The location: Caddy’s Alley in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC.

The venue: The old Boffi studio contemporary furniture showroom.

The task:

1. Display the text of the “First Amendment” on a large existing glass wall.

2. Hide some unsightly plumbing pipes from view in a sitting area.

Our response:

“First Amendment” print on cling material for glass wall.

“First Amendment” print close-up.

In order to solve the plumbing issue, we designed and fabricated wooden boxes that were painted black.  The boxes slotted together for ease of use and storage, and the tops of the boxes were tagged with the First Amendment Party’s logo.  These boxes doubled as high tables for the party.  Below is the concept rendering presented to the client for approval.

The final product:

Washington Life Magazine covered the event. See the full set of pictures from that night here.

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It was interestingly helpful to us to put into words what we do with our tools.  Unless you are “forced” as a business to write about yourself, it may be unclear what it is you actually do with your time.

This can be a great exercise for anyone.  It will immediately help weed out the unproductive items/processes in your life and help you be more productive at the end of the day.

See the full article here.

Basecamp screen shot.

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We swung by Massage Envy in Leesburg, Va. this week to check on its progress. It is almost done! We are excited to get in there and take pictures as soon as the finishing touches are complete. They are open for business. If you are in the area and need a great massage at an even better price, they fit the bill. Tell them dbd Studio sent you. Here is a sneak peak at the layout, the high ceilings and curved hallway have a really nice feel. You will just have to go see it for yourself if you don’t take our word for it. Stay tuned for the final pics.

Cheers from dbd.

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Our first furniture project of 2010 was commissioned for a modern loft condo in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington DC, directly across the street from Mies van der Rohe’s last building, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. The owner is an avid art collector and wanted a media cabinet to double as an art display piece and act as a room divider between the living and dining spaces. He requested a mix of modern and industrial materials, so we combined stained, finished wood with raw, unfinished steel.

Custom fabricated 3″ steel adjustable lally columns extend floor to ceiling to support the media cabinet and 2 shelves above. The entire left side of the media cabinet is cantilevered fora dramatic effect and minimize contact with the floor. Shelves are 2 layers of 3/4″ stained plywood supported by 2″ square steel tubes bolted to the main supports.

An additional request was to design the TV mount so it rotated to face every room in the condo. The center load bearing lally column had to be heavily modified in order to accomplish this. The guts of a lazy susan (normally used in kitchen corner cabinets) were installed to provide a smooth rotation.

Our previous furniture install video was well received so we photographed the install of this one as well and put together a video of the design, install and walk through. We commissioned a custom soundtrack for the video from one of the biggest local DJ/Producers in the District, DJ Soundtrax, big thanks to him for providing the music.

dbd Studio – Rotating Media Cabinet from Adam Crain on Vimeo.

Let us know what you think in the comment section below! For inquiries on custom furniture for your home or office head over to our Contact page on the left and fill out the form.

Detail photos can be seen in the thumbnails below from our Flickr page.

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It has especially affected architects. We were listed as the number 1 hardest hit profession by an NBC article in Dec of 2009. At that point job losses in our industry totaled 41,000 nationwide. That means just under 18% of the total workforce has been laid off.
The early 1990’s recession led SOM partner Michael McCarthy to tell the New York Times in 1992 that, “It will never be the same again… This one, to me, is without a doubt the worst.” As you can see by the graph below, unemployment at that time was around 9%, much lower than the nation’s current status. It appears it will never be the same again, it’s gotten worse.

So times are tough. We all have former and current colleagues and friends from architecture school that have lost their jobs (if you haven’t yourself) and the firms who still have work are getting resumes and portfolios in the mail daily. I wrote a guide almost a year ago to the day on my blog Archipreneur and I want to revisit some ideas and introduce new ones. My recent comments & ideas are added in bold.

What We Recommend:

• As soon as you are laid off, sign up for unemployment. Virginia offers I think 16 weeks (check what your state offers), and usually you are eligible to receive around $400 weekly, or $1600 a month. That will help pay the rent/mortgage. You can sign up online, its very easy. Links for Virginia unemployment, Maryland unemployment, and Washington DC.

• Scour craigslist for freelance jobs. Don’t limit yourself to architectural jobs and gigs, if you know Photoshop or Illustrator, look for branding or graphic design jobs. Put together fliers for club promoters. Create some art pieces you can put on consignment at local boutique stores to sell for you. Our classmate from VA Tech Architecture  Karen O’Leary has started receiving heavy praise all over the web for her hand-made map cuts. This is outside of but related to her architecture work. There are numerous websites out there that offer a constant supply of small design competitions for logos, t-shirts, themes, etc. The best We’ve found is 99designs.com. The prizes are usually small, but even if you lose your portfolio of work and experience base is still growing.

• Get more involved with your local government. Read the minutes of meeting from your local City Council and see where local government money may be going to local architects or builders. Instead of approaching architecture firms for jobs, trace the jobs to the firm that’s getting work. Sign up for the mailing list of your local real estate blogs or websites that follow local happenings. DCRealEstate.com runs a blog called DC Mud, where plenty of developer and construction related projects end up being covered. These are great starting points for finding work, or the firms who are getting the work. Another resource would be your local business journal. In the DC area we have Washington Business Journal.
  

