Starting Out

Welcome ~

My hope is that this blog can be a repository for the fleeting and often contradictory thoughts I experience in my daily life that otherwise can find no adequate outlet. I am trained as a designer. This essentially means that anything I can see or touch or read or hear or perceive is a potential target for my criticism. As you may imagine (or are familiar with firsthand), this way of seeing the world is not necessarily a healthy one. It leaves one always wanting other than one has, and what's more, it leaves one unsatisfied with what one has once one gets what one originally wanted in the first place.

The design studio is a strange place. In the studio, satisfaction is a weakness. Criticism is a strength. Even the final review is a last ditch effort to say, "you completed the task, but don't think that you're done." After many years of struggling with this difficult question of completeness, I have come to suspect that there is a small space of the mind from which a person can be both constructively critical, and yet wholly satisfied with the outer world. I hope this blog can be a space where this kind of balance can be struck.

This blog is also a mechanism for feeding my squishy and amorphous thoughts through the pasta machine of language into a coherent, legible form. In my day job as an architect, the capacity to communicate is the most important skill one can have. I find that despite many years of formal schooling i still often find words to be an inadequate and clumsy tool. That is until I read some great poetry or prose that really strikes a chord in me and I feel at that moment that language is the ultimate instrument of emotion. Then I sit down to try to write and it comes out like half-dried play-doh through the play-doh press. So it goes. I hope that I might one day find an intuitive ease with thought-to-letter translation, but in the meantime, I'll write and rewrite and re-rewrite to my heart's content through this blog.

Now for some context - My undergraduate experience opened my eyes to the world in many ways that I could not anticipate as an optimistic and self-important high school graduate - they call this big fish, little pond syndrome. Design school was fascinating, however the farther into it that I got, the more arrogant I became and yet the more secretly confused. Did I really understand design? At times I would go into a review confident of my direction and my illusions would be shattered by a disappointed instructor. At other times I would be utterly lost and my instructor would encourage me, saying "you're on the right path, keep going!" After five years of design education, I still wasn't sure where the path even was. I imagined that by the time I graduated, this nagging uncertainty would fall away and I would soar freely into the bright sky of my career. Graduation came and went, but my inner confusion remained. A few years into a frustrating and unsatisfying career in architecture, I began to look to Zen, first as a tangential curiosity, and later as a more serious interest in my life. Perhaps I could finally understand this thing called design, which the Japanese are so known for, by studying the ancient wisdom of the Japanese (and the Chinese before them).

I had for a long time struggled immensely with the question of how to bridge the chasm from abstract design process to a specific, resultant form. There were many examples out in the world of different approaches to creating form, which, given sufficient distance, inevitably become identified as historical styles - neoclassical, art nouveau, futurist, constructivist, art deco, modern, postmodern, etc. etc. All seemed compelling to me in some way or another but none could clarify how exactly to arrive at a definitive result - there always remained a black box between the theory and the end product. Was form what was left over when the 'decoration' was stripped away? But then this stripped away result was understood as yet another style - minimalist, functionalist, or rationalist. Despite my best contortions of conceptual thinking I could not nail down the true essence of form.

In my fever to understand the perplexing design decisions of my architect-heroes, I had devoted countless hours of my undergraduate life to studying the Postmodern theoretical writings in a vain attempt to glean some conceptual clarity. I had read so many contradictory theories that my brain was swirling with a myriad of irreconcilable ways of understanding form and its multitude of readings that I no longer knew who or what to believe. Was there even an answer? I had begun to fear that form was hopelessly and utterly subjective. Was form really meaningless? It was from this dark and fearful corner on my mind that I hoped that Zen could offer a simple clarity. I had to know what form meant. I bought a book from an online bookstore called Amazon and when it arrived a week later I opened it and read the following: "All form is essentially empty."

Sometimes you flip a coin because you cant make a decision and as the coin lands you realize that what you thought was a difficult choice is actually a simple choice between what you want and what you are afraid of. As the Rolling Stones famously said, "You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." In the typical fashion of Zen, I was confronted with the naked truth of the matter.

All this is to say, I am on a journey of reconciling my career in designing form with what I have come to recognize as the inherent emptiness of form. This blog won't be about Zen, per se, but a mild Zen flavor may find expression at moments along the way. My intent is for this blog to be about design and how we can live well on this planet. More on that to come.