office recap-

After one year, I have finished working for SOM London, and I think it’s time to upload some of the pics I took on my cell during that period. It’s been an intense year, I worked at the office more than 2700 hours which means i worked like 1.5 years time in one year. It’s been crazy, instructive and I have to say fun. It was not fun to work like crazy, but it was a great team and we had fun together. We went through a lot of different situations, we had sleepless nights, some parties, some triumphs and quite a bunch of defeats. I think we spent more time together than with any other else this year. So, this is just a small taste of what we have gone through, some pics that I /we took with my cellphone.

I am not sure where this blog is heading right now, and probably it will change the direction and the topics of the post a little bit but on the meantime, this is what we did at the office.

 

… and the leader said, there might be light to illuminate our world

and light was created…

also a big dildo was created  in the middle of the world, but that’s another story)

of course we had a list of famous visitors… (we kept the cards as souvenirs)

as a good navarricos that I am,  we celebrated San Fermin (7th of July) with Kalimotxo (red wine and coke)

 

…. and some people were really enjoying it. (Bernard- Brian)

We had guest DJs, like San Miguel bottle…(rocking the studio sessions on wednesday nights)

 

We cried the death of our beloved model…

Towards the end of the year, SpiderPig came to visit, but it was more like GodzillaPig.

 

dedicated to the team

I feel like

I feel like not going to bed, I feel like not staying late at the office for nothing again and again and again, I feel stupid because I don’t think we are making a difference, I feel tired of being the only one saying that’s crap, that’s crap. I feel like meeting my old friends, then I fell I prefer not to, I don’t wanna smile and fake, I feel like too many things and when that happens I normally end up in the couch sleeping and doing nothing. I feel like we normally do and only think afterwards, I feel like it should be the other way round, I feel like living at nights and sleeping during the day, I feel like isolating myself to write, to think, to do, I feel like writing  for the shake of writing, I feel that getting rid of 35 is not gonna solve your problems, I feel like we are afraid to address the real challenges, I feel we are not able to think what we need, to know what we want.

I fee like we are just stumbling again……

live coverage

I have thought that if I can work “live” I can also write in the blog “live”, as it is happening, like some TV people would say.

Ok, I stopped for lunch and couldn’t keep writing, my company doesn’t provide me a laptop, crappy company (mm, this is absolutely off topic). Well, back to work, I’ve been asked to keep working at the minute, send te new model of the city to chicago and explain it to the cosultants. Consultants are late, so director has time to be back and deal with consultants. good. relax afternoon, the first one in the whole week.

Even though when I publish this it is going to be late afternoon I keep writing as if this was a sport narration, or sth alike.

As the afternoon goes on and after send the “stuff” to Chicago looks like I can stay here doing nothing, so I decided to start doing my own “stuff” and I am writing the chapter introduction for “built entities” (note. title of the chapter still provisional)

4.50 pm. Meeting is over, and changes have been made. BM consultant is a pain in the ass, and our partners stupid. So cad information to be updated for now. Working at the minute afain.

6.00 pm. Fortunately changes made. Thinking on going to bed

7.00 pm. Ok, so I left the office about 6.10 and passed through the other office, oh yes we are split in two and I had to spent the whole week in the other office jumping from one computer to another, it sucked.  Got home like 15 mins ago, workshops are over, monday afternoon we have a debriefing of this week, looks we are going to change the scope and the part of the project we are working on.

Going to lay on the sofa, fall asleep. i just had a bowl of rice.

That’s it.

tough

3 weeks without writing, the longest period this year. I always think that I want to write everyday and I never do it. First weeek I was in Spain near the coast, plenty of time, plenty of movies, no excuse, second one just back in London, social week, too much social, third week I am fucking working my ass woth no aparent reason but that is the real thing. Client and cosultant workshops taking place, coming from nowhere, unexpected, unwanted and me just sitting there in a borrowed place to do whatever the partners want me to do. I love working under pressure, but this week it has been really fun, I truly have worked live, with 3 partners overseeing my screen or model live over my shoulder, oooohhh yeahhhhh, that was nice. And the best thing of all, when you do things right nobody would know you have done anyhing at all.  

Amazingly they are not able to put a thugh deeper than the one a 10 year old kid would do, so obvious, so straight, so volatile, so empty, so difficult to follow because there is nothing to follow.

Also we got a team diner which I didn’t attend to as I don’t like those stupid thigs, so I got pist with my buddies.

In Alicante I didn’t do a lot of things but I watched quite a lot of movies.

Paris, Texas / Blood Diamond / Caro Diar0 / Flags from our fathers/ Letters from Iwo Jima / 24 hours to the limit / The good sheperd /  and my memory starts to fail but there were a few more.

whatever

lesson to whoever wants to listen Nº 1024

parcel boundary. definition.

1. I am sorry to say this but why British cannot speak proper English. Parcel boundary = Plot limit, or plot line, or plot boundary.  Parcel is what you sent through the post to other people.

Well, back to business.
Parcel Boundary. Definition
You spent a couple of months doing the layout of an area around 3km by 2 km, boulevards, parks, roads, and plots. You freeze this layout, you focus on the volumetric conditions and deliver your masterplan.
After that you Chicago office take 6 blocks within that masterplan to go further and they just decided, well you know, can you change your parcel boundaries because it doesn’t fit my buildings. Fuck, wow, I thought it was the opposite, I define the limits and you stuck to them. 

