A few months ago, I was talking about schooling and our chosen majors with my friend Matt. He’s in medical school now, and told me a story about a time he volunteered at a free clinic. When he got there, a nurse immediately handed him a clipboard and told him to go see X patient in curtained-space Y. The patient saw the white coat, stethoscope, and chart and started describing his ailments to the “doctor.” Meanwhile Matt was thinking “wait whoa I’m just a student! I don’t know what I’m doing!” I’m sure he soon collected himself and did a fine job helping the patient; he’s a smart guy.
But the point is, doctors have uniforms, and uniforms have power. Firefighters, police, military, repairmen, Dharma Initiative workmen, salespeople at Best Buy, they’ve all got a cute lil’ outfit that says “this is who I am, this is what I do.”
Architects don’t have that. I suppose if you are on a job site, you can pick out the architect as the one inappropriately dressed in nice shoes and pants, but otherwise, we’ve got nothing. I suppose you could say that dressing in all black, with thick black glasses, and potentially a bow-tie is a uniform of sorts…
Anyway! I think architects need a uniform. The pants need to be able to be cuffed, for fashion, muddy worksites, and biking to work. The shirt should have a pocket. We’d carry around a big metal T-square (yeah we don’t draft anymore, but it would be cool to have) and some sort of sextant-esque device, with a little scope to look through, and I don’t know, dials to determine if a wall is plumb or something. Someone figure that out. Let’s make this happen!
