CompuServe Messages

John: To not participate in a design competition can be a significant limitation to your market. Some competitions, if won, bring a tremendous amount of publicity and hopefully new work. Its almost impossible to know for sure which competitions will yield this benefit. To even enter a competition you often have to be willing to work on the design for free for several weeks in the hope of winning. Electronic copies of 'blue prints' are zinged around the globe all of the time and you've hit on a topic that stands the hair up on the back of my neck. Pirating of plans is a plague and scares me. Facility Managers, furniture dealers, manufacturers and contractors all think nothing of passing around disks of electronic floor plans when the data is copyrighted to the architect. Modifications can and have been made causing serious problems and soon we will hear of deaths caused because of some unscrupulous person editing an electronic shop drawing which altered the strength of a material and caused a building collapse. We do RFP's all the time but we are often asked to take it a step further and actually show a partially finished product for evaluation. Since work in architecture is extremely scarce there will always be a number of us willing to gamble away a few weeks of work in the hope of getting a year's worth. The fact is that there are way too many of us architects for today's construction demand. Bob