So we started fighting, we change the lines, we don’t, and so on so forth for 2 months. But not only that, they want to change the parcel boundary because it affects its contention wall for the basements, hello!!!!!! you want to extend the plot limits because you want to keep you perfect structure grid and build the contention wall outside, but yu cannot do it on the public domain, so you have to extend the plot limits, you change the road layout, you change the park design, you change all of the other architects buildings because you wanna build the contention wall without affecting your grid and as you are Chicago and the mother ship, London do whatever you fancy.

whatever. these romans are crazy.

One of the problems of our age is time. If you try to do something in half time that is require you are not going to be able to do it properly, and if you do it for sure you would not have put enough thoughts on it. But who cares, it looks that not thinking is how we are suppose to behave, and then suddenly problems appear.  Then when you want to solve the problems you put 5, 6, 7, fancy mediocre people together to do video-conference and that are not able to take decisions and what it is even worse they have no right to take them.

 whatever. these romans are crazy.

I’ll put some pictures of the so “called” “process”. 

They look like kids with new shoes, smiling thinking on how big and important they are doing projects like this.

lesson to London architects Nº 534 and Nº 716

534.DON’T INVENT THE WHEEL. (Someone already did it a few hundred years ago)

Same discussion as always. Each and every time you face a new project same old problems, and same discussion about how we can solve them. Helloooo!! sorry but we have done it before, it should be a no brainer.

I mean, if you really want to propose a revolutionary system, or focus all your energy in pushing to the next step that specific problem within the whole project fine. But if it is just the same discussion about which of the 3 know options to solve that problem we choose, I mean that should take what 5 minutes, that’s it.  

There are a lot of things to solve and decisions to take in the proccess of making a building (or anything related to architecture) and there is no need to invent the wheel in each of them, there are a lot of things that have been done before, so just copy them.  It is really frustrating when you are sitting in the middle of a discussion about the same old problems about structure, facades, aligments and so on, so on, and you see they are trying to invent the wheel as if this time was the first time ever someone faces this problem, and not only that, but they come with a solution worst than the ones developped n the 1930’s.

Shame on us. We still don’t know how to fix a grid. If Mies were alive. Shame on us.

716. SOFTWARE IS A TOOL. TECHNOLOGY IS A MUST. COMPUTER PROGRAM ABILLITY IS NOT AN ADDED VALUE. I AM AN ARCHITECT.

During the last 2 decades or so (maybe 15 years) computers have been incorporated to the architect’s everyday life. but this new way of working have not been understood completly and has not been incorporate to our way of thinking as something natural. 

At job interviews we are still asked what computer programmes we use, because being able to use one software or not is still and added value. But oh my dear friend, be careful, because it is not an added value to your architectural skills, it is an added value to your contribution to the production chain.

We are not hire as architects anymore, but as technicians that know how to operate “complicated and oscure” software that produce the so desired computer simulation image, the new object of desire of architects and clients nowdays.

So if you so your technical / computer skills you will be push to produce images, booklets, brochures, excel sheets, wahtever you know how to do, instead of being considered an architect.  Young architects are not hired as architects anymore but as people that know how to deal with the computer world and with software meanwhile the “god designers” keep drawing in trace paper as a reminescent of the prehistoric ages.

Adding to this incapacity of the “god designers” to express theirselves through computers and draw a single drawing, and the use of young architects as technicians, there is the fact that no training, no software specialist is brought into the companies, because that is not an important part of the job.

Whatever

nothingness (part II)

…we don’t have much sun there, where we come from…………

things to do while waiting (part II)

This time they were rebooting the server, so computers off.
I decided to lay down and have a nap, someone thought it was funny enough to take some pictures. So me on the floor.

sleeping on the floor

context view of my nap

things to do while waiting

IT guys at the office have decided to transfer all the files from one of the other office’s server to our server precisely today and tomorrow so every time you open a drawing (reminder. I am an  architect I work with drawings) you have to wait for about 30 minutes. So there a few things you can do while waiting, like writing on the blog, read the spanish newspapers, chat, read blogs, write emails teasing your italian co-workers (shame on them, they don’t respond, arrrrgggg) and basically get angry with your co-workers because they are a bunch of asslickers,

now, I’ll just pop down to the street and have a free ice-cream while watching Wimbledon

dubai. Part II (lesson to London architects 532)

and I guess more parts to come as my life is focus on that at the moment.

people tent to do what they are familiar with, and what they know how to do. but this doesn’t imply you are doing the appropiate thing or the better thing possible to do. This thinking structure normally leads to a position in which you try to move your task to a field you are confortable with, but normally don’t do what you are require to do.  sorry guys, that’s wrong

second issue of the week is about being short-sided. you loose focus, you loose perspective and you loose the sense of what you have to submit and that leads you to one of those special moments that almost every architect loves which is changing and changing and refining something based on no-idea, just opinions, feelings and my neighbor saying how beautiful that is. really nice 4 hours discussions about the sex of the angels to end up with a solution worse than any solution drawn at the second year of architecture school.

truly architects are killing their profession themselves, they have margin the space, the people, the construction to put their focus on the image, and shout out loud how good they are in creating images, problem is everybody can make an opinion about that…………. so we are killing ourselves.

third issue of the week is about fame, authorship, position,  hierarchy… Now everybody wants to be a famous architect, or a famous architectural firm, wants to be boss, or project leader, of have a nice name on a card saying director of my own crap.so nobody cares about the actual project, but about being the one with the greatest idea ever, or the one putting the face to the crap being built. And they think that will bring them money and a nice house in the suburbs with a dog and 3 kids.

let’s see what happens the 14….. what about ending the game?

firstly tonight, spain plays the final of the eurocup soccer championship