Sandcastles in The Sand
Hello thank you for tuning in. Listen, I have been putting off making this episode for a while because even though I think it’s a super fun topic, I have a lot of feelings about this particular designer depicted on TV. You know one of my favorite things to talk about is the portrayal of architects and interior designers in TV and film, and this is one that came to mind for me right away when I started this podcast, because it’s a show that I watched for years, but it’s also a show with an ending that basically ruined the whole series for me. There are so many classic TV shows that have had poorly received endings, from The Sopranos, Dexter, Game of Thrones, even the last episode of Seinfeld was controversial when it first aired.
I understand the challenge of trying to wrap up a beloved story in a neat bow, while still delivering a surprise or some kind of twist. I think many writers would rather their show go down in a blaze over a whimpering predictable boring conclusion. But, I can’t think of another show that left me feeling so down in the dumps after it’s ending other than How I Met Your Mother. With the recent announcement of a spin-off show called How I Met Your Father, I was flooded with my memories of the original show’s main character Ted Mosby, architect. Today we are going to take a look at Ted the architect, what the show got right about design life, what doesn’t make any sense at all, and why Ted is actually the perfect architect.
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There are so many things that I love about How I Met Your Mother, and I’m actually not going to get into too many details of the show itself, how it ended, or any other spoilers like that. If you’re curious, you can watch the show or just google what the ending controversy was - there were tons of articles written about it when the series ended in 2014. I want to zero in on Josh Radnor’s character Ted, who is a younger version of the narrator, Future Ted aka Bob Saget. Future Ted is telling his two children the longest bedtime story in history of how he met their mom, and every episode is a piece of the puzzle, with Future Ted adding narration to punctuate what the viewers can only assume are key incidents in solving the mystery identify of the mother. We viewers spent 8 of the 9 season wondering - “is this finally her?!”
The show mainly focuses on Ted and his group of friends who live in New York City and search for love, meaningful careers, and general life fulfillment. All the while, Ted is said to work as an architect. The friend-crew consists of Lily - a teacher; Robin - a local news anchor and journalist, Marshal the lawyer, and Barney is mysteriously wealthy, routinely refusing to provide details of his bank-related job.
When I am watching any piece of media that represents a designer of any kind, I’m always going through a mental checklist that, for me, deems the words and actions of the character realistic. This checklist is of course, just my opinion based on 15 years of working as an interior designer primarily at large architecture firms, and working with lots and lots of architects, graphic designers, engineers, lighting designers, and of course other interior designers. A lot of those experiences for me were not sunshine and roses memories, and to say that cynicism colors my perspective is probably an understatement. That being said, most designers and specifically for today’s topic, most architects I’ve worked with are absolutely wonderful human beings who work incredibly hard for a cause they are exceptionally passionate about. The reason I’m saying all of this is that this character we’re looking at today embodies several negative stereotypes that are associated with architects. Along with the ending of this show landing poorly with its audience, a lot of viewers turned on Ted after a few seasons, and we’ll talk about why that is. All this to say, my opinions about the personality traits of architects are my own, and nothing more.
I remember when the show was airing back in 2008 or so, one of my co-workers knew the architect who was working as a consultant for the show to provide feedback of the architectiness of Ted’s world, and it shows in a lot of details, and not so much in others.
I did go back a rewatch several key episodes of this series to really take look at how Ted’s life as an architect impacts the show, and in so many ways - it doesn’t. Out of nine seasons with over 20 episodes each, I found just over ten episodes that really focused on Ted’s occupation and even then it was a B plot for most of those episodes. It is stated many times that Ted’s working late, Ted’s going home to do work, and this all sounds accurate to me - architects tend to really dedicate themselves to their work and pull late hours all the time. But, I never really felt like the show gave a proper glimpse into that area of Ted’s life because the crux of the whole show is a group of friends hanging out on their down time at a local dive bar, rather than the working life of an architect.
One of the things that was glaringly apparent as I rewatched the series that I have to address is how out of touch it seems today. The show is majorly lacking in diversity, all the main cast members are white, thin, able bodied, and upper middle class. A lot of jokes are steeped in anti-asian sentiments, and a lot of the one liners are super cringey. It just goes to show what we as a society find acceptable has changed so much, even in the last ten years. All that being said, let’s look at our architect friend Ted.
