Douglas M. Rooney

Love the photo where you see in the background the old-fashioned drafting board complete with a T-square and circle template. I guess that portraying the way we worked 30 years ago is more “romantic”. At least they don’t have him driving around in his truck with his “mow-n-blow” equipment.

Take your former salary and reduce it to an hourly rate. Take hourly rate X 1.35 = contract hourly rate( then round up to the nearest $5. Example, if contract hourly billing rate comes to $27.75, round up to $30 per hour). Thirty-five percent is a fair approximation of the value of benefits plus self employment tax. I would not use your former…[Read more]

I was an organizer for PARK(ing)Day in San Francisco in 2009. Myself and a group of  other unemployed design professionals, designed, constructed, and operated a 3 hole miniature golf course for the day. It was a lot of fun and kept us busy during a very difficult year. I even managed to make it onto Weekend Edition on NPR for my 8 seconds of…[Read more]

Jason, I do not think your statement that you must have Masters degree to become a licensed Architect is correct. The 5 year BArch degree(most commonly found at public state universities) is an accredited professional degree that NCARB accepts for their education requirement. Some states including your state of Maryland do not even require an…[Read more]

What happened to the DOUR photo?? I so enjoyed “bitter Jason”…..

Jason….I was just joking….I agree with you that safety is an illusion..I was just trying for some levity in an otherwise dour discussion.

Au contraire Jason, have you not heard of the certainty of Death and Taxes????
Mortician and tax accountant must therefore “be safe”.

MLCC, that is not how I read CLARB’s transition plan. If you only have section E left to go and you do not pass it before the new exam starts, then you will get credit for Sections 1, 2, and 3, but will have to take section 4 which costs more and repeats part of section D. You will not have to take section 3 as previously passing section C and D…[Read more]

Obviously that student has never been in a correctional facility. There are too many windows and no barbed wire. I think alien spacecraft meets nuclear power plant is a more fitting description.

And to prove Nick’s point….here is a gem from SF Bay Area Craiglist today looking for an AutoCAD drafter for an Architect:
Drafter 3-5 years experience in Autocad (SOMA / south beach)
MWA Architects is looking for a drafter with 3-5 years experience. This position is for a recent graduate, and we will not be looking a resumes with more than 5…[Read more]

You are dead on in your analysis Andrew. Most firms I know currently have a “barbell” structure. They are composed of the partners and the junior production staff. Everyone at the firm has less than 5 years experience or more than 20 years. Middle management need not apply. I still think it is quite hard for young people coming out of school to…[Read more]

Alex,
I really must congratulate you. Not everyone could generate nearly 100 posts on a topic like fonts, but you have…..Bravo.
First let me state I do not now, nor have I ever used Papyrus. I actually had to look it up to see what it looked like, because I had no idea. Not the type of font I am likely to use since it has a “visual onomatopoeia”…[Read more]

I have solved the riddle….. 225,000 jobs were saved because (thanks to the government bailout) GM is still in business, and now that they make an electric car (Chevy Volt), all of those jobs are now counted as GREEN. Jobs created? ZERO

He is looking for a Chartered Member of the Landscape Institute (UK version of ASLA) to mentor him on his “Path to Chartership” (P2C). I blame this on texting…people are now speaking in acronyms.

So when you say you have been a Landscape Architect for 28 years, you mean you have been licensed for that long, right? Or was there a “rouge unregistered period” in there?

I am not sure what the history on the ethics for LAs has been, but I did read once that the AIA had made advertising for Architects an ethics violation starting in 1909, however by the late 1970s that was no longer true. I do know that the ASLA code states:
R1.106  Members shall not mislead through advertising or other means existing or…[Read more]

Heather, I am very interested to hear more about how you developed your business. I know you have said your husband is licensed as a Landscape Architect, but does he have a contractors license as well? I have always been very interested in doing design/build, but here in California you need to be a licensed landscape contractor to do that. In…[Read more]

Alan you are killing me…….that is even funnier than Jon’s fake phone call.

I just got my license last week. My route to RLA was rather circuitous. My degree is in Architecture. I worked in that profession for 6 years out of grad school. I never got my Architect’s license because I listened to bad advice that I “would never need it, I would always work for someone with a stamp, and it was a huge waste of time and money”.…[Read more]

For those that forget their 11×17 sheet, there is another way to deal with the vellum issue, assuming that you are working on a white or light colored surface( I recommend that everyone bring some sort of board to draft on because the tables at some test centers are not good surfaces to draw on). You can “think outside the book” by taping down…[Read more]