six years in. -or- don’t call me an Architect.

from Back40.ws (june-oh-nine)

Packed comfortably now in a steel tube, ascending above the asphalt and exotic grass basin that is Phoenix, I consider the last few days.    This past weekend, our old class from architecture school gathered for reunion.   It was a fine Sonoran Saturday that found us collected in Tucson’s Barrio Hollywood under full moon and sky that stretched across the globe.   We were old friends, comrades and sometime rivals, all back together to honor what our old faculty simply think of as, ‘The Class’.   Six years later, it’s needless to say that just about everybody needed a drink.   As we settled, the stories emerged.   The most common one involves a firm and a computer, a well worn routine, a sagging economy and sometimes the phrase ‘layed off’.     Ugh.

But amidst the dry, deadly familiar, there were others:

There is my unofficial love and equally unofficial little sister, Madeline, our fine host for the evening, who after spending years immersed in the earth and glass and sometimes-billionaire-client-funded world of Rick Joy, is now digging into the scruffy part of Oakland. Working with a few hungry fellows on a mission to redefine the way people use bikes.  It’s called Xtracycle – and with her help, their who-needs-an-SUV-when-you-can-have-a-bicycle lifestyle is coming to the pavement near you.    Promise.

Then Im and David, who after several years working more common architecture jobs by day, and crafting and empowering every square inch of a tiny apartment by night and weekend, popped up on the cover of some trashy rag called Dwell.   They walked away from the left coast a few years ago to study at Cranbrook Academy and make lovely things.   Today they are themselves on a plane, headed to Bangkok, and a little plot of land laying in wait for the design studio they’ve set out to build.   Their material lives are packed in a shipping container, sitting on an enormous boat and traveling a one way route somewhere presently in the South Pacific.     The future is open, the details unclear.

And yes, there’s us, with our build it right now, bootstrapping, self teaching, scrap-your-way-through-digging-trenches-and-crafting-new-visions-for-old-buildings-alike model.  What’s common with these stories is the bob-and-weave.   A refusal to be bound by conventional paths and a willingness to apply more than just your education, but rather your entire self into doing something.      A lightness that respects the flowing wind and shifting tides of deep time, and modern time.

People in the world.

I don’t want to glamorize this – it’s largely the absence of glamour, or the immunity to glamour that defines such a way, i think.    Even more, this really isn’t a discount to the more conventional roads many take – the world still needs architects who are simply [Architects].    …I think.       Something that sticks though, sitting now somewhere above Southern Oregon, is that of all the stories told under the wispy desert clouds and beckoning moonlight that night, the light ones sure didn’t dwell much on the economy.

As ever, go forward.