What Architecture Is Actually Like

You just passed your last ARE section. You're officially licensed. How does that feel?

It feels like finishing a race and looking around and realizing you're in a completely different place than where you thought the finish line would be. I spent five years in school, three years and change doing the AXP hours, and then about a year and a half on the exams. Six divisions. I passed Programming & Analysis on my first try, failed Project Development & Documentation the first time, passed it the second. That one cost me $470 in retake fees plus whatever Ballast study guides cost, and I don't want to add that up.

The weird part is that having the license hasn't changed my day at all. Not one thing. I went to work the Monday after I got my results and I sat down at the same desk, opened the same Revit model, and started detailing the same stair section I'd been working on Friday. Joon-ho, the senior associate who's been mentoring me, he sent me a Teams message that said "congrats, now you can stamp things and be personally liable." Which is his sense of humor. But he's also right. That's the main practical difference. My signature now carries legal weight. Nobody has asked me to stamp anything yet.

What does a typical day look like at a firm this size?

Right now I'm on a $40 million mixed-use project in the West Loop. Residential tower, retail at grade, parking structure. The team on this project is 14 people, just from our firm. That doesn't count the structural engineer, the MEP engineer, the landscape architect, the civil engineer, the lighting consultant, or the curtain wall consultant. On any given day there are probably 30 to 35 people touching this project across all firms.

My piece is construction documents. Specifically, I'm drawing wall sections, stair details, and door schedules in Revit. A door schedule is exactly what it sounds like: a spreadsheet of every door in the building, with its size, material, hardware, fire rating, and frame type. This building has 847 doors. I know this because I've been staring at them for three months. Each door has to match the spec, and the spec has to match the code, and the code depends on what's on the other side of that door. A door between a corridor and a stair has a different fire rating than a door between a corridor and an office, and if the door opens into a means of egress, it has to swing a specific direction and can't reduce the corridor width below the minimum when it's open. This is what I think about for eight hours a day. Not what the building looks like. What the doors do.

When you were in school, did you imagine this is what you'd be doing?

No. In school, I was designing museums. My thesis project was a cultural center on a reclaimed industrial site along the Chicago River. I built a physical model out of basswood and museum board that took me three weeks. I made renderings in Rhino and V-Ray. The jury loved it. My professor, Dr. Kaplan, said the spatial sequence was "genuinely compelling." That was the best moment of my education.

Now I draw door schedules. And I don't say that to be bitter about it. It's just the reality of how large firms work. The principals design. Margot, the principal who runs our studio, she's the one making the decisions about what the building looks like, how it meets the street, what the facade does. She's been practicing for 28 years. Between her and the client, the design is largely set by the time it reaches people at my level. We execute. We take the design intent and turn it into something a contractor can build. That translation is real work and it matters, but it's not what drew me to architecture. Nobody goes to architecture school because they dream of door schedules.

What happened at the design review this week?

The client walked in, this is a developer, his name is Roger, and he'd just come back from a trip to Scandinavia. He sat down in the conference room on the 22nd floor, looked at the renderings pinned to the wall, and said, "Can we make it more like that building I saw in Copenhagen?" And everyone paused. Because that's the kind of comment that sounds simple but can unravel months of work. Which building in Copenhagen? What did he like about it? The materiality? The proportions? The ground floor retail rhythm? Roger didn't know. He just liked how it felt.

Margot handled it beautifully. She asked Roger to pull up photos on his phone, and he showed her a picture of this residential building in Nordhavn with a folded metal facade. Very clean, very Nordic. Margot looked at it for about ten seconds and said, "We can explore that language in the upper floors without reworking the podium." Which translated to about three weeks of design revision for the senior designers, and probably another two weeks of construction document updates for people at my level once the design settles. Meanwhile, Wei, the structural engineer, is going to have opinions about the facade change because the loading on the clips changes if you go from a flat panel to a folded panel. One comment from Roger in Copenhagen just generated maybe 200 hours of work across four firms.

You studied art history before switching to architecture. Why the switch?

Two years at DePaul in art history, and I loved the material. Loved looking at buildings, talking about what they meant, writing essays about Brutalism. Then I went to a lecture by an architect from Studio Gang, and she showed a slide of the Aqua Tower from the inside during construction. You could see Lake Michigan through the concrete formwork. The rebar was still exposed. It wasn't finished yet and it was already beautiful. And I thought: I don't want to write about buildings. I want to make them. Transferred to U of I the next year, started the five-year B.Arch program as a second-year, which meant I graduated at 25 instead of 23.

