I started architecture school with only a vague idea of what I would become, and now, as a practicing architect, I find I still have no clear idea of what I am. Many of the ideas about architects and architecture that I acquired in school are in conflict with the way I practice today. At Rice and Berkeley, students endeavored to resolve formal design problems as autonomous artists, while as professionals we collaborate on projects entangled in regulatory, marketing and financial concerns. My experience indicates that contradictions between aesthetic aspirations and business responsibilities create strong tensions in the development of a professional identity among architects.

Rice University
Few of my freshman classmates at Rice had a clear idea of how architects worked. We had taken mechanical drawing in high school, had poured over house plans in popular magazines and perhaps had even been shown around an architect's office. But in general we had not read professional journals, worked summers or grown up with architects. From our high school counselors we learned that an architect is part artist and part engineer, while from our parents we heard that professionals live responsibly, joined the Rotary and voted Republican. Fascinated above all by architectural renderings and models, we came to Rice to learn how to realize our own designs. When we saw Fountainhead during orientation week, we applauded Howard Roark's uncompromising passion and longed to stand on top of our own buildings with the wind blowing through our hair and love at our feet.

At Rice no one questioned the need for architects to have a university education. Our professors depicted architects as Renaissance types, and that vision implied a liberal arts preparation. However, the architecture faculty ascribed little importance to knowledge taught outside the department, despite the ideal of a liberal arts education. Moreover, support classes such as "structures" offered within the department were less thorough and less difficult than their university counterparts. We began to assume that our knowledge was primarily visual knowledge and our special skill visual presentation. We avoided architecture books with more text than pictures and became accustomed to visiting lecturers who almost exclusively presented slides of their recent work.

Both professors and students agreed that only architectural design mattered. Design classes determined one's standing in the department. Design classes were given the most time and the best professor.

The core of the curriculum was the sequence of design studios. Our first studio was introductory design, where we made compositions of tones, colors, textures, and finally shapes. Here it was assumed that architects know as much about form and color as painters and sculptors. Then having mastered basic visual skills, we were ready to begin the design of buildings. Working in the studio we came to believe that real design took place on a drawing board amidst a brilliant clutter of crumpled sketch paper, model fragments, reference photographs and old coffee cups; and that perfection happened in the final hours of the charrette. For the design charrette is the central architectural experience. As early as the Ecole des Beaux Arts, students stayed up all night to finish their drawings, applying the final touches as these were being carried to the jury room on a cart (charrette). The long hours of work in a common studio space forged us into a close knit group of men and women who were marked by our dedication, endurance and talent. We shared the excitement of learning to see the world in a new way, of learning to distinguish between well and poorly designed glasses while our friends were drinking coffee unaware from styrofoam cups. We were the imaginative professionals with certified taste.

The way architectural history was presented reinforced our assumption that only visual design mattered: the only architects mentioned were design architects and the landmarks of architectural design were described purely in formal terms, with little attention to the institutional contexts in which their creators worked and developed their ideas. We memorized facades without caring whether the roofs leaked or the working drawings had been completed by others. Moreover, our professors evaluated studio projects primarily in terms of visual design, with little concern for relative costs, satisfaction of programs or durability. Since housing programs tend to be flexible and their costs relatively uncontrolled, we did not appreciate the impact of program and cost on design solutions. Only as a practicing architect have I discovered how closely design decisions are controlled by budgets and how inconvenient is a client's demand to accommodate a favorite dining room table.

What the architectural tradition and our mentors suggested and what we students were teaching each other was that boring and conventional people produced boring and conventional designs. We encouraged eccentric dress, hyperbolic speech and unconventional behavior. Not only were we part of the individualistic college counter culture of the late 1960's, which held traditional institutions in disdain, but we also felt that individuality was an essential part of architecture. Great designs came from being able to conceive solutions in a new way, a process that required freedom from conventional ideas and conventional forms. We were endeavoring to create buildings with the same unique and startling character as those of our heroes. The proponents of orthodoxy represented by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were anathema. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) represented the pedestrian architects of Middle America and we would never consider joining.

The University of California, Berkeley
Graduate school at Berkeley brought me a step closer to professional practice. The department of architecture was grouped with the smaller departments of landscape architecture and city and regional planning into the College of Environmental Design. This structure explicitly acknowledged a greater diversity amongst design professionals than existed at Rice, but it also narrowed the focus of any individual's studies. Although sharing the same building, the students of each department had little contact with each other. Moreover, the architects dominated the concerns of the college as we would later dominate the design professions.

Many architecture professors at Berkeley spent the majority of their time in professional practice. Instead of doing small projects out of their homes as most of the Rice professors did, they were frequently principals in medium sized firms that designed schools, housing complexes and clinics. Their work was easily accessible; it was concentrated in the Bay Area and was often published in design magazines. We were impressed by the number of competitions they had won and the number of design awards they had received. We were no longer as certain that we would change the world as we had been as undergraduates, and we worried about our future lifestyle. Our professors appeared to be highly successful practitioners and we aspired to match their success both aesthetic and material.

As we were forced to accommodate more realistic programmatic constraints, our visual designs became more conventional and our own design standards began to evolve. Instead of judging our projects and those of our professors against the great works of the international style, we judged them against the more forgiving standard of other local work. We were learning to appreciate the distinctiveness of the Bay Area regional style, as the dominance of the Modern Movement came under attack by both preservationists and post-modernists.

