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O P I N I O N
How to find a job
Y ou can read many stories about how to get a job and grow your business. Mine is just one of many. The business I’ll describe is an architectural, design, and planning practice, started in 1965 by Art Gensler. Be honest. Don’t puff up yourself or your credentials. Explore the nature of the job and, more importantly, the idea behind the company.
When I joined the firm in 1969, I was employee No. 2, and it felt like a start-up. I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a master’s degree in architecture in 1968, relocating back to the San Francisco Bay Area in the middle of a recession. There were no jobs for architects, so I went back to work for a developer in Marin County where I had spent a year between college and graduate school. I enjoyed the breadth of experiences I was having but knew that, if I ever really wanted to be an architect, I had to fulfill an apprenticeship working for a licensed firm. At this time, I lived in a four-plex built in 1895 that my friends referred to as “rodent heights.” My landlord owned a small, vacant piece of property on Corinthian Island in Tiburon. Most
of the properties there were so small – the size of postage stamps – that they were given away with newspaper subscriptions to the San Francisco Examiner around the turn of the century. While a few were grander, with views of San Francisco Bay, the one my landlord owned looked over downtown which, at the time, was a railroad yard. Its configuration was a long, slender triangle that went from 35 feet wide at the top to three feet wide at the bottom. It was mostly a 2:1 slope (very steep), but the wider section of the property was even steeper, greater than 45 degrees. In addition, the lot was located between the one- way street that exited the island and Main Street below.
Edward Friedrichs
See EDWARD FRIEDRICHS, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER April 2, 2018, ISSUE 1242
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