I can change jobs faster than you can kiss a duck.

And that's pretty fast.  

(This is a compilation of other info and thoughts I've been letting go of randomly, so forgive me if you've already portions of my spill)

I turned in my two week notice Friday.  Exactly four months after I started.  This is the least amount of time I've held a "real" job - I only worked three weeks at Walmart in college.

Goody Clancy (GCA) just wasn't a good fit for me.  More so than any other firm I have worked at previously, their work is focus on one thing: making their clients happy.  So, really, their designs aren't so much a reflection of how good their work can be.  Rather, their work is a reflection of how good their clients can be at designing a building.  I saw what I believe to be bad design decisions made simply because the client requested them.  There was never any discussion about how to better achieve goals - whatever the client wanted, that's what they got.  GCA is all about service, which is great.  Our clients are, after all, footing our paychecks.  However, I would rather be at a place that clients come to because of our expertise, our design, and our creativity.  Not so much because we can follow orders.

[Below, a GCA designed atrium.  Pretty un-interesting)

So how did I end up at GCA?  Well, we had a house on the market, with an offer, and I had one job offer at the time.  We wanted to make the move work, and so we made it work.  GCA wasn't my first choice, but

 it wasn't my last, either.  I did like a few of their buildings - one of which they ended up not being the chief designer of, and who knows how the other one got built.  I had been told that they had come from a long "dry spell" in design terms, but some people said they seemed to be coming out of that.  I thought these two newer buildings were evidence of that.  Maybe at least one of them is, but I'm not willing to wait 10 years for that to happen.  I didn't see too much interesting design being done around the office in my tenure, nor was any presented to us in our weekly office presentations.

So, I'm starting work at Sasaki in two weeks.  Sasaki seems different.  Whereas GCA pretty

 much does only higher-ed work and multi-family housing, Sasaki 

does it all.  And, they are a multi-disciplinary firm.  So I'll be working directly with landscape architects, eco-tech experts, urban planners, etc.  And the firm is all about collaboration between these fields - it's one of the reasons their designs end up being pretty good.   

 

[Right, a Sasaki chapel.  Much better.]