Small pleasures are important ones

Frank Gehry:

One story that Mr. Gehry told me and which made him chuckle was that of a friend who is a chiropractor and who asked him to help her lay out her office. "I love doing that kind of stuff," Mr. Gehry said. The friend came over and brought her floor plans and Mr. Gehry spent several hours noodling over them. "I've always had the fantasy of having a little kiosk in the mall where I could do that. Where people would line up and you would charge them 25 bucks and you would look at their plans. I love doing that kind of stuff. They think you are a genius when you move one little wall and get an efficiency and nobody had thought of that before. Small pleasures."(italics added)

Comments

[JRoth]

This may be the first thing I've ever heard about Gehry that makes me like him. This is more or less what I tell people at parties - architects love this stuff. It's part of why we're underpaid - we like it so much that we're willing to undersell ourselves in order to do it.

Pittsburgh has a great program called RenPlan through the Community Design Center. Homeowners pay a modest fee (I think over a hundred bucks, which is higher than I'd like, and higher than it was just a few years ago) and get a 2 hour in-house consultation, no strings attached, with a volunteer architect (who does, in fact, get $25). I take them often with some hope of getting a job out of it (as I have a few times), but even when it's clear I won't, I always enjoy it.