How to tell 20-year-old women about the practice of architecture in the course of just a few seminars? Students: they signed up, what's more - they came, and mostly came because architecture is increasingly female. The men in the group are 25 percent, mostly poorly connecting the dots "erazmus" from Spain and more literate guys from the steppe lands on Europe's eastern borders, or the jungles of Southeast Asia. The girls seem more well-read and knowledgeable. A Spanish woman professionally hooks the presenter with an invitation to LinkedIn, while a Ukrainian woman in her thirties has moved her family and the door business she inherited from her parents to Poland. To my surprise, they show up every week, almost a full house, and listen to the presenter, me, waving my hands, recount the plight and misery of my fellow professionals. Those of the 20th century and the present. Of course, not only about that: biographical tidbits are a juicy topping on a dish consisting mainly of the bones and sinews of architectural everyday life.
At the beginning of the course, I decided to break architecture students out of the illusion that life is a Hollywood narrative. There is no single, repeatable scripted career or biography pattern that follows the Platonic triad. Even worse, there is also no guarantee or even one possible form of happy ending. Fortunes happen, sometimes we earn them the hard way, sometimes they are like a shot from over the coals. Careers only in a few cases carry us all the way up, towards the gods, as happened with the "ascensions" of Bjarke Ingels, Helmut Jahn or Carlos Ferrater. Even for such cases, some price must be paid. I patiently explained to the young people that usually fortune smiles, yes, but it takes place alternately with battering. Sometimes appreciation (by the world and people) comes in old age, not infrequently after death. and on top of that, we can be appreciated not so much for our professional achievements, but for some parallel strand of our activity, like Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for her steadfast anti-fascist activity, or Maria and Kazimierz Piechotek for collecting documentation on disappearing wooden Jewish temples.
What's more, we can be hardworking and talented, but be born in overly interesting times and, like Schütte-Lihotzky, spend years in prison or languish in provincial exile, like Moisei Ginzburg, who may have been grateful to fate that the machinery of Stalin's purges did not grind him down. I drew narrative lines on the blackboard, talked about the literary principle of hero transformation, introduced pivotal moments, introduced the theory of the black swan and extremely rare events. I also did not refrain from painting them a sarcastic landscape of human existence and death. I told the story of Antonio Gaudi's pathetic demise under the wheels of a streetcar on his way to the Sagrada Familia for supervision, and of Louis Kahn's heart attack, indebted up to his ears, in a Penn Station restroom just after arriving from campus construction in Ahmedabad, India. I also assured them that many accomplished architects have made a life of well-deserved retirement, like Le Corbusier while swimming in the Mediterranean. In a word, don't be afraid, act, squeeze what you can out of your potentials, and even if it won't always be to your liking, at least it will be interesting.
In the next class it was about checkout. What types of customers from different sectors can we meet on our way? How to shred payments so as to minimize the risk that the customer will not pay us for unspecified reasons? How not to fall prey to the passion pushing us towards design, which causes many smart people to recognize that "if architecture is your passion, why pay for it?". How do we ask clients questions to not only optimally address their needs, often unconscious, but also learn new things from them, such as investing? How to jump out of project logic towards financial independence? Here I suggested not only to be prudent and vigilant in deciphering the signals that might bring opportunities to enrich oneself, but I also had no qualms about zooming in on cases involving architects who: a.were richly born, such as Oscar Niemeyer, b. married richly, such as the aforementioned Louis Kahn, c. had wealthy and influential mistresses, such as Bohdan Pniewski. "If case "a" applies to you, make good use of the family fortune, if you want "b", take care of your dentition and don't go to parties for architects, only toexpensive establishments for socialites, if "c", then, like many of my female interiors colleagues, travel on business only in first class, because there you can meet really interesting people with 'beaks'."
