ecoarch

“Gravity is a mistake… Whole life is an effort to escape from reality.”

“In this brilliantly fun mockumentary from German filmmaker Tim Nowak, a man named Dr. Nick Laslowicz from the Institue for Centrifugal Research (ICR) recounts his “achievements in the realms of brain manipulation, excessive G-Force and prenatal simulations,” stating unequivocally that “gravity is a mistake.” What follows is a series of increasingly terrifying and equally absurd roller coasters that fling passengers into the sky in an attempt to theoretically improve their cognitive function.”

OMG I love this… when you dislike constraints on your imagination but your discipline requires that you commune with reality.

I don’t consider my setbacks in my arts career as failures nor do I attribute them to external forces (I’ve never faced discrimination beyond catcallers who do the “Konnichiwa, me love you long time” bit… academia tends to be progressive, and arts spaces even more so… the major discouragement I’ve faced is parental (psychologically speaking) because it is the tradition in Chinese cultures for parents to have the right to control all aspects of a child’s existence including their career, what they wear, who they date… nothing will make you value freedom more than a lifelong tyranny that has tried to deprive you of it… I’m an old ass adult and my mom and I still fight about what clothes I wear, goodness… or if I get to spend my money buying a stuffed animal or not… I’m going to buy a mountain of stuffed animals just to piss them off… do I see a lot of my interactions with authority figures as fighting off my controlling parents? I don’t know… probably… I can’t psychoanalyze myself… that’s what making art is for!!! *party parrot*)…

I was not a renegade to the system… it was just a mismatch in interests and end goals… I loved architecture as I experienced it in undergrad because it was a very academic, impractical, fantasy, whimsy, pure art kind of architecture that never cared about meeting the constraints of reality:

Defy the laws of gravity? That’s fine! Can’t be built in reality? Even better! The crazier and more whimsical, the better!! It is art for art’s sake…

The mistake I made was joining a Master’s program that had the end goal of not turning out academic architects but architects in practice. Which meant for the first time, my favorite shapes (the only things I care about in architecture) needed to be strapped down by the necessities of reality - the building needs to be properly insulated, heating and ventilation has to be properly installed, thermodynamics and energy efficiency correctly analyzed, and it can’t defy the laws of gravity and fall down and kill everyone inside. After so many constraints, the most feasible shape that is left is a rectangle:

Much as I dislike rectangles, I actually find this house to be beautiful. Nevertheless, I still don’t want my portfolio to be full of variations of rectangle stacking (that gets to be old really fast). 

My mentors helped me realize I don’t want to be a practicing architect. I don’t have an interest in functional buildings that people can inhabit. The program’s goals and my goals diverged significantly. A better fit is an academic program (for those interested, there are a handful of schools that specialize in the genre of computational design I like: AA (Architectural Association), Bartlett, MIT, SCI-Arc, ETH Zurich) or an arts program or fantasy architecture that’s used in gaming/entertainment/movies… One of my mentors said, “You’re an artist” and it was said with the intonation of you should own that and be proud of it (which is contrary to the very pervasive, direct and indirect messaging I’ve received my whole life of “doctor is the only thing anyone should be”…. I never have and never will want to be a doctor… good for you if that’s your dream… but you can’t force someone to be passionate about something… if I want something, I go for it full force… three back to back all nighters to build my impractical art models before show time, no problem… but something I don’t want… can’t lift a finger for it… if I love something, it is with all the intensity I have in my being… and if I don’t love something… I just can’t be bothered… I don’t control this about myself… no one can… I’m buying that stuffed animal)

So I am grateful for my mentors for helping me realize my artist identity… and for helping me realize my interests… but living a life devoted to one’s passions… is that a luxury? Pursuing a hyper niche academic interest (as computational architecture is) is career suicide… you can count on a single hand all the schools that even include this discipline in their programs… you can’t get an industry job doing this wacky stuff… it’s academia or nothing… but there are other routes to being an artist… ones that don’t require going into significant debt with next to zero employment prospects… I’ve never doubted my talent in the arts… but I do doubt my ability to survive and make a living entirely off of art… translating art into money… that’s a very different consideration than, how do I create beauty, which I think is the core focus of art across all the mediums… I love the high of getting my brain circuits blown out with visual stimulation… it’s a drug of it’s own sorts…