To follow, thoughts/ramblings about architecture and thesis and life, as I think this stuff through:
The latest BLDGBlog post is very relevant to me: Indefinite in Number, But of Certain Fixed Shapes It also relates to a quote I posted a while back… how do the toys we play with as children affect our world as adults? Specifically, architects and the building toys of their youth (but generally speaking too—our understanding of the world is different than our parents, as theirs was from their parents; but how and why? What are the mechanics of this process?)
It is difficult for me to answer questions like “why are you studying architecture?” (I say something about how I “used to” play with LEGO…) It is less that I have a reason, more that it just is who I am. I’m fascinated by how the world is built, how things fit together. If I could build a scale model of everything ever, I would. “Architecture” is really a collection of all sorts of things—art, history, physics, sociology—and I like it because I get to study many different aspects, which aids in an overall understanding of the world. I want to be able to stand in the street, and look around me and understand how everything I see is made, how it works, why it is the way it is, how it got there. I want to visualize it in 3D exploded view, every part, every component, and understand everything there is to understand about each one. I want to zoom in and “see” the electrons whipping around; I want to zoom out and see the stars and galaxies. And for all of it, I want to wind forward and back in time.
I want to trace a single atom through all time, expanding outward from a singular point, whirling around in a proto-star system, compressed into a higher element, exploding outward only to be whirled up into another proto-system, this time solar, pulled out of the earth, floating around, traveling through a daffodil, inhaled by Abraham Lincoln…
I want to be able to write something like the Futurist Manifesto—but less jingoistic, misogynistic, etc.—but to do so I need what I’d call a “persistent worldview,” a holistic understanding of our times, the zeitgeist. What does it mean to be a “millennial;” what, precisely, is our “pop” culture; who am I and what am I supposed to do with my life?
I enjoyed the movie Inception, in part by its idea about architects being uniquely suited to dream up worlds. I am fascinated by my own dreams, which can vary from so real that I’ll be confused later whether it actually happened to fantastic stories which don’t involve me at all, worthy of being short stories; vividly detailed locations which recur, as if all of my dreams take place in a single world, like ours but different.
And, I want to pull something out of all this that become a thesis topic.
