I held the stamp and none of the decisions

Adapted from my conversation with Branson Bowen on episode one of Beyond the Blueprint.

I moved to Orlando in 2016 because my wife found a job here and we'd just had our son, and after Syracuse and stints in Ohio and Boston, getting back to Florida and closer to family made sense. I landed at a design-build firm and helped establish its Orlando presence. Most of my career before that had been commercial work, so the firm was a reasonable place to keep doing it.

What eventually became a problem wasn't the work itself, it was the distance between what got sold to a client and how the business actually ran behind that. There was a fair amount of smoke and mirrors, with decisions getting made in the company's interest rather than the client's while I watched from a seat where I couldn't do much about it.

The part that made it untenable is structural, and I suspect it's more common than people admit. I was an employee and I was also the licensed architect, so the liability sat with me and the control didn't. If the drawings were thin because the fee was thin, or if the client didn't get what they were told they were getting, my license was attached to it. That is a genuinely uncomfortable place to sit, and it doesn't get more comfortable with time.

I raised it in multiple conversations over multiple years and nothing changed in a direction I could live with, so by the end I think the writing was on the wall for both sides. I was in a sort of quasi-contract that determined whether I'd stay on past a certain point, and it happened to expire in April of 2020, which was also right around where I'd landed anyway. The timing was convenient in a way that didn't feel convenient at all at the time.

About two months in, with no office, no certainty about income, and nothing but whatever work I could bring in and complete myself, my wife told me she'd never seen me happier. That was the tell. I had completely fallen out of love with architecture as a profession without understanding that what I'd fallen out of love with was one particular way of practicing it.

The reason I'm putting this on a firm blog rather than keeping it as a war story is that if you're hiring an architect, it's worth asking who is actually accountable and whether that's the same person making the calls. In a lot of arrangements it isn't. The stamp goes on the drawings, and the decisions about what those drawings contain got made somewhere else by someone optimizing for something other than your project. I don't think you can build a practice on owner advocacy if that split exists internally, so we don't have it.

Listen to the full conversation

This post came out of episode one of Beyond the Blueprint with host Branson Bowen, where we got into starting the firm in April of 2020, hiring for weaknesses instead of the org chart, and why I don't compete on dollars per square foot.