Thought for new year - "Architecture and Time Out - Doing it better next year" - Ruairí O'Brien

The office was extremely busy in the weeks coming up to the Christmas holidays. I love Christmas of course. But...if you have a design office you are really under pressure in December. 
For architects the winter is always a dangerous time anyway. One never knows when the "real winter" is going to turn up and destroy all the time schedules that have been written in the good times when the sun was still beating hot on our heads. Especially here in Germany where if it snows it really snows. Of course that’s part of the great challenge of architecture in general, one is always playing with time dimensions and essentially transporting ideas into reality in the future. The idea, the vision, the dream has to be put on paper or fed into a computer, this provides us with a framework, a theoretical and a practical structure with which we can begin to change a thought into reality, one does calculations, one listens to the inner voice of hard won experience, one takes all eventualities into account, there is even a calculation for the unexpected, then the future arrives and the project is finished. Ideas are like fragile time machines which we have to protect and guide through thick and thin to their destination. In the case of a city house we were working on over the last year and a half, the clients were able to put their christmas tree up in their living room and serve the mulled wine to the sounds of Bing Crosby a week before Christmas, may I add in a personal space that did not exist outside the imagination of the clients less than a year ago.
This makes the work very exciting but one has to be careful not as a result to start living in the future, wishing the days away until deadlines has been successfully reached. Christmas is a time for slowing down, taking "Time Out" for the family, friends and the spiritual in life. This does not always go hand in hand with our profession but it is part of the responsibility, as an advocate for society, to include such "Time-Out" periods in the calculations. "Time Out" is the biggest Christmas present one can receive and it comes around only once every year, it can even be inspiring, so let’s get back to the computer and get these drawings out so we can shut down before Santa comes shooting down the next chimney we build in 2014!