My sister Audra, she's a nurse at Northwestern Memorial, she told me I was insane for adding two years to my education to enter a field that pays less than nursing. She wasn't wrong about the math. She was making $68,000 her first year out. I started at $52,000. But I get to touch door handles for a living, so who's really winning here.

The door handle thing. Tell me about that.

People think I'm joking but I'm dead serious. Hardware is the part of a building you literally touch. It's the most intimate interface between a person and architecture. You can look at a facade from across the street, but you hold a door handle in your hand. The weight, the finish, the radius of the curve, whether it clicks or pushes or pulls. A bad handle can ruin a beautiful door. A great handle can elevate a mediocre one.

The one in Wicker Park, at that hotel on Division Street, it's a brushed bronze lever with a slight downward curve. The metal is warm when you grab it, which means it's solid bronze, not plated. The latch has a soft click, not that cheap spring sound you get from builder-grade hardware. I stood in the lobby photographing it and the front desk person asked if I needed help. I said no, I'm just here for the handle. She looked at me like I was unwell. Joon-ho understands because he has a similar thing with stair nosings. Margot collects photos of window mullion details. We're all a little obsessive about the things other people never notice. That's actually a decent filter for whether someone should be an architect. If you've never looked at a building and thought "that reveal between the stone and the glass is doing something interesting," this might not be your field.

What's yours?

How long it takes before you get to design anything. I'm four years in. I have a professional degree. I just passed my licensing exams. And I have not designed a single built thing. Not a room. Not a corner. Not a window. I've detailed other people's designs. I've coordinated with engineers on other people's designs. I've produced construction documents for other people's designs. But the actual act of deciding what a space should look like, how it should feel, what it should do to the person standing in it? That hasn't happened yet.

At a firm this size, the design pipeline is steep. Margot designs. The two senior associates contribute to design. Everyone else executes. There are 850 people at this firm and maybe 40 of them are making design decisions on any given day. The rest of us are making those decisions buildable. And that's fine, that's how buildings get made, large buildings require large teams doing specialized work. But nobody tells you in school that you might be 35 before anyone asks your opinion on what a building should look like. The schools sell the dream of being a designer. The profession needs people who can draw stair details in Revit. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of young architects lose their way. I've watched two people in my cohort leave the profession entirely. One went to UX design. One went to real estate development. Both said they got tired of waiting for a turn that wasn't coming fast enough.

You left a big firm to start your own. What was the breaking point?

Parking garages. I designed parking garages for three years in Seattle. At first I told myself it was good experience because parking structures are structurally interesting, which is technically true. A post-tensioned concrete garage has some real engineering elegance to it. But by year three I was sitting in a meeting about ramp slopes and I thought: I went to architecture school for five years, I spent a decade of my life preparing for this, and I'm arguing about whether the ramp should be 5% or 5.5%. That was a Tuesday. By Friday I'd told my wife Delphine I wanted to start my own firm. She's a landscape architect, so she understood the impulse better than most spouses would. She also said, "You know we'll lose money the first two years." She was right. It was closer to three.

What does a typical week look like now?

Messy. That's the honest answer. I have six people including myself. Candice is our office manager and she handles invoicing, scheduling, and keeping the books straight. Without Candice, this firm would collapse in about eleven days. She sends invoices, chases payments, manages our QuickBooks, and reminds me when insurance renewals are coming. The other four are two licensed architects and two architectural designers, meaning they have degrees but haven't finished their licensing yet.

On any given week we have 8 to 12 active projects, mostly residential. Custom homes, renovations, a few small commercial jobs. Restaurants, retail spaces. My day splits roughly in half: mornings are design and technical work, afternoons are client calls, contractor coordination, and business management. I probably spend 40% of my time on actual architecture and 60% on everything else. The everything else includes responding to emails from clients who want to know why the tile they picked isn't available anymore, reviewing submittals from contractors, writing proposals for new projects, and doing the quarterly liability insurance paperwork that makes me want to set the Moleskin notebook on fire.

Tell me about the foundation problem.

