Yeah, this one’s ranty. I waited too long to write. So much has happened. Agendas have changed, a zillion people in architectural fields have been laid off due to downsizing and restructuring—an unbelievable number of architectural firms have closed their doors in Chicago and the Chicago Department of Environment is going away entirely. For real. Yeah, it’s feeling a little apocalyptic these days.
I’ve considered everything from starting a brewery to going to law school, but the truth is, I’m a damned writer with a lot of debt and opinions. And I like to write about architecture and history and the environment at this point in my life. So here I am, feeling a little lonelier in Chicago these days as I watch almost all of my preservationist friends from grad school and beyond leaving this city for jobs in Los Angeles and D.C. The melancholic autumnal vibe is making me want to write poems about my favorite buildings decomposing into tortured faces.
Alas, let me sip my scalding herbal tea and calm myself down while looking at the trees swaying and the hoods flipping up outside this here café window. Things are changing like the season and, I hope, evolving to be more intelligent and livable. It remains to be seen where all of this restructuring will go. Perhaps a strange, unintended result will be the scattering of environmentalists and preservationists into seemingly unrelated fields where we can make changes to those disciplines based on our former lives in green/historic fields?
The truth of the matter is that we can’t go back at this point. I think (and rather hope) that we know too much now and have too much information to go back to the status quo in terms of energy and the impacts of demolition. And nobody would hire us anyway. Codes are forcing our fields to span multiple disciplines now and I think that’s a positive. Preservationists are finally catching up and even innovating out of necessity with technology like 3D laser documentation, phone apps, more comprehensive energy efficiency case studies, (hopefully smart) multi-cultural and multi-age outreach…there’s a general and sweeping restructuring of goals and huge changes in the green building world as well. These are good things. I’m not entirely sure how many of them translate to jobs for the non-tech savvy, but that just means that unless we’re able to retire (ha!), we all have to work harder to be more informed and less isolated which will only make our arguments and successes stronger in the end. Right?
I’ll be honest. I don’t even know where I fit into any of this. It’s a tough thing to be brimming with ideas and have no idea what to do with them, or how to make them happen. But I’m trying to just hang onto the idea that if I (we) just keep working and learning it will all be okay in the end.
Or, if you have some start up capital, call me and we can start a brewery with punny names and cute little historic buildings on the label.
Actually, what I really want are comments. Suggestions. Encouragement throughout this field that is genuine and not just lip service or Tony Robbins speak. Talk to me, people. Where are you working? What are you doing? Where are you finding opportunities? This blog has been viewed tens of thousands of times after three years of posting and I’d like nothing more than to hear from any and all of you about what is happening in your cities and with your jobs–the good, bad, and hideous. I’ll keep posting updates on policy and strategy and energy and all of it, but I want to hear more from the bottom on up. It’s important stuff.
It’s somewhat reassuring to hear someone else frustrated with the total lack of paid HP jobs in Chicago. I had suspected SAIC had some inside track, but evidently that’s not the case. I guess we all have to move to nowhere, Indiana.
Sad to read this is true in Chicago, also. I was laid off in San Francisco 2.5 years ago. Worked part-time in the field, but with a family I needed a steady income and benefits. So I had to leave HP and go into a completely unrelated field–copywriting. It’s a difficult business to get into, but I’ve had more response and more job offers in this field than I ever did in HP–a field in which I have an MSc from an Ivy League university. Sad. So so sad.
Yeah, I actually have a writing background as well and may well need to fall back on that if I don’t figure something else out, pretty much immediately. Tough times in any architectural field–just had high hopes coming out of my own grad program and have been quilting together a salary that rivals what I made out of undergrad ever since (and sometimes less than that). So, it’s time to either move across the country for work–the odds simply have to be better as there is nothing in Chicago at the moment–or hone the old writing and editing skills for pay, not insights. Bums me out, too, but I am holding out some hope. I’ve got a little more fight in me!
I believe the trick is to be willing to move. Relocate yourself to an area of the country where jobs are more plentiful. A quick review of the posting on Histpres and other HP-related job boards will reveal that there are HP jobs out there, but they’re not usually in the desirable urban environments. Take a chance, learn some new skills in a different environment, and continue to work hard. Someone will take a chance on you. By a matter of pure luck, someone did just that for me over five years ago and I have been gainfully employed as an architectural historian in the consulting field since. There is plenty of work with Section 106 review that isn’t going away as long as the federal agencies have money to spend and need to fulfill their environmental review requirements.
The only thing I can say is that HPres jobs seem to exist in unexpected places. You would think the bigger the city, the more there is to preserve, the more demand to preserve it. But I’ve never seen proof of that. I moved from Chicago to Albany and now to Buffalo after graduation for HPres jobs. Granted, I have an architecture degree, so that opens a lot of doors more easily, but a lot of what I do is writing. In any case, both Albany and Buffalo (especially Buffalo) are pretty forgotten (if quite beautiful) places. They are places most people move away from, yet they are places preservationists (not just me) move to. Preservationists are like economic trash collectors, in a way. They pick up the pieces and help recreate vibrancy after most mainstream people leave.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to it, but some cities just have much stronger preservation ethics than others. Surprisingly, neither Chicago nor New York City are among the cities that have strong ones.
For the same reason that working-class places like Blue Island near Chicago are well-preserved, large-scale preservation only seems to happen when there is a steady trickle of money flowing in. If there is too much money, then people get grand ideas without vision and new things are built. If there is absolutely no money, then things collapse.
Just some random thoughts.
Good luck 🙂
-LaLuce