Den of Lions

My first lesson on working on Public Commissions:
DO NOT trust the engineers. They will always try to screw you.
This is something I had seen a professor of mine go through. It eventually grew into a huge public battle, which he lost. I did not quite grasp the many manifestations that this type of ignorance can mutate into.
So, yes, I got the commission, and yes, I eventually got the architect excited about my idea to the point that he saw it as enhancing the appearance and function of the building. But then came the technocrats (calling them bureaucrats is a disservice to semantics).
Basically, because my piece involved the heavy use of some of their materials, so that we could do something significant in scale, they waited until I went ahead with my bid, and then, did not allocate any construction funds for those areas. In other words, by letting me “spend” from my moneys to do the preparatory work which he was supposed to do in the first place, he kept me from spending money on other areas of the building that were going to serve to frame and contextualize the piece (the nature of the approval process necessitated this for reasons far too long and boring for this context).
So to sum it up: one person with ZERO artistic training, who could not even begin to comprehend all the conceptual aspects of the work I am proposing to do, and who controls all the financial aspects of the project, decided to wage a budgeting war with the guy who has the least money to dispose of. It was carnage.
I’ll just say this: Art has been taught, tried, and tested on universities since there first were universities. Engineering has only been taught in universities for the last two hundred years. Therefore my field has a more solid academic foundation that his. This, however, didn’t keep him from trying to tell me which symbols to use, and how to go about designing things. Of course, I totally blew him off, and now I’m paying for it. You should see what he did to the architect’s design….