Yeah. So we're doing a custom home in Lake Oswego. The client is Brock, and Brock has been building his dream house for three years. He's changed the floor plan 11 times. Eleven. I have a folder on my desktop called "Brock Revisions" and it has 11 subfolders. Every time we get close to finalizing, Brock has a new idea. He went to his brother's house in Bend and decided he needed a different kitchen layout. He saw a fireplace in a magazine and wanted to move the living room wall. Each revision takes my team 20 to 40 hours of work, and Brock pays for each one, so technically it's fine. But the project has lost all momentum. We're in construction now, finally, and the contractor is Orin, who I've worked with on maybe 15 houses over the last eight years.

Last week Orin called me and said, "We have a problem." Those are the four worst words in residential construction. The foundation was poured, and when Orin's crew went to lay out the first-floor walls, they realized the south foundation wall was four inches north of where it should be. Four inches. That doesn't sound like much. But Brock's kitchen island is 42 inches wide, and it sits between the south wall and the plumbing stack, and that plumbing stack is already roughed in. Four inches less means the island either doesn't fit or the walkway on the south side drops below 36 inches, which violates residential building code for kitchen clearances.

I drove out to the site, and I could feel it in my chest the whole way there. That cold, sinking feeling. Because this is the kind of mistake that has a chain reaction. The island placement affects the cabinet layout, which affects the plumbing, which affects the mechanical routing in the basement below. I stood in the hole, literally standing on the footing, measuring with a tape measure while Orin watched. He was right. Four inches off. The survey stakes had been placed correctly, but the forming crew misread one of the dimensions on the foundation plan. They pulled the measurement from the wrong gridline.

How do you fix something like that?

You can't move a poured foundation. So you redesign around it. I spent the rest of that day and most of the next reworking the kitchen layout in Revit. We narrowed the island by 2 inches and shifted it 2 inches north, which kept the south walkway at 36 inches. But that meant the sink centerline moved, which meant the plumbing rough-in needed to shift, which meant Orin needed to get his plumber back out. The plumber charges $120 an hour and this was about a four-hour fix. Then we had to issue a revised drawing set for the kitchen, get it to the cabinet shop because they'd already started fabrication based on the original dimensions, and notify the countertop fabricator that the template appointment needed to be pushed back two weeks.

Total cost of a four-inch mistake: roughly $6,800 in rework, a two-week delay, and a very uncomfortable phone call with Brock where I had to explain that his kitchen island was going to be 40 inches instead of 42. He took it better than I expected. He said, "Will I notice?" And I said, honestly, probably not. But I'll notice every time I walk into that kitchen for the rest of my life.

You mentioned liability insurance. How much does that weigh on you?

Constantly. My professional liability policy costs about $14,000 a year. It covers claims against the firm for errors and omissions. If something I design fails, if a roof leaks because we detailed the flashing wrong, if a stair doesn't meet code and someone gets hurt, the liability falls on me. My stamp is on those drawings. Every set of construction documents I sign is a legal promise that I did my job correctly, and the insurance exists because sometimes, despite your best efforts, something goes wrong. I've never had a claim. But I know architects who have. A colleague in Eugene had a moisture intrusion issue on a commercial project that cost $180,000 to remediate. His insurance covered it, but his premiums went up 40% and the client sued him personally on top of the insurance claim. He settled. He's still practicing but he told me that experience changed the way he sleeps.

Delphine, my wife, she doesn't carry the same kind of liability because landscape architecture has a different risk profile. Nobody dies because a planting bed was six inches too narrow. But a building can hurt people. A stair with the wrong riser height, a guardrail at the wrong height, a fire exit that doesn't meet code. These are life-safety issues and they're on me. That weight is always there. It's the background hum of running a firm. You stop hearing it most days, but it never actually stops.

Do you ever miss the big firm?

I miss the resources. At the Seattle firm, if I had a waterproofing question, I could walk down the hall and ask the building envelope specialist. If I needed a rendering for a client presentation, there was a visualization team. If a contract needed review, there was in-house legal. Here, if I have a waterproofing question, I call the manufacturer's rep and hope they call back. If I need a rendering, I do it myself in SketchUp and Enscape on a Saturday morning. If a contract needs review, I send it to a lawyer who charges me $350 an hour.

What I don't miss is the distance from the work. At a big firm, the principal meets the client, the project manager runs the meetings, the senior designer makes the design calls, and the junior staff produces the documents. You can work on a project for two years and never meet the person who's going to live in it. Here, Brock has my cell phone number. He texts me photos of tile samples at 9 PM. That's annoying sometimes, but it also means I know exactly what he wants because he tells me directly. No filters. No middle management. Just me and the person whose house it is.

