This entry looks into an anecdotal situation where I (as an architectural assistant) had to step into a role higher than initially anticipated. This an entry for the month of December 2018 and January 2019.
As the title of the role implies, Architectural Assistants are employed by practices to ease the burden placed on project architects or project leads. As a new employee in the world of architecture, such a title can seem confusing because the responsibility is not usually clear. However the story is different depending on the size of practice in question. I have been fortunate to have worked in both large and small practices, thus the conclusion that Part 1 Architectural Assistants are an easy and cheaper way to maintain profit margins within architecture practices; not aiming to sound negative.
Large practices of 100 and above employees tend to have structures in place that fairly outline the task of an assistant and are usually emphasised upon during the induction week. In contrary, small practices (20 and below employees) tend to leave the role open for interpretation by the employee. I work at a practice of 125 employees.
In the last few months, I have been working closely with a project architect and a project lead (I being the assistant resourced) on a small residential development project in Kent of about 50 units. It had been a smooth process until the project team of 3 people were informed that the architect I had been working with had decided to leave for another practice in about 3 weeks from the date of notification. This inevitably raised a lot of concerns on my part, one of which was in regards to who receives of the mantle of ‘architect’ on the project we had been working on. I especially needed an answer to that question because I was the only other employee working full-time on the project; the project lead had other commitments and was only resourced to spend an estimate of 7 hours per week on this project.
As expected, it became absolutely urgent to finalise the RIBA Stage 3 process and inform the client of the change in situation. I was immediately asked to work even closer with the architect to extract information that previously wasn’t of my concern and document them in case of future necessity after he leaves. In general, I was appointed more responsibility over the drawing packages we were going to issue to the client in preparation for submitting the planning application in January. My newly acquired responsibility included producing a Design and Access statement of about 60 pages that includes, site analysis, typology studies, a wide range of explanatory diagrams and summaries (in form of text on every page) of the design process between RIBA Stage 1-3; this is eventually submitted to support the planning application drawing package. I will end up spending a total of 5 weeks (about 188 hours) putting together all the necessary information and coordinating them with the drawing package in Revit & AutoCAD with minimal assistance from the project lead who later informed me that I was capable of handling the work load. It would become clear to me that a new level of trust was established between the project lead and I as a result of what would have otherwise seemed like an unfortunate situation.
I plan to bring it up at my next review and ask for more responsibility and opportunities to prove my capabilities.
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