Training Confidence in Technical Detailing

A This episode is sponsored by Monograph and Arc IT. You'll hear more about them later on in the episode. I'm Evelyn Lee. And I'm Janine Chastain.

B We're collaborating on curated conversations to explore how the industry of architecture is changing.

A Together, we'll find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. Welcome to Practice Disrupted. Hello, listeners. Hello, Janine.

B Hi, Evelyn. Hi, disruptors.

A Today's guest is helping architects strengthen their technical capabilities and offering something that both Janine and I wish we had when we started out in architecture.

B That's right. Christine, also known as Christie, has a growing following on social media, and she's really well known for being the go to person when it comes to detailing and making your building envelope not leak.

A Christine, why don't you go ahead and tell us about yourself and a little bit about Building Science Club?

C Okay. Well, my background is in architecture. I have a master's in architecture. And pretty early on in my career, actually, while I was still in school, I started working for a firm that was really interested in extremely energy efficient buildings, typically residential, multifamily, and the practice was in New York City. It was Chris Benedict. Fantastic firm, small firm, kind of scrappy firm at the time, probably a little bit, still now too, though I haven't checked in super recently. And what I mean by that is, scrappy in the in the sort of jack of all trades mentality in the firm itself. Right? So everybody does a little bit of everything.

C Nobody is too good for you know, no task is too unimportant. Nobody's too good for anything. And it was a great environment for me as a as a student. And in any case, if you if you care about or if you're attempting to do anything bold with respect to energy efficient design, which certainly this firm was, certainly Chris Benedict was at the time. I mean, her buildings and still is. But the buildings at the time were using 80% less energy for heat and hot water than a typical New York building, and she was doing it for no extra upfront construction costs, which was absolutely extraordinary. And if you're going to do that, you have to know a lot about building science and you have to know a lot about construction. And, she, Chris, really felt strongly about teaching the apprenticeship model of architecture and making sure that practitioners were gaining experience or young people were gaining experience in all areas.

C And so she put me in the field a ton, and, and I just loved it. I thought it was absolutely magic. It's where the the real magic happened, was, how what we were doing in the office actually got built. And I guess just starting there, I really took to the, enclosure details, water management details, that kind of stuff. It it matters more when you're trying to make things more energy efficient because previously, we've been or we've been able to rely on energy and energy inefficiency specifically to dry our buildings out. Right? Poorly insulated buildings and leaky buildings have a lot of energy that goes across them, and we use that or that energy would could be used for drying. So stuff would get wet, and it wouldn't really matter because it would dry out pretty quickly. And when we start to, pay more attention to energy efficiency and also other things, it's not the only thing, but interior comforts and oh, there's a lot of other stuff there.

C But just focusing in on the energy for a moment, if you, if you start paying attention to energy and reduce energy flow across our enclosures, then there's less energy available for drying. So we need to get better at our detailing and controlling water in the first place, and a bunch of other stuff has to change as a result. And I find those trade offs and that dynamic really fascinating, and, I've I've made a

B career out of it. So so there you go. There's a few reasons that we invited you on the show today. You are very entrepreneurial. You have done some really incredible stuff to help bring the level of education up on these topics. Obviously, you care a lot about climate and and having real solutions that are gonna make a difference in buildings and construction. But I I guess I wanna just make sure that our audience really understands this term of building scientist because I think that not everyone really knows what that is.

C Can you tell us what it is? It's very applied physics, and it's applying physics to our to the building enclosure, which which are basically the the building enclosure is essentially the term we use for the layers that separate the inside from the outside, and so I specialize in those layers. I use the term building scientist because some people are familiar with it, and it means something to them. But, really, it's a I consider my own work personally as a subset of architecture. I don't view it as separate. I don't view although a lot of people do approach building science from an engineering angle or even from a scientific angle, I think it is a it's a form of applied even applied architecture, applied or physics as applied to architecture, particularly in the area of energy and water water management. But it's not a whole lot different than like, architects have been doing this anyway. It's just giving architects, I guess, an understanding or a framework for understanding stuff that they've already been doing anyway. And the better a framework you have for the physics, it lets you gives you more creative freedom in making changes to standard practices in response to a changing climate, changing demands, changing program, changing expectations from our from our clients, that kind of stuff.

C So it's the it's the physics, the background in physics to help us understand stuff that architects already do to create comfortable interior environments.

A Your enthusiasm is really refreshing in this space because if I were in your shoes and got thrown into the field, I definitely would not have reacted the same way you did. So is there anything in your background that either piqued your interest or maybe made you interested in architecture in the first place that really drew you to this aspect of building and design and construction? Janine and I always talk about being big dorks from an operational perspective, and a lot of people could probably care less about operations. So I'm just overwhelmed by your enthusiasm for an area that I really always struggled appreciating. But given the way you present it and not just because it's pink and pretty and on Instagram, it really makes it educational and interesting. So what inherently drew you to, like, this particular aspect?

C I mean, I don't know. I think it's probably a mix of a lot of things. I do think that people's backgrounds, especially their early background, really ends up affecting what they kind of take to or what path they take. I mean, I think that's probably true in a lot of professions. I was introduced to fieldwork and to this kind of stuff, a, by someone else who is really passionate about it. So that's normal. Right? I mean, even in elementary school, when you have a good teacher who really loves whatever they're teaching, the the students start liking it too, or they tend to like it too. So part of it was just that.

