Posts Tagged ‘architecture’

April 01, 2016

A Tribute to Zaha Hadid

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet I don’t like starchitects. But I was very sad to hear about the death of Zaha Hadid yesterday. At 65, it was too soon, considering architects tend to mature and do some of their best work late in their careers. (For example, Frank Lloyd Wright received the commission to design the Guggenheim Museum when he was 76 and designed the Price Tower when he was 85.) Dame Hadid had a lot of great architecture still left in her, and it is a true loss for the world never to see it. I have a lot of mixed feelings about…

January 11, 2016

How to Build Confidence as an Architect, Tips from 4 Women Architects

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Sometimes you don’t have all the answers, but thankfully having all the answers is not a prerequisite to building confidence. I’ve struggled for a long time and still do at times with lacking confidence as an architect, even after being assigned large projects and getting my license and being put in charge of teams. The nagging lack of confidence persisted despite other people’s confidence in me. Over time I’ve found that confidence doesn’t come from being perfect and knowing everything, but from a deep reserve within that we can draw on when things get tough. There are many ways…

December 27, 2015

How to Build Confidence as an Architect, 20 Tips from Diane Jacobs

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet “Construction is a very costly endeavor, costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and it is a huge responsibility for architects to be the steward of that kind of money in the form of a building,” says Rosa Sheng, Senior Associate at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and Chair of Equity by Design. This huge responsibility along with the tremendous breadth and ever changing amount of technical knowledge that is required to be an architect and an education that conditions people to think that they are failures if they do not become starchitects often leads to confidence issues in architects, especially…

December 19, 2015

How to Build Confidence as an Architect, Part I

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Some years ago I designed a stair for an office building that was too narrow. It was supposed to be a minimum of 48 inches wide, but I designed it to be 36 inches wide. No one caught it, not my supervisor, not the firm’s quality assurance team, and not even the contractor until he had already ordered the steel, which was the wrong size. My firm had to pay for new steel for the correct size stair. I was so ashamed and this hurt my confidence so much, that it was part of the reason I left architecture…

August 03, 2015

An Entreaty to Young Women in Architecture

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Architecture is all about art and beauty and feeling good inside a building right? Wrong. Architecture is also all about codes and actual wood framing sizes vs nominal and how are you going to make sure that skylight won’t leak. Recently, I started working for a firm called Communitecture as a project manager/project architect. We are so busy that we are looking for another person who can lead projects by herself as well. We’ve talked with quite a few people and looked at quite a few resumes. What has become apparent in our search is that there are plenty…

April 13, 2015

Let’s Give a Damn about Gender Equity in Architecture

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Two weeks ago I was at an event where I was completely inspired and utterly disappointed at the same time. Design Museum Portland screened Making Space: 5 Women Changing the Face of Architecture at the Hollywood Theater and by the end of it I felt like I could change the world. But I was deflated by the fact that the audience was overwhelmingly comprised of women and such few men attended. No doubt this movie is of interest to women architects, but what wasn’t obvious, apparently, is that it is of interest to, and maybe even more important for,…

March 23, 2015

Philadelphia University Interview on the Meaning of Architecture

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Philadelphia University has a blog aimed at prospective architecture students called Built@PhilaU. The authors recently interviewed me about the meaning of architecture and the role of sustainability in the profession. Below is the interview. You can find the original interview here. Taz Loomans of The Blooming Rock Blog loves everything about architecture, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some things that she would like to see change in her lifetime. Here, Loomans discusses some of what she loves the most about the field and what she hopes will change in the future. Architecture means a lot of things to…

February 23, 2015

Architecture as if People and the Planet Mattered

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Last week I watched a Peruvian documentary on the lives of local musicians called I’m Still, screened as part of the Portland International Film Festival. It displayed stunning imagery of mountain-top villages in remote areas of the country where indigenous musicians played their violins, harps and guitars and sang folk songs. I was struck by the indigenous architecture of these villages, which comprised of hand-built stone masonry walls and clay tile roofs. They were beautiful buildings built by families generations ago, perfectly scaled to Peruvian human proportions and completely fitting of Puruvian native lifestyles. Moreover, they blended in with…

January 26, 2015

What do Architects Do?

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Most people don’t really know what architects do on a day to day basis. Perhaps you have a vague notion that architects make napkin sketches sitting in sleek, low-lit bars playing jazz piano and a few months later fabulous buildings like the Guggenheim in Bilbao by Frank Gehry or the Bullet Building by Norman Foster manifest from that sketch. This is not entirely true, there are a number of people and processes missing from that scenario. A lot of things happen between the napkin sketch and when the doors of a building open and that stretch is where the…

December 01, 2014

A Review of The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Modernism was king when I went to architecture school back in the late 90s and early 2000s. And the architect’s ego was carefully cultivated through very severe critiques of student work which quickly established who the stars of the class were and who the laggards were. Architecture was all about what we created and how we could impose our vision on the natural world. Professors blathered on with great delight about architects like Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer. These were architecture’s heroes. Nevermind that their urban planning proposals had little to do with the actual human experience and everything…