***
I’ve
decided to start a blog. Your ability to see this webpage has made that a
statement of the obvious. I don’t really know what will come of it – I may get
lazy and have this be the last post I ever make. I’d like to think not, but nothing
is for sure.
I’ve recently come into some free time and these
posts are a direct result of what happens when I’m not in school. All this free
time will probably turn into a gateway to hard drugs and a life on the streets.
I hope not, but we’ll see…
If I’m correct in the assumption, blogs tend to
be one person ranting or relaying a story/event and people comment on how
exciting that is. My interest in starting this is less about my tirades and
more about opening subjects up for discussion. I have no doubt this is exactly
what people want to do with their free time.…
If you like it: neat. If not: that’s cool. I’m
pondering out loud which means if you disagree – awesome. I don’t know what I’m
saying half the time anyway. I’m literally writing because I want other perspectives
on the topics discussed. Some topics are architecture-specific. If your
personal focus isn’t on architecture, your opinion would still be awesome – an outside
opinion/correlation to anything is completely warranted and would be intriguing
to further discussion.
***
After spending a week-ish recuperating from my
final undergraduate semester, my brain is refreshed, updated, and thinking for
itself again. One of the joys of having a studio-based semester with various
3-credit courses consuming your every-waking second is that your brain falls
into a sort of autopilot mode.
I’ve come to discover that this autopilot is
two-sided in its existence.
Firstly, it limits your brain's ability to
wander aimlessly. This is fantastic
for a couple of reasons - none more-so though than its ability to restrict
unrelated thoughts/subjects less connected to projects. You’ve suddenly got
this magical ability to not have the patience to focus on things unrelated to
your work. It’s the ultimate working mode: you ignore everyone, you kick
yourself for being hungry and you have no idea what Pandora is playing. It’s
like you’re on a high dosage of Adderall or travelling with the tunneled vision
of a Warp 3 ship.
On the other hand, your brain loses its ability
to wander purposefully. Some of my
best ideas come early in the semester. It's weird, because we inherently
believe that spending 80-hour weeks reworking and formulating new iterations,
we'd have more refined, resolved, and cohesive ideas. However, it’s all come to
seem a little backwards.
I can’t speak for fellow studiomates, but for me
the beginning of the semester is traditionally filled with periods of
non-architecture related tangents including playing catch, sleep and food. We
eat dinner at home, go out on Friday night and read the news for its content
and not as a form of procrastination. We have some semblance of a social-life.
Typically by the second week, the transition is
being made: we may still take a night off to play a board game, get a haircut,
or go grocery shopping, but our brains are slowly transitioning into that
autopilot way of working. A hierarchy is developing in our schedules, and more
often than not, our socializing is a guilty procrastination. We’re cheating on our
projects when we go out and feel guilty when studio rolls around and your
designs haven’t changed in over 24-hours.
This continues developing until a week before
mid-reviews. We suddenly implode, staring at the drafting table or computer
frantic to uncover some deeper meaning in our designs that we hadn’t before
seen, we cater to our professor’s likes and dislikes, and we hope for a few
decent hours of sleep in the meantime. We become temporary yes-men for the sake
of finalizing a half-thought through project to present at a mid-review in
front of our professor’s peers. We go into a state of autopilot that ignores
our personal foundations for design and instead just seeks an end product.
Auto-pilot is on overdrive at times like these.
There is a panic of underperforming and disappointing your critiques and self
that causes your design to evolve into something simplified and unrefined
because anything less would mean a plan-less, section-less wall and a review
from hell. It’s a slippery slope, but it’s not for lack of commitment, time
management or trying.
I was incredibly guilty of this during last
semester’s mid-review. It was scheduled the first studio day after Spring break,
I was out of town all week, and I was royally screwed. I found myself dropping
my principles and design philosophies left and right in hopes of producing a
building that had, until the day before break, not existed. By brain was on
autopilot, and I was designing without a second guess.
There have been countless instances with
countless people when I find us discussing our excitement about joining the
real world so we can have a life again. Is there something to this? If we are
spending all of this brainpower and time in an autopilot state knowing a design
could be better but scheduling, limitations and other variables force us to
compromise second-guessing, are we really performing our best (excuse the
run-on)? Are we ever really pushing the boundary of design and our own
capabilities as designers when our focus is on the next unrealistic deadline?
The greatest testament to this form of thinking
relates back to what I said earlier: Some of my best ideas come early in the
semester.
Why? While every professor argues that a moment
not spent taking advantage of the freedom of design found in architecture
school is a moment wasted, why do I find myself time and time again returning
to early concepts and ideas to springboard from? Are there pitfalls to this
notion that not being in studio is taboo? Do my best designs come early in the
semester not because I’m a super-awesome, naturally-gifted, crazy-cool person
but instead because I’m taking breaks, socializing, and acknowledging other
topics of interest? Does nothing of flare or innovation appear later in the
semester because I’m so focused on the next deadline that I suddenly narrow the
capacity of investigation or imagination?
Part of studio culture has been about one-upping
the other guy: spending more time in studio, getting the least amount of sleep,
creating the coolest model. If you topped everyone in any of these, it meant you
had more passion, drive and commitment to architecture. But, did spending more
time in studio create better work? Not necessarily. My best work came during a
semester when there was a balance between my studio and social time. I made
plans with other people and stuck to them. It was great – there was a refreshed
perspective to studio work that I lost during semesters when my day in studio
started and ended with the sun and then some. Breaks are good. Breaks mean
you’re resting your brain from architecture. It gives a fresh outlook on your
work.
Autopilot is great if you know where you’re
going, but more often than not, are we not literally flying by the seat of our
pants – producing perspectives without meaning, design sections without
relationships and making models of the wrong details. We’re designing without
purpose. This culminates into two final questions:
_is it better to show up
with nothing qualitatively or nothing quantitatively?
_does the implied belief
from teachers who deem little work a failure affect the ability of students to
design effectively?
….aaaaand go.
