Shop Talk: Home Work Vol. 2 - Dan Weissman

The global health crisis of the coronavirus pandemic has overturned every moment and corner of our day-to-day lives. In this new micro-series, Shop Talk: Home Work, we turn to our network of friends, colleagues and collaborators for comfort and community, and discuss how they’re adapting to work and life in this unprecedented era of uncertainty.

This week, we chat with Dan Weissman about how he’s finding a balance and routine between working and parenting at home, as a senior associate who manages multiple projects and junior staff, and as a husband and father of two young kids, ages 2 and 4.

Dan leads the firm’s research and development efforts which includes a variety of academic, technology, and conceptual-based initiatives. In addition to his professional practice, Dan has also taught lighting and daylighting courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and published numerous articles and peer-reviewed daylighting research. In 2018, Dan was named as one of 40 under 40 international lighting designers by Lighting Magazine.

Our firm has just under 30 people split between our offices here in Cambridge and in Pittsburgh, and we try to maintain a sense of a cohesiveness between the two. We renovated our space a couple of years ago and it’s a really wonderful place to work. I have a view of trees from my desk which is really nice.

I started working at Lam Partners in 2005 right out of undergrad, then left the firm in 2008 to go to grad school. I pursued my Master’s of Architecture at the University of Michigan and got really into large-scale systems thinking, landscape ecology, and urbanism, and ended up wanting to pursue a second degree. I got into the Master’s of Design Studies program at Harvard GSD, and after that worked at Safdie Architects. I came back to Lam Partners in 2014, where I’m now a Senior Associate and the Director of Lam Labs, our experimental lab that explore things outside of typical lighting projects —it’s what AMO is to OMA, you could say—but most of my time involves managing and directing design projects.

On any given day, it’s a mixture of sitting in digital space, either answering emails, on Slack, web conferences with clients, or designing in 3ds Max—which we use pretty heavily for all of our design study work—as well as Revit, or Rhino and Grasshopper for more advanced digital work and to conduct daylight analyses. A couple of years ago, we found that instead of traveling to a client’s office every time we wanted to have a design session, we could just jump on a web conference and bring up the 3D Max model to work through together. It’s been an incredibly efficient way to design and communicate with your client. In the last couple of years, I’ve also been managing other people more regularly, which has been an interesting change of pace and a very rewarding addition to my work.

One of the things that is really interesting about our current predicament is that on a day-to-day basis my work process hasn’t really changed that much, aside from the fact that now I have to get up every once in a while to wipe a four-year-old’s butt.