I was privileged to undertake a few days part-time lecturing at UCD Architecture & Engineering department last week; the topic of the talk was the concept of reinvention where I gave a personal example of how I decided to effectively reinvent myself from being the ‘CAD’ guy (Mr. Vectorworks) to an architect. To go from teaching CAD to teaching architecture and that the students have the same opportunity (at any stage) to reinvent themselves and the skills of thinking and problem solving that they are learning as architects and engineers can apply to many realms.

This process in my case has taken nearly twenty years, from qualifying as an architect in the UK, to helping thousands of Vectorworks users across the world to reinvent myself as an architect based in the West of Ireland (where I requalified as an RIAI architect). To now going full circle where I have recently presented to my peers at the RIAI and now on to the lectures at UCD.

All sounds good so far, but the strange bit is that half way through the second lecture (in the ‘Red Panelled Room’) I realised that I’d been in that room previously. Twenty years ago I was in the same room; giving a presentation on CAD and visualisation to UCD academics. And now here I am again, reinvented in the same room, giving a talk on reinvention, using the room as an example of reinvention with twenty years separating events.

So I thank UCD Architecture and Engineering, Vectorworks for setting me on this journey (incidentally I still use Vectorworks in my Practice) and especially Dorothy Jones for making this happen.

I have a few more bits I need to say about this at a later stage but I’ll stop here my just saying that sometimes life can be strange!