Architects don’t always get it right

It pains me to say this but architects don’t always get it right. That’s right … I said it. I am secure enough in my abilities to admit when I don’t get it right (**notice that I didn’t say that I got it wrong, I’m not crazy**)

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Maybe I have set the bar to high – not sure that you could set it higher if you think somebody … anybody … gets it right 100% of the time but that doesn’t stop me from trying. My personal expectation is that I get it right to a point that you can’t tell it’s wrong, which to me sounds a lot like getting it right all the time.

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It is Saturday morning and I am sitting in the front room of my house beating myself up because I’m not happy with the lighting plan for the remodel at my own houses. What makes it worse is that I spent a lot of time thinking about the decision I made, thought I could be wrong, but convinced myself that, nahhhh, I got it right the first time …

… and then my wife walked in and pointed out the same issue. Rather than stop at that moment and say, “I got this wrong,” I continued to drink the Kool-Aid and carry on. I can still fix my mistake, it will cost me a little bit of money and a small chunk of pride but it’s the right thing to do.

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So here is the mistake – where I chose to center the lights. I had originally stood in the space (which was the old space, complete with walls and furniture which are now all removed) and decided that the center of the room would be perceived as between the wood furr down on the right and the new glass wall on the left. Now that I am in the space, the perceived center is between the furr down and the beam. When the original window wall was in place, it was so heavy that you felt its presence and the beam above your head was a nonentity. Now that the wall is mostly glass, all you perceive is the wood beam..

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The red dots represent the location where I should have put the lights…

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In order to solve this little issue, I resorted to a little on site mock-up. We stuck some paper inside kitchen plastic bags and started moving things around until everything started to feel right.

So what happens when I make a mistake on one of my projects where it’s someone else’s house? Do they punch my in the face or start rubbing their thumb onto their fingers together in the widely recognized gesture for “pay up”? Well, I’ve never been punched (at least not literally) and nobody has ever asked me to pull out my checkbook. I attribute this to the fact that I have always maintained a great relationship with the people who hire me and they know that the decisions I make aren’t cavalier – but I also haven’t made any huge mistakes.

It’s possible that what I call mistakes are really esoteric judgement calls – i.e. “I think this would look better than that” and then it doesn’t. Sometimes you end up living with a decision because you don’t think it’s all that bad – or the solution is worse than the mistake, delays the project, or nobody but me cares enough to make the change. All I know is that I have to make things right …