Hasta La Ideas

A lot is changing about the way we work and the way we apply for work in 2023. Remote work is becoming more popular, Applicant Tracking Systems are fundamentally changing the job application process, and AI is becoming an integral part of some jobs. So, if you’re looking for new opportunities this year, you might be second-guessing a lot of what you know about the job application process and asking yourself all kinds of questions, including “are cover letters still relevant in 2023?”

And rightfully so.

After all, there is a widespread belief that recruiters don’t even read cover letters. If that’s the case, why waste your time writing one, right?

Are cover letters relevant in 2023?

Many applicants think that submitting a cover letter when applying for jobs is not necessary and will likely go unnoticed by recruiters.

That’s because they view the cover letter as a summary of their resume, rather than as a complementary addition that can add value to their application.

This is reinforced by the fact that if you google “do recruiters read cover letters?” you’ll find plenty of sources claiming that cover letters are useless and that we should cut them out of the job application process entirely.

We think otherwise. Done right, cover letters can still be extremely useful in helping you land your next gig in 2023.

Here’s why:

Cover letters are still required by most employers

Most employers still require candidates to submit a cover letter when applying for jobs. While they may not have the time to read each and every cover letter they receive, they’ll definitely check out a cover letter if they’re on the fence about a candidate.

In such cases, a well-written cover letter can improve your chances of getting hired.

Not to mention, failing to submit a cover letter when it’s specifically requested in the job description will be considered a red flag and might get you disqualified.

Cover letters show dedication

When applying for jobs, most candidates submit a very generic cover letter with minimal personalization.

By writing a thoughtful and well-crafted cover letter, you demonstrate your commitment to the job and the company.

It shows that you are willing to go above and beyond the minimum requirements of the application process and that you have a genuine interest in the position.

Cover letters can set you apart from other applicants

Sometimes, recruiters have to choose who, among several candidates with the same level of professional experience, to invite for an interview.

In such a case, submitting a cover letter can help set you apart from other candidates.

A well-written cover letter can prove to the hiring manager that you’re a skilled candidate who has taken the time to research the company and the position and is genuinely interested in the role.

Your cover letter can highlight your unique skills, experience, and achievements, all of which are reasons for the hiring manager to pick you over other candidates.

Cover letters provide additional information about the candidate

A resume provides an overview of you as a candidate, but it doesn’t provide you with enough space to go into detail about certain key parts of your career.

This is where the cover letter comes in.

Whether you have a significant career gap in your resume, you’re going through a career change, or are looking for a relocation, you can use your cover letter to explain the “why-s” behind your decisions more comprehensively.

Moreover, a cover letter is your chance to discuss your professional achievements, talk about how you gained your skills, and even let the hiring manager know just how hiring you over other candidates can benefit the company.

In short, a well-written cover letter can provide a more comprehensive and personal view of you as a candidate and complement your resume in more ways than one!

5 tips for a well-written cover letter

The bottom line is this:

A cover letter is still an essential part of any job application in 2023 and you should include one with your resume.

So, as you can imagine, your cover letter should be on par with your resume. Before you start writing your cover letter, here are a few tips to make the process easier for you:

1. Keep it short. The optimal cover letter length is between 250-400 words long, so don’t overdo it with the writing.
2. Follow submission instructions. In the job description, look out for specifics on the cover letter format (Word or PDF), or on formatting rules, such as the fonts and margins.
3. Always proofread. If there’s one mistake you should avoid at all costs is submitting a cover letter with obvious grammar or spelling mistakes. Make sure to proofread your cover or run it through an app like Grammarly letter before submitting it.
4. Be specific. You want to be as specific as possible when you’re explaining your achievements and skills in your cover letter. Instead of just mentioning specific skills, for example, explain exactly how using them can help you excel at this position. Or, instead of just saying you love the company, mention exactly what it is you love about it. 
5. Use a cover letter template. Choosing a cover letter template can save you the time and energy needed to format and personalize your cover letter. The result will look professional and modern at the same time.

SinHei Kwok has designed and built a sculptural apartment complex that is meant to offer an alternative to the low-density housing found in Phoenix, Arizona’s sprawling capital.

The project, called M-shaped Bungalows, is located near downtown Phoenix in the Garfield historic district, a neighbourhood characterised by single-family homes dating to the early 20th century.

Occupying a 6,600-square-foot lot (613 square metres), the complex contains nine rentable studio apartments spread across two buildings.

Designed by SinHei Kwok – an architect based in Phoenix and Hong Kong – the project is meant to offer an alternative to the traditional mode of residential development in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

“Phoenix has been infamous for urban sprawl, where low-density development is being built with the mindset of a car-dependent environment,” said Kwok, who started his studio in 2015.

“This project attempts to demonstrate a denser multifamily development on an urban infill lot, where typical developers might build a single-family house, which is not sustainable.”

To make the most of the compact site while also respecting the context, the architect created a rectangular-plan building and a square-plan building, both of which rise two levels.

The buildings have M-shaped roofs – a reference to the gabled roofs found in the district.

The buildings are surrounded by pathways, terraces and desert gardens.

“Where the buildings pull apart into two masses, community open space is created, promoting interaction between tenants,” the architect said.

Standard asphalt shingles were used to clad the exterior walls and roofs.

On the street-facing elevation, the upper level cantilevers over the lower level, forming a sheltered area to relax and connect with neighbours.

A parking lot with permeable paving is located in the back of the property, alongside an alley.

Because of the closeness of the units, the architect made sure to provide privacy and ample daylight for each tenant.

“With multifamily development, the challenge is to make sure every occupant has a sense of individuality and quality of space with natural lights,” Kwok said.

The architect conceived seven different floor plans for the nine apartments, which range from 450 to 550 square feet (42 to 51 square metres).

All of the units feature full-height glazing, a sliding glass door, and a patio or balcony. The upper-floor apartments have a storage loft.

Windows are shaped and positioned to offer framed views of the downtown district, Camelback Mountain or South Mountain. Entrances to the units are not aligned with each other, helping reinforce a sense of privacy.

To reduce noise travelling between units, there are no shared walls. Instead, the architect created two stud walls between the units, with a half-inch gap between them. The dual walls also help mitigate the spread of fire.

Interior finishes include walls made of drywall or maple plywood. Concrete flooring is found on the ground level, while a material called Elastocrete, which is a polymer-modified cement, was used for floors in upper-level studios.

The kitchen features countertops made of black granite, white quartz or Elastocrete. Backsplashes are made of custom steel plates.

A tall, white curtain separates the sleeping area from the main living zone.

Kwok acted as the project’s architect, developer and builder – a position that gave him more freedom as a designer.

“This ‘wearing all hats’ mentality allows the designer to make decisions based on the quality of space, rather than profit,” said Kwok, who holds degrees in both architecture and real estate.

“It also allowed us to create an alternative approach to multifamily properties that benefit the occupants and the city at large.”

Other atypical housing projects in the US include a communal living complex in LA by Bittoni Architects and a Detroit apartment building by Undecorated that features apartments housed in an elongated, metal Quonset hut.

The photography is by Roehner + Ryan.

Project credits:

Architect, developer, owner: Sin Hei Kwok
Associate architect: Karl Sippel
Structural engineer: Struktur Studio, LLC
MEP/FP engineer: Otterbein Engineering
Construction manager: Sin Hei Kwok

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The latest edition of our weekly Dezeen Agenda newsletter features plans to build a 400-metre-high cuboid skyscraper in Riyadh. Subscribe to Dezeen Agenda now.

The Saudi Arabian government has revealed designs for a cube-shaped skyscraper to be built as part of its Murabba downtown plan in Riyadh.

Named Mukaab, the structure will be 400 metres high and 400 metres long, making it both a supertall skyscraper and the tallest building in the city.

The 19-square-kilometre Murabba development has been described as “the new face of Riyadh” and is being planned as a new downtown area for the Saudi capital city.

This week’s newsletter also featured a coloured concrete housing complex in Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighbourhood, ChatGPT’s warning to architects about the threat of AI and a virtual apartment by Swedish designer Christoffer Jansson exhibited at this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair.

Dezeen Agenda

Dezeen Agenda is a curated newsletter sent every Tuesday containing the most important news highlights from Dezeen. Read the latest edition of Dezeen Agenda or subscribe here.

You can also subscribe to our other newsletters; Dezeen Debate is sent every Thursday and features the hottest reader comments and most-debated stories, Dezeen Daily is our daily bulletin that contains every story published in the preceding 24 hours and Dezeen In Depth is sent on the last Friday of every month and delves deeper into the major stories shaping architecture and design. 

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Sculpd’s Bookend Vases Kit is a fun way to practice pottery building that yields functional, earth-toned decor. It comes with everything needed to create two minimalist bookend vases: air-dry clay, a video tutorial, waterproof varnish and optional paint brushes and pottery tools.

Organic architecture is less a style or school and more a set of principles, Mexican architect Javier Senosiain and Noguchi Museum curator Dakin Hart tell Dezeen in this interview.

Senosiain calls his work organic architecture – a term first coined by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright – but said that the term is mainly a description for architecture that tends away from conventional building shapes and towards natural formations.

“When we see brutalist architecture, or architecture of any certain style, like international, or rationalist architecture, they have a style in common, right?” said Senosiain.

“Perhaps one of the main characteristics of organic architecture is that every work is very different from another, be it from country to country or region to region.”

“Organic architecture is the philosophy of architecture that seeks to create harmony between human beings and the natural world,” he continued.

Since October, Senosiain’s designs have been on show at an exhibition called In Praise of Caves at the Noguchi Museum in New York. The show features a selection of Mexican organic architecture, including Senosiain’s work as well as architects Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman and Carlos Lazo.

“I don’t think Javier would, and nor would Noguchi, like the idea of mimicking nature, because we’re not talking like old-fashioned mimesis,” said Dakin Hart, senior curator at the Noguchi Museum.

“What we’re talking about is trying to model after nature. Following nature’s footsteps,” he added. “You know, evolution is the greatest inventive process in the history of our planet.”

Senosiain has been known in Mexico as a practitioner of organic architecture since he completed Casa Orgánica, a shell-shaped house, in the 1980s. Hart describes him as the philosophy’s “spiritual mastermind”.

Senosiain believes that a current renewed interest in organic architecture runs in tandem with the contemporary acceptance of vernacular architecture and the search for more sustainable materials.

According to Senosiain and Hart, organic architecture is not so much about copying nature but trying to model the built environment after the way that natural systems produce and reproduce themselves.

Senosiain is perhaps best-known for his structures that take fantastical shapes – like his Nido de Quetzalcóatl, a snake-shaped apartment complex – but he said that the adornments and colourations come later in the design process.

“It’s a little like when one watches the clouds. One imagines some animal or some vegetable,” said the architect.

“For most of our works, when they’re in an advanced stage of progress, in organic forms, people start to discern the shape of an animal or a vegetable.”

“In the case of designing the Nido de Quetzalcóatl, we had a mockup done with all the curves of level, with all the trees, [something like a] children’s pool ring was set up, and it moved according to the orientation and the views, and one day I thought, what if we add the head of a snake at the mouth of a cave?”

Similarly, he told Dezeen that The Shark developed its arresting moniker after earning a nickname among the construction workers on the project.

“In the shark design that we did, when the first stage of the work was done, the masons started calling it The Shark, and then I thought of the fin, and I added a fin,” Senosiain recalled.

“I think that over 90 per cent of works that have a name at all, it was not thought about first, but given a name once finished.”

Read on for the full, edited interview.

Ben Dreith: In your words, what is the school of organic architecture?

Javier Senosiain: It’s a little hard sometimes to classify it because it can have more than one style, right? It can have a style and then another style and it may have variations but somewhere, there is a definition that says that organic architecture is the philosophy of architecture that seeks to create harmony between human beings and the natural world.

Dakin Hart: It’s more principle. Though Javier is the spiritual mastermind, the intellectual force behind this, it is not a movement, per se. It encompasses all of human building history. And this is just a more recent chapter that we’re tapping into, but the shape that it has, the coherence that it has, as a group of ideas that you can really work with, has come from Javier.

BD: An idea of organic architecture mimicking principles of nature seems in contrast to the artifice of a gallery. Why show these works at the Noguchi Museum?

DH: I don’t think Javier would, and nor would Noguchi, like the idea of mimicking nature, because we’re not talking like old-fashioned mimesis, you know, this is not art holding up a mirror. What we’re talking about is trying to model after nature. Following nature’s footsteps. Noguchi didn’t see technology and nature as opposing forces. He thought of nature as the greatest technologist. So it’s a matter of a different theory, a different set of principles and processes in the development of new ideas, which nature is coming up with all the time. You know, evolution is the greatest inventive process in the history of our planet.

BD: What are some everyday examples of organic architecture that people can latch on to?

DH: The mass of architecture more generally is cognizant of at least the symptoms of all of the problems that have been caused by not building it all organically. It’s trying to look at where we’ve been, and looking back to times when maybe we were building more simply but also more rationally, in ways that it turns out were also more efficient because they were more closely connected to natural models. But I think there’s no question that there, again, those latent tendencies are already always there and they’re just coming out again, they’re coming to the forefront. And now they’re being understood as a solution to our problems and problems that we’ve created for ourselves.

JS: Yes, yes, organic architecture is, on one side, very wide. I think there is a lot of influence from vernacular architecture, in fact, in 1964, Bernard Rodowski’s exhibition of architecture without architects, I think with that, somehow, there was a change in the world, and I remember, in the architecture career at college, you did not see vernacular architecture. And it was like a novelty, or more diffusion for that kind of architecture, which was not well-known in the world, and I think that modern organic architecture goes back to the origins of vernacular architecture a lot. And I think that’s why Dakin was saying that a large part of modern architecture is using a lot of natural materials – such as wood, stone, earth, etc, and from that vernacular architecture, though there is some likeness in some latitudes, at the same time organic architecture has a special quality that I see.

BD: Why has Mexico been such an important place for the continued development of these ideas?

JS: [Architect] Mathias Goertiz said that he could not have done what he did in any other country and I think it’s a place that has a lot of advantages because of cheap labour, a country well known for its plastic arts, you know? And I think all of that helped.

I don’t know whether to call organic architecture a style or a school, but it has something not so common or conventional, in the sense that every work is generally very different. When we see brutalist architecture, or architecture of any certain style, like international, or rationalist architecture, they have a style in common, right? Like Barragan and such. Perhaps one of the main characteristics of organic architecture is that every work is very different from another, be it from country to country or region to region. Right now Yolanda Bravo Saldaña is making a book of organic architecture in general, and all the pictures she is compiling, well, they’re all so different. Perhaps in the Mediterranean, for a while in the ’60s, with ferrocement, they were slightly similar things being made, the constructive system, etc, but every work is very different, isn’t it? That’s one of the main characteristics I see in organic architecture.

BD: Why has your implementation of the principles led you to use these very symbolic shapes or literal animal forms and natural forms?

JS: That symbology is not born a priori, but a posteriori. It’s a little like when one watches the clouds. One imagines some animal or some vegetable. For most of our works, when they’re in an advanced stage of progress, in organic forms, people starts to discern the shape of an animal or a vegetable. In architecture that’s, not conventional but more traditional, for example in Mexico, there is a building called El Pantalón (“The Pants”), and I am sure the architect did not think of a pair of pants. Still, people started seeing it and thinking of pants.

I know that they didn’t think of it a priori, but that people later started calling the buildings that. In the shark design that we did, when the first stage of the work was done, the boys/the masons started calling it The Shark, and then I thought of the fin, and I added a fin. I think that over 90 per cent of works that have a name at all, it was not thought about first, but given a name once finished.

In the case of designing the Nido de Quetzalcóatl, we had a mockup done with all the curves of level, with all the trees, [something like a] children’s pool ring was set up, and it moved according to the orientation and the views, and one day I thought, what if we add the head of a snake at the mouth of a cave?

BD: So it’s like the storytelling or narrative of the design dictates how the work is view and where it is going. Does this aspect of storytelling and narrative in the design help point to where the practice is going?

DH: I like that idea very much. That this is extending and it’s more connective. That’s so fundamental. It’s very vague, but it’s extremely important. That organic architecture one of its main principles is just more connection. Because architecture in the 20th century is all about separation. Javier is thinking about making buildings is trying to link much more into daily activity in a way that’s more innate to what we are, and recognizing that we are not trying to separate us from what we are.

JS: Yes, yes, there was a master of mine who spoke of the importance of the whole, of the importance of integrating the parts with the whole and the whole with the parts, I think that integration and continuity are important, it’s like space, it flows, and you have to let space flow. I really like a work that I often analyze with my students too, the Guggenheim in New York, which I think is characterized as a sculpture, but where space flows, space is continuous, and the function is continuous – you go up the elevator and it is continuous. The structure is continuous. The shape is also continuous. I think the Guggenheim is a great example of continuity and integration – with little elements, it’s able to resolve all that.

The photography is courtesy of Javier Senosiain, unless otherwise stated.

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