How Klic Started: The First Five Years

Today I am opening the practice’s blog, with no clear idea of what it is going to be about.
Rather like the beginnings of the practice itself, back in 2006, when the urge to start something of my own — to decide for myself how I spent my time and what I pointed my interests at — led me to give up the security of a monthly payslip and strike out on my own. I had no clear idea at all what I would end up doing, only the urge to begin. To begin what? Time would tell.
Today, five years on, klic has stopped being a way of giving myself a job and become the combined effort of a lot of people working towards a common aim. We have turned into a practice specialising in refurbishment, with a good deal of experience behind us in that field. Even so, we keep the door open to any new commission that brings a challenge with it: energy retrofit, the ITE (Inspección Técnica de Edificios, the periodic inspection Spanish councils require of older buildings), sustainability — anything that makes us feel we are contributing and learning.
What these years have taught us is that what matters is work: hard work, done with your head as well as your hands, to take on the new challenges and to keep getting better in the fields we work in most often. We have also learned that an architect does not live by architecture alone, and that surviving as a practice means having clear ideas about marketing and management, particularly in times as hard as these.
So I am opening the blog with a rough account of how the slog has gone over these five years. I still do not know quite what it will end up covering, but I do want to tell you something — most likely how the slog is going, because there is plenty of it, and how spirits are holding up. As long as the urge to do things is still there, we will be here doing them, whatever the crises throw at us ;L)