Life in a large firm is more social. In many ways, it is a direct extension of architectural school. Three or four people may take lunch together regularly. A team frequently does work. The Christmas party is often the social highlight of the year. The whole office may go to a baseball game or a picnic in the summer.
The structure of the social environment is also demanding in a large firm. Working in a large firm means climbing the corporate ladder. Employees start at the bottom and work to the top. The lowest level is that of draftsperson or model maker. With experience, the draftsperson becomes a project architect responsible for a specific building design and working directly with the client or the client's representatives. With more experience, the employee assumes the role of project manager with several project architects to supervise. Above the project, managers are the senior-level firm associates with overall responsibility for the work the firm performs. Finally, there is the principal/partner who owns part or the entire firm and has major financial responsibility and firm leadership duties as well as the task of seeking and serving clients. Climbing this ladder in an office obviously takes both architectural experience and good social and political skills. The people at the highest levels of the firm frequently are also accomplished in the financial skills necessary to maintain a business.
The person who owns a small firm and the person who owns a large firm are probably not doing the same job each day. The sole practitioner may still be doing drafting and have major design responsibility for an admittedly small building. The person in charge of a large firm may spend most of the week in a boardroom and may never pick up a pencil. One person could be responsible for $2 million in building costs per year; the other may oversee projects worth $200 million. One person may be solving a problem about a board and a nail; the other may be meeting with the board of a corporation to resolve a master plan. These two architects may have been college classmates or taken the same Architect Registration Exam.
PRESENT AND FUTURE PRACTICE
Changing times have had their effect on the architect's services. Yet the ultimate objectives and functions of architectural practice remain what they have always been: to design buildings and the spaces between them, and to administrate contracts for their construction. However, the methods of practice are becoming very different from those traditionally employed to reach these objectives.
In June 1998, the ALA appointed a task force to develop a long-range plan for the American Institute of Architects. It was
Charged with "Aligning the Institute for the Millennium." It became known as the AIM Task Force. Its product was the AIM Report. It's mission was to, "...challenge the comfortable assumptions in order to look into the future for where the profession will be, or needs to be, and to determine how the Institute can best support the growth and success of the profession."
The AIM Report itself is available upon request from the AIA. The major objectives that were identified by the task force are summarized here:
Architecture Education. Promote the accountability of schools offering professional degree programs in architecture for better preparing their students to become architects upon graduation.
Information and Knowledge Delivery. Identify and provide market-driven, timely, relevant, concise, and accessible information and knowledge, using all appropriate delivery systems.
External Dialogue. Seek opportunities and create mechanisms to foster dialogue that engages the architect with the marketplace.
Partners. Identify, promote, and enhance strategic partnerships between members, their clients, and other contributors to the built environment.
Advocacy. Initiate and enable results-oriented advocacy with government and industry at the state, local, and national levels, speaking with a clear and consistent voice.
Inclusiveness. Aggressively broaden the membership base to be more inclusive, and focus services to anticipate and creatively respond to member needs.
Governance. Transform the culture, structure, and resources of the Institute to facilitate the bold implications of policies that support the (AIM) Mission and (AIM) vision statements and provide more timely, consistent, and innovative responses to emerging issues.
YOUR PRACTICE
This concludes our discussion of the details of architectural practice, as we know it today. The next chapter discusses the education and licensing requirements you must meet before you can enter the community as an architect.
Chances are that when you enter your own practice, you will be a person with quite different qualifications from those of the present-day architect, for the expanded services and new techniques of practice discussed in this chapter will radically affect architectural education and practice in your time. These changes are bound to multiply at an ever-increasing rate. Such is the nature of the computerized society in which we live.
These changes, as important as they will be to your practice as an architect and to your responsibility for continuing self-education as a professional, will not alter the basic architectural mission, the creation of humanity's physical environment Rather, the changes will broaden your practice by freeing you of much of the hand-work now associated with research, analysis, and computation, affording greater control over management and design processes, and permitting you to spend more time on creative design.
