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 | Mike Hermans The Life of an Architect … And What He Leaves Behind 245 × 134 mm, 128 pages 124 comics, hardcover ISBN 978-3-86922-440-4 EUR 18,00 / CHF 22,90 / USD 19,95 Available October 2015. DOM publishers, Berlin |
Now available from DOM publishers:
Mike Hermans
The Life of an Architect …
And What He Leaves Behind
Mike Hermans, pseudonym Maaik, injects humour into the daily lives of architects. In the comics by the Belgian cartoonist, himself an architect, it is likely that all of the struggles and everyday concerns portrayed will ring a bell with architects themselves – a capacity for self-irony is, however, of the essence.
The Life of an Architect … And What He Leaves Behind, a small booklet with 124 short comic strips, will be available from DOM publishers in autumn 2015. These strips all address the life of architect Archibald and his daily struggle with his office colleagues, employees, clients, contractors, civil servants, consultants, architecture critics, and other people involved in the building industry. Archibald runs an architecture office with his partner and engineer, Gerald. While Archibald is a visionary and a romantic dreamer with a tendency to idealistic and egocentric behaviour, Gerald is the rational one who keeps his feet on the ground. An exploited intern named Ralph; a narrow-minded IT-specialist named John, and a weird Asian cardboard model builder named Mr. Shan also work in their office. Archibald is married to Charlotte, a successful lawyer who quit her job to help Archibald clean up his administrative mess. They have two children: Archie, his six-year-old son who wants to be the best architect in the world and Charly, a smart-mouthed ten-year-old daughter with a strong dislike for everything regarding art.
However, poor Archibald – whose ideas and visions nobody other than himself understands – has not only to deal with these members of staff day in day out. For his customer Julius, everything is too expensive and he constantly requests that adjustments and standardisations are carried out – Archibald would rather get on with building without this constant nuisance. He is also continuously at loggerheads with Fred, the building contractor, who has to implement his ideas and does not consider anything to be feasible. Even God, the supreme architect who created the world in seven days, cannot live up to Archibald’s standards. The life of an architect is thus a hard one that features a number of construction sites…
Mike Hermans (* Antwerp, 1971), pseudonym Maaik, has been an architect since 1997 and is a cartoonist for newspapers, magazines and companies. His strip “arch.” Is published worldwide in architecture media in several languages.
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