A Note on the “Small” project
There is an older, wiser architect in my life who has warned me more than once: be careful about taking on projects for people too close to you. It isn't that friendship and work can't mix — they can, and often do beautifully. But the guardrails we build around professional relationships exist for a reason. When those guardrails come down, the work suffers. And sometimes, so does the friendship.
I won't go into the specifics of the recent project that reminded me of this. It was a small residential job, now finished, and the details aren't the point. What I want to write about is the strange arithmetic of "small."
The Arithmetic
In my last post I wrote about designing at 1:1 — how there is no place to hide when a line is no longer a symbol for a wall but simply a groove in the metal. Every millimetre lives on your thumb.
Small projects, I've learned, have a professional version of this problem.
At a masterplan scale, there are layers of abstraction between you and the decision. A line on a drawing is a wall someone else will build, in a phase someone else will manage, on a budget someone else will approve. There are teams. There are stages. There is distance.
On a small project, the distance collapses. You are the designer, the detail draughtsman, the coordinator, and — if you are not careful — the message-answering service at 10pm on a Friday. Every question lands directly on your desk. Every change request skips the three emails it would have travelled through on a larger job. The "small" project, by the time you add it up, can eat as much of you as a full office fit-out. Mine cost me 168 hours before I walked away from it.
The Sins I Wrote About
The hardest part of this to admit is that I knew better.
When I was qualifying as an Architect, I wrote — at length, and with some confidence — about good practice. I provided critical analyses of bad practice. I catalogued, with the smugness only a candidate can produce, the mistakes I had seen at the firms I worked for.
And then, given my first proper opportunity, I walked straight into all of them.
I accepted design changes over chat without an email trail. I agreed to meetings at times I should have protected. I discounted a fee because of a personal history that did not, in the end, protect the working relationship. I kept saying yes when the professional answer was a firm and friendly no.
I am writing this down mostly as a reminder to myself. But if you are a younger designer starting out — or an older one restarting, as I am — perhaps some of these are worth holding onto:
A small project is not a small commitment. Price it, scope it, and treat it with the same rigour you would a larger one.
Put meetings in the calendar. Put decisions in email. Chat apps are for small talk, not small print.
A deducted fee is not a favour. It is a quiet agreement that your time matters less, and everything downstream of that tends to confirm it.
When the scope begins to drift, say so early. The longer the drift, the harder the correction.
Dignity Over Portfolio
I could have finished the project. I was nearly at the end. There would have been a few photographs, perhaps a line on the portfolio, perhaps a partial fee recovered.
I chose to walk away instead. It was not the commercially clever decision — the financial dent is real, and it will sit with me for a while. But the older I get, the more I believe that a practice is not built on the projects you finish. It is built on the terms under which you are willing to work.
Fakeprintshop is a small studio, still finding its shape. The shape it will not take is one bent out of line by a project that should have been declined at the start.
The next post will be a more optimistic one — I promise. There is a project I have been quietly developing for over a year now that I am looking forward to finally sharing. Walls, gravity, and all the rest of it.
For now, thank you for reading. I hope you are wiser than I am. And if you are not — well, consider this the shortcut.