Ted Mosby is from Shaker Heights, Ohio and graduated from Wesleyan University, and I did confirm that Wesleyan offers architecture as a major because not every college does - so that checks out. He is a Taurus sun with a Sagittarius moon. One of Ted’s major personality traits that is a running joke through out the entire show is his love for correcting people, especially when it comes to grammar, word choice, pronunciation, and historical facts; despite being unable to correctly pronounce the word chameleon. This is all symptomatic of Ted’s inherent pretentiousness, and one of the things I actually like about the show is that all of the characters are portrayed as flawed. None of them are glorified in anyway and I think the show struggled with doing this and still making the characters likable. Barney Stinson is a good example because his charm and repugnance are fighting to dominate his personality. But I think that in terms of Ted, having pretentiousness as a character flaw is a really accurate characteristic of an architect. I, myself have been accused of being pretentious more than once and it’s true. I love factual information and I do correct people when I feel like someone’s getting it wrong. People who are hungry for facts, rules, details, and general knowledge tend to make great designers of the built environment because you have to know a little bit about a lot of different topics to make a building work.
In terms of Ted’s outward appearance and fashion, there’s a little something left to be desired. Ted wears a lot of slightly oversized button down shirts, untucked, sometimes layered with a t-shirt underneath or a v-neck sweater overtop. We even see him in the occasional blazer come season five. But his fashion sense is just a notch down of what I would expect from someone who works in a professional design field. I think his styling was aiming more for that everyman, guy-next-door vibe. But most architects dress a little slicker than Ted, especially ones who live in Manhattan. The stereotypical caricature of an architect is wearing all black, with thick glasses. Black button down shirts with black blazers over top. Black shoes. Black pants. Ted is almost always wearing blue or brown, or even plaid flannel. He loves slightly oversized bootcut jeans and corduroys. While that may be a sign of the time the show was filmed, architects tend to go for a slimmer cut pant for sure. But I think this is all in an effort to make Ted feel approachable, if he was wearing all black and always correcting his friend’s word choice, he wouldn’t have stood a chance with audiences.
We do see Ted at his office on a few occasions, the office in general is a pretty good rendition of a typical New York City design firm. An open floor plan with exposed old metal fluted columns, arched windows, concrete floors, desks with Herman Miller Aeron chairs - it looks the part. However, the Hollywood romanticism version of architecture comes into play as Ted is constantly working at a hand drafting board, which have basically disappeared from architectural firms in lieu of double screen monitors for computer aided drafting. Sure, a triangle and drafting brush looks a lot cooler, but anyone who has even set foot in a design office knows they haven’t looked like this in multiple decades. To gloss over the fact that designers spend hours hunched over their computers, in constant vigilance of preventing carpal tunnel, that any architect under 40’s entire resume hinges on their competency with a certain hit list of software makes about as much sense a pretending a drugstore still uses a giant golden cash registered with lots of giant type writer style keys.
He also uses the word blueprint in Season 4 Episode 18 which sends off alarm bells in my mind because blueprints are an archaic type of content that phased out of use long before Ted was even born. The only time I’ve heard the term blueprint used in a professional setting was when I was sifting through archived flat files in the basement of a building built prior to 1970.
His boss, played by Bryan Cranston, is a bully. Although at some point, Ted is promoted above him and given the authority to fire his former boss - all of which does not sound like any type of hierarchy I’ve witnessed at an architecture firm, unless the people involved were playing a much longer game, like 20 years in the making of this scheme to fire your former boss. Over the course of series Ted excels incredibly quickly, making the cover of New York Magazine as a rising architectural star at age 33. From what I’ve experienced, architecture is a fairly gate kept profession that is currently held by the elder baby boomers. Frank Gehry is 92 years old. The only times I’ve seen anyone under the age of 40 get so far so quickly is purely nepotism.
In Season 4 Episode 8, we meet Ted’s revival architecture firm Sven, which is a crass composite of several Scandinavian design companies and Mike Meyer’s Sprockets sketch from Saturday Night Live. Both Ted and Sven compete to design the new bank headquarters where Barney works, and both submissions are complete abominations. Ted’s looks like something from 1981, and Sven literally presents a model of Godzilla. Everyone loves both buildings. This is hard to watch because it helps tie into the narrative that architecture is not a high value service. If buildings look this predicable, this ridiculous - anyone could do it.