C I had a teacher who early in my career, like, right at the right time, who was really passionate about this kind of stuff too, so it was easy to to recognize through her. Hey. There's something interesting here. I wonder if it interests me too. And then the second part was that 2 things. 1, I had done something first. My undergraduate degree was not in architecture. I I was working in marketing for a couple years before deciding to go to architecture school, and I hated it.

C I was just really bad at it. I didn't like business at all. It was really difficult, actually, in that for the first time ever, I was I was really bad at something, and I I didn't like it. I didn't like being bad at something. And I think maybe having approaching architecture I I got to be a student again. So I was a student when I when I was having these early experiences in the field. I was a student, and I'd also experienced, like, personal and professional failure. And I think 2 of the like, both of those things together can make a person open minded in maybe ways that when you're an adult and you're being confronted with something, you're a little bit a little bit more, I don't know.

C There's there's a higher expectation that you enter something with more confidence, and I think that's a big a big challenge with practicing professionals, architects and architects in training, of a great deal of experience in the profession, but not a whole lot of experience in this one area. And, of course, it's annoying or intimidating or particularly for people who, I think, often define themselves as as more creative and less technical. This can seem overwhelming and, and just not that not that interesting. And then I think our profession actually is organized in some ways that make it even harder to really get at the the stuff that I think is kind of fun, and that is that we just don't spend a lot of time in the field. Our profession is increasingly specialized, so acquiring this skill set in the 1st place is difficult. And I think there's also maybe unintentionally some incentive, some market incentives to make this stuff seem harder than it is. And that's not to minimize, like, building science there is there is physics in it. There's science in the name.

C So and there are people who spend their entire lives studying this and dealing with only this, and they're very, very smart, and they're practicing at a very high level. And I don't wanna diminish that work, But at the level that most architects need for daily professional practice, it's not that crazy. And, really and I think that's what I've sort of tapped into is if I can provide a framework or some clarity to a topic that's otherwise complicated, it, it makes something that seems complicated accessible. It really is not as hard. Like, architects, I think, get really intimidated by or they can, not not all of them, but, fieldwork can be intimidating and and some of the some of the science behind particularly water management and energy can be really intimidating. And, yes, there's a real richness if you start to do that. You could dedicate your whole career to it, but there's also some generally applicable rules of thumb and frameworks that architects can incorporate into their daily practice so that they can basically solve, like, 95% of what comes their way themselves. And then for the 5% of cases where they really need a specialist, well, then they know that they can go deal with a specialist.

C And then even better, they're equipped to actually work with that specialist better because they have this framework to begin with. And I think sometimes consultants make this seem harder because when when we'd get our professional education either through manufacturers or from consultants who are getting just not to knock consultants. I am one, but who are getting you know, they're doing it for free to basically get business for their consulting practice, and the sort of message is, well, this stuff is really hard, and therefore, you should hire me, or this stuff is really complicated, and therefore, you should buy our product. Because then you like, the solution is our product was. Here's what you need to do or here's what you need to know to solve the problem yourself. Was. Here's what you need to do or here's what you need to know to solve the problem yourself, and, oh, by the way, you can apply that to, you know, the dozens of versions of the same problem you come across in your in your practice.

A You know, I've been talking to a few people about BIM and efficiencies and how architects don't necessarily use BIM to its full extent. But one interesting comment that came up in the conversation, and to be fair, I left the profession before really diving deep into BIM myself, was that there's a greater separation in using this technology from understanding building sciences or how buildings go together in construction. This is because before we hand drew or at least I cut it out details, and I actually had to draw in the various different connections, label them properly. And now we have these three-dimensional blocks that we just drop onto the page. You know, let's use that same connection that we used in that last building. And I think it just makes it harder for people to understand how things come together, which is why what you are doing is that much more critical for today's architectural practice. But I guess I am wondering, what is your response to that? Have you seen a greater emergence in the need for what you're doing?

C Yeah. It's it's hard to make connections sometimes between not sometimes, a lot of times, between the lines on a drawing and what those lines actually represent in real life. And and that's, I think, a natural function of the tools that we use to produce our drawings. And I think an important distinction or a helpful distinction is that for builders or for contractors, the deliverable is the building. And for architects, the deliverable is the drawing. Now that's not entirely a fair characterization because, obviously, we're not being hired they're not framing these drawings and putting them on the wall. The our our clients want to produce a building in the end. But in terms of how our how our businesses are organized, we produce drawings.

C That's our job, and it's stuff that we use to facilitate drawing production isn't always aligned with encouraging and understanding on our part on the design side with, with what with what the elements of those those drawings actually mean in in real life. And, I mean, you know, I I don't I have mixed feelings about it, obviously, as do, I think, probably everybody. It's a tool that makes some things easier, but make other things other things more difficult. So, I mean, I guess, like everything else, it's trade off.

B I wanna come back to this idea about training, and, you know, you kinda mentioned this division that's created around the technical knowledge set. I mean, there are people who pursue becoming a technical architect, and they spend their whole careers working towards that. And, you know, in some firms, they they divide out people who are technically competent and split them away from people who are design focused or have other skills that are, you know, generally pushed in other directions. But I guess I there's a lot of things I think around the training component of how we orient people to this knowledge that feels like a massive barrier, especially for people who are very early in their careers. And I guess the the conversation that I hope we can go into today is just about confidence and how do we overcome these barriers to get people, you know, more comfortable and trained on this stuff earlier in their careers rather than making it inaccessible? So I was curious. A lot to unpack in that, and maybe we can take it piece by piece.

