with me way back in 1973 I wanted to be a restoration architect as I saw so many of the heritage buildings of Halifax being knocked down. then, when I got to arch school I got sidetracked by a fascination with architectural theory. After a brief hiatus I have never given that up, to the detriment of the heritage buildings of Halifax.
What about you?
I got fascinated by looking at maps and the floor plan brochure of the new house we moved into when I was 5. I could grasp the connection between the image and the space we were living in, and I loved looking at, then drawing, houses. The rest is low-wage history.
I grew up in a neighborhood that included a bunch of classic West Coast Residential homes by Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Fred Hollingsworth. All considered to be doing there best work in the early 70's in the pacific northwest ( Canada, Eh!)
That and having a grandfather who emigrated to Canada and could and would build anything he set his mind to ( houses, furniture, refabricating the fenders and running board on my first car out of flat stock, R.V. cut the whole back of a ford econline van by hand before forming the fiberglass shell on the back )
Landscape, craftsmanship and a stunning respective for the "spirit of a place"
sophomore year i was premed and chem. i found myself spending more time reading about architecture for the class i was taking for fun and less time figuring out the redux reaction to synthesize 2,2,4,dimethylbutyloctane.
dropped the chem major like it was hot and started doing what i enjoyed.
Legos. Lots of legos. Assembling them just by looking at the pictures on the box. no instructions needed no sir not me. And my grandparents in the background saying "you should be an architect" I figured yeah sure why not. Its what i always heard my whole life, even through high school, long after my lego phase had ended. So at the all important age of 17 when i had to decide what i wanted to do with the rest of my life, the only thing i had ever dreamed of was becomming an architect. And now I am, probably the only thing ive ever carried out in my whole life, and I'm not even sure it's ever what i really wanted to be. I love it, thats for sure and I plan on practicing for a long time to come, but a part of me still wonders where my life would have been if i had never opened that first lego space station.
When I was 4 or 5 my parents bought a new refrigerator and I appropriated the box, told my mom where to cut the holes for the door and windows (making my mom my first general contractor) and played in it for months. Then there were the boxes of wood blocks, the bins of legos and lots of navigating on family road trips.
Only later did I find out that my aunt went to arch. school and my grandfather was an engineer. I wonder how many people here are the 3rd or 4th in their family to be in A/E/C. I suspect that spatial ability is inherited.
found 40s/50s house plan books at a flea market and set out to design my 'dream house'. over and over and over again. learned to draft very young so that i could do this better. never really got over it. (though, ironically, i really have no desire to ever design my own house.)
summers spent making collages of dream houses with my cousins around the age of 8. Strangley, I worked at a firm doing high-end residentials and hated it.
At least makes more money than art, and I didnt want to bother myself with a real job.
I didnt even want to do it, I ended up doing it for many reasons, and became addicted. This vice is harder to kick, and more expensive to sustain than most drug addictions...
chaglang: I studied architecture in the same Beaux Arts building in Halifax where my maternal grandfather first studied and then taught engineering just before and after the 1st World War.
and my grandmother calling me "engineer" when i was a child. reverse psychology...
i used to use the pillows off the sofas in the living room to build houses, and as soon as i had a garden i was building shacks...oh, the memories are flooding back!
One morning, about 8 weeks after turning down architecture and 1 week after beginning a business degree [what was I thinking] I awoke to the radio blaring an ad for the institution, stating that there were still places available in their architecture program. I got out of bed, rang the guy I had talked to, begged for my place and started the next day.
i didn't start talking or walking till i was four. between the ages of four and seven all i would eat was milk and chicken. my mom would take me from doctor to doctor and they all basically said i was retarded. some here would certainly agree.
my mom would put me in our backyard, and in costa rica, where i spent my early life, you only have to dig several inches before hitting some beautiful red clays....wet and absolutely giving to the imagination. and i built and sculpted with my hands, castles, dinosaurs, whatever my mind could come up with, it kinda became my voice and soon people started saying i was going to be an architect, i had no idea what the word meant, so they told me, and it made sense, so i said yeah, that's who i am.
As a kid, each time I took a train ride past some ugly industrial buildings, I swore that when I grew up, I would buy them all and fix them. Still trying to grow up - we'll see about the fixing.
Liberty,
long time no talk. I've been actually keepin my nose to the grindstone. Not really, took a bit of a vacation.
You hit it for me - I just plain liked to draw. Every teacher I had in elementary school was always 'gettin' onto me' because I was always drawing & never listening. "Why are you drawing all the time? You're gonna be an artist. Artists don't make no money little boy. Do you want that?" Dang Mrs.Dixie! (yes, her real name) I wasn't drawing to be no damn artist (no offense to artists), I'm gonna be an architect. But first, I gotta be a garbage-man, bbq cook, bag-boy & yogurt maker....
but I digress.