In fact through out the show, Ted’s work consistently misses the mark in the sense that he never seems to understand his client’s needs, or even have a basic grasp of architectural strategy, yet he’s supposedly a “head architect” - whatever that means. When in fact, pitching something as high profile as a bank headquarters involves understanding every key player’s goals, the overall brand and mission, and translating this into a building that looks stately without looking extravagant or wasteful. Ted also presents this very import pitch completely by himself which is just ridiculous. Any architecture firm that cares about winning a project, sends a full team to pitch it. It wouldn’t rest on one 29 year old’s shoulders. At the end, everyone at the bank claps - which is completely laughable. When a design team pitches a project, they are met with a litany of corporate, bottom-line minded questions at the end. It isn’t a dance recital, no one is clapping. It’s also worth noting the whole room is full of men, which is unfortunately more accurate than I wish it was.
After all the fuss with the bank project, it ends up getting scrapped due to budget cuts which is real, this happens all the time. What doesn’t happen is that your client hides the fact that the project has been cancelled and has you keep working for a month because they want to bolster yourself esteem. That is completely ridiculous.
Eventually Ted, grows tired of working for soulless corporations who abhor sunlight and beautiful wood beams, so he quits/ gets fired. This is something that resonances with me personally, I think all designers question their work from time to time, and sometimes that means shifting to a different company, switching from corporate jobs to independent ones, or from designing sky scrapers to rib restaurants.
Ted strikes out on his own, and can’t stop obsessing over mundane details revolving around his business, gives a shout out to felt tip pens (my personal favorite), hires an intern, and tells Robin a good anecdote about factoring in live load calculations. Ted does finally get a chance to to pitch a job, stays up incredibly late working on his design (still hand drafting at his home office), missing his own surprise birthday party, and being tormented by a goat. You’ll have to watch the episode. Ted’s design is beat out by none other than Sven, and with Lily’s urging, Ted decides to put a pin in designing and try his hand at teaching architecture at the college level, at none other than Columbia University, no big deal.
One of my favorite things about Professor Ted is on his first day, due to nervousness and of course playing on the stereotype that architects can’t spell (I fall into that one myself), Ted struggles to write the word “Professor” on the board, unsure of its exact spelling. He also starts out in the wrong classroom. Very relatable. Ted’s class is called Architecture 101, which I assumed at first had to be an elective class for non-majors because it sounded so generic. Like, not even “History of Architect 101”?. Just architecture 101. Got it, sounds legit (sarcasm). And Ted is standing next to an oversized foam mounted print out of the Empire State Building. I mean listen don’t me wrong, I love the Empire State Building as a symbol of New York, it’s an icon, but as an opener introduction to architecture, it seems totally random. Not starting out with Greek Orders, or something from the Chicago skyline where the skyscraper was really born and developed. I mean even the Chrysler Building has more to talk about architecturally than the Empire State Building. And it turns out this class is intended for students who are actually studying to become architects. The whole class is set up very traditionally, like a lecture-style format. The vast majority of architecture classes are taught in a studio environment. Architecture students live, eat, and even sleep in their assigned studios, where they work on projects for hours on end. And yes there are lecture classes, but it just seems unlikely that Ted would be teaching this way. Again, I think it all goes back to cinematic effect and how things look on camera. A wood clad lecture hall is a lot more evocative than an open plan architectural freshman year studio. Those rooms get messy - covered in foam core and chip board and paper scraps and exact knife blades. I personally love the vibe of a school studio, but it likely doesn’t translate on camera.
Ultimately Ted does go back to designing on his own, hence the New York Magazine cover, and feels a sense of great accomplishment in his career, before meeting the mother of his children.
This career path is all very much realistic with the trajectory of an architect - the internal struggle to find one’s place within an established design firm, experimenting with other avenues including teaching, striking out on your own. These are things that many architects and designers go through, myself included. For a sitcom that’s mainly a coming-of-age story, having an architect as a main character is helpful, because it ties into the larger narrative of Ted’s ups and downs as he finds his way. Many people find themselves drawn to careers in design because it sounds like a good balance of creativity and practical job stability, only to find neither with gatekeeping and micromanaging bosses, frequent lay-offs and economic downturns, and “aggressively medium money” as Ted so accurately puts it.
Thank you so much for joining me today, as always a full transcript of this and our most recent episodes is available at www.softlandindstudio.com/podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast please consider giving it a five star review on Apple Podcasts, and sharing it with a friend. I hope you have a great one and I will talk to you in the next episode.
