Life of an Architect

As an architect, every space I walk in to, I look at … intensely. I scrutinize, evaluate, process, and redesign.Every. Single. Space.

For the 9th year in a row, Life of an Architect presents its "What to buy an architect for Christmas" - gift ideas that will please even the most particular and demanding of architects.

What does a day in the Life of an Architect look like? There are a lot of different answers to that question and even if I look at what my day looks like, it has varied over the years as I move through my career and took on different roles and responsibilities.

So how much money do architects make? They're all rich, right? Well, that's the topic today and we are going to take a look at how best to answer that question.

There are many things I do during a typical day – designing “stuff” is just one very small portion – but I still consider myself a designer more so than a project architect. Since I work at a smallish firm, everyone wears many hats and nobody has just one task or label. To be considered a designer just means you need to think about the design of everything – and I mean everything. Not everything I do is BIG picture design – compared with the overall time spent, very little of it is – but I...

With their clarity often confused with simplicity, modern houses require a far greater attention to execution and as a result, seem to surprise everyone with how expensive modern houses actually cost.

If you are interested in becoming an architect, what are the best reasons to pursue your dream? The field of architecture can be extremely rewarding and today we discuss a few of the reasons why.

Fall is just around the corner and that means it's time for students around the country to return to their desk at architecture school. For most, this time is a mixture of excitement and enthusiasm while for others, it's a mixture of anxiety and sleepless nights ...

Architectural offices do a lot more than simply provide a space in which the occupants do their job ... they represent the culture of the office and provide a context in which people imagine what they are capable of doing.

In this fifth episode of the Life of an Architect podcast, Landon and I take on the topic of Architects and cooking and how those two things come together in a way that could be unique.

Architects like to travel, at least that's what all my friends who are architects would like you to believe. While I will agree that this is a true statement, I think it's a fairly generic statement because don't all people like to travel?In this fourth episode of the Life of an Architect podcast, Landon and I take on the topic of traveling - or at least we start a conversation about traveling. When we sat down to prepare our show notes, it quickly became apparent that this was a topic...

Sketching is a hot topic regardless of the people having the discussion, but I have learned over the last nine years of writing this site that sketching is one of the more hotly contested topics. While few architects would dispute the value in sketching, HOW that sketch is generated seems to fall into camps of individuals: Team Analog versus Team Digital and I don't think anyone would be surprised to learn that the age of the individual seems to decide (more times than not, but not a...

In this second episode of the Life of an Architect podcast, we turn our attention towards the college years. I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, while Landon received his diploma from Virginia Tech in 2016 ... so how has college changed over this time?There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to architecture school:How do I pick which college is right for me? Is it hard to get admitted? Is there a portfolio requirement? Will I have a social life? What sort of classes...

Life of an Architect has finally entered the podcasting world! In the first episode, Bob Borson and Landon Williams discuss why they decided to start a podcast, their objectives for the podcast, as well as possible future topics.

Today I answer the 4 most common questions I get asked to answer regarding an architectural degree and studio life in college. The questions probably won't surprise you, but the answers might.