50. chill out on your famous/oeidopus complex

Dear Cat,

No personal offence taken.

I am just very happy to get feedback.

Actually, your comment falls into the most common category of responses to this blog.
I think that most people believe fame is something that comes to those who work hard, do good design, are talented and have a bit of luck.
In my experience this is true but missing a very critical ingredient.
That ingredient is called "working on cultivating fame for yourself"

I wished we lived in a great meritocracy where architects are recognized purely on the basis of their work, but this is just not reality. Once in a blue moon a lucky chap will win a competition and get instant recognition. But if he/she does not cultivate their fame they will loose it. For the rest of us, its a goal that is cultivated and worked on over a lifetime like any other career path.

My hopes with this blog is to open people up to this idea. Fame is an achievable goal that must be tampered with talent, work, a bit of luck, etc, etc,. To focus on fame alone is just as bad as focusing on hard work alone. Haven't you heard the saying "Hard work and no Fame makes Jack a dull boy"

If I seem a wee bit obsessed with fame...well... that's just because I am! (genealogists have proven that I share a common ancestor with both Paris Hilton and Philip Johnson) It's also because this blog is just about this one aspect of the big picture. I don't wish to tell you how to design, or how hard to work, I leave that up to you. That's another blog.

I am not worried about being perceived as fame hungry because I don't talk about fame with other people as much as I write about it. I don't even tell people I write or read this blog and neither should you. See my post on how to read this blog.

Anyway, please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions or comments.

Best Regards

Conrad Newel

NOTES ON BECOMING A FAMOUS ARCHITECT
Freeing Minds Since August 2007


--- On Tue, 5/6/08, cat wrote:

From: cat
Subject: famous architect comment (cat)
To: architect.journal [AT] gmail.com
Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2008, 6:36 PM

Email Address: [EMAIL ADDRESS WITHHELD]

Name: cat

i think you need to chill out on your famous/oeidopus complex
(cant spell, sorry).

its distrubeing, and though amusing..
ultimatley you will be perceived as the
one that wanted to be famous,
rather than the one who worked hard enough to
become famous.

nothing personal.


--
Date/Time: 2008-05-06 09:36:19 PDT
Referrer:
http://famousarchitect.blogspot.com/2008/02/37-famous-architects-are-super-action.html

49. Young Architects Now Means "Young"

This was just too good to pass up. We have been talking about this stuff all along and then came this. We have said don't wait. The age of "The Lone Genius" architect is gone we are now in the era of the united team , go out and work for a famous architect and most importantly Rem Koolhaas has wings. Well this just confirms it. If you can't take if from us take it from Icon:

Is it just us or is the young architect a very different beast these days? For the first time, "young" actually means young, but "architect" may no longer mean architect. This is our list of the most significant rising practices. Like all list stories, you'll disagree with some of it, but that's half the fun.

The first thing to mention is that the "young architect" is definitely younger than he or she used to be. We borrowed the convention of using 40 as our cut-off point, but at least half of the people on this list are 35 or under - and one of them is a 33-year-old overseeing a practice with 75 staff. Have we moved from the architect of promise to the upstart with power?

Secondly, the school of thought that architects need to build things to make their presence felt is losing currency. There are a few on the list who reflect that - these are the strategists and networkers who challenge legislation and foment debate.

Interestingly, of those who do build, by far the most successful in business terms are the practices who were nurtured by Rem Koolhaas at OMA. Theirs is a world of seismic competition wins and huge staff counts.

But where's all the rebellion? There's little sense here of a generation reacting against the ideology of its elders - Perhaps that's simply because we live in apolitical times. In fact, there are few signs of a coherent generation at all, although there are definite camps: the Children of Rem, the quiet but extremely sophisticated disciples of Zumthor and SANAA, the tower builders and the open network activists.

This is a global list in more ways than one. You'll find three Americans, two Japanese, two Chinese, a Chilean, and Indian and a bunch of Europeans. But increasingly these practices are international anyway, undermining notions of national architecture - more important (a crucible these days) are the practices they meet at. Having said that, you'd think a British magazine might put more British architects on the list. But then, the key thing that is giving all these youngsters their big break is the culture of open architecture competitions - and that's something this country desperately needs.

