Survival Through Design -R.N.
5.4.07
I have been on architectural creative block for about six years now. My life filled with countless sleepless nights and feelings of worthlessness. Inferiority complexes and all that come to mind right now as I write. Failure!
It all began when I was a boy. I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was about twelve years old when I first came to that conclusion. My dad took me to many construction sites from about the age of seven. I remember a large building mainly out of block walls. Many years later, I learned in my first internship, that it was mainly out of C.M.U. (concrete masonry unit) walls. I didn’t do any labor. I went to accompany my pops for a Saturday afternoon. On that particular day, in that C.M.U. building, on a busy street, I wandered into an empty room. I saw a sleeping bag and some colorful Mexican blankets. They were laid out into a bed, on the floor, in the corner of the room. I find that there is a transformer toy next to the bed. It is in the form of a gun and I transform it back and forth and play with it until it is time to leave. On the way home, I asked my dad about the toy gun and the bed. He explains that it was where the night watchman sleeps and the gun is to scare off would be thieves. I do recall thinking that the toy gun was heavy and realistic. It was very cool.
Later, when I got old enough to actually do work, my dad would remind me that the profession was well paying and a great gig, but reminded me that he broke his back everyday and was burned by the sun often. He always reminded me that with an education and a smarter career choice, I could sit behind a desk in an air conditioned office every day.
When I was in the 11th grade and I thought about studying philosophy. My counselor asked me what I would do with a that degree? I simply stated that I could be a professor of philosophy. She was impressed, but told me to think about it.
When I was in 2nd year architecture school I kept getting glimpses into 3rd year architecture. At the time I was in a serious relationship with a very talented individual. She helped me, but I was also very driven and had a hands-on approach to my lab classes. It came from all those summers working in construction with Pops. I also loved the conceptual theme of that year. I loved to make models, draw them and sketch a whole lot. I still struggled to meet dead lines, but it was never as apparent as in my 3rd quarter. Darin Johnstone. He was a very young and talented professor with a lot of spirit. I just could not accomplish anything in his class. It was not the project. It might have been my knowledge of the future: The reality of a 3rd year that would no longer be conceptual, but based in reality. Your building must stand! And be able to be restrained by the powers that be.
The project was a complete disaster. It was a high rise in the desert! Yes, I envisioned it having the latest and greatest technology to allow such a horrific unnatural idea to work (it works in Vegas right?). I just could not produce work. Darin would see me at the end of class to allow me to have something to show; a practice that haunted me until my last lab class.
Maybe, my professors took pity on my wasted talent. I don’t know how I got to 5th year thesis. I sometimes think that someone should have taken me out of my misery. Now I finally realized what I stopped doing; how it all fell apart.
That quarter I learned AutoCAD. A much needed tool of the trade, a computer program that allows you to draw lines in exact measurements. I forced myself to learn it specifically for that project. My final model was crap. My conceptual models ceased to exist. I became a Drafter. I stopped sketching. I lost my motivation to sketch, to put ink, graphite, charcoal, any medium, on paper. If it wasn’t exact, there was no need. Conceptual design is irrelevant in the real world. The battle between concept and reality had begun and I chose my weapon: AutoCAD. My conceptual creation process, from then on, was put on the shelf.
My 3rd year was a series of incomplete projects with amateur AutoCAD drawings and simple design, or little to no design. Not only that, but my procrastination rose to a legendary status in the IDC (interim design center). I would present with stitched up fingers as pointers and even an X-Acto knife wound to my mid section, from lack of sleep and the last minute rush before presenting.
After all these years, I still need 26 units to get my degree and something of a miracle to finish. I realized my problem. I, like every one in the planet, have some limitations in my creativity. I cannot come up with a drawing out of thin air. I am a tracer. What I am good at is making some damned good conceptual models. Coming up with ideas and bullshit like a muthafucka! I also love the quick sketch, hence, my love of charcoal. Strokes so bold and beautiful they scan perfectly and you can scale them in many sizes in raster format.
I now know what I must do: I need to go back to Darin’s class, figuratively speaking. I need to start where I left off at that point. This does not mean negating all that I have learned in the past six years. I did gain experience from being around all the great people that surrounded me. As I write, I think about all the lectures my teachers gave me, the most important teachers, being my fellow classmates. What going back to Darin’s class means, is just going back to that time in my career and rethinking all my decisions from the perspective that I am not a drafter. It means, finally realizing that the process of creating spaces, buildings and anything that I design, must begin with a group of ideas that start abstract as ever and little by little, become chipped into a finished product. Like a beautiful sculpture coming out of a large shapeless blob of marble. In third year, that process must be present, even if you cheat that process, by speeding it up to give you more time to work on the final gigantic model.
In my first year of architecture, I was actually a Landscape Architecture major and I learned the basics of design with an emphasis on Landscape Architecture. This was hard for me, especially in the last quarter because by then, it was more focused on designing gardens and learning about plant life. This was a large leap from my goal of becoming an Architect, or what I thought being an Architect was, at that point in my life. I would tell my fellow classmates, at that time, that if I would not get into the Architecture Program, I would just become an elementary school teacher.
What we learned in the first year was really how to create design composition. How to hewn in all our artistic abilities to create the best visual presentation. Then we learn how to use an existing piece of art and transform it and deconstruct it to create a completely new finished product. In the end, we created something that took all those earlier methods and displayed them at there finest. It was all a very abstract introduction to any environmental design field. So I made it into the architectural design studio. And that was it. I was done and I was in. I had worked so hard and focused on my goal and I reaped the benefits. At that point, I was walking on air.
That is what I need to get back to, but this time, with both my feet on the ground. That whole abstract, creative process that gets fined tuned, to create something that makes people say: “how did you come up with that?” Every quarter the people that were successful in creating a great project, were the ones that never forgot that process and that perfected it by doing it over and over with different sites, different programs, different professors, and most importantly, with different inspiration.
There is no more getting stuck. I got stuck because I wanted to create a great finished product using the latest and greatest technology, but I lost the most important tool of all and that was my actual ability to produce great drawings and designs from any influential piece of art. First year taught us to use books, movies, paintings, anything that can be the catalyst for creating great architecture. That was what I have always been good at and it is just like riding a bike you never loose your ability to draw. So that is it. I am back. There is no more getting stuck at anything I do in my chosen profession because I know, like I have always known deep inside that I am going to be a great architect the kind that creates at least a few masterpieces amongst all the crap that society makes us do.
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