We cannot do it all.

by Erik Illies

We cannot do it all. In the world of architecture, especially, this is reality... however, in school students will often falsely believe otherwise. I'm willing to speak in sweeping generalizations about this assessment because I've been an architecture student for a total of 5 years now and have worked in the profession for 3, and in that time I notice habits of my own and those of my peers. Quite frankly, we fall into the notion that we must not only design the best/ only possible solution for a design problem, but we will also determine every scale of detail associated with the development of that project (i.e. parking, structure, mechanical systems, envelope assemblies, life/safety & welfare, etc).

This is the root of our undoing (again, a sweeping generalization because it is what I find to be the cause of my own problems and I assume I'm not alone). What is expected of us, and what we should expect from ourselves, is a working knowledge of how these systems should/ would be integrated into design decisions. Granted, the better we understand them and the further we can incorporate them into our designs, the stronger the final product will be... however, my heart aches for those of us that falsely begin to believe that we should master these systems and solve them absolutely for our design projects.

Here lies the manifestation of the seed of deceit we sow in our own fields. We cannot do it all! And that was never the expectation, but I think we all are aware of the growing insecurity and un-assurance we start to feel when we haven't fully solved an issue like how a parking garage is designed and functions (much less the entire two hundred freaking thousand square feet of mixed-use residential tower you have above it). Recall that parking is but one facet of the multi-headed hell beast that is an architectural project.

The expectation of the project should be to see how far and how well we can develop our design, including the various related systems, within one semester (excluding thesis work). If we can remember that we won't be so worried about not having our structural systems perfectly/ completely laid out and assembled, because they never were supposed to be in the first place! Just as far as you can get it within one semester is the expectation. When we forget this we sometimes fall deep into the pit of eternal despair and regret and that causes us to not solve anything because we haven't solved something completely. Remember, no one is going to achieve the perfect/ completely finished project in that amount of time on this kind of scale BY THEMSELVES. Even in the "real world", we all grow up hearing about and hope to go to someday, no one does it by themselves. There is an entire team of people who's shared experience are needed to realize a comprehensive design solution.

I hope it is understood that I am not advocating laziness or complacency, instead I wish to spread the word of realistic and healthy personal expectations. I accept that I may not solve it all, but I will solve it the best I can and that's all I ever needed to do in the first place.

The skies will turn blue again, you just have to keep looking up!