2026.0221 / Design By Intuition

Often, in my short architecture experience, I've observed a peculiar behavior by designers. I don't believe it's exclusive to designers, but perhaps everyone who has ever made an aesthetic decision, which is pretty much everyone in some degree. It typically begins with a visual observation of the work, a quick visual assessment of the thing's proportions, colors, composition, context, which varies based on that person's particular experience. The analysis, whether articulated or not, is often followed by a nudging of this or that edge, form, shape, substitution of color, removal or addition of some quality or aspect of the design, or some combination of all those and more, and critically, a final judgment that it "feels (or looks) right", without necessarily having done the tangible of work of designing, mainly opining. One might think of it as backseat designing while someone else has actually produced the design, though this is not always the case. I understand the ease of casually assessing a design, particulary if time-pressed, in this manner. What I take issue with is the subjective conclusion that it somehow "feels right". Whether it looks right is different, and can be objectively assessed by whatever established standards, but I won't get into that here.

When one states that something feels right with regard to an aesthetic outcome I sometimes wonder where that assessment really comes from. Some might regard it as intuitive, a sense, explained only, or purely as a feeling and nothing else. I think, even if justified as such, that feeling has something to do with at least some subconscious understanding fulfilled by some prior experience, even without an overt awareness or understanding of what led to the outcome. While it's common, I don't recognize such a judgment as legitimate in terms of a proper analysis of a design or a particular aspect of a design.

I don't think it’s enough to just feel like a particular design or aspect of it is good. To be legitimate in this context, that feeling needs to be validated by knowledge, vetted by integrity to actual principles and standards. This is not to say you cannot make design judgments by "feeling" or that the feeling in itself is illegitimate, but it is to say that there is a misconception that feeling, or intuition, or sense, is primary or fundamental in those types of determinations, There are deliberate, rational decisions made to incite that feeling in the first place. Feelings, intuitions, those types of senses are all responses. Emotions are responses to particular experiences (including knowledge) that have already been captured by the conscious and/or subconscious. I believe that intuitive design judgments come from the individual's existing constellation of values regardless of whether or not the individual can articulate those values or the intuition.

What's the point of thinking of such design judgments in this way? The point is that I think design outcomes can be better articulated, true to the intended concept, if intuition were secondary to actual reasons, or if design outcomes were explicitly judged by rational criteria instead of an arbitrary sense. Satisfaction of a design outcome should properly emerge not from "random" sense, but from clearly defined principles, standards, procedures and goals. I don't know the extent to which this is significant relative to the alternative, but this isn't an issue of the magnitude of difference in design outcome, but of integrity to rational decision making in design.

2026.0217 / The Multi-disciplinary Architect

I dug this out of a library of images I maintain, taken in 2019 at Virgil Abloh's exhibit at the MCA in Chicago. I took the picture because since I began my architectural studies, the idea of the multi-disciplinary architect has fascinated me. This isn't necessarily the future of the architect, who really knows what that is, but I believe has been the character of architects throughout history. Plenty of architects explore or cross over into the different fields of design in varying degrees largely because design skills and principles often transfer across fields, requiring specialized knowledge in the relevant field to fully pursue professionally. Many architects have some personal or professional background in other artistic pursuits, which are also often supplementary to their architectural work or in support of their general design philosophy or ethos. I think this diversity of skill, knowledge and experience is particularly valuable for the designer in any field. As an architectural designer, it's not a stretch to see how design applications in smaller scales of design can accommodate architectural practice or design methodology.

Kanye West is shown here as this multi-discplinary figure, not necessarily an architect, but a design generalist, and more than a dabbler by virtue of the substantiality of his individual pursuits. Say what you want about how he thinks about design, about YEEZY (a firm which I admire but for reasons I won't get into here, and has little to do with its approach to design or architetural wing, but does have something to do with the existence of particular wings under a singular umbrella), there is something fascinating about the fact that a single person can take on multiple interests, and take them all seriously in some significant measure. I think what's missing at the top of the image is businessman or entrepreneur. Not many architects or designers make it that far relative to those who work under an employer, but I do believe that is ultimate the way forward for the architect, the final frontier in a sense. The pursuit of other design interests with architecture at the core is am incredibly difficult dream I've held for a long time now, and examples like Kanye, the businessman and entrepreneur, tell me it's possible, even if I fall way short of that level of success. That's his success though - I define my own by my own standards anyway.

