My work doesn’t get built.

There, I said it.  Nothing I’ve designed as Cobrooke in the last five years has gotten built.

Zero, zip, nada.

Not the concierge ALF in Tampa, the new campus plan for a developmentally disabled service provider, a new technology center or the performing arts center addition or the school for victims of human trafficking in Africa. By my count that makes me 0 for 5, batting a perfect zero. Recently, we were executive architects for a fairly large church addition that did get built but that doesn’t count. It’s like being a car passenger, along for the ride with your feet hanging out the window enjoying the view.

And yet here I am, still standing in the batter’s box, bat in hand waiting to take a swing. Hey, I’m an architect, it’s what we do.

We dream, we hope (these days pray, a lot) that the next one is the big one. Until that happens we forage, like survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, for nuts, berries and insects to keep ourselves alive and hopeful.

Today it’s a new competition that occupies my time and keeps me from wondering if today’s the day that a proposal submitted two months ago for a small project with a whopping three grand fee gets green lighted, or the even smaller proposal for half that amount goes through. Hey, it’s all nuts and berries remember?

Until then I work on my competition winning acceptance speech and hang my hat on the adage that “architecture is an old man’s profession”.

Problem is, depending on who you ask, I am already an old man.

Robert Vecchione is an architect/designer and principal of the multidisciplinary firm Cobrooke Ideas-Architecture-Design (www.cobrooke.com).