So long and thanks for all the fish

This is my final post for the PAYETTE blog, four years and 46 posts later, but who’s counting. It has been a lot of fun writing about the ravings of an architect in his early 60s who has the advantage of looking back while musing about the future of the profession. My writing has been a culmination of more than 40 years in architectural practice and even more years experiencing the world around me.

So, how did I get started on this blogging adventure? A colleague, Paula Buick, lent me a book. It was a compilation of Jeremy Clarkson’s articles written for the London Sunday Times. It was a good read and it inspired me. If he can do it, I thought, why not me? So off I started, writing about an experience I had sitting in my car at a traffic light in New Haven Connecticut…Musings on Scale.

I submitted it to Karen Robichaud, our gate keeper of all things blog, and low and behold she posted it. Additionally, she encouraged me to continue writing. I thought she was being kind at the time, we had recently launched the firm’s blog and she was always looking for content. So thusly encouraged, I wrote about the Sandy Hook tragedy and what, if any, effect it would have on the design profession. Again, it was posted. So further encouraged I have continued to write, not about what I have been doing here at the office, but about how I see architecture, sustainability, design and popular culture, not as individual siloed pursuits, but as an integrated cultural experience steeped in historic references.

Inspiration for posts started coming from everywhere. All it took was for someone to make a random comment or to see an old Jag on the back of a truck or something in print that triggered a line of observations and questions. Many of the folks in the office have also unknowingly contributed to this process that resulted in a post. A few examples: How I love leasing cars…The sustainability of ‘out of sight out of mind,’. an article about a new Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit…Who’s your favorite architect? or people taking too many selfies…What is the carbon footprint of a tweet.

An interesting byproduct of ranting about all these topics is the amount of research one ends up doing when you explore a particular rabbit hole. Not only did I have fun writing the posts, but I learned a thing or two along the way, which, once in a while, would lead to yet another post. Not to mention the occasional response. It is always interesting to see what people find engaging, where they are in the world and how long ago it was since you posted. In one case, I heard from an architect in England three and a half years after the original post. I guess things never die on the internet.

I would be remiss in this final post not the thank all the good folks at PAYETTE that helped make my 25 plus years here a great place to work, building a business, exploring architecture in all its many permutations and meeting lots of new creative people. Many of you have moved on to other places and in some cases different careers – gone but not forgotten. Again, thank you all.

What’s next as I move on to other things after my career at PAYETTE? Well, one thing is that I will continue writing about what interests me, so visit my new blog ‘Ian Adamson Architect’. And finally, my parting words of encouragement – read my recent post If a Tree Falls in the Wood, and, in keeping with the title of this post referencing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘‘Don’t Panic.’’