2026.0211 / Work-Life Balance Is A False Dichotomy & Work Passion

We've heard of all kinds of ideas for "balancing" life and work for quite a while now, but the notion they are compartmentalized - that work is somehow separate from life, or living - is flawed and rarely addressed. Having mostly gone unaddressed, many of us seem to accept that work is separate from life, but if we think about it, what we specifically mean is that our job is but one unique, and significant, activity among many activities within our lives. Work obviously does not somehow occur outside of life - it's clearly a part of life - so by life we're really referring to activities that are exclusive of our jobs, activities that may be related or unrelated to our jobs.

What we actually mean by work-life balance is, unglamorously, "job/non-job balance". From this we can understand how to properly think of our jobs as an integral aspect of our individual lives that we spend much of our time on, and as such should ideally form a foundation for everything else, as opposed to thinking of a job simplistically as a money-making endeavor that you need to mitigate as much as possible in order to "live life". This would otherwise be a negative attitude toward work - work is understood as just drudgery; something to get through or get out of the way or make as painless as possible so that "life" can be lived afterward, as if you're not living life at the job you typically spend much of your day and your life in. Our perspective towards work becomes one of making it pain or friction free, an evasive or avoidant attitude that seeks to reduce work to a less important role in life, rather than advocating for the benefits of the challenges it poses to us and the growth potential as a central area of our lives. Work understood in this sense, a sense that's actually very common, becomes a "necessary evil" more so than a necessary good.

We should instead frame it more positively because work is positive. It's life-affirming because it's life-enhancing. Work is a necessary and productive endeavor if one wants fulfillment and happiness in life - not just because one can make money it but because one can make oneself a better individual out of it, as work is an ambitious enterprise for individual growth. In this way we can begin to think of work, our jobs, as fruitful and productive endeavors that can serve as one of the primary sources of happiness in our lives. If we begin to think of work as central to our lives the idea of work-life balance is not feasible, rather an approach to balance in the way one lives life becomes possible.

In this case, balance is about prioritizing one's values, not necessarily equalizing them (as in many conventional notions of work-life balance), with work taking on its role as one of one's highest values. When one knows how to properly prioritize the multitude of values in his life, this is real balance, whether or not those values/activities are actually equalized in time or effort spent on them. Each value or activity demands a different amount of time and effort depending entirely on how much one values them. If that means work requires many late nights then that's what the achievement of that demand requires, same if work may require a long respite from work to recharge so as to come back renewed to take on more challenges. This highlights the importance of what one chooses to work in and toward. If one values work, then one necessarily has to find a job and career in which one can most value work - one requires a minimum level of interest, and has well-understood and ideally deep reasons for pursuing that career. This is how one maximizes his valuation of work - by maximizing one's ability to get the job his desires require.

How can you know where you ought to be and what you ought to be doing if you don't know who you are? If I don't know who I am, I'll just stumble blindly into a career and probably be miserable in it because I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. Money is never enough incentive to dread going to work every day... Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from. Business is way too hard to work at something just for money. Winning at business requires that you exhaust every ounce of spiritual, emotional, and physical energy you have. You won't put that effort in day in and day out, year in and year out, just for money. Money is great, but it is ultimately an empty goal. Bigger homes, bigger cars, and even more giving is just not a big enough goal to keep you creative and energized throughout your life. You have to have a passion, a higher calling, to what you engage in. Hard work is a prison cell only if the work has no meaning.

Every single job and career has tasks in which you have to work in the trenches. Relatively speaking, some trenches are dirtier, more physical than other trenches, which may be physically easy, but intellectually for more difficult, both of which clearly require different levels of experience and different skills. In any case, every job has a trench, and every job has it's front-facing/storefront, glamour task. The key to finding work you love is to finding which aspects of a particular job you would love to confront on a daily basis, that you would relish as a challenge, in which you would enjoy most of your time, despite the trenches.

When you're focused on and operating in your strengths and passions, nothing can hold you back. The secret of success in any career is making your vocation a vacation in the sense that When you love what you do, you will work like crazy, but it will never feel like work. In fact, it may feel like playing. Remember when you were a kid, just making stuff with whatever was laying around and the time passed with barely any awareness of it? That should be the experience of your work - an all-consuming enjoyment and obsessive exploration. This, in my opinion, is what it means to function at a high level because you know that the work you are doing fits perfectly with your gifts, skills and talents, and that's expressed in your heightened enjoyment and fulfillment from the day to day and into the future. You won't depend as much on external motivations because your interest in learning more about your passion naturally drives your curiosity and need to explore.

