Ten years ago, Clare Nash was struggling with a common problem: how to be an architect and still have a life. With no job, no savings and no clients in the midst of a recession, Clare set up her own practice with little more than a few postcards in local shop windows and a very simple website. Determined to better combine her life and family with professional work, she created an innovative practice that is flexible and forward-looking, based around remote working and the possibilities offered by improving technology. Bursting with tips, ideas and how-tos on all aspects of designing a working life that suits you and your business, this book explains in clear and accessible language how to avoid the common pitfalls of long hours and low pay. It explores how to juggle work with family commitments, how to set your own career path and design priorities, and how to instil a flexible working culture within a busy lifestyle. Encompasses the full range of life-work challenges: Money, fees and cashflow Playing to your personal strengths Outsourcing areas of weakness Building a happy and productive remote-working team Creating a compelling marketing strategy Juggling parenthood and work Studying and honing workplace skills Provides the inside view from innovative practices: alma-nac, Gbolade Design Studio, Harrison Stringfellow Architects, Invisible Studio Architects, Office S&M Architects, POoR Collective, Pride Road Architects and Transition by Design.

Adapt As An Architect: A Mid-Career Companion is the only book that helps design professionals to navigate the vast heart of the architect’s journey. It serves as a roadmap: a career GPS that provides options for architects getting from where they are today to where they really want to be. The focus of this optimistic, engaging book is on continued relevance, professional engagement, perseverance, and career longevity. It argues that mid-career is the lynchpin of the architect’s career, and provides the guidance and support that practices themselves are missing for emerging professionals, who are often left to their own devices to find their way as they approach the middle of their career. This book means architects don’t need to navigate these years on their own.

This book seeks to improve the work lives of architects of diverse demographics who do not fit, or want to replicate, the traditional ‘24/7’ white-male architect lifestyle. Aimed at a workforce whose life and career expectations have changed drastically in recent years, it helps readers of different generations to make informed choices about their careers – enabling students, educators, and professionals to prioritise wellbeing and offer their design and practice voice to enhance a built environment for all. Work-Life Balance in Architecture examines what it means to play the ‘game of architecture’ – to choose to study and pursue a career in architecture rather than another profession. The book shows the economic, social, and professional structures within which architectural education and practice operate and reveals the impact of a corporate, neoliberal ‘big business’ mentality on wellbeing. After setting out the context exacerbating work-life imbalance, the book discusses the paths an architect may take – whether this leads to a career in practice or not in architecture at all – and how alternative gameplay moves can advantage or disadvantage those of different gender, class, ethnicity, race, or age at different career stages. It concludes by examining how the places in which an architect works, the time available to work and critiques of perpetual neoliberal economic growth can enhance the lives of all architects today.

Part narrative, part business book; Architect + Entrepreneur is filled with contemporary, relevant, fresh tips and advice, from a seasoned professional architect building a new business. The guide advocates novel strategies and tools that merge entrepreneurship with the practice of architecture and interior design. The Problem:Embarking on a new business venture is intimidating; you have questions. But many of the resources available to help entrepreneur architects and interior designers start their design business lack timeliness and relevance. Most are geared toward building colossal firms like SOM and Gensler using outdated methods and old business models. If you're an individual or small team contemplating starting a design business, this is your field guide; crafted to inspire action. The Solution:Using the lean startup methodology to create a minimum viable product, the handbook encourages successive small wins that support a broader vision enabling one to, "think big, start small, and learn fast." It's a unique take on design practice viewed through the lens of entrepreneurship and is designed to answer the questions all new business owners face, from the rote to the existential. Questions about: - Startup costs - Business models (old and new) - Marriage of business and design - Mindset - Branding & naming (exercises and ideas) - Internet marketing strategies - Passive income ideas - Setting your fee - Taxes - Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) - Securing the work - Client relations - Software - Billing rates - Contracts Building a business isn't a singular act; it's a series of small steps. Using the outline found in Architect + Entrepreneur you can start today. The chapters are organized to guide you from idea to action. Rather than write a business plan you'll be challenged to craft a brand and you'll sell it using new technologies. Follow the guide sequentially and you'll have both the tools and a profitable small business.

“Thursday morning. One hundred pounds overweight, no man in sight, and rounding the bend to 57 years old—a full-blown catastrophe.” What happens when you realize you’ve had the career of your dreams, but you don’t have the life of your dreams? This was the stark reality facing Sheri Salata when she left her twenty-year stint at The Oprah Winfrey Show, Harpo Studios and the OWN network. She had dedicated decades to her dream job, and loved (almost) every minute of it, but had left the rest of her life gathering dust on the shelf. After years of telling other people’s makeover stories, Sheri decided to “produce” her own life transformation. And this meant revisiting her past, excavating its lessons, and boldly reimagining her future. In these pages, she invites readers along for the ride—detoxing in the desert, braving humiliation at Hollywood’s favorite fitness studio, grappling with losses, reinventing friendships, baring her soul in sex therapy, and more. Part cautionary tale, part middle-of-life rallying cry, Sheri’s stories offer profound inspiration for personal renewal.

Almost 40% of architecture graduates choose not to practise as architects. Instead, by ‘leaving’ their chosen profession, this surprisingly large but vastly overlooked cohort are making significant contributions to a wide range of other sectors, from politics to videogame design, demonstrating that architectural training can be a pathway to roles, and even leadership opportunities, across a variety of other professions. Architecture’s Afterlife is the first book to examine the sectors into which these graduates migrate, and to identify the transferable skills that are learned, but not always taught, in their degree programmes, and that prove most useful in their new careers. The book – a result of a three-year pan-European study funded by Erasmus+ – provides a roadmap for increasing graduate employment, addressing skills shortages across all sectors and adapting curricula to changing professional landscapes. It is therefore essential reading for all those responsible for curriculum design and delivery in architecture and other disciplines, including deans, professors, postgraduate researchers and policy makers, as well as students and professionals seeking to expand their career prospects.

This book presents 25 international housing schemes that draw on traditional vernacular principles whilst taking into account modern day materials, methods and financial or energy requirements. The aim is to show how, despite mass housing needs, we can design quality modern schemes that ‘fit’ their surroundings and generate a sense of place, community and regional identity – rather than the poor quality, identikit housing currently seen wherever you are in the UK.