really scares me.
i’m getting more confident…slowly.
don baxter & associates: new office building for a financial planner
another pm job, but this one from scratch…much easier. the first meeting my principal and i had with the contractor and don, we discovered a common love for wine. no sooner had we begun discussing his small wine stash in his office, than he pulled up a spread sheet of the 700 bottles he has collected at home. he opened a bottle to commemorate our first meeting and every meeting since then, we have taken turns providing a bottle. as the project’s design evolved, it became tuscan inspired. after the new year, i’ll hit the cd package hard and will get to put everything from the grading plan to the interior finishes together. though it’s location screams suburbia america, it will be the first i see go from my head, to my hand, to being built.
i’m becoming an architect…slowly.
throw in a new wood-oven pizza restaurant, programming for a retinal clinic, and LEED research for a new “gold building” in portland, along with city review comments and zone variance applications, and you have my working week. there was a time i longed for my phone to ring or reasons to send emails with my name at the bottom. now, i cringe when heather pages me and delay checking my message light. but i truly enjoy what i do. creating, molding, forming things into being and putting all the pieces together. ..i really don’t know of another profession which would fit me so well. someday, i’d like to do something i love so much that getting paid would be icing on the cake. the kind of job i am excited to get up for, one i would do without any financial reimbursement. i’m not there yet.
but i’m figuring it out…slowly.
