Every Monday morning, team members in the Philadelphia and Princeton offices gather together via video-conference to discuss firm news and upcoming events and projects. Since 2003, founding partner Allan Kehrt, FAIA, has delivered his Monday Morning Musings, weekly slices of personal insight into the design profession, to the firm. To comment on any of his posts, send an email to us. We look forward to hearing from you. |
| August 27, 2007 Ruins (again) All of what we build will eventually lie in ruins. Time will work its destructive processes and leave only portions of the passion we have imbued in our buildings. The ruins will present themselves to those who follow as some reminder of another time; something that once was. My hope is that our ruins will be as good as were our buildings. Alan Weisman deals with ruins in his new book, The World Without Us. He looks at man's works and imagines a world in which humans no longer exist, examining the destructive and regenerative forces of nature and describes the consequences of our absence. In some ways it's a sad book since his primary focus is the amount of time nature will take to undo the environmental degradation we have wrought and the vast pollution we have left behind. His examination of what will survive after we have gone points out what we architects certainly already know: the most survivable structures may be those built many years ago. The Pyramids, the Sphinx, some substantial masonry and concrete work we have contributed since then, and the major scars we have made upon the Earth's surface: the Suez and Panama canals, and one of the largest scars of all, the Ekati Diamond Mine in northern Canada where 10,000 tons of ore a day have been removed every day 365 days a year since 1998, leaving a hole a half mile wide and one thousand feet deep. We have wrought immense damage to our planet; let us make sure that what we architects leave behind for future generations to find and judge, rather than causing anger and condemnation of our irresponsibility, will put a smile on their faces. |
| August 20, 2007 Others We must always keep in mind that we are designing buildings that will be used by others. It seems basic, but the idea that someone will live or work in the things we create sometimes seems foreign to us as we lose ourselves in the intricacies of a project. But others will have the product of our minds and hands much longer than we have it and it will become more and more theirs than ours as time passes. We need to consider that as we design. The Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis said, "The true work of architecture is not a monument, but a receptacle of life... a form that is never finished or final, but that is completed as time goes by, flowering again and again into daily perfection." It is perfected as this receptacle of life by others who take it from us and use it as a part of their lives, not ours. We have an obligation, an opportunity and a responsibility to understand this as we do our work. |
| August 13, 2007 Growing Twenty-four years ago there were only three of us at KSS. Now there are about fifty. It's been a long steady period in which we have gradually increased the size of the firm and of the projects we can undertake. Our intention is to keep growing the firm, to keep getting bigger and to simultaneously keep making it better. If we grow at a rate of ten per cent per year, (a reasonably aggressive goal; we have grown at about four per cent per year for the last three or four years), in a little more that seven years we will be one hundred people; at only five per cent growth per year it will take us fourteen plus to get that big. The issue of growth and eventual firm size has been an ongoing discussion since the beginning. There are questions of why we want to grow: more prestige, better projects, room for staff to grow and a place within the firm for them to go, or perhaps a greater influence within the profession. And there have been discussions of the issues that growth brings; more management, more pressure, more headaches. But grow we will, and the issues will slowly resolve themselves as they always have and we'll keep discussing the growth of the firm as we always have. |