What's yours?

How much of running a firm is chasing money. People see architecture as a creative profession. And it is. But it's also a small business, and small businesses have cash flow problems. My average project fee for a custom home is about $85,000, paid in phases over 12 to 18 months. Schematic design is 15%, design development is 20%, construction documents is 40%, and construction administration is 25%. The problem is that clients don't always pay on schedule. Brock, for all his enthusiasm, was 45 days late on his last invoice. $17,000 sitting in accounts receivable while I still have to make payroll for six people every two weeks.

Candice sends the reminders. She's diplomatic about it. I'm less diplomatic when it goes past 60 days. But the power dynamic is tricky because Brock is also my client, and I need the relationship to stay healthy through a two-year construction process. You can't send a collections notice to someone whose kitchen island you just redesigned. So you send a "friendly reminder" and you absorb the cash flow stress and you make it work. Last year the firm grossed $780,000. After salaries, rent, insurance, software licenses, and everything else, I took home about $135,000. Which is fine. Genuinely fine. But it's not the kind of money people imagine when they hear "he owns his own architecture firm." Delphine makes more than I do and she doesn't carry the liability insurance. She reminds me of this roughly once a quarter.

Healthcare architecture sounds like a niche. How did you end up there?

By accident, which is how most people end up in healthcare design. I started at a general practice firm in Austin after grad school. They had one hospital client, a small community hospital doing an outpatient clinic expansion. Nobody in the firm wanted it because healthcare projects are slow, heavily regulated, and full of coordination headaches. My boss at the time assigned it to me because I was the newest person and the newest person gets the project nobody wants. That's a universal law of architecture.

But I loved it. I'd done one year of civil engineering at UT before switching to architecture, and the engineering brain never fully left. Healthcare design scratches both itches. You need the creative side because these are spaces where people are scared and vulnerable and the environment genuinely affects their experience. But you also need the technical side because a hospital has more building systems per square foot than almost any other building type. HVAC pressure relationships between rooms, medical gas piping, nurse call systems, radiation shielding, infection control requirements. A hospital room has more code requirements than most entire buildings. That complexity is what keeps me interested ten years in.

What are you working on right now?

An emergency department expansion for a regional hospital here in San Antonio. We've been on this project for nine months. The scope is about 22,000 square feet, adding 18 treatment bays, a new triage area, a behavioral health holding area, and a dedicated ambulance entrance. The construction budget is $14.5 million. My team is me, Frankie who's the project manager, and two designers. On the consultant side, we have structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, medical equipment planning, and an infection control consultant. That's eight firms coordinating on one emergency department.

The primary client contact is Lorene, who's the nurse administrator for the existing ED. She's been an ER nurse for 22 years. Lorene knows things about emergency department flow that no architect could learn from a textbook. She told me in our first meeting that the single most important dimension in an emergency department is the distance from the ambulance bay doors to the first trauma room. Every second matters. Their current layout puts that distance at about 140 feet with two turns. We got it down to 65 feet with one turn. Lorene looked at the floor plan and said, "That's going to save lives." I've never had a client say that to me about a floor plan before. That's the thing about healthcare. The stakes are different.

Tell me about the corridor problem.

This was last week and I'm still processing it. We're nine months into design, through schematic design, through design development, and we were about two weeks from finishing construction documents. Nils, our principal, had already started talking about the CD milestone review. Frankie had the construction schedule roughed out. And then Lorene forwarded me an email from the hospital's facilities director saying the fire marshal had done an informal review of our plans.

The fire marshal flagged the main corridor in the new ED as being 6 inches too narrow. We had it at 7 feet 6 inches. Healthcare occupancy in Texas requires 8 feet clear for corridors that serve as a means of egress in a hospital. Seven foot six meets the general code requirement. But hospital corridors also need to accommodate bed transport, and the state health department has an overlay requirement that's separate from the building code. That overlay says 8 feet. We'd been designing to the building code and missed the health department overlay.

