I was having an interesting discussion today with a new BArch graduate who interned for us. He wants to now do a building apprenticeship with a quality home builder. Then position himself to design and build the houses he has bubbling inside of him. Looking at his portfolio and standard of presentation I am awed at his creativity, drive and enthusiasm. He aced the course and I can see that he has much to contribute to the process of creating the built environment, both domestic and high end commercial builds. Its hard to convince him of the validity of completing the process to full registration when it takes another 3 years minimum (if you are a working for a company that does complex work all the time) after the 5 at uni.
There is a real problem here in that our students are encouraged to come up with some very out there stuff with no real consideration of buildability or utility. This young man has already swung a hammer for high end builder for a year before he went to uni and has a very acute perception of the principles of utilising material sizing modules to determine footprint dimensions and the cost effectiveness of not filling a wastetaker with offcuts and letting transportable lengths determine span.
I think that the market will make room for visionary entrepeneurs, but its very hard for a single person to put the capital required into a project like that for the length of time it takes to sell the finished product for what its worth, there are plenty of bankrupt builders, but then if you start small with eco housing, say duplexes or quadruplexes it may just work. Watch this space, I may just be getting my hammer out of retirement myself and putting the ranch up as collateral.
Leave a Reply