Reflections, Part III

Small, present day update: The job hunt continues as I seek a place that will take me once my time at BNIM is up in September. A new firm founded in April had a posting on Chicago’s AIA website, which seemed interesting. Still haven’t gotten a response, but I am anything if not resolute. Anyways, onward.

I think that now that I’ve covered the two more extra-curricular parts of my college education, I can start getting into the real meat. There will probably be side notes and detours along the way, but hopefully this becomes a pleasant read.

Architecture schooling can appear very counter-intuitive in a lot of ways I found, and a lot of it starts at the roots of the education, in the first year, what we called the CORE program. You see, when we are first brought into the college of design, we are not guaranteed to be able to follow the discipline of our choice. I knew going in that I wanted to study architecture (or at least, what I thought at the time was architecture), but there was a long road ahead before I could even start on that path.

In the CORE program, we were grouped together, people from every discipline, in order to learn the fundamental basics of design itself. In theory, this is a great idea. Exposure to people who will go on to other disciplines opens us up to the possibility of laying the foundations of interdisciplinary relationships. However, things on paper don’t always work the same in practice, a valuable lesson.

You see, we have to compete to get into what we wanted to study. Architecture is the leading program, but Graphic, Interior, Landscape and the newer Industrial all have high stakes contention as well. Whatever we want, we have to fight for it, and we have to be better than everyone else around us, which is extremely difficult if you have no idea what design even is, as I did. This competition, at times, defeats the formation of relationships and crushes interdisciplinary spirit as we struggle to be top dog. It’s a double edged sword. We push ourselves to do better, challenging each other when the spirit is in good competition, but then that same push becomes mean spirited quickly when laziness or desperation are what we strike against. People can take things very personally in the first year, and I’ve witnessed more than a few breakdowns.

When I started my pursuit of architecture, I had this very vague notion of what it was. I went into it thinking that architecture was the science of putting buildings together, that it was logical, methodical. I had an engineers mindset from my highschool years, which makes sense seeing as I hung out with people who all went on to be engineers, and some successful ones at that (coughNathanStaleycough). This mindset though was bound to get me in trouble. Luckily, for my first design professor, I had Rob Whitehead, who eventually beat it into me that I had no idea what I was doing. It was a hard lesson, but one that did not go unrewarded.

There are three projects in the first studio course, DSN S 102. The passageway, the poster, and the object (the third has several parts to it and is known by many different names). Each one when I came up to it, I tried to attack as an engineering problem. The first project, the passageway, was a miserable attempt at teamwork. Well, I shouldn’t say that, it was a miserable attempt at dealing with one teammate, a snarky pothead living off of daddy’s dime. To this day, I think he is still trying to go through the 102 program and get into architecture, or maybe he’s given up. Who knows. The one positive thing was that I was able to meet a man who has become one of my best friends, Miguel Carrasquillo. The man was talented and fun. What started as an Eddie Izzard quote along became a fast friendship. If you don’t know him, look him up, he’s gonna be a rockstar graphic designer soon. But I digress (see, side trips!). The passageway was like a doorway, and so a doorway it became, incredibly uninspired and what little craft was put into it was soon drilled out of existence and hinged away. The poor excuse of a project mad eit sdebut and was quickly shunted aside.

The poster fared little better. I though of it as an arts and crafts project, but the pictures on the paper, print out some words and you’re done, so long as you have a message. I had no grasp as to what the commitment level was supposed to be I thought a good message would outweigh any craft problems, and wasn’t I wrong. The poster was torn to pieces with critiques sharper than any sword. All I had to do was look to Miguel’s project, a silly piece with the phrase “Breathe Easy!” nicely crafted atop a face snorting rainbows, to begin to see I was not yet grasping something fundamental.

Finally, the object came. The object begins as a tool, which you take a part, and then make a pattern to then build the tool again out of paper. My tool was an ice cream scoop. Things began to clarify at the critique for the pattern, where mine was compared to schematic, where I noted others were like works of art, though still conveyed the same structural message. In my stubbornness, I plowed forward, determined not to yield my sensibilities to the subjective views of a few professors. The recreation of the tool was lackluster and poor, my understanding of a tabbing system completely uninspired. Then the last leg of the project, the space container. I did not understand what it meant or what to do. I was lost. I threw pieces together, thinking of an exploding ice cream scoop, and left it for review. It was at a large group critique that something finally sparked in me. A classmate picked up mine, without knowing whose it was, and said “I like this.” I felt a rush of adrenaline and endorphins the likes I have experienced a fair few times in the public world. When asked why, he said it was funny, like a pineapple. He saw it completely different than I did, but began to talk about it, the way it moved, the lines of it, the simple craft. I was blown away. I stared at the object for a long time after in order to make my serial section drawings, but could not decipher the meaning. The sections went about as well as my pattern, and I was left with a very kind B for the class, and a few critical words from Rob.

Afterwards, I had to take a drawing class, DSN S 131. Here I found a talent in sketching and using a pencil, but I got a lesson in finesse from Deb Pappenheimer. She showed me how to really see things, and how to get my eye and hand to communicate without looking at the page. I had some great times in that studio, learning and drawing. It was incredibly rewarding, and I began to understand the concepts of composition and organizing, and soon things were becoming more and more clear as to my shortcomings in 102. I came to understand that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I was confused and proud and stubborn. As such, my portfolio suffered from a lackluster approach. As a result, I failed to get into my program (remember what I mentioned back in post 1 about not getting into things right away? Connections!). In any case, I wasn’t alone. Turns out, a lot of people don’t get into a program, let alone the one of their choice. Miguel, for all his raw talent, also didn’t get in.

It is hard to explain this feeling of failure. It was the waste of a year, I thought. I hit the second most extreme states of depression I had ever been in. If it hadn’t been for my family, especially my mom, dad and godmother, I don’t think I would have made it. But my dad got em to swallow my pride and take this for the lesson it was, and not let the past year go to waste. I would return in the fall, and I would hit it harder than ever and I would prove myself. It was humbling, but it fueled me, and when I hit 102 again, this time with Patience Lueth, I felt renewed and I hit those projects hard, and I came out better for it.

Perhaps it was fate that I didn’t get in. If I hadn’t, I would not have been in the same year as my good friend Justin Wang, and I might never have made friends with all of the amazing people in the class of 2013. My professors, projects, experiences, they would have all been completely different, and I would not be the person I am today.

The most important thing was my first failure. Because I didn’t get in, it made me realize that in design, we have to break down our preconceived notions. our pride and stubbornness only gets int he way. We have to be resolute and flexible, conceptual and practical, all at the same time. Designers are the people who live on both sides of the coin, because we have to. We never stop learning, we never stop proving ourselves, and, in fact, we just never stop. Always moving forward.

This was just the start though. More reflections to come.