why Chris would be a terrible architect
As a child I was, perhaps surprisingly, one of the few who never passed through the phase of wanting to become an architect; I tended to have the negative, or perhaps positive habit of focusing on small things rather than large ones, and was never able to imagine myself creating, and much less drawing up plans for something as immense – as it seemed in scale at the time – as a bus station, an airport, a shopping centre, or a marketplace. I never learned to draw (despite my mother’s insistence that art classes would “do me some good”), an error which I’ve spent the last few months trying to correct. As I was detail-oriented as a young teenager I dedicated my interest to science in the hopes of finding some of the precision, the concrete answers I needed for things to make sense.
Time passed and I became frustrated with problems that had only one right answer (although I think that the safety of mathematical logic is still something wonderful to fall back on when necessary), wishing I could find a vocation that allowed for more freedom of expression, the element of creativity that – at least in my opinion – my years of university studies in science were lacking. I left the university and started writing, attempting to paint (badly), and somehow found myself missing the systematic elements of my scientific and mathematical studies, the underlying logic.
Perhaps my developing a sudden interest in architecture was an accident. I’m afraid I can’t claim to be one of those artistic children who designed their own dream house at improbable ages and carried around a pencil everywhere, because it simply wouldn’t be true. The potential architect inside me was something of a late bloomer, and once awake, immediately began attempting to make up for lost time, prompting me to buy dense and poorly translated books about architectural theory in an attempt to learn more before it was too late.
One of the books I bought this past summer broke down architectural concepts with regards to the senses: touch, hearing, sight (but in ways I hadn’t expected: refraction of light and the effect produced by running water), and upon finishing it everything suddenly began to make sense: the two sides of architecture perfectly complemented one another, the mathematical logic contributing to the beauty of the finished creative product and vice versa, each part bringing out the best of the other. The creative freedom with the physical restrictions, the solidity of scientific logic as a prop for bringing forms, images, concepts from imagination to reality.
Perhaps that was, in the end, the deciding factor; the creativity I need paired with the science I love. The little I’ve been fortunate enough to learn about architecture until now has changed the way I see everything, and there is no comparison between a walk now through the city I know so well and the things I was unable to see or even imagine a year ago.