Berkeley architecture students seemed much less vivid and intense than my Rice contemporaries. However, we continued to think of ourselves as artists and to gear the presentation of ourselves and our work solely to the academic community. We were unprepared for professional standards that would be imposed in practice, since unlike medical students, for example, who actually worked in hospitals, we had no contact with clients.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
My search for a job was a painful way to learn the values of the profession. The confidence of high marks was rapidly exhausted in a series of polite yet certain refusals: no one was interested in novel forms or sensitivity to site context. When a job offer finally came, it was made with a nod toward an old school tie which suggested that I was hired by grace and not by works. I came to SOM grateful for employment and determined to prove myself in the new situation, a resolve soon reinforced by deteriorating work load and rumors of layoffs. Good lettering and following instructions were the chief virtues of young architects. Only later did it become clear that what we wore and weighed and how we spoke also influenced our careers.

At SOM everyone starts out building models and detailing stairs, but eventually an architect specializes in design, technical production or project management. Specialization depends on a combination of ability, interest, chance and personal style and is not predetermined by academic career. The process sometimes begins at the request of the individual, but more often it commences as senior designers and technical coordinators select individuals to staff teams. Although design talent may usually be accompanied by brashness and technical talent by reserve in some mysterious genetic pairing, it seems more likely that team leaders tend to choose people who resemble themselves and who reflect stereotyped conceptions of their roles. As a result of the team system, young architects acquire mentors and patrons who guide their development. Styles of conversation and outside interests are reinforced over beers or white wine as social groupings begin to mirror professional ones. This process works against the advancement of women, who have few female supervisors. Women are frequently encouraged to specialize in interiors because they are thought to be more suited to refined interior space than to gross building structure.

Team design in a large architectural firm is very different from team designing in school, where all team members shared a common point of view and common goals. At SOM project development is negotiated between designers, technical coordinators and managers who have different responsibilities and different priorities. Moreover, we work with interior architects, specification writers and estimators from within the firm, as well as with lighting and acoustical consultants. What is true for all is the loss of total project involvement and a resulting sense of dissatisfaction. The subdivision of work also lessens a sense of responsibility for the total project, which would have facilitated a transition from personal to professional ethics. After a few years in practice, we quite willingly prepare drawings for new buildings to replace historic landmarks and for windowless offices we would never want our friends to occupy. Concern for individual career advancement dominates abstract considerations of environmental impact.

Many of the attitudes that we developed in school continue as part of our professional outlook. We continue to design to please other architects rather than the general public. We still cluster with each other and regard the lives and work of better paid accountants and engineers with condescension. We feel most creative when once again we work all night to finish a presentation or issue a set of drawings. As individuals and as a firm we find it difficult to adapt our traditional style of project development to accommodate new technologies. The use of computers is looked on with real antipathy, because designers must relinquish the soft pencils and yellow sketch paper which symbolize their creativity. Fast track projects which require general decisions before completion of design and detailing cause great anguish as architects, who are unused to thinking ahead, find themselves faced with unwelcome solutions or expensive revisions. We continue to direct several hundred employees with some of the casualness of an academic studio.

Interaction with clients and contractors results in further changes of our attitudes and behavior. Clients, usually developers, exert a strong pressure for conformity in both personal style and building design. They come to our offices expecting to meet architects in traditional business attire. They become uncomfortable if our presentations are unconventional or our opinions hostile to their profits. Our relations with contractors are usually antagonistic. We expect to supervise all aspects of construction including the work of other artists and professionals. In criticizing the quality of workmanship, we thus reaffirm our control and our sensitivity to subtle distinctions of color and finish.

All registered architects are invited to join the AIA. At SOM our annual evaluation form has an entry for professional acitivities and the firm will pay for AIA membership dues. Membership is an extra accolade which is hard to refuse, and I quickly joined without reflecting on my lost innocence. Within the AIA professionalism is no longer a subtle component of thought and behavior, but a frequent topic in a flood of newsletters and announcements: "Professional architects don't enter competitions," "Professional architects support architectural appreciation in public schools:' The AIA organizes its members to benefit the common practice of architecture and the prestige of architects.

In the last few years architecture has enjoyed a great deal of public attention, and the popular media as well as trade publications have created contemporary architectural stars. The emphasis on personality gives special importance to the way we present ourselves as well as to our projects. I feel the need to demonstrate a special aura when people tell me they wanted to be an architect, and I am unlikely to discuss the difficulties of working on a team when someone asks how I design a building. As art galleries begin to market architectural drawings and museums mount architectural shows, there is an increasing emphasis among architects on pretty drawings rather than sound projects.

Conclusion
In thinking back over the influences that have shaped my under standing of how architects think and work and behave, what strikes me is how different my school impressions were from those I have formed in practice, even though my professors were practicing architects and my professional colleagues had similar academic careers. Clearly the organization of large firms demands a radically different individual than the multifaceted, autonomous designer that formed the object of our training and aspirations. However, whatever their work situation, all architects continue to cherish the notion of the heroic, unfettered artist and have difficulty acknowledging to each other, as well as to students, the limitations imposed by actual practice. Hence we still aspire to start our own firms and to find the right clients in order once again to have full control of our work.