Starting again

I started using Google blogger in March, 2007 and spent about three months feverishly building up a series of ‘blogs’ on “Tessellation Planning”. They were not really blogs, but websites about different aspects tessellation planning and some of the on-going projects that just happened to be set up using the blogger tool. I was able to link them all together under a single title, “Tessellar”, a navigation bar and a uniform look.

I then discovered that my websites weren’t really attracting many people! It is something that hits any beginner.

So I started blogging as a way to get more readers. I picked “vernacular architecture” as a theme. This was a topic that interested me. But also I was keen to pick up readers from as many countries as possible, and I hypothesized that if I wrote about say, mud-huts in Africa, I might pick up interest from Africans. As it turned out, I picked up readers from all over the world.

But putting up two to four posts each week was very time-consuming. By May 2008, I stopped.

Economists in the US now trace the beginning of the current recession to the 4th quarter of 2007, but most people got its first inkling only in September, 2008 when the US government let Lehman Brothers go belly-up. Here in Malaysia, people in the housing industry got our first wind of bad, bad times in early 2008 when building prices went haywire. Construction costs seemed to be going up and up with no end in sight, and developers just stopped in their tracks. Work for architects and town-planners started to dry up, and practices like mine have had to hunker down and wait till the storm blows over.

Many on my staff left to further their studies, a few others resigned, and the ones still with the firm understand that times are hard. Happily for me, in the past year I had been able to grow lean without too much heartache. The storm is still not over yet, but I see specks of light in the far horizon: architects like me are in the futures business.

It’s time to start blogging again!