Michael Douglass:  

Life Hello fellow classmates! It's pretty unbelievable how time has gone by. It seems like an eternity and yet it seems like yesterday. After 5 years at the University of Oregon (what a great place!) I moved to Los Angeles area where my family had migrated over the years. I came out with a mistaken belief that I knew everything there was to know about architecture! Whoa!!...was that a wrong assumption!! I was hired into my first job in an architectural office as an aspiring designer.....however they needed a blue-print boy!!! A humbling entry in deed! One of the associates, realizing my desire to design, sat me down one day and asked me to come up with different solutions to a bathroom layout for a tract house. No sweat I say...yet I distinctly remember staring at this, with piled up crinkled sketch paper, and could not in my life come up with ANYTHING....... I remember him returning and in minutes....voila...had several designs layed out. I can tell you this was my wakeup call. I came to realize that 5 years of college gave me great experience in philosophizing and theorizing, but virtually no experience in the real world. Rather, what I was given was an opportunity to look over the shoulder of some great designers and LEARN. In ...Expand for more