The Architect is a balancing act while studying to emerge and not flatten into the mass, while filing, suffering, his idea, as he watches his creature grow and mutate, as he launches his passionate challenge against a hydra of bureaucracy and technology whose heads die and reborn at the pace of global breath. We live and work suspended between imagination and reality, between technology and human relations between heart and brain.
But despite everything, I’m an architect, and I will be forever, everywhere, ready for every battle because projects are my strength, my gravity center.
We are all afraid
The focus keyword for an architect should be battle, not as a blind struggle, but as perseverance and commitment to carry on his ideals, his creations and to face his fears.
Which one of us was never afraid?
Ours is a world that puts you in front of a thousand challenges from university with assessments, exams, juries at the internship where you must always live up to the situation and prove your worth, up to the world of work where every project is a test field where you have to excel. In short, we live every day in a pressure pot ready to explode.
But let’s be clear the real fear of architects is the CLIENTS!
Fighting “monsters”
We architects land in the world of work with an artifact idea of what will be waiting for us. One of the causes of this is this idea comes from the proliferation of glossy TV shows about super-cool architects grappling with renovations of super-cool homes. This idea generates an imaginary world in the minds of young people of good hope who, with this fictitious dream in mind, embark on their path to becoming architects.
But the most fallacious idea they propose to us is precisely that of the relationship between architects and clients, always narrated as an endless honeymoon and without the final subtitle that warns that all this is only the authors’ imagination product.
Customers are the most unpredictable and changing beings you can meet in the world.
For them all, the focus keyword is changeling, you will never know what they will reserve for you during the day or overnight.
Here are some raw realities very different from television fiction.
Some urban legends that need to be debunked before it’s too late.
Did anyone say rich?
There are no such rich clients, or rather there is a small part of it, and it is so difficult to get to that target.
The standard of customers IS NOT a guy or with a couple of guys who buy an apartment worth about a million euros, with the same fluency with which we would buy a slice of pizza. Customers ARE NOT the guy who never talks about money, for whose nothing is too expensive and the economic reason is never a factor. In this case, the architect’s only concern would be to figure out if they are part of the Mafia, drug trafficking, or have kept capital that has escaped from some bank overseas.
Of course, this never happens in the real world.
The clients examine every economic detail with absolute attention sometimes, the homeowners after the deed are already at the end of the rope. Have taken out a mortgage, and plan to renovate a little at a time, recycling part of the existing and always giving up the best ideas (which are often the most expensive). Ultimately the hardest part, but also the funniest, of our work is to do the best with the minimum budget.
No one delegates
There are no clients who delegate so much, no clients, magically, decide to entrust any choice to an architect. No white paper to work on.
The standard of customers IS NOT a guy that does not prefer a style, that does not need space, that does not make requests, or that gives you the house keys and disappears for months, reappearing only to finish work.
It is clear that this is absolutely impossible.
All clients claim to examine any choice the architect does, they pretend to rely on but, actually, trust almost zero. Also, the client believes that he knows any type of material and knows where to buy it at a lower price.
Finally, the clients are never alone in this complex decision-making process: they have wives, husbands, relatives, friends, friends of friends, friends of friends who know other friends, who know more and more about it than his architect. And we are definitely lucky if they do not go to the construction site every day to give orders to the teams of manufacturers without realizing the problems that this behavior creates.
But in the end
There are no such serene architects. Every architect knows that every relationship with the client contains an additional dose of stress compared to that already accumulated to face the condominium, the technical office of the Municipality, the fire brigade, the ASL, etc.
Stress often seems so much to swamp you, but at the end of the job…when you have achieved the desired goal when everything you have worked for months has become true, then all the accumulated tension, stress, and malaise dissolve, leaving room for satisfaction. At that moment you realize that despite everything, countless difficulties understood, this is the work you had always wanted.
