This is quite the title, I know. But why did I choose it?
Everyone knows the horror stories of all-nighters in studio, projects that pose impossible amounts of work with scary deadlines, cutting 55 slices of cardboard only to glue them back together...
But that isn't the type of torture architecture has caused my mind. This involves how everyday spaces morph in front of me. An art museum is no longer and art museum. A shopping mall is no longer a shopping mall. Even my own college campus is no longer simply a collection of buildings and lawns. Every designed space becomes a source of inspiration, a question of design, and a space to be studied. I cannot drive through suburbia without wincing, almost feeling physical pain at the site of McMansions going up block by block in record time. Any house where the walls are dry walled before the roof is even begun gives me nightmares.
On the other side of the coin, its amazing how the canopy of a tree becomes architecture, how a single block of a busy street becomes an outdoor living room, and a shopping mall becomes a way for a growing middle class to express their new-found values.
A design mind begins to see the world differently than the average mind, asking itself so many questions.
"What did they do?"
"Why did they do this?"
"Does it work?"
"What would I have done differently?"
Then my mind delves into concepts such as: programme, aesthetics, context, form and function, the list goes on and on.
The fact that these questions race through my mind in every city I visit, every building I enter, and every space I inhabit, that is where the title for this blog comes from.
I inhabit an architortured mind.
Everyone knows the horror stories of all-nighters in studio, projects that pose impossible amounts of work with scary deadlines, cutting 55 slices of cardboard only to glue them back together...
But that isn't the type of torture architecture has caused my mind. This involves how everyday spaces morph in front of me. An art museum is no longer and art museum. A shopping mall is no longer a shopping mall. Even my own college campus is no longer simply a collection of buildings and lawns. Every designed space becomes a source of inspiration, a question of design, and a space to be studied. I cannot drive through suburbia without wincing, almost feeling physical pain at the site of McMansions going up block by block in record time. Any house where the walls are dry walled before the roof is even begun gives me nightmares.
On the other side of the coin, its amazing how the canopy of a tree becomes architecture, how a single block of a busy street becomes an outdoor living room, and a shopping mall becomes a way for a growing middle class to express their new-found values.
A design mind begins to see the world differently than the average mind, asking itself so many questions.
"What did they do?"
"Why did they do this?"
"Does it work?"
"What would I have done differently?"
Then my mind delves into concepts such as: programme, aesthetics, context, form and function, the list goes on and on.
The fact that these questions race through my mind in every city I visit, every building I enter, and every space I inhabit, that is where the title for this blog comes from.
I inhabit an architortured mind.
WE ARE SO SIMILAR.
ReplyDeleteArchitecture mind = artist mind. But instead of turning everything into spaces and, well, architecture, I turn everything into paintings and symbols. Haha. High fives for us and our extremely busy minds!