In Architecture school, things are particularly overwhelming because there are no rules for ‘right’, only for ‘wrong’. You never truly understand what you have done with a project until it is pinned up of the wall in front of a panel of guest Architects and they are constructively tearing it down to its purest element and the only thing that is running through your mind is “don’t ask me WHY“.
With so many ‘wrongs’ and no real ‘rights’, you never really know if what you are doing is even close to what it should be. That is kind of the beauty of it though. You have an idea or a vision and even if you don’t know how it will turn out, eventually your ideas flow into one another and you start creating spaces and experiences through pencil and paper and you go in circles hating everything because it doesn’t look at all like you originally envisioned but there comes a deadline where it has to be completed and you finish something, wishing you had time to do more, you always want to do more, but once it is done and you step back there is so much to love, so long as you stay true to your vision.
That is basically what working on a project is like, except in reality there are 1-2 all-nighters per week, 5-6 cups of tea per day, millions of things to cry over and you really, truly, very much hate your project from about the moment you start drawing your ideas until it is pinned up on the wall for the final presentation. It is the first vision in your mind and the project pinned up that make the chaos worth it.
Architecture can be extremely artistic and deep and sometimes it can be too big for students to understand the whole picture. There is so much more than just an interesting shape or a nice colour of paint on the walls. You really have to understand how the human race uses spaces and how we interact within them. What kind of space makes you want to stop and pass your time for a while, and what kind of space raises the hairs on the back of your neck and makes you feel vulnerable? What kind of space makes you feel vulnerable in the most overwhelming way possible, like your emotions can’t be held in and you feel tiny in the presence of it? How do you make someone want to spend time somewhere, and how do you keep people away when you want to be alone?
Those are things you have to think about to answer the dreaded questions “WHY?”… When a guest architect sees something in your project they don’t understand, what they probably will ask you is “WHY did you do this the way you did?” and if your only answer is “because it looked nice”, well, you might as well call it a day, pack up and go home. They want to know exactly what inspired you, how to came to use rusted steel as a siding material and why that odd little window is exactly where it is. Maybe on one side of that window is a reading nook to take a break and on the other is a framed view out to the tree their father planted. Reason is everything in architecture.
A students brain, is not quite so developed as that of a seasoned architect who has lived and seen it all in the world of design. We basically have 1000 ideas in our heads like clippings from magazines and we try to use them all in one go and our projects end up being a complete mess. That is where our professors come in and tell us to strip it down to the raw elements and design what matters. That doesn’t always help because most times they end up confusing us even more than we originally were and we spend an entire night doodling sketches then realise we are not even drawing our building anymore but flowers and oceans and mountains and foods we wish we could eat, right now.
Don’t worry. It gets better. I mean that in the sense that you start to understand the chaos and you start to make sense of those magazine clippings of nice kitchens and bathrooms by throwing it all in the trash and starting from scratch. Eventually you forget the world of ‘house decorations’ and ‘white picket fence’ and you start to see a bigger picture. A picture that will take years and years to understand. Maybe that is the reason Architecture fascinates me; there will always be something more to learn.