I spent the weekend out at the Alyeska Hotel in Girdwood - you skiers out there will know that place well. The AIA State Convention (American Institute of Architects) was going on and I had volunteered to work their registration table.
This is not the first time I've done that for them, so I had a good idea of what was in store for me. I have to say that this one was a lot better organized than the last one was. We still had a few issues, and I really don't like crowds of people, but for the most part it went off fairly well.
It did serve to remind me how amazed I am sometimes at some people's nerve. One lady signed up for the cheapest thing she could find on the registration website: the banquette meal on Saturday Night. She then proceeded to attend the entire conference, eating 6 meals in the process - all without paying!
Well, she THOUGHT she wasn't paying. I happen to know that she is going to get one heck of a bill in the mail. Of course, there's nothing to enforce her payment of said bill - but if she doesn't pay, she will be black-balled from all further AIA events, and her husband (who is the actual architect in this picture; she is just a wife) will be extremely embarrassed in front of his peers.
The overall theme of the conference was - as it is almost everywhere - the state of our climate and what the building sector has to do with it. Of the three sectors most blamed for the CO2 in our atmosphere (Transportation, Industry, and Buildings)the built environment is responsible for close to 50% of the CO2 emissions! So you see, it really is up to us to do something about that.
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