12 Things Architecture Has Taught Me
by Fougeron Architecture on November 16, 2012
- It is slow, inversely slow to the pace of emails you’ll receive, documents you’ll have to read. As everything else gets faster, it gets harder to build and it takes more time.
- Making space is complicated; making good space is enormously difficult.
- You get better at it with time, practice really does make “almost” perfect
- It is addictive, an intense high, when something works and you know you hit a home run
- Failing is the most brutal, the evidence remains there forever.
- Architects are not the friendliest bunch: too competitive and insecure
- BB, don’t TT. Be bold and don’t twinkle toe. Wise words borrowed from my UC Berkeley professor Marvin Buchanan.
- Being a woman does not means I am the interior designer. Thank you vey much.
- Also, why is a 2×4 actually 1.5 x 3.5? Or a 2×8 is 1.5x7.25? Absurd! Give me metric any day My favorite example: There is such a thing an 13/32. In the field a carpenter refers to a 32nd as plus or minus a major fraction. For instance, 13/32 is 1/32 less than 14/32 or 7/16, so it is called “7/16 minus” and 11/32 is 1/32 more than 10/32 or 5/16, so it is called “5/16 plus.”
- I have to worry about birds and glass, a lot, and then there are the endangered species like red-legged frogs and the steelhead trout, and the invasive species like Cape Ivy that all influence the design and its footprint. I should not have skipped those science classes in college.
- If you invite architects over for dinner, don’t set a place for your kid they will be bored out of their mind.
- Every day the quote, “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” – Winston Churchill, becomes more and more apt.
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Fougeron Architecture 
12 things that are beautifully articulated.
It would make a great architectural calendar…
I guaranty you calling 1.5 x 3.5’s “2 x 4’s” is a man thing. Women never over state size.