• Talk to contractors, especially large ones, about the possibility of coming on with them as a project manager or a construction administrator. I highly recommend getting some in-the-field experience if you haven’t yet, in positions such as an Assistant Superintendent. Building Construction majors often start out of school at $50k+, that’s probably around what you’re making if you’re a few years out of Arch school. Some of the big ones in the DC area are HITT, Clark, Whiting Turner.

• Look at working in sales for building related products. Talk to all the reps of products that you’ve specified on your projects. Suppliers of window, tile, plumbing and lighting fixtures, siding/brick/exterior finishes, roofing, etc. Often these companies offer commission on sales, so if you don’t suck and can hustle a little bit you could realistically pull in $100k+ yearly.

• Do competitions. You have free time, turn off the Xbox and sharpen your Sketchup skills on a competition entry. These may not be paying, but some are, and even if you don’t get recognition, its a portfolio piece. You don’t need a client to have a project. Check bustler.net for a huge list of upcoming and ongoing projects.

• Design unsolicited work. Again, you don’t need a client to have a project. Pick a run down lot or building you come across and design something new for it. Add apartments above an old urban garage. Turn a warehouse into a shopping center or loft condo building. Look up the owners on the tax assessment log and send it to them as a brief proposal. Maybe they’ll put up the lot as partner capital for you, and if you can find investors, BOOM… you’ve become a real estate developer. A simple perspective rendering can become a real project if you can sell it. Why not? One project could make you a millionaire if you understand the numbers, can put together an accurate proforma and a marketable design, and can sell or rent the place.

• Have a nice camera you’ve used on surveys? Photograph weddings or events for extra money. Take the time to learn how to use the camera, including ALL its features and settings, and even more important, teach yourself how to touch up the photos in Photoshop or other editing software. Even if you don’t have a nice camera, take nice photos with one that you have. Learn photography as a skill, don’t let it revolve around the equipment you do or don’t have. See the ‘Tone is in Your Fingers” section of this blog post by Tim Ferriss. It’s not the gear that matters, it’s playing what you’ve got as well as you can.

• Do little gigs locally that are completely unrelated to architecture. Why not? It’s extra money, you get to meet people, and most importantly it is a networking opportunity. Always mention you’re an architect and looking for projects. You can pickup a lot of freelance jobs this way, even a bathroom remodel or something small will keep you busy and add to your portfolio. Check craigslist gigs section.

• Don’t let your ego get in the way. The economy sucks, no one has money, there’s no room for thinking you’re high and mighty if you have a crapload of experience or are used to working on high-end jobs. Care as much about the small projects as the big ones, because those small projects are paying your bills and keeping you fed right now.

• Attend art or style related events. Look in the weekend section of your newspaper. See & be seen on the scene, mingle with style conscious people. These are the ones who remodel their place every few years and enjoy having a designer for guidance. YOU could become that designer. Some recent ones in DC were Artomatic and  G40: The Summit, which runs until the end of March.

• Go drinking. Really. Its a social atmosphere, it makes people happy and talkative. Its a chance to meet people and network. Plus it’ll take your mind off the fact that you’re an unemployed CAD monkey. Definitely, go out socialize and drink. Beer is good for you.

• Leave architecture all together. Its drastic, but it’s also an option. If you decide to, roll out!

• Be a nice person. This has come back around tenfold in more ways than I can describe. I’ve seen first-hand the what happens to greedy, grumpy, a-holes and their clients: They don’t stay clients long. If you want to gain and retain clients, them liking you is a very very important factor.
  

In times like this, we have to become entrepreneurial. Think of new (and multiple) ways of creating income. If you hustled this hard, even during flush times, you’d have a lot more money laying around.

Good luck and let me know what you guys come up with!

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Late last year we were contacted by a friend who had a stretch of wall he wanted to do more with in his Dupont Circle condo here in Washington DC. The owner had a severe lack of storage for household items, as well as no display options for objects collected from his worldwide travels.

Our solution was a large bookshelf that serves as both an art piece in itself and a functional storage/display system. An organic curving surface was created in Rhino that stretched from floor to ceiling and overhead, terminating at the existing bulkhead, creating an almost cave-like feeling as you enter the condo. Embedding a large-scale piece of furniture in a small condo gives visitors an unexpected change of scale as they enter the space, and also provides a playful introduction to the other modern furnishings within.

17 sheets of 3/4″ birch plywood were then CNC milled to notch together and form the undulating, gridded mass. Special attention was paid to avoid interfering with the recessed lights, sprinkler heads, air vents and fire alarms along the hallway ceiling. The vertical plywood components were spaced to avoid them or notched to allow them to function.

We setup a camera on a tripod to capture the construction process. It got moved around a bit during the build but it came out alright, check it out below:

The project was well received by by design blogs online, see some of the features it made in the gallery below:

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If you’ve found this blog post, then you’ve seen what we’ve been working on the past week. We’ve taken a quick departure from working on buildings and furniture to teach ourselves how to build websites, and here are the results. Our new website is chock-full of photos, information, guides for existing and potential clients, as well as blog posts on recent work and happenings in our company and the Washington DC area. We’ve streamed in our new Flickr photo page with images of our work, as well as an up to date Google Map with all of our project locations.

We’d appreciate your feedback on the layout, design, and user friendliness of the site, feel free to comment below. Book mark our homepage or this blog page to stay updated!

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