The Month of May is special for Pendulum Studio – my business partner and I decided to hang our own shingle on May 18, 2007 (Incorporation Day), My wife and I tied the knot May 30, 1998, we’ll move into our new office space May 2011. As we continue to reach new milestones in our careers it only seems appropriate to launch our blog in our favorite month of the year.
We’ll save random thoughts for our twitter posts and instead “break ice” with dialogue centered around issues we encounter while practicing architecture during troubled economic times – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It’s been reported that there are over 400 unemployed architects in the Kansas City metro alone and the numbers are climbing. Firms that have been considered household names for the past 25 years (affectionately referred to as the 800 pound gorillas) have started to bleed – there’s just not enough bananas to go around. Principal Owner’s of these firms are adopting guerilla warfare tactics just to stay alive. The “client pool” is becoming harder and harder to secure on the long term – fueled by the desperation of the profession. The “client pool” treats “us” (architects in general) as second class citizens because guess what…”if we don’t like it, there’s always another architect out there willing to do the work and live to die another day” – which says something about “us” (yet another topic for discussion).
As my business partner often says – “It’s tough out there”, yet we are still aggressively optimistic. We are living in the era of the “market challenger” – it’s time for us to be smarter, faster and more agile while conducting better business in general. It’s time for all of “us” to ingest a healthy dose of “get right” (as my father often says), and bring value back to this devalued profession.
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