Inevitably, I had to descend into topics bordering on philosophy and ethics, saying that they will have to ask themselves what the limits of their flexibility are, and not only in terms of deliberate selection of official and unofficial partners, but also in strictly architectural matters. Do you want to design for the nabobs of Gazprom? Do you believe that the Green Lungs of Warsaw are ideally suited for development with expensive housing estates? Do you really believe that pecunia non olet, and that Philip Johnson was right when he called our profession "the world's oldest profession" in front of a room full of students at Harvard?
Then we tackled the topic of motivation and emotions. After all, most of us decided to enter this profession out of a fondness (or: "because it looks cool with a drawing tube under our arm"), then a genuine fascination and finally love. Love, unfortunately, like any passionate feeling, had to collide with inexorable reality, with its routines and Excel sheets. In the case of many of us, love may have turned into a warm friendship or evolved into a toxic relationship leading to burnout or, not such a bad thing at all, to eventual divorce. After all, many former architects have excelled in the new chapter of their biographies as consultants, managers or, like Fernando Colomo - as a director of popular Spanish comedies, or Witek Szymanik - as the owner of WSC, a software distribution company for architects and designers. Professional burnout can, like a crisis in a marriage, affect anyone. A sudden dislike of clerks, clients and their problems can fall on a person unexpectedly. That's how it fell on me in 2019, when a pandemic outbreak pushed me into the arms of a new lover - literature. Passion as the main motivation for work can easily lead astray, I argued in front of 20 students, which is why it should be dosed and the self should pour a bucket of cold water on its head every now and then. Before reality does. Momentary sobering up comes in handy for anyone who wants to go long, not just go fast. Here, I pointed out, the question arises: go where? Every American manager's handbook tells us to answer this question by imagining ourselves in the future. "What do you want to be in five years, a heartthrob?"
Students passed the class by making simple presentations from "lives of saints" according to a special key. From Minnette De Silva and Charles Correa to the Hansens, the Piechoteks and the CENTRALA Design Group. Just before that, I did another class on the nature of business. Where there is money to be made is one thing, creative goals (if we have any at all) is another, and the means by which we want to achieve them is a third. What scale? What path? Practice in a smaller studio, then a larger studio, then authorial activity or with a group of friends? Act alone or in a group? If in a group, what kind of group? What kind of legal personality? Limited liability company and limited partnership for larger turnover? Sole proprietorship for smaller ones? Or instead of exposing yourself to the uncertainty of your own business, how about cozying up to a full-time job with a developer, a large construction company, or never leaving a big studio from housing, where the work front is billed in quarters, but the money flows into your account every month? I also talked about the relationship between the "coolness" of the assignments and the money and opportunity to grow the company, showing examples of low profile oriented studios. At the end of the day, scaling in business is essential, because even though we may be very artistic, we still have to take into account that pregnancies, feeding and educating the kids, loans, bills, illnesses, investments and pensions are not getting any cheaper. The nature of business is a product of our appetites and aspirations, lifestyles and opportunities. A creative space stretched between mercantilism and idealism in an increasingly generic, plastic world.
Why all this? Because no one told me at college, and I've been to three European universities, "what the kaman", how to connect the dots in this perverse profession. And in general what to do next. No one laid out the palette of possibilities, showing how much freedom of choice I could have and what would limit me in it. At the end of my studies, after six years out of eight, I teleported between the naive enthusiasm of creating (more than working) with a group of friends and warnings from old (forty-year-old old men), frustrated architect friends. These told of the rudeness of developers, the whims of rich wives and the insolence of officials. My students will face further transitions and seas of paradoxes: some things will not change, such as the fact that contact with the public sector will be a gehenna for many of them, and rich wives will want fireworks and serious treatment of their pinterest overtures. Other things will change radically, like work methods and the status of the profession, and perhaps geopolitical realities. Will these classes help them? I hope so, although I couldn't give them a route marker or determine the best route. Instead, I could describe points on a map full of precipices and dragons and mention that it's always worth remembering where our personal north is.
Know your north, baby!
Jakub Szczęsny
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