Hasta La Ideas

Almost over his bout with jet lag, this writer is slowly getting back to normal. But due to some lingering brain haze, let’s just get to the meat and potatoes of the day’s happenings and keep this short and sweet, okay? First up, some sad news from earlier this week when Michelle Kaufmann, one of architecture’s very rapidly-rising stars (and one who knew how to hire good PR people to put together press releases, we might add), announced that she has decided to pull the plug on her firm, Michelle Kaufmann Designs. She cited the economy as the reason (of course), but in particular that one of the factories who was helping create her oft-discussed pre-fab houses went bankrupt. That, on top of people ready to buy her buildings were finding it increasingly more difficult to set up deals with lenders, and it was a perfect storm, driving the firm into a downward spiral that reached it’s sad conclusion this week. Here’s a bit:

“We had gotten lean, and I was sure we were going to survive, but two weeks ago we had a factory partner close, we had a number of projects which were ready for construction that looked like the financing was all set and then the lending fell through and it all happened all at once,” she said. “It is so difficult for a small company without big cash reserves to deal with that all happening at once.”