How To Be An Architect and Never Touch a Drawing

There is a moment in a firm owner’s growth that almost nobody warns you about, and it is not related to something financial. It is an identity crisis. 

You went to school to draw, to design, to make the thing. And at some point, if the firm grows, you stop doing that. You start directing it instead. For a lot of architects, that feels like a small death. Am I even an architect anymore if I am not the one producing the work?

Tim Derrington, who runs Derrington Building Studio in Austin, has completely (and refreshingly) made his peace with this, and the way he recently described it to me is worth sharing.

He no longer drafts or draws. In fact, he cheerfully admits his drawing skills have languished. What does he do at his firm instead? Set the stage. 

His priority now is to be the one who sees where the firm is going and to help everyone else realize the same vision. That means teeing up a project so his most design-talented architect can run with it, then hand it across to his most building-talented architect as it moves into documents and construction. 

He guards their time and steps in for the complex problems that need judgment more than hours, and you’ll also find him writing the contracts, building relationships, and maintaining the company culture. 

Tim calls himself visionary, then immediately acknowledges the tinge of ego in the word. But strip the ego away and it is simply the honest job description of an effective CEO.

Bjarke Ingels is someone Tim likes to reference, an A&E leader who described starting with crayons as a kid, then colored pencils, then technical pens, then computers, and then with people. 

Tim feels the same way, and he also pointed to Donald Judd, who did not fabricate his own work but was unquestionably the artist behind all of it. Being an architect, Tim argued, is not the sketching. It is solving a complex problem in service of a better way to live. The drawing is a tool so that a building can exist. It was never the thing itself. 

In his own words, Tim is not a paper architect. His whole ethos starts with “does the thing work?”, and only then, how do we make it beautiful?

I will add one name to his list. When a group of us recently visited Taliesin, what struck me about Frank Lloyd Wright was not just the buildings. It was that he built an education system, a framework through which his architecture could be carried forward by other hands. It’s a system that is still teaching people today. 

Here is why I bring all this into a conversation about building teams. The emotional block that stops firm owners from delegating, from hiring, from growing, is very often this identity question wearing a disguise. 

If I hand off the drawing, who am I? And the answer, the one Tim lives daily, is that you become what your firm actually needs you to be, and that is the person who sets the framework and foundation where people can do the best work of their careers. 

Tim says exactly that about his own team, that his job is to set the stage for people so they can excel. That is not a downgrade of the architect, but rather the fullest expression of one.

He gets more gratification now, he says, from collaboration and from giving people what they need to be the best version of their architect selves, than he ever did from a beautiful drawing. 

Not only that, he joked that his back is better and his eyes are less strained. 

But beneath the joke sits the real point: You are still one hundred percent an architect, you are just no longer the one holding the pencil. And once you truly believe that, every hire, remote or local, junior or senior, stops feeling like a loss of your craft and starts feeling like an extension of it, one that like any good building, will stand the test of time.

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