Last year and a month ago, I posted a quote from a Modernist architect, Walter Gropius, on the thoughts aboug getting a job.  I accepted a position for summer employment, and right now those words seem to ring true to me again.  I have put into bold an added emphasis:

Excerpt From Walter Gropius, “Eight Steps Toward a Solid Architecture,”

“Making a living cannot be the only aim of a young man who would want above all else to realize his ideas. Your problem is, therefore, how to keep the integrity of your conviction intact, how to live what you preach, and still find your pay. You may not succeed in finding a position with an architect who shares your approach in design and who could give you further guidance. Then I would suggest you take a paying job wherever you can sell your skill, but keep your interests alive by a consistent effort carried on in leisure hours. Try to build up a working team with one or two friends in your neighborhood, chose a vital topic within your community, and try to solve it, step by step, in group work. Put ceaseless effort into it, then some day you will be able to offer the public, together with your group, a well-substained solution for this problem for which you have become an expert. Meanwhile, publish it, exhibit it, and you may succeed in becoming an adviser to your community authorities. Create strategic centers where people confronted with a new reality and then try to weather the inevitable stage of violent criticism until people have learned to redevelop their atrophied physical and mental capacities to make the proper use of the proffered new setup. We have to discern between the vital needs of the people and the pattern of inertia and habit that is so often advanced as the “will of the people.”

I am trying to realize my ideas; my summer work is working with a local architect to publish a book, a Builder’s Handbook for LEED Residential.  I will be doing the academic research and the writing to a publication that talks about how a builder could build a house to LEED Homes.  Broken down into chapters, it would give detail drawing, photographs, case studies, and the technical information to help a builder make a house to fit LEED requirements.

This position is even more an answered prayer from myself, my family, and my close friends who have been praying with me.  It is helping me down the path of a type of architecture that I see myself having a future involvement, and gaining a level of understanding through this project that I can take to another job and apply what I have learned.