2026.0210 / Totem Field, Shadow Cache: A Sense of Creation, A Sense of Adventure

On my desk is a collection of items symbolizing or referencing movement, navigation, exploration, mystery, time and travel: A 3D-printed maze, a 3D-printed pawn and knight, a motorcycle pin, spark plug, a leaf from the arboretum, a weird medallion on a gold chain I found lying around the house when I was young, a cap from a bottle of tea I bought when I was in college with an excerpt from a now-favorite poem below, a tiny compass, a strange dead plant stem I picked up while walking around Lexington, KY on a sweltering afternoon, a 9mm casing, a .22 cal casing, a key, an hourglass. I collected them partly out of a reminder of past adventures, adventures I want to seek, things I want to do or acquire, an urge to keep exploring, uncovering curiosities, and most importantly a reminder to act - the clock keeps ticking, there's no time to waste.

Sea-Fever by John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

2026.0207 / Thoughts On Building: Builders, Architecture & Business

What is architecture without its full context? It is what some may call building construction. Part of what makes architecture so is the understanding of a building and its spaces within the context of something (whether or not that context is deliberately ignored in a design). Arguably, the purpose of architecture is to express and advance culture and society at large in the direction the architect see fit through the practice of the building arts, by the individual expression of each building, unique as it pertains to its inhabitants and the values of its architect(s). Architects add something else to the building trades that the trades do not have, and every trade has its role. What does the architect add? Architects inform a building design with context. This necessarily means that all the decorative details, the form or shape of the building, the why behind its design, all come from specific value judgments by the architect - value judgments that come from a combination of the actual context within which the building sits, from personal experience and knowledge and from the culture at large. Architecture thus expresses something specific in its design beyond its obvious function.

Architectural expression is an artistic process, so architects add artistry - a different kind of attention to detail that, say, typical builders or non-architects do not have or do not care for (I'm not knocking builders for not caring, plenty of them do but there's often a significant difference between a builder's design and an architect's). This attention to detail comes in the form of a particular set of skills - skills related to geometry as it pertains to both art and science, skills related to context (cultural and social understanding), skills related to the use/function/experience of space itself (phenomenoloy, psychology), skills related to the why of designing something in a particular way (philosophy). These are the skills builders do not have or at least do not have to same or full effect as an architect. That is what separates typical builders from architects - not just an academic degree or a specific type of license, but a different kind of knowledge on top of the knowledge of construction, even if that construction knowledge is not complete, but complementary. There are plenty of builders who don't care that joints misalign, or that unsightly mechanicals are exposed in some view - only that a space "works" or is viable enough to meet a particular basic function. Architects are, or should be, skilled in elevating the minimum to include overall and detailed experience - this has to encompass more than the technical construction of a space and a concern for function (mechanical or otherwise), but a certain cognizance of the inhabitant's actual and potential experience - how something could be enjoyed, valued, now and in the future. To be clear, technical knowledge of construction is absolutely critical, not to be reduced or rejected by any architect, but here I'm simply placing an emphasis on the additional knowledge an architect needs to distinguish himself as an architect, and it requires that technological knowledge is the bare minimum of that knowledge. Most builders tend to reside at that bare, essential, minimum, but often lack the additional edge in terms of knowledge of architectural experience because their primary or only concern is the basic construction and function of the space itself, and maybe decoration at most, moreso than those additional factors that are within the purview of architectural design.

A designer thus needs to consider the most full possible scope of context in relation to what is being designed. Given this, I believe design is an inherently optimistic practice. There must be at least an implicit understanding that the work he is doing is intended to improve some aspect of the quality of life for individuals. The pursuit of a design requires that the designer himself not only has the skills and knowledge required to complete the job, but the integrity to deliver on his expertise as a designer, which means to go beyond the basic technicalities of construction, to find new ways of constructing, to bend the rules if necessary, to provide something of his own creation, something unique when and wherever possible, to posit new forms, functions, and experiences for the thing to be designed.

Taking quite a leap, I view business as the pinnacle to a designer's practice. Building a business is also a process of building oneself. One cannot build a legitimate business without oneself also growing. By necessity, such a pursuit brings out the designer's best by demanding his total energy and effort, by marshalling all his built-up experience, knowledge, skills and ideas and stress-testing them in the markets for architectural design ideas and services. Even if his efforts result in failure, there's so much to learn, and to be gained, from the process of building himself toward the aim of starting and operating a bespoke architecture firm, but to even start one requires a conviction that his ideas are worth pursuing, that the risk is worth it, and that he is more than a builder. An architect needs to be distinct in his motivation - he is not building for the sake of making a nice building, as good as that is. He is building for the sake of building the world he envisions, the world he wants to live and flourish in, and this requires a clarity of values, purpose, and philosophy. He builds for his own sake at least as much as he builds for the world.