When i was a kid i'd express or project whatever it was that seemed meaningful to me by drawing it, most likely indicative of the fact i was and am a visual/spatial thinker, and so as follows i remember wanting to be a firefighter so i'd draw fire engines, or i remember wanting to be a truck driver so i’d draw 18 wheelers. As i grew older and the drawings became more realistic i added skylines in the background, naturally as i lost interest in being a firefighter, a truck driver, I lost interest in drawing the trucks in the foreground and just found pleasure in drawing the city skyline in the background as I remember being taken by the mega shapes and forms the city and its skyline(s) presented to me on my visits to my grandparents. This eventually led me to drawing city plans for the skylines I drew and drawing perspectives and plans for fantasy buildings. I'd visit the local library, take out the architecture books and draw the buildings inside, sometimes adding them to the skylines I drew. So I think the choice of architecture came from the desire I had to express or understand the pleasure/fascination/wonder I had experienced traveling through the city in visiting my grandparents as a kid.
This is an amazing thread! I'm a junior at UCLA majoring in Art History, but preparing my portfolio for a M.Arch. And to think, I thought i was naive to turn my childhood obsessions with legos+building into a career in architecture..
in high school i wanted to study philosophy and was big into sculpting...my dad is an engineer, he suggested architecture. i put it down as a major i was interested in when applying to colleges, and just sort of got wrapped up in it.
Also always loved to draw. First drawing was a house, age 2. Gave my OCD some exercise through repeated construction, then destruction, of buildings out of legos, blocks, and train sets. But always drew. Houses. Why? Who can say.... Anywhore, In 4th grade an aunt asked me what I liked to draw. I said houses. She said I should be an architect. I asked what an architect was. She said "They draw houses."
Well, shit. It was a done deal for me. I went right off and wrote an essay as to why I wanted to be an artichect.
Also, I grew up in a town of gorgeous old houses surrounded by miles of Levittownesque developments -- from early on, I realized that some buildings were thought about and some weren't. Some were unique and some looked like all the others.....
Bula: thanks for that flashback: I guess no ideas are original - still it's interesting to see how archinects answered basically the same question in Feb/March of this year
Sep 9, 05 1:51 am ·
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why did you choose architecture?
with me way back in 1973 I wanted to be a restoration architect as I saw so many of the heritage buildings of Halifax being knocked down. then, when I got to arch school I got sidetracked by a fascination with architectural theory. After a brief hiatus I have never given that up, to the detriment of the heritage buildings of Halifax.
What about you?
I got fascinated by looking at maps and the floor plan brochure of the new house we moved into when I was 5. I could grasp the connection between the image and the space we were living in, and I loved looking at, then drawing, houses. The rest is low-wage history.
I grew up in a neighborhood that included a bunch of classic West Coast Residential homes by Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Fred Hollingsworth. All considered to be doing there best work in the early 70's in the pacific northwest ( Canada, Eh!)
That and having a grandfather who emigrated to Canada and could and would build anything he set his mind to ( houses, furniture, refabricating the fenders and running board on my first car out of flat stock, R.V. cut the whole back of a ford econline van by hand before forming the fiberglass shell on the back )
Landscape, craftsmanship and a stunning respective for the "spirit of a place"
sophomore year i was premed and chem. i found myself spending more time reading about architecture for the class i was taking for fun and less time figuring out the redux reaction to synthesize 2,2,4,dimethylbutyloctane.
dropped the chem major like it was hot and started doing what i enjoyed.
Legos. Lots of legos. Assembling them just by looking at the pictures on the box. no instructions needed no sir not me. And my grandparents in the background saying "you should be an architect" I figured yeah sure why not. Its what i always heard my whole life, even through high school, long after my lego phase had ended. So at the all important age of 17 when i had to decide what i wanted to do with the rest of my life, the only thing i had ever dreamed of was becomming an architect. And now I am, probably the only thing ive ever carried out in my whole life, and I'm not even sure it's ever what i really wanted to be. I love it, thats for sure and I plan on practicing for a long time to come, but a part of me still wonders where my life would have been if i had never opened that first lego space station.
When I was 4 or 5 my parents bought a new refrigerator and I appropriated the box, told my mom where to cut the holes for the door and windows (making my mom my first general contractor) and played in it for months. Then there were the boxes of wood blocks, the bins of legos and lots of navigating on family road trips.
Only later did I find out that my aunt went to arch. school and my grandfather was an engineer. I wonder how many people here are the 3rd or 4th in their family to be in A/E/C. I suspect that spatial ability is inherited.
found 40s/50s house plan books at a flea market and set out to design my 'dream house'. over and over and over again. learned to draft very young so that i could do this better. never really got over it. (though, ironically, i really have no desire to ever design my own house.)
summers spent making collages of dream houses with my cousins around the age of 8. Strangley, I worked at a firm doing high-end residentials and hated it.
At least makes more money than art, and I didnt want to bother myself with a real job.
I didnt even want to do it, I ended up doing it for many reasons, and became addicted. This vice is harder to kick, and more expensive to sustain than most drug addictions...
chaglang: I studied architecture in the same Beaux Arts building in Halifax where my maternal grandfather first studied and then taught engineering just before and after the 1st World War.
and my grandmother calling me "engineer" when i was a child. