Breaking the Circle: How Do You Say Goodbye to a Partnership and Reinvent a Practice?(Practice‪)‬

I life is short, people sometimes say, to convey the idea that you should do what makes you happy. But now that we're living longer and retiring later, the opposite is also true, though the meaning is essentially the same: Life is long, so look ahead and pace yourself. Rather than being too single-minded about it, there's probably time to test out new ideas, dreams, and directions. Or, as T.S. Eliot poetically put it, "there may be time for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea." That's more or less what Christopher Hays, AIA, was thinking a year ago, when he left a satisfying partnership at William McDonough & Partners, Charlottesville, Va., to do something he'd dreamed of since he was in seventh grade: head up his own architecture practice. "Architecture is a long, slow profession," he says. "It's easy to get on a track that may be interesting and exciting, but how that relates to a longterm vision is something that's important to continue to gauge against. Life is long, and there's opportunity for many kinds of professional experience."