C Yeah. It's I I have mixed feelings about it too as I think probably everybody practicing does. There's a huge disconnect between our formal academic preparation for this profession and the actual daily practice of it. And and I don't know what the what the ideal, you know, combination is with this stuff. I think I think also it's so easy to compare in our world right now with particularly with social media. So when we compare how our profession is compared to other other professions and our level of competence, upon graduation versus the the level of competence of of other technical professions at at their graduation and entry into the professional paid world. I don't know. It's tough.

C It's it's, it's hard to come up with, with a with sort of an ideal model for this kind of stuff. I do think it's okay that we encourage people to pursue specialties within architecture. So in general, it doesn't I don't see a huge problem of principle with more technical oriented people pursuing pursuing that and starting to pursue it early and more design oriented people pursuing that and being encouraged in that. But I do think that one of the things we obviously have to be really careful of, which is, I think, what's what's happened in a lot of places is that, we make these decisions early on and end up not benefiting from at least a basic understanding of what else is going on in our profession. We are generalists in our profession, and and it's okay to be generalists. But it's difficult sometimes to maintain that because there's just so many subspecialties. Right? It's hard. Right? We have there's it's not and it's not just the part that I do.

C Like, what's an art what what is a typical residential architect to do with understanding so the building science stuff, water management, energy efficiency, and, acoustics and indoor air quality. And there's all kinds of specialties that we ought to know something about, but it's really hard to acquire that skill set. And it's and it's hard to do that even if we had programs in schools that did this a little bit better, which I think we should. I think we should always be improving this kind of stuff. But I think when I was a student, I wasn't even if someone taught me this really well, I I didn't have the context to apply it. It wouldn't mean anything to me. I wouldn't understand what I was really learning. So you kinda have to learn this as you're practicing, but that's very frustrating because, you know, you learn through doing, and it's extremely uncomfortable when you are on a job site and you're supposed to be in charge of some stuff, and you're represent you know, you're representing your firm, and now you're supposed to kinda learn something in front of your contractor and sometimes even your clients.

C And that's a that's a really difficult position to to be in. So I don't know. I just try to help people make that process less uncomfortable for them, but I think it I I think to a in a certain sense, it's gonna be it's uncomfortable. And we're all adults doing this. It's that's hard. It's hard to say, I don't know this, especially when it feels like something that you should know. And when you're on a job site in a hard hat, and let's say you've been, up until then, pretty focused on design, it can feel humiliating. We're sort of presuming that everybody that we are always partnering with people who are good natured and and pretty decent, but I think a lot of times, we can really be in our profession taken advantage of and railroaded by contractors and subcontractors who wanna undermine our position in front of our clients and position themselves as being the the ones who really understand how this is working, and your architect is just getting in the way.

C And now this is I work with great contractors. That's not been typical for me in my profession, but it's also not been uncommon. And architects, I think, get pushed around a ton on technical stuff. And, yeah, I don't I don't like that. I don't like seeing that. I like I like being able to equip architects with more technical competence so that they can be open minded and not pushed around, both of those things. When you have a lot of confidence in your your technical abilities, you can listen to a contractor's suggestion request, or whatever with an open mind. You don't have to say, you can say yes more often, and you're also less likely to get pushed around.

C So I guess in the ideal setting, it's to make you more open minded. In the in the sort of difficult setting, it's to avoid getting, taken advantage of, which happens a lot, particularly younger in your in your career, which I I just I don't like seeing that at all. Makes me so mad.

A So I used to work on I I used to work in public projects in California. And as you know, it's always lowest bid. Yeah. So there was a saying that the contractor was trying to change order their way to a profit. So we definitely felt that every time we were on a job site, they were just looking for mistakes in our drawings or places to call us out.

C Yeah. And unethical contractors, sometimes, like, they I worked for 1 once that oh, gosh. I just I just hated working for them. They do this sort of weird right pocket, left pocket accounting. So it was a developer that also the same company owned a contracting company. So they were developer and builder. But in the company, they were compensated differently. So what they would do is they would, they would, like, deliberately get subs to underbid jobs.

C They would obscure the clarity of the bids on purpose to try to get subs to underbid the jobs, and then they'd get rewarded for coming in under budget, I presume, for their for their project. And then, like because the change order stuff came out of someone else's budget. So in the end, it was, like, it was a dumb way to build, and it wasn't overall good for their company. But because of their company culture and the way that they had their reward structure organized, it was, individuals could benefit from this sort of lack of transparency and obscuring bids and trying to take advantage of subcontractors. And I I thought it was just a really annoying and disheartening way to to do business, but that that happens a lot in construction. I wish I understood the business side of things a little bit more to to kinda understand how I mean, maybe I'm the fool. These guys all seem to be doing pretty well financially, but, but it was a pretty miserable way to operate. Like, why wouldn't you want your your bid documents and your drawings to be as clear as possible? Why wouldn't you want your contractors to know exactly or subs to know exactly what is required of them rather than being like, gotcha.

