Bob Borson, FAIA | Apr 8, 2024

Life of an Architect Podcast Ep. 148: Meetings are a Waste of Time

You check the time and realize that you have four minutes before your next meeting. Maybe it’s an internal meeting, maybe clients are coming in. Is it in person or online? Depending on how you answer those questions, time to start scrambling so that you are where you need to be and have the information required to make this meeting a good use of your time. But guess what? I promise that you will end up waiting on someone (maybe you are that someone). Either way, you aren’t getting that time back and you haven’t even started yet. Welcome to Life of an Architect Podcast Ep. 148: Meetings are a Waste of Time.

| Nov 29, 2018

What to Get an Architect for Christmas

This is the 9th annual and highly anticipated What to Get an Architect for Christmas gift guide. It’s hard for me to process that when I wrote the very first gift guide back in 2010 that this would become the most requested blog post that I would write every single year. In that first year, the guide was just my own personal gift wish list, but now I spend almost an entire year curating what sort of items should make the final cut.

| Nov 11, 2018

A Day in the Life of an Architect

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. The one thing that has not varied all that much over the years is that I start my day pretty early. Today is a good example of that since it was a Sunday, and I was still up pretty early because I had a lot of work to get done.

| Nov 9, 2018

An Architect’s Salary

It was only a matter of time before I once again tackled the topic of an architect’s salary. This is actually the fourth post I’ve prepared on the subject, but I haven’t talked about it since January 2013 so maybe it was overdue. I have long been on record that I can’t stand when architects complain that they don’t make more money. Of course they want to make more money – who doesn’t?

| Oct 14, 2018

What Makes You a Designer

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.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Sep 30, 2018

The ‘Low Cost Modern House’

Modern Design used to be about the mechanization of the process, thereby making a thing affordable to the masses. But that’s not the case anymore. 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. The phrase “big bag of nothing” comes out of my mouth more times than I care to admit.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Sep 20, 2018

Top Ten Reasons to be an Architect

If there is one moment I can look back and single out the moment when everything changed, it was February 22, 2010. That was the day I decided to write the post “Top Ten Reasons to be an Architect,” and nothing has been the same for me ever since. This was the post the put me on the radar screen of hundreds of thousands of people. As of this writing, this post by itself has been read a mind-boggling 845,924 times.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Sep 3, 2018

A Survivor’s Guide to Architecture School

Fall is just around the corner and that means it’s time for students around the country to return to their desk’s 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 … during my time in school is experienced a mixture of the two. Landon and I sat down in this episode to talk about architecture studio and how to come out with not only the best possible experience, but to make your time in school a little less stressful.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Aug 19, 2018

Inside an Architect’s Office

Work environments are important – they tell visitors a lot about what to expect from the place they are visiting. I almost always enjoy visiting other architects office because it seems like there is always something wacky going on somewhere. I’m not talking about the office’s of large architectural firms – no. I like going into the offices of firms with 30 people or less…15 or less is even better. It’s at the point where the budget is still the major obstacle and the possibility of seeing saw-horse desks and reclaimed bookshelves is a distinct and sometimes necessary component.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Aug 5, 2018

Architects and Chefs

Architects and chefs share a great number of personality characteristics with one another, and in my extremely scientific poll (conducted by me) a vast majority of architects actually like to cook, although, even more dislike cleaning up after cooking. 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.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Jul 23, 2018

Architects and Traveling

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 worthy of several episodes.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Jul 9, 2018

Sketching

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 guarantee) which camp an individual belongs.

Bob Borson, FAIA | Jun 27, 2018

The College Years

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 should I take?

Bob Borson, FAIA | Jun 14, 2018

Character Development

So after eight and a half years, I have finally decided to enter the world of podcasting. I am excited to add this medium to my toolkit as I think podcasting my actually be a more natural medium for me rather than writing a blog post. I have maintained that I ama terrible writer, but I actually think I am a fairly engaging speaker – especially in the casual environment of a conversation between friends and colleagues.