I think today will probably be the last vacation inspired podcast we do for a while. After this trip to Florida and with COVID strengthening again, I know my family doesn’t have any immediate plans to go anywhere for the rest of the year. While were were in Florida, I had a conversation with my sister-in-law’s boyfriend about what he enjoyed about his job as a vet. He has experience with both large animals (cows and horses) and small animals (dogs, cats, etc.) but said he preferred the small animal practice because you get to have more fun with it. According to him there were more interesting cases and a wider range of things you could do. What caught my ear in this conversation was him mentioning having fun with his job. That got me thinking about having fun in my job as an architect, and that’s what we’d like to talk about today: having fun doing architecture.

Now before we get the inevitable comments about how, “of course we have fun as architects!“ let us clarify. Yes, architects are in a creative industry which allows for all different types of fun projects. Every architect I know has an inclination towards certain types of projects, but what I am talking about is just having fun doing an activity in your spare time that happens to fall under the category of architecture. While we were on vacation in Florida, we went to the beach at least every other day and on our last few days I spent a good deal of them making sand castles with the kids. On our last day at the beach I made a real effort to make something cool without the kids destroying it halfway through. As I was designing and building this sand castle on the fly ,I thought this was a pretty clear example of having fun as an architect. I’m sitting at the beach with unlimited building supplies and my kid’s plastic buckets and sand building molds working out my own design for a fun sand castle while my twins run around me trying to destroy it.

It’s a great memory and we all had fun there, but the larger question I’d like to ask here is when is the last time you had fun doing something related to your job? As architects there are so many things we do in the daily grind of our job. We have a business to run, projects to see through production, and construction administration to document. The list goes on and on. But we’re also in an industry that is creative and fun and in doing the drudge work involved in being an architect, sometimes we lose sight of why we are in the profession. Building sand castles on the beach with the kids reminded me that we can have fun with this too.

P.S.

Let us know on our Instagram @archgeekspodcast what you have done to have fun with your industry knowledge. Side note: it doesn’t have to be architecture related (that’s the cool part about this!)