C You agreed to this, but didn't realize you agreed to it. You know? Now I'm now I'm winning. I I I this is also I'd mentioned before that I was in business before. As you can see, I don't like, some people thrive on that type of negotiation and kinda feel like someone has to be losing for them to win. And, and I maybe that's what makes me such a bad business person.

B No. I mean, I think you're hitting on a really important idea around ethical business relationships. And to me, it just it challenges a question of ethics. And I think we all can work to make money, but you have to be you have to be grounded in how you're making money so you can sleep at night about, like, just because you can make more money and take some shortcuts to get there faster. I don't know. At the end of my life, I wanna be proud of how I made my money. I don't wanna have, you know, a shadow of doubt on the way I went about it.

C That's something I love about architecture and our profession in general is that there's actually so many small business owners in it. And I think that so you you have a lot of people who are just deciding, okay. What kind of person do I wanna be? What kind of business do I wanna run? And I think that's nice. I like I like that. There's a freedom and a flexibility with that sort of model that I think is admirable. I I like that about the profession. Not everybody's in that position, but, and it comes at a cost. Right? Actually, I I when I was working, I mentioned my early experience with Chris Benedict.

C There were a lot of decisions that I I saw her make that were financially not good for her, but she made them out of principle because she decided this is what kind of business I wanna run. And I aspire to that, especially when it hurts. Right? Like, when you're making when you're passing on a job or not working with a particular collaborator or something because you don't think it'll be a good fit. It's tough sometimes to make those decisions, but I see people in our profession specifically making them a lot in ways that I I really respect.

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B Tune in next week to hear the next tip from Arc IT. To take your security solutions further, contact Arc IT at www.getarkit dotcom/pd to set up your free 15 minute cybersecurity assessment or speak to them about custom solutions for your design firm. I wanna come back to the training, and I I just wanna push a little further on this because I think that the

A I think I guess I

B see this climb towards technical competency is pretty steep for people. I mean, I've seen people there just just last week, I was in one of the women in architecture Facebook groups and there was this young person who was saying she just started a new job at a firm where the 1st month she was onboarding and she was training and it was going well. But as soon as she kinda got out of her comfort zone, you know, all this self doubt came up. And I've certainly experienced this in my own career when I was practicing and I was really on the course for becoming a licensed architect, trying to climb that ladder of technical competency, understanding what the lines in your model and your drawing mean, it can be really overwhelming. And I've also seen people who are further along in their careers that are very competent struggle with this self doubt and anxiety that comes from trying to figure out these more complex challenges that we face. So I'm wondering, in building your business and learning how to teach around these ideas, have you gained any insight about helping people overcome that self doubt and helping them get past these mental barriers that helps them kinda get into understanding this technical knowledge a little bit easier?

C Yeah. There's there's sort of 2 things I think about that, actually. Okay. So the first thing is what we do is hard. Buildings are difficult. It involves a lot collaboration from a lot of different kinds of specialists, and we have to have these sort of like, we're building something in the physical world. Thinking in 3 dimensions is hard. And every project we do, every building is a prototype.

C It's new. So it's hard. So I think that the first sort of part of approaching this is to recognize that in choosing this profession, you are choosing a path of lifelong learning. Lifelong does not stop. And I think there's some, comfort, I think, really in acknowledging that and that and acknowledging that that's true for everybody. There's I don't know a single professional who I don't care how old they are, who doesn't learn a lot of new things with every new project, even if they've been operating within the same, like, typology for their whole career. There of course, there's more stuff that they can draw, and that's what experience is. But, but this is lifelong learning, and it's okay to I I think it helps to acknowledge that and acknowledge that that's true for for everybody because we'll all and self doubt is part of being human.

C It's part of practicing any profession. So I think that sort of maybe takes the edge off it on the one hand. On the other hand, I think there's a real problem with the way our profession approaches technical things right now. I liken it to learning a language and that in a lot of certainly in the the technical part of the profession that I focus on and that I teach, what we do or the way we expect people to learn is basically the way you would prepare. Like, you memorize a few phrases of a foreign language from a phrasebook in advance of a vacation abroad, and and we just sort of accumulate these phrases and this sort of mental shorthand for stuff that we know how to do. So if you know that if you go abroad, you're gonna need to know how to order food. You're gonna need to know how to ask where the bathrooms are. Like, there's a few things.

C Like, I would like another, please. Like, there's a few things that you know you're gonna have to say, and and that's how we kind of approach some of the the technical parts of our profession. We're sort of just memorizing stuff. And over the course of a career, you can get by that way. Right? You, like, you end up knowing kind of a lot of a language if you've taken 30 trips to the same country and have learned how to say more cheese, please, in a lot of different ways. But if instead of doing that, if you learned a little bit about the grammar and vocab a few key beginners' vocabulary in that language, you could actually start to communicate original thought and have real conversations with people. And this isn't to say that learning a language is easy. It isn't.

C We know that it's we know that it's hard, but learning some sort of some really basic grammar at the beginning helps us throughout the rest of the career because after that, it's just expanding your vocabulary, And that's easier to pick up rather than picking up, like, the like, attempting to pick up whole phrases where you don't even know, you know, like, where one word ends and the other begins. You know, you've just memorized it. So that's what I try to do with people, and that actually is not as hard as people imagine it is. We sort of take this inflated view of stuff that we don't know how to do. We assume it's harder than it is. It is not that hard. I cover I teach a course in building science. I cover all of the fundamentals in approximately 10 hours.