Six inches. That's the width of my hand. But those six inches, in a building where the structural grid was already set, where the MEP routing was coordinated above the ceiling, where the rooms on both sides of the corridor had been sized to fit specific medical equipment, those six inches rippled through the entire plan. Every room on either side of that corridor had to lose 3 inches. Three inches off a trauma room means the medical equipment layout changes. Three inches off the medication room means the casework has to be re-specified. Mateo, our mechanical engineer, had ductwork routed in the ceiling plenum above that corridor that now didn't fit because the wider corridor meant less room for structure above, which meant lower ceiling height, which meant the duct runs had to be rerouted.

How did you fix it?

Twelve days. That's how long it took. Frankie and I basically lived in the Revit model. We widened the corridor to 8 feet, took 3 inches from the rooms on each side, recoordinated with Mateo on the mechanical routing, recoordinated with the structural engineer on the beam depths, and went room by room checking that every piece of medical equipment still fit. The CT scanner in the imaging room adjacent to the ED was the scariest one. A CT scanner has a specific room dimension requirement from the manufacturer, and we were already tight. Losing 3 inches put us 1 inch below the manufacturer's minimum. One inch. We solved it by rotating the scanner 90 degrees, which meant the patient enters from a different direction, which meant the technician's control window moved, which meant the lead-lined wall shifted.

All of that because of 6 inches in a corridor. Nils told me afterward that this kind of thing happens more than anyone admits. He's been doing healthcare for 25 years and he said the code overlay issue catches people every few years because the building code and the health department requirements are published in different documents and they don't always cross-reference each other. I asked him why we don't have a checklist for this. He said we do now. I wrote it. It's on a sticky note above my desk. Pink.

How much of your job is actually design versus coordination?

Maybe 15% design, 85% coordination and documentation. And even that 15% is generous because "design" in healthcare is heavily constrained. You're not designing a room from a blank canvas. You're working within infection control guidelines, equipment clearance requirements, code-mandated room sizes, and clinical workflow patterns that the nurses and doctors have refined over decades. Lorene has opinions about where the hand sanitizer dispenser goes. She has opinions about which direction the door swings. And her opinions are based on 22 years of working in emergency departments, so they're usually right.

The coordination piece is where most of the time goes. On any given day I'm in at least two coordination meetings. One with the MEP engineers, one with the owner's team. Mateo and I probably exchange 15 to 20 emails a day during heavy coordination phases. "Can you drop the ductwork 4 inches in grid C-7?" "No, because the sprinkler main is there." "Can we reroute the sprinkler main?" "Ask the fire protection engineer." And then I email the fire protection engineer, who says they can reroute it if we add a head in the adjacent room. And so it goes. Building a hospital is a negotiation between systems. Every system wants the same space, and my job is to be the broker who figures out who gets it.

You mentioned switching from civil engineering. Any regrets?

None. My dad is a civil engineer in Laredo, and I grew up hearing about road grading and drainage calculations. Respected the work, but I wanted the parts of a project you could see and touch. Civil engineers make buildings possible. Architects make them inhabitable. That distinction matters to me. My dad gets it. He came to visit the hospital project site last month, looked at the structural frame going up, and said, "I did the invisible part. You're doing the visible part." Which was probably the nicest thing he's ever said about my career choice, and he's not a man who gives compliments easily, so I'm holding onto that one.

What's yours?

The weight of knowing that your mistakes can hurt people in ways you'll never see. This isn't abstract. In a hospital, every design decision has a clinical consequence. The distance between a nurse station and a patient room affects response time. The location of a hand-washing sink affects infection rates. The width of a corridor determines whether two gurneys can pass. The acoustic separation between rooms determines whether a patient in a behavioral health crisis can be heard screaming from the waiting room.

I made a mistake early in my career, at the Austin firm. It wasn't on a hospital, it was on an outpatient surgery center. I specified a door with the wrong fire rating. It should have been a 90-minute door and I put a 45-minute door on the drawings. It got caught during plan review, so it never got built wrong. But I lay in bed that night thinking about what would have happened if it hadn't been caught. A fire. A door that fails 45 minutes too early. A patient on an operating table. The distance between my mistake and a real consequence was one plan reviewer doing their job.

That's the thing about healthcare architecture that stays with you. Every wall section, every door schedule, every corridor width has a reason, and the reason is usually that someone got hurt in a building where it was wrong. The codes aren't bureaucracy. They're scar tissue. Every code provision started as an incident report. And when I'm detailing a fire-rated wall assembly at 11 PM and I'm tired and I want to go home, I think about that 45-minute door, and I stay another 30 minutes to check my work one more time.