CALCULATIONS IN HONOR OF OUR 25TH ANNIVERSARY​

I like anniversaries. As I was cleaning a frying pan the other night, I noticed a 60 on the bottom of the pan. I remembered that it was a special edition to celebrate 60 years of ScanPan in Denmark. But isn’t 60 or 25 just a number that marks time? Is longevity itself an accomplishment worth celebrating? That made me think about the calculations we make about time.

In a typical 24 hour day, in America we are expected to sleep for 8 hours, work for 8 hours, leaving about a third of our day for everything else. When you take out commuting and eating, most of us are lucky if we get 4 hours a day available for fun-like tonight.

In the US, we are not expected to work weekends, so our actual work time (40 hours) as a percentage of our entire breathing week (168 hours) is only about 25%. I know that many of you in this room would be thrilled if you could keep your work time down to 40 hours, but bear with me.

Now in my 63 years of life on this earth, more than 25 years of them have been at LS&A, or 39.6%. I calculated the number of years spent by Suma and Monique at LS&A as a percentage of their younger-than- me lives, and weirdly, they also have spent 39.6% of their lives at LS&A. That seems like a lot of time, right?

However, if we use the calculation that only 25% of each week is spent working, that means that only 9.9% of our time on this planet has been spent working together at LS&A. That means that all of our wonderful work was done in less than 10% of our lives. Now that’s amazing! Aren’t you impressed?

Here’s another statistic: about 2/3 of the LS&A projects ever done have been touched by either Suma or Monique. Statistically speaking, there would not be much to LS&A without Suma and Monique. And certainly our successful projects are directly due to their efforts. But wait, there’s more!

You know that there really wouldn’t be an LS&A if it weren’t for ALL of you here today (and for many who were unable to attend): Our clients, consultants, and the collaborative architects, designers, contractors, builders, artisans, artists, suppliers and other industry professionals. I want to make it official: YOU ARE NOW FRIENDS AND FAMILY! But of course you already knew that.

I also want to give a special shout-out to our families, who have lived through the ups and downs of the practice over the past 25 years-make that almost 40 years, Steven…yes, you get credit, too!

Luckily, we have so many of our friends and family here today. That means that there is one more calculation to make, and it’s an easy one to do: 100% of you have made all the difference.

Thank You!

We have the carriage house until 9, so please continue to eat, drink and be merry. Take a stab at coloring an elevation and post them on the brown paper. Go outside and play ping pong. Try your skills in the horse stalls. Watch the slide show. Meet a new person. There’s no such thing as too much happiness. Thank you again for coming and for your contributions to LS&A and to our clients – and especially to our slide show!