I am an Architect

I am an Architect.

Yup.

That's a true statement. And isn't it glorious?! 

For whatever reason (it's the stars, really), life is Kerouac-like at the moment. Photographs of my architecture assignments from an eon ago put me in the mood of healing nostalgia. The kind that comes only after you've walked through fire, crawled through thorn bushes and ended up at Master Oogway's soft, petal-laden nirvana mountaintop. 

There's no doubt that I had a creative flame flickering tentatively inside me. How magical would it be if an inspiring education bellowed that flame into a raging creative fire?

I like that I'm revisiting these assignments after all these years. They'd been buried under the shame of not-good-enough. 

I am an Architect. 

I denied myself that identity for decades. I earned my degree but I didn't earn my own self-worth. Based on discouraging critiques of professors, I planted the seeds of "I am lesser than" in my own heart, watered the seeds everyday, composted disheartening comparison with peers and walked under the shade of that tree for the rest of my life. 

Looking back at my assignments, I can see where the professors might have wanted something more or different in my work but I can also see where they missed highlighting what was already working. And, to get me to where they wanted to see my work, they did not provide a clear path in that feedback. 

It's dawning on me now that I've been sitting with this feeling of being incomplete, not whole, not good enough for years. A large, large part of it was my architecture education. 

By the time I reached the penultimate semester, this design education took away any confidence I had in drawing. I wasn’t even able to draw a freehand perspective of my capstone design. The education worked backwards. Even if I was bad at drawing, so what? Even if my drawing wasn’t at the same excellent level as my classmates, so what? Does that mean I’m not allowed to pursue studying my interest in architecture?

I'm going to update this post with some of my designs. When I look at them, I still have a lot of love for them. I can also see a bright, bold, fearless creative spark. I like the ideas even now. 

But yeah, hell yeah, I AM AN ARCHITECT!

Postscript: All assignment images have now been added!

A Basic Design exercise in a 2D colour composition on harmony 

A Basic Design exploration of space - 1

A Basic Design exploration of space - 2

A Basic Design exploration of space - 3