• REX
• Alejandro Aravena
• Estudio Barozzi Veiga
• FAT

• Jesko Fezer
• BIG
• Architecture For Humanity
• Serie

• Philippe Rahm
• 6a
• MAD
• Work Architecture Company

• Junya Ishigami
• JDS Architects
• Information Based Architecture
• Limited Design

• Carmody Groarke
• Dorell Ghotmeh Tane
• Sou Fujimoto
• Feld 72

from Icon Magazine
original title - 20 Essential Young Architects -

48. Be Open & Coachable

Some time ago I visited a friend in architecture school at his studio there. While he was showing me around, and I noticed something rather strange. Some of the students' drafting boards were covered up like they had secret plans of Fort Knox under them.
I asked him "what was that about?"
He told me "they covered them up because they did not want anyone to steal their ideas"
I thought "Gollum!"
Do you remember Gollum from the movie The Lord of the Rings?
He was this guy that became possessed with a magical golden ring. He called it "My precious" and did almost anything to protect and keep it. In the end of the movie he became a sorry creature.




When you guard your idea out of competitive aims, your idea develops only with you. And when this happens, you become myopic. If you are like most human beings you will have blind spots [stupid obvious mistakes right in front of you, that you fail to notice because you are so close to your project]. You fall in love with your project, and your judgement becomes impaired. You take criticism of the project very personally and become defensive should anyone try to point out its weakness.

When you guard and protect your idea, you inevitably become a kind of a helicopter parent to it. The more protective and inflexible you are, the weaker the idea; it can't stand on its own, you will have to be there to defend it all the time. It is better to be like a mother bird and throw your idea out of the nest and fly on its own. When you let people in, they can see all the weak spots in your projects immediately and tell you. Of course it will be battered and bruised, but thats part of the testing process. When you are willing to give up darling parts that doesn't serve it and patch the holes, only then does your idea become stronger.

When I was in second year of college, a girl who was in 5th year at the time, who was quite smart and talented came to my desk and asked me if I had a moment to critique her project. I was a little puzzled at first. Why would she need the advice of a second year student? What do I know that she doesn't? But then as she began to explain her project to me, I began to see how useful it was for her just to just talk about it to someone. She spotted quite a few weakness in the project herself (just hearing herself speaking about it) before I even made a comment. In the end I was only able to point out a few other things that was blaintely obvious to me that she could not see. It wasnt becasuse I was smarter than her but it was because she was smart enough to understand the principle of being open and coachable.



JFK knew this. He was young and inexperienced when he came to office, but he was able to lead a country and have one of the most successful presidencies. How? He surrounded himself with smart people and took their advice on different issues. Ideas were thrown on the table and discussed. It was hammered out, criticized, and debated by the brightest minds. In the end he made the decisions, but they were informed decisions. The one man against the world thing is a myth.

Compare with George W. Bush who was not open or coachable. He ignored the advise of everyone around him [except those who agreed with him]. The Iraq War idea was not really questioned, not even by congress, because to do so was unpatriotic. He chanted either you are with me or you are against me. He was one man against the world. The individual against the collective. Sounds familiar? If he was an eloquent speaker he could have made that Howard Roak speech in the clip at the top of this page.



In contrast to good ol' Georgie and popular myths about the Famous Architect, Louis Khan was open and coachable. He actually took advise from a lot of people. The idea that he was this lone genius dreaming up these great projects out of his head is a myth. In her book Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism, Sarah Williams Goldhagen debunks the myths that have cast him as a mystical neo-Platonist, a visionary champion of Beaux-Arts principles, and a rebel against modernism. She demonstrates instead that the essence of Kahn's architecture lies in his deeply held modernist political, social, and artistic ideals. Kahn frequently discussed his ideas with other architects, even other famous ones that were considered his competitors. He was obviously not afraid of them stealing his ideas. Consider this, it was famous architect Louis Barragan who convinced him to drop the idea of landscaping the now famous plaza of Salk Institute with trees and leave it open.

The second benefit of being open and coachable; it is that it creates and/or build relationships. Just talking about your ideas with people can help to create a support base of people who see the idea as partly theirs and want to see it succeed too. By taking the time to discuss your project with you, people tend to feel that they have somehow made an investment [not to mention feeling complimented that you value their opinion enough to ask for their advice]. They develop a sense of loyalty to your project and to you. They will help your project even while you are asleep. They will talk about you and your project with other people. In one case someone who helped me, went to a party and met someone who is working with something related to my project and said "hey Conrad is working with that maybe you should talk to him" The next morning I got an email from someone that was able to push my project 10 times as far as if I tried to do all the research for it by my self.

This brings me to the third good reason to be open and coachable. Despite Howard Roak's claim that there is no such thing as a collective brain, this principle works like a multiple processor chip computer processing your project. Picture this, the more people you discuss your projects and ideas with, the more brains there are in the world churning for solutions to make it better.

If you take nothing else from this blog, take this:

Think less Gollum and more A-Team