Ironically it took years to publish this post because of my increased architectural output. I don’t even remember when I started it. Sometime after the first draft of this post I went from a blogger who worked in the field of architecture to an architect who used to have a thriving blog. I’m trying to find a better balance these days because I miss writing.

Let’s jump back to 2017…

I am starting this blog post at 6:50 pm on a Wednesday night. I just finished the dishes and now my wife is doing calligraphy with our daughters while I sneak off to my office to write for a half an hour. If I typed at full speed for those thirty minutes, I could crank out about twenty-five hundred words. I’m a fast typer. If I complete my thoughts in the next half an hour and proofread it in the morning after getting my kids off to school, this blog post could be published by 9 am. From initial idea while making mac and cheese to publication, it could be all of eighteen hours. I’m sure this won’t get published that quickly, I’m more finicky over my word choices and paragraph structure these days. I’ve definitely written and published blog posts in under two hours. A few times last year I read a comment or got an e-mail right after finishing breakfast and decided the answer should be done in a video. I’d record the video, write the blog post, and start spreading it around social media all before lunch. Blogging is fast. Once published, a post is at the whim of the internet. Some posts have a slow boil and are read a few thousand times over the subsequent weeks and months. Others blow up and have hundreds or thousands of eyes on them in hours or days. It all depends on what I write, who decides to share it, and how the algorithms are feeling that day. Architecture is the polar opposite.

Architecture is agonizingly slow. While working at SALA Architects, one of the highlights of the year was the annual calendar. Every year SALA sends a calendar to all their previous, current, and prospective clients—as well as lucky former coworkers, consultants, family, etc. They also have a stack to share at their office and at various trade shows. If you have a firm with enough work, I highly recommend copying this idea. A simple wall calendar of twelve to fifteen images is a nice object to create and share. Each year, each project architect typically got one project of their choosing in the calendar. For those of us who weren’t project architects, it was always exciting to explore the calendar and see if our names were in it. The first few years at SALA were always a silent disappointment for me. My name never showed up because none of the projects I worked on were in the calendar. After a few years that changed. First there was one project, then two. Then one year—I’m not sure I got included on the credits for all the projects—there was three or four projects I was integral to. It was really cool. But then I quit and moved away from Minnesota. The marketing opportunity that was the calendar disappeared. In January 2015, after being away from SALA for two and a half years (or two calendars worth of time) I got a call from the admin. She wanted to send me a calendar because one of the projects I worked on was in it. That was a pleasant surprise. The following year I got another call, verifying my address hadn’t changed. It hadn’t. Another calendar showed up, once again with a project I worked on in it. Then the 2017 calendar arrived (which was the reason I started writing this post five years ago). I wasn’t expecting it. But I did once again eagerly flip through it, curious if there were any projects I knew in it. And sure enough there was.

By 2017 I’d been gone from SALA for five years, longer than I was there; longer than I’d worked at any other firm besides Shoegnome. And yet projects I worked on were still fresh enough that they showed up in choice marketing material.

Architecture is so slow. There is rarely instant gratification. All our 3D modeling helps; I know what projects will look like before they are built and I can market renderings, but renderings aren’t photos of the real thing. Had I stayed at SALA, I’d have been there over fifteen years by now. I’d be a principal or an extremely disgruntled project architect. I’d have a long string of clients and projects to promote. But I’d probably only recently have new work that was the result of projects started within the past few years. Odds are I’d still be reaping the rewards of those earlier projects.

Architecture is slow. Painfully slow.

In 2015 I picked up a bathroom remodel. Construction got delayed and only started in early 2017. The contractor was a two man father-son operation. They had other projects going and often had to walk away to deal with other things for a few days. Six months later was the first time the clients got to use the bathroom. We took a few pictures. We told ourselves that it’d be a while before we could coordinate a time to take better photographs, maybe with the help of a professional photographer friend of mine. With luck, I’d have good marketing images that Spring—almost two years after we first talked… about turning a powder room and two closets into a three-quarter bath and a walk-in-closet. Two years. It actually took four years to get photos. Turns out the photos didn’t happen until they sold the house in October of 2019 and we’d done a second, much bigger project.

Architecture is so slow.

In this post I’ve mainly talked about marketing, but the whole process is slow. I’ll write about that another day. How permitting in some jurisdictions can take months (thanks Seattle). How schematic design can drag on forever if ideas don’t come together and clients aren’t happy. How the whole design and documentation process can easily go from forty or fifty hours for a small garage to hundreds of hours for a normal house to thousands of hours for larger projects.

In the time it takes to go from first meeting to finished photography, so much can change. Presidents come and go. Children are born. Recessions hit. Recoveries sputter out. Prospective clients call and e-mail. A few turn into new projects that will in turn go on for months or years, and with luck will produce future projects and clients.

While that’s all happening, I can write whatever I want on my blog, or elsewhere. Those elsewheres can go dark and I can pretend I have time to revise those lost blog posts and reshare them on Shoegnome. I can crank out hundreds of blog posts, amounting to over a million words (my back of the envelope calculation of how much I’ve published online, and a little offline, in the first seven years of blogging).

I wanted to wait and share this post after I finished another unfinished post about starting a firm. Because this ties into that; starting an architecture firm is complicated by the slowness of our business. Even if you pick up a few good clients to start, it’ll be an agonizing amount of time before you have images of that work. Sure you can rely on work done at previous jobs, but all that work degrades. It’s disheartening to share work with clients and say “I did this at X firm…a billion years ago.” But that’s what we have to do. Anyways. More later. The goal here is to get back to writing and sharing. More soon.

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