With blood on my collar, I wish it were mine. Less friends before me, and more left behind.

What is it like to be young and so full of potential that it's almost too intimidating to move forward? At what point does that possibility become a disappointment? 25? 30? 50? Who knows.

Architecture is an old person's game, and unlike the more glamorous fields it seems that your youth is for teeth cutting and general screw-up-ery instead of your "glory days".

Please excuse the next segment as it borders on both the insufferably philosophical and the embarrassingly physical.

A friend of mine, an actor in New York, made the statement that you cannot become a truly great actor until you have made passionate love to someone and have them break your heart in return. While not a literal translation, I think the same may hold true for architecture. There can be victory without defeat, no wisdom without foolishness and no success without failure. Still we fight on, backs to the past, always blazing forward.

It's a hard kind of learning. The kind that bruises, the kind that wounds, the kind that is not easily forgotten or forgiven.

The best example of this is probably in Frank Ghery



It always surprises non architectural friends to learn that for a long time, Ghery was considered in turns obtuse and ignorant by the architectural elite. I recall overhearing Peter Eisenman calling him "dumb" at a lecture only just a few years ago.

Despite this, Frank survived and persevered. Whatever your opinions may be of the deconstructivist showmanship he puts out, there is no denying that he helped change the game. The same is true for many visionary architects who had early failures, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi, James Sterling.

So where does this put a young or aspiring architect? What is the right path? Do you fight for recognition among your colleagues? Do you nestle yourself amongst the game of pride that is academics? Or do you simply go rogue and decide you will get there when you damn well feel like it? How do you know if you're even any good? Doubt, it seems, becomes intrinsically connected with faith.

There is no correct answer. You don't win. You just decide not to lose.

With all that being said, I am probably going back to Graduate school in the next few months and with any decision of this magnitude you wonder if you are making the right choice.

As I am still obsessed with Game of Thrones (Season 2 starting on April 1st!) we'll let Maester Aegeon sum up my feelings.

Only time will tell, but should you not hear back in a year, It should be safe to say that you could find Retly Corm here.

ARE: Site Planning & Design

In spite of the fact that this exam has the highest pass rate overall at 76%, I feel the least confident about my performance on this one.  Unfortunately, I let other things get in the way of my studying - I may have only put in 10 hours for this one.  I did not study from anything beyond the Kaplan and Ballast study guides.  Usually, I try to do a quick review of pertinent codes or whatever other major industry standard book is recommended by NCARB.  This time, however, I did not.

I think I should have spent more time preparing for the vignettes as well.  For some reason the grading one trips me up - I feel like on the one hand you want to make smooth curves, but on the other hand the more you move the lines the more it sounds that you could be docked for disturbing the site.  I guess I just don't feel that tweaking topography lines is as literal as they are making it with this particular exam.  Does anyone really go out to a site afterwords to verify that every square inch of grass is between 2% and 20% grade?  I have never seen it.  But, that's besides the point with these exams!

Anyway, in conclusion (so you may get some use out of this post), I would recommend going hardcore with the vignettes.  Do the NCARB ones and try like 3 of each of whatever other practice ones you can get.  If I have to retake this again in six months, I'm going to do every practice vignette I can find.

Multiple choice-wise, I would say brush up in the codes section, you never know which piece of code they're going to ask you and you don't have a lot of questions in the section so each answer has a lot of weight.

Completing IDP

This morning I submitted my final work experience into IDP e-EVR to fulfill the training requirements portion of IDP.  I heard or read somewhere that NCARB will automatically forward your NCARB record to the state once you have completed all of the jurisdiction's IDP requirements, and after that you just have to wait until the board receives all of your exam scores.  I'm searching for documentation of this somewhere.... stay tuned.

I was reading through the PA requirements for an initial license and I found some fees I wanted to share.  It appears there is $40 fee for the application for initial license in PA, followed by a $15 fee for license certification/verification and a $25 fee for certification of exam scores.

It also says, however that there is a $30 fee for "processing exam applications."  I'm not quite sure what that means - I'm interpreting it as a fee you pay when you are requesting your Authorization To Test.  I have not yet received a bill for this, so maybe all these charges come to you at the end right before you receive your initial license?

Not sure, will have to post a response to these questions later after I get through it all.

The one thing that is a little troubling about the e-EVR reporting system is that it does not provide information anywhere about how NCARB quantifies the durational requirement portion of IDP.  If they go from start date at a firm to end date at a firm, I think I will be at the 3 year mark by the end of April.  If they count every day you log hours for, including weekends, I may be behind by a little bit because I didn't always lap my reporting periods exactly where the previous one left off.  It would be nice if in addition to quantifying all the training hours you have, they would quantify the duration of your internship as well.

ARE: Building Systems

I realized I never made an official post dedicated to the Building Systems exam.  Unfortunately, I have already forgotten much of what I probably would have posted.  But here  goes anyway:

I think I put in over 60 hours of studying.
I believe I gave myself 4 weekends to study for this one.

With this being my first multiple choice exam, I came up with a system for determining my study intensity, which I still employ currently.  I take the NCARB sample multiple choice questions first.  If I do poorly, I study a ton, if I do well, I study a little.  By the end of the studying, I retake the quiz (because I am quite forgetful, it's almost like a new exam) to see how I score and if it is satisfactory (85%+) I cease studying.

For BS, my first crack at the NCARB MC was 69%, ergo serious studying was required.  I ended up reading all of the Kaplan 2009 study guides, and I believe all or most of the Ballast study guide?  I read through some code information, I think it pertained to the fire protection aspect of the exam.

I averaged 75% on the Kaplan Lesson Quizzes, got a 74% on the Kaplan Practice Exam, got a 63% on the Kaplan Sample Questions booklet and I'm not sure about the Ballast exams as I neglected to hang onto those notes.

When I was done studying, I retook the NCARB exam and scored an 80%.  Not stellar, but good enough for me at the time.

I believe I did one practice vignette besides the NCARB one.  I don't remember anything tricky about that vignette, I think it was pretty straight forward and I think I did it in like 15 minutes or something ridiculous like that.

Anyway, that's all I have in my notes, so hopefully that helps anyone who is studying!
(Oh and in case you stumbled onto this post before reading the others, I did in fact pass this exam on the first try.)
My advice with this one and with Structural Systems is to just relax and be confident.

Oh and if you encounter any ... objectionable questions on the exam, don't freak out.  I remember feeling rather irate after the multiple choice because some of the questions seemed subjective and I know at least one had the answers in the incorrect units.  Enjoy!

LEED GA Exam

So not to hype it up too much, but come Friday I will be parking myself in front of a computer in Towson, MD and will take the LEED GA exam. Am I nervous? A little, I guess. I've heard the test is pretty easy, but however a few of the test exam questions make me anxious.

Example question #1:

A reduction in overall water quality due to an increase in the concentration of chemical nutrients would be an example of which of the following?

a) Xeriscaping
b) Eutrophication
c) Denitrofication
d) Osmosis
e) Hypoalimentation

The correct answer is "b" which I picked solely because I had already reviewed Xeriscaping and Osmosis and Eutrophication just sounded right.

After looking up the terms: Denitrofication occurs in the ground (mostly) and "Hypoalimentation" means you are malnourished.

There are, on the other hand the easier questions like:

Example Question #2:

What are the benefits of better lighting control? (pick 2)
a) it reduces cooling loads
b) it creates energy savings
c) it improves green roofs
d) it helps operators use fewer cars
e) all of the above

This is clearly a&b. However questions like this are almost worse than the hard ones. Doubt creeps in and you start to think: "maybe lighting CAN improve your green roofs...think about it...the plants would grow better." Then before you know it, you're talking like your stoned-out hippie roommate from freshman year. The one with all the batik skirts who was melting crayons in the dead of the night to Dave Matthews for some bizarre art project. Oh wait. That was me. (For the record, Kelly Ford of Avalon, NJ, I'm sorry for being such a weirdo)

but I digress.

The third kind of question are the somewhat self-serving LEED process questions. Now, to be clear, I really do believe in the goals of the USGBC (for those non-archi-nerds out there that is the US Green Building Council). We should be striving for better more environmentally sound buildings, however questions like this:

Example question #3

Which of the following are true regarding costs? (choose 2)
a) Certification fees are waived for Platinum projects
b) Recertification fees are the same as initial certification fees for Existing Buildings
c) Certification fees changed in 2002 and again in 2005
d) Certification fees are based on project location
e) Certification fees for a LEED silver project differ from those of a LEED Gold Project

seem to be the kind of information one would have in a pamphlet or website information page, and not, say, on a licencing exam. About 10% of the practice questions seem to be about when USGBC gets paid for things, when you pay for the building certification, the review, the recertification, etc. It just reminds you that the USGBC despite it's somewhat federal-sounding name, is, afterall, a money making venture.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes.



oh, and the correct answers the third one are a & c

ARE: Construction Documents & Services

This was the 4th ARE I took, about 3 weeks ago.  I received the results today and hoooooorah I passed!  As promised, here's my idea for studying:

I read through the Kaplan 2009 study guide and the Ballast study guide (I forget which edition).  I did decently well on the quizzes (83% average), but pretty poorly on the practice exams (71% average).

As usual, use the NCARB practice vignette software.  I found the circle sketch tool to be a bit graphically misleading, so I ended up using the rectangle tool instead.  I believe I did 2 practice vignettes other than the NCARB one.

I did not study nearly as much for this one as for Building Systems and Structural Systems.  However, the majority of my work experience pertains to this exam.

Next is Site Planning & Design.  Getting closer!

Home is where the art is

This is an offshoot from our typical topics, but I figured it was time for a little shameless self-promotion.

Retly Corm signed herself up with the 2012 Sketchbook Challenge (Sponsored by the Art House Co-op, in New York)

See the link for excerpts from the sketchbook themed "Travel with Me"

Arts-n-Farts