C Give me 10 hours. I will give you the framework you need. And now that's not nothing. Right? And people come back to it, and there's there's applying that has nuance, and you'll get you'll get better at that throughout throughout your whole career, and that's fine. But having the initial framework is what's most helpful, and that's what's missing. And it's just super intimidating when when you hear someone like in this foreign language. It sounds like a foreign language. But if you if you've got a framework and and some some basic vocabulary, you're not feeling quite so lost.

C And then, actually and then when you ask questions and people answer, you can understand the answer better. Right? Like, I remember being early in my career, I'd ask questions, and I'd be like, those words were all English, but I have no idea what that person said. And that's that's what it is. That's how I approach building science and building enclosure design and and detailing is from this, really first principles aspect. Like, what are the basic things that a a practitioner needs to know for daily practice, and and how can I present that with as much clarity as possible and and let them apply that in ever more complex situations? Or they get to a situation where they're like, well, they know they need help on this. But for, you know, 90 like I said, 95% of the stuff that people do daily, especially if they're operating within a particular typology, it's not out of reach. It really isn't. So be okay feeling lost and, and and see if you can find someone to teach you a framework in in whatever it is.

C Right? This is so I'm doing enclosure design, but there's other areas where I believe this type of stuff applies as well, like acoustic control, acoustic design, or I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but, but there are other specialties that I think sometimes appear way more complicated than they are for our for for our purpose. You could spend your whole same thing. You could spend your whole career doing acoustics, but not every one of us is doing a theater. You know? What do we need to know for, for our day to day practice? And that stuff is not out of reach. It just seems like it is.

B I can't help but think back to my 1st year in practice, and I just had no clue what I was supposed to be doing because there was just no onboarding process.

C My gosh. I know.

B I just I really wish I had had someone like you, Christine, who was showing me kind of that just some entry points into some of this stuff because I don't think that the model that we have inherited of throwing people in the deep end works for everyone. And for me, it really did not work. It just kinda stalled me out from any growth because I just didn't know I didn't know what to do. I literally took I talked to the woman that sat next to me. I was like, can I just, like, watch you over, like, a couple of days? Because, like, I just don't I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't know what questions sometimes to ask. I get really overwhelmed when I open the Revit model. And, like, just having I really think that the challenge that we're kinda facing in practice is we need to be better about helping people early in their careers starting into this career, like onboarding, coming in, understanding how to get oriented into a project team or on a job or on a, you know, whatever they're working on.

C It's demoralizing. And I've like, I've been there for years. It's it's very difficult to spend multiple years going into work every day feeling like I don't actually know how to do the majority of what I'm going to be asked to do. It that it's and that's exhausting too. It's just exhausting. And then every year that goes by, that disconnect between what you think you should know and what you actually know gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then you feel more self conscious. No. I I I don't like it.

C That's actually sort of how I started or how Building Science Fight Club started is I had this experience in the technical side of the profession where I went through that too. Even though I had I I really feel like I had fantastic teachers, their job wasn't to teach me. Their job was to do something else, and they were teaching me in their free time. Right? So I guess I was sort of putting this framework together on the fly, like, as I was learning it, and I would share it with my classmates from architecture school who weren't in the field as much. And I did that on on Instagram. I would take a I would take a photo, and then I would just I'd mark it up or I'd I'd add a sketch or something and describe the technical principle at play as I understood it. And when I started doing this, I was sharing this with people I knew from architecture school. These were friends.

C And I started realizing, oh, but we weren't right out of school. Like, we were this was a this was a few years out, so we'd had a little bit of experience. And I think we were all sort of realizing around the same time, it was a little bit like the emperor has no clothes type of stuff, where we were realizing that we'd been asking questions for several years from our, you know, bosses and more senior colleagues and stuff and getting answers and not really understanding the answers, but being too afraid to ask the follow-up question. Or we'd ask one follow-up question, maybe even 2, but we were like, I gotta now they're really gonna think I'm an idiot. Right? I gotta call it off. Exactly. And I think we started getting to the point where we were like, no. They like, even the people that's the answer that they gave me, but I don't think actually even they understand it.

C And it was a kind of a crazy realization that people that we had otherwise looked up to didn't actually understand this stuff very well either. I don't know. For better or worse, that's just the case. I think that's true, but that's why I thought it would be interesting to take for me to take teaching more seriously and pursue it as a as a real thing as opposed to just something I do along with my regular job because there existed that gap where we didn't really nobody had a really good framework for this, and people were too afraid to ask. And I I wanted to I think it says something. If somebody who's acknowledged to be an expert, better or worse, publicly asks the same or similar questions. And I that I think that's actually really powerful to say I don't like, if when I say oh, I don't understand either or, like and and and then and put oh, I don't understand either or, like and and and then and push and press with the answer. That exact sort of demoralizing feeling is what led to my business.

C I mean and to be clear, this isn't my only business. I teach. It is just fun. I just enjoy doing it, and I would have, incorporated it probably into anything, but I I'm a consultant, and I work on real buildings, on real projects. I'm an immigrant, though, also, and there was a period where I wasn't permitted to work formally. And it was about a year. And so I thought, well, how am I going to use this year? And I was like, well, I could either take the AREs or I could, treat teaching like it's my job and see if there's anything if there's anything to it. Like, if I'm gonna teach and it's and I'm gonna ask for money to teach, then I better be good at it.

C So why don't I why don't I practice teaching? Why don't I why don't I invest in that in a little while or for a little for this period of time and see what happens? So I did that, and and now and now I do both. I teach and I consult. But it was a really fun I guess I didn't realize how much I would like it when I really treated it with more discipline than just being a hobby. Now it's also a hobby, but, but you do things differently when you've got I mean, same with us. Like like, in this is this should not be an unfamiliar concept in the design profession. There's a different way that you approach something when you're doing it for a client than when you're just sort of playing around with something. And both are valuable. Both are valuable.

A And what's interesting to me is I have this distinct memory of when I worked in an architecture firm, and I was detailing out a new build of a school. And the project manager I was working with, you know, it was like, it got to a certain point with how many questions you ask them about a single detail. Well, it's or the project manager I was working with, I I had a lot of questions about details because I'd never detailed a school like this. And it was just really clear to me that he kept giving me weird looks after I had hit a certain percentage or a certain number of questions. And so at that point, I was like, okay. I obviously can't pursue the same line of questioning with this individual because, apparently, I'm supposed to already know or have learned everything from what he's told me.

C Yeah. I think also there's a few like, there are common I've learned through through just through pure experience teaching. There are sort of common barriers to understanding in our profession where now I wish I could think of an example. Maybe one will come to me. But there's, like, a few things where if you just explain that one thing, then then the the learner is like, oh. It's not always intuitive to the to the person teaching, but that's something I've really enjoyed actually about teaching more formally is, learning what those sort of those barriers are, because they're not all some of them are unique. Like, there's just something that's unique to you, Evelyn, that you happen to not grasp about a particular concept. But a lot of them are just, like, kind of basic first principle things that somebody just missed.

C Like, they didn't start teaching you a, b, c, d. They started at c. And if you just knew a and b, you'd be like, oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. The rest of it, that's fine. That that all makes sense, but you didn't tell me that one critical part. So there's I I love identifying more and more of those through teaching that kinda makes stuff click for people.

C Oh, I can think of 1. Okay. So energy recovery ventilators, ERVs. I personally would always be confused about it. I didn't understand ventil like, a big part why I didn't understand ventilation was because I didn't understand ERVs because energy is in the word. I thought that sort of their primary purpose had to do with energy efficiency, and that's not really true. It's their energy recovery ventilators. Their job is to provide ventilation, to provide fresh air for a space.

C So it's a little bit like a hybrid car where when you press the brakes, it recharges the battery. I don't know how hybrid cars work, but whatever. But that's really cool. That's energy efficient, and that's cool. But the reason that you break is not to recharge the battery. You break to stop the car. And, anyway, it was like that with with ERVs. And as soon as I understood that the purpose wasn't didn't the energy part was incidental to the main purpose, which was ventilation.

C And once I understood that, I could make sense of, like, a zillion conversations on mechanical conditioning and ventilation that previously were, like, completely unintelligible to me. Anyway, there's I think there's just dozens of those those things where when you when you break it down, people are like, oh, I get it. But it's like lots of stuff. Stuff that seems hard to us, we put at the bottom of our list a lot of times. And, we put it off, put it off, put it off. And then when you get to it, you're like, oh, really? That was it. That took, like, 30 seconds.

B I still do that. Very relatable.

C Oh my gosh. When will I change?

B I do wanna dive into your business some more. So you said you're doing you're running multiple businesses. Let's start with the, online learning program that you've developed. So you've you've come up with a you said you developed a curriculum. It's available online. People can sign up for this. Tell us a little bit more about what you're offering.

C So, really, it's just continuing education for architects in the area of in technical competence and and detailing. So energy, water management, and indoor air quality, really. That that's it. There's not much not much more to it. I spent a long time because I had this sort of this time off, this mandated courtesy of US Customs and Border Control, I had this this mandated time off where I had a long time to explore the best way of teaching this kind of stuff, and I came up with a framework that I thought was really helpful. And I filmed it and put it online and thought, well, let let's see how people like it. And it turns out people really do. So that's really nice.

C It's satisfying. A lot of a lot of people who take the course are like, oh my gosh. Thank you so much. Sort of the same thing. It was a series of moments for practicing professionals, and that makes me so proud and so pleased to see people who previously viewed this as a as a gap in their area of expertise, a weak spot in their practice, view it now as a strength. I'm very happy for them, and I'm so glad to have participated in that. Anyway, so that's so that's the that's the teaching part of the business. I'm I'm launching 2 new classes, soon.

C It's, probably probably around mid February. I'll have one on ventilation and indoor air quality for residential homes and residential buildings, and then another one on on condensation control and dew point, which is, I think, one of the least well understood concepts in architecture and the most intimidating vapor control, that kind of stuff. And those are shorter. The the one I started with was the comprehensive course. It's about 10 hours, and it takes you through pretty much everything that you'll come across in in daily practice. And it's it's on demand. It's, there's no expiration date to it. It's intended to be a reference for people to come back to multiple times in their career when a new concept becomes newly relevant with new work.

C But it's been that was really fun. It was a a really fun project. I'm I'm really proud of it. Anyway, so I manage that process. And, and then I also teach privately. So some firms will say, can you come in and teach us about this particular thing? Or this is what our practice looks like. These are our our primary areas of concern. Help us out.

C And that's also really fun. I especially like doing that locally. There's a firm that I work with where I'm based in Dallas, although I do this everywhere. Oh, I went out you know who I went out and talked to is mutual friends of the show, Rios. And, oh my gosh, are they not the coolest firm ever? Those guys are so cool, and they're all, like, extra cool because it's California. California.

B Oh, I know. We love them.

C They're so I loved their podcast interview with you 2. They are so cool. I had a ton of fun with them. I love doing that and connecting in a different way. The course I do is really designed for individual learning, but there's really something special about group learning, especially in among colleagues, where you can feel free to ask different kinds of questions. If you're, like, if you're at a conference, you ask a different kind of question than if you're, you know, if you're asking it, like, next to your, you know, suite mates in a or, you know, studio mate in a in a project. There's a a fun level of informality that can happen to those kinds of teachings. And then I also consult, so just sort of normal specialty consulting on particular projects, building science, water management, energy efficiency, that kind of stuff.

C So but this is new. I've really only done this for a little while, so I feel really, like I said before, just really inspired by the small business owners in the profession of architecture. I have a lot of respect for that and admiration for people who because, I mean, it's a lot like the practicing architecture also, but you're trained in this one area, but you also have to file your taxes. And and when people have employees, right, they have to figure out payroll. All these things that they have to figure out, and, there's, I I a lot of respect.

A You mentioned that you were from Dallas, but, actually, you're broadcasting from Denver right now or Colorado, which I think is an interesting twist. You know, that the kind of the pandemic has allowed us to change how we do work and where do where we do work. And you and I talked at the top of the conversation about being quasi on vacation. How have you adapted in terms of remote work, in terms of how you teach, and in terms of how you do your consulting on real projects?

C I'm in the field a lot less than I used to be, and I don't like that. I love being on active construction sites, and I don't think there's a real substitute for meeting with people face to face. I think there's a real efficiency in that. So overall, I will be very pleased when we get back to some kind of more normal practice. I mean, I'm sure, like everybody, there's there's nuance to this and trade offs, and there's some real benefits to, I think, a lot of people being granted more flexibility in their jobs. I think those are those are good things. I don't know. Overall, I think I kind of I've almost forgotten with so much work from home stuff and digital stuff.

C Like, this is fun. What we're doing right now, this podcast over Zoom is fun. This is great. But I would really rather be sitting with you guys drinking a beer at, you know, I don't know, Greenville or something or the AIA conference or just while I happen to be in California. Or I guess I think, Janine, you've moved, right, to

B Yeah. I'm in North Carolina now. But, yes, I'm the same because

C I'd rather have a coffee with you or whatever.

B Probably because you and I are extroverts. We, like, really love that.

C My husband is an introvert, and he's like, this is fantastic. I know. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. But t for teaching in particular, I find that, yeah, I've made do with online. And for some, like, the the course I teach that's on demand, that is I think it being online is an asset. It's individual.

C It's quiet. You do it at your own pace in your own living room. Like, there's some types of learning that are more individualized, and I don't think that really so the course I teach doesn't it being online is an asset, and on demand is an asset. But for much learning, it just is that you just get a better experience when you when you're doing it live. The first the first course like, back when we thought the pandemic was over, I did a I took a trip. It was you know, I hadn't take I hadn't been on a plane in, like, a year and a half, maybe longer. And I took a trip, and I was teaching a group of people in, Portland, Oregon. And it was, like, electric.

C I was so happy to teach, and so were they. It was just fantastic. So I don't know. It's I like of course, like everybody, I like the flexibility of doing stuff in stretchy pants and pajamas and slippers, but I do I do obviously really miss the the actual face to face interaction. I'm sure the same.

B You know, I know you said you had business training. You didn't feel very competent on it. But the way that you've put together your website for your business is so impressive. Like, Evelyn and I, we do care about business. Like, we, like, that's the thing that we excel at, whereas, like, you excel at this other part that we don't have. And but when we look at your business website, like, that is a very sophisticated delivery that you're putting out there. So you you've done a great job marketing it and bringing it together, and I think the way you're selling it makes sense to both of us.

C Oh, thank you so much. I so, actually, weirdly, there is an architecture lesson in that, and I will and I will share it. And although I needed a little encouragement from other people in my life in this direction, but my philosophy on that and there's constraints on this philosophy, obviously. But my philosophy on that is to hire specialists, like, when you're not which is what we do in architecture. Like, I tell I tell people all the all the time, like, this is why you should hire a designer. Like, who is an architect? Who does this? I think, in general, like, homes, for example, are much larger than they need to be because they're poorly designed. And so people think that an architect is just an added cost to something. No.

C No. No. An architect is a specialist who will make better use of your limited resources. And I kind of felt that way with my business also where there was a time so I had, you know, I had this course, and I wanted to teach this course. But I thought, okay. So I guess I could film it and edit it myself and just teach myself that. And my husband was like, listen to yourself. In no other circumstances do you recommend that people just do that.

C They just wing it. Like, go hire someone who's good at this. And, anyway, so I didn't do the website design myself. I didn't do the, the filming or the editing myself. There's obviously limitations on that. I also didn't so I hired somebody professional to do those things, and I'm glad. Thank you for that high praise coming from the 2 of you that works. But Many well spent.

C Thank you. And it was pretty I thought it was pretty modest investment, but it was an important one. But I did there were other investments I didn't make. So, for example, there's I have a sort of general hierarchy in how I represent things in in my teaching. Like, the there's a consistency to the color. So the bright pink always means something Insulation is always the same color, that kind of stuff. So there's an there's an order to that, but I didn't hire a branding specialist or so there's no, like, there's no real logic to my typography or the I don't I like, I don't I don't know what color it is. It's the color that I was that's p prepopulated on my iPad.

C There's no, like, Pantone or Like, I don't I don't know what it's called. It's just the color that's there. So there's a lot of stuff where if it were a more sophisticated business or a division of a a big business or something that obviously I would have there's there's room for improvement for specialists there or not. I mean, that's also a that's sort of a conscious balance too. Some people there's some things that I handwrite that people really they're like, I can't read this or that they really don't like the pink. And I'm like, well, sorry. Like, that's that and that's a that's a that's a brand decision or a brand identity decision, and it comes at the expense occasionally of clarity. And that's you know, there's always, there's some tension with some of those decisions as well, but thanks for I really am kinda feeling around in the dark, but in general, it's important to I think that advice that we, as designers, give to our clients is good advice for ourselves too.

C Let specialists, yes, be a generalist. Let yes. It's important to understand what's going on, but also understand when to step aside and let someone else take over.

A Yeah. I actually would say that I think it is your training and marketing that makes you aware of the nuances that you just expressed to us in the last 2 minutes about branding and making those conscious choices. And you're the one who's running your Instagram account, even the voice and the designer behind your Instagram account. I feel that your marketing background, whether you like it or not, is definitely playing out there as well.

C It was only 2 years, and I was very young. But but that's true. I still keep in touch with some of those people, and they they, of course, approach their jobs with just as much discipline and seriousness as as anybody else. And I think there's there's a a sort of truism. Like, everything is easy until you actually know something about it. We see that in design too where a lot of times well designed spaces don't feel well designed. They just feel awesome. They're not, the you're not noticing the design.

C You're noticing whatever else the designer wanted you to notice or experience in the space. And I try to kinda get out of my own way in terms of teaching in the same way that it's yes. It should be appealing, and and there's a there's a brand aspect to it as well. But the goal is to actually make the information itself beneficial, and I think that's why the that's why it's been successful. Maybe it could be because being, like, an influencer is sort of in and of itself valuable, or popularity is is is seen as its own end. And I don't think the I've always focused on the, like, the content first, the other stuff, like, the the packaging later. Not that it doesn't matter. It's just that the that the content is so important.

C And, also, that's what makes me proudest or or most embarrassed if I screw it up. Right? You know? If I get my branding a bit off, okay, whatever. I'm not a branding person. If I get the building science off, that's not

A good. Well, obviously, I think there's so much that you've said throughout this conversation that are both lessons and takeaways. Not only those that are entering the practice, but those who are lifelong learners and you have had any decades of practice behind them already. We have been closing out our podcast series or episodes this season with kind of a final question. So that final question to you and everyone else is, what is one lesson on change needed in the practice of architecture that you'd like to pass forward to the architects, emerging professionals, and industry disruptors listening?

C There's lots of things that our industry is dynamic. Right? So there's lots of things that we could benefit from as an industry. I always think that it's being asked to give advice is I don't know. It always sort of makes me smile a little bit because I think a lot of times when people actually ask for advice, individuals, you're talking about to the profession in general. But when people ask for advice, they don't actually really need advice. What they need is encouragement. And so I think, I don't know. That's just an observation.

C Encouragement matters. I think it I think a lot of times, encouragement ends up mattering even more than advice. We talked briefly about branding and running a small business. And when I I have noticed that in running my business, there's no shorter I get lots of advice all the time, unsolicited, sometimes solicited. I think that's true for a lot of professionals because this profession has so many entrepreneurs and small business owners in it. And, I think everybody kinda already knows this that, like, at a certain point, you have to know when to not listen to the advice and and go your own way. And what's really again, there, what's really valuable is the encouragement part, part, not the specific advice. So everybody's different.

C Everybody's business is different. So I don't know. I guess maybe keeping that in mind, that's a good thing to keep in mind for the profession difference between encouragement and and advice. And we're we're creative people. We are good at at taking what other people's experiences and learning from them and adapting them to suit our own lives. But everybody's everybody's different, so I don't think that there's universally applicable stuff that works for every every person at every every different point in their career, and that's okay. So, anyway, that's something. What could be as the profession be better at? Building science.

C I don't wanna take my class. No. I mean, I think, I think we're pretty good as a profession. I think as we seek to this is my advice. As we seek to improve, I think that we, acknowledge what a good job we actually are doing in the with with hard stuff. Buildings are so complicated, and I think we, as a profession, do really well at navigating that complexity and producing really fantastic spaces for our clients given their constraints. Not an excuse to stop, not an excuse to, to be lazy, but I think maybe an encouragement. We do, but we really build very differently than we used to build even 30, 50 years ago.

C And maybe maybe that's my advice is is, always be improving, but appreciates, appreciates the, change in the in the progress. Things are not the same as they as they used to be, and it's helpful to acknowledge that.

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A Thank you for joining us on Practice Disrupted, a podcast by Practice of Architecture. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.