In an interview with Jason Hartman, Esther Sperber of Studio ST Architects shares five things you need to create a highly successful career in architecture and so much more.

To highlight from the article, here are Esther’s Five Things:

1. Love architecture — You need to love buildings and get excited about the beauty of stone or the smell of wet poured concrete.

2. Love people — In my opinion, you cannot create good architecture if you do not enjoy people. Buildings are designed to be inhabited and I love imagining how people would use the spaces we create. It used to be common to photograph buildings without any people in them. In recent years we have started photographing our work, especially public buildings, with people in them. I feel that this gives a better sense of what we are trying to accomplish.

3. Love your staff — Like other service professions, we are only as good as our team. Architecture cannot be created alone, and I am fortunate to have a great team at my office. We share ideas, suggestions and bring our own strength to the team.

4. Love running a business — When I started my firm, I did not know much about running a business, tracking costs and projecting profits. Over the past two decades I have learned from friends, colleagues, YouTube and coaches. I enjoy the task of running my business and making sure we are financially stable alongside the creativity of the design process. My work week is incredibly varied. I spend a few hours sketching a new design on trace paper, putting together a fee proposal and spreadsheet schedule for our team, learning about a new product, putting on my work boots to visit the concrete foundation work on a multifamily building, selecting stone for a countertop and giving a lecture to students about the architecture of synagogues. What could be more exciting?

5. Love a new challenge — When you are an architect there is always more to learn than one person can handle. We need to be able to learn from others, ask the right questions and have good intuition about mechanical systems, structure, sustainability and city codes. But there will always be something new that we have not encountered, and a good architect needs to not be intimidated by this, but rather find these new challenges exciting.

Right on, Esther! These are a great five.

Don’t miss out on the other gems Esther shares in the complete interview published here.

This week NY Times published two impactful articles that caught our attention. We’re sharing them here with you.

Overlooked No More: Elizabeth Wagner Reed, Who Resurrected Legacies of Women in Science shares the story of Elizabeth Wagner Reed, a post-WWII scientist who published “American Women in Science Before the Civil War” to raise the profile of twenty-two important women scientists from the 19th Century. The author of the article notes that women today continue to face hurdles entering and remaining in STEM careers.

Read more here.

The other article is titled What Young Workers Miss Without the ‘Power of Proximity’ and speaks on the “hidden penalties” of remote work.

Read more here.

We are thrilled to share the news of an exciting project underway, co-lead by MWA Founder Nancy Kleppel! For nearly 5 years Nancy has been working on her first real estate development project as a co-founder of the ownership group, Live|Give|Play. The project, a 70-unit mass timber, Passive House rental apartment building in Northampton, MA, is through design development and entering the construction documents phase, planning for a spring 2023 groundbreaking.

Live|Give|Play was founded to transform how older Americans live with new buildings in walkable connected communities.

The challenge:

·      40 million baby boomers will turn 65 between now and 2030

·      30 million of them cannot afford to age in place due to insufficient post-retirement financial resources

The L|G|P solution:

·   Apartments in walkable neighborhoods of small cities

 ·  More vibrant lifestyles, lower costs, and greater sense of purpose than car-centric suburbs

The Live|Give|Play mission as carried out in the Northampton, MA development project concept has been lauded as a sustainable solution to a housing crisis for baby boomers by a number of publications, including Treehugger in this recent article, titled This Mass Timber Passivhaus Rental Building Is Perfect for Active Adults.

BKSK

With her strong professional background as a trained architect, with deep experience in business development, marketing and operations consulting, Nancy serves as serves as LGP’s architectural and design interface. In this role she recommended the architect for the project, BKSK Architects*, and has advised on team members and project participants throughout. As a project owner and sponsor Nancy participates in all design meetings and provides diverse advisory, moving the project forward on all fronts alongside partners David Fox and Patrick McDarrah.

At present L|G|P is pursuing equity investors and construction funding, learning about the twists and turns of the global economy along the way.

As Nancy says, “A career can take you to unexpected places where the thread connecting everywhere you’ve been to where you are currently going becomes apparent. Along the way you tie up all loose ends, bringing the pieces together, culminating in your life’s work. The feeling of pride and accomplishment and deep respect for all the people who played roles along the way is satisfying, humbling and awesome!”

*BKSK Partner, Julie Nelson will lead an MWA seminar alongside Nina Kinoti-Metz in January.

In case you missed it, The Architect’s Newspaper recently sat down with Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, co-founders of Grafton Architects to discuss their winning design for the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Material Innovation at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. Farrell and McNamara won the competition in 2020, the same year they won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

At a time when the AEC industry is buzzing about mass timber as the only renewable building construction material, the recent article takes a deeper dive into the design of the building, calling it “the first building designed in North America to be a masterclass in timber”.

Grafton Architect’s design is a response to the challenge to provide a building that is “redolent of the qualities of the forest, one that imagines anew timber and wood as materials” and is “hewn, carved, jointed, woven, and assembled, layered, laminated”.

Learn more about the design by reading the complete article titled, How Do You Hang an Auditorium From a Queen Post Truss?

After the long holiday weekend, most of us are putting summer days behind us and are back to the reality of work and school.

Here is a bit of architecture school humor from Common Edge to brighten up your week and kick off the academic year, whether you are in the throes of your academic career or it is a distant, but surely unforgettable memory.

ENJOY!