Christian Nielsen-Palacios
Confession time, Part 3
In this 3-part series of blogs I want to share (and encourage you to share) some war stories regarding mistakes I have been involved in as an architect. Part 1 was about an error that generated a large Change Order. Part 2 was about a project with a bad contract. Part 3 (this one) is…
Confession time, Part 2
In this 3-part series of blogs I want to share (and encourage you to share) some war stories regarding mistakes I have been involved in as an architect. Part 1 was about an error that generated a large Change Order. Part 2 (this one) is about a project with a bad contract. Part 3 is…
Confession time…
OK, I grew up Catholic, but that’s not what this is about. I want to share (and encourage you to share) some war stories regarding mistakes I have been involved in as an architect. In reverse chronological order, I will write about: Part 1 The case of the big Change Order Part 2 The case…
Errors, Omissions and Typos, oh, my!
Years ago, I was the architect and Project Manager for a new, $40-million-dollar middle school in New York state. It was a nice design in a great location. The only 4-story school I have ever been involved with. During the construction phase, there were the inevitable changes to the scope of the project, and the…
The Polysensory Perception of Space
In 1977, after my third year in architecture school, a friend and I convinced our parents to send us to a three week immersion course in German (which we were already studying) and then we traveled all over Germany for 10 more weeks. The course was in Würzburg, were the famous Baroque architect Balthasar Neumann…
The A.R.E. exam in the old days
The Architect Registration Examination (ARE) is a series of tests required in the United States in order to obtain a professional license as an architect. It has existed for decades, as a method to ensure that those of us in the profession are properly qualified by a combination of education and experience to safely practice…
Compare and Contrast
Remember when you were a kid and you received a magazine, or a section of the Sunday newspaper, that had one of those puzzles where you were to find several differences between two apparently identical pictures? I enjoyed doing those, and still do. As an adult, in my late twenties, I studied architectural history at…
Spanish ‘dialects’
I have always been interested in languages. My father spoke several, and my mother was fluent in English. When I was 9, we lived in Denmark for a year. Learning English was required in school in Venezuela, and I also took a bit of French in college. At the same time, as an extracurricular activity,…
Coffee, tea and regional pride
A recent post in FB about what people have for breakfast in different countries brought back some memories, which will probably require this to be my first “long” blog (90 seconds to read rather than the usual 60.) My dad was a tea drinker. He would make a full teapot (porcelain, of course), with loose…
Architect memories
Recently, in the EntreArchitect group in Facebook, we reminisced about what architectural practice was like in the “good ol’ days.” Below are some memories I shared. More to come. I studied architecture in my native Venezuela. There, your university education is all you need to practice. No ARE. I graduated a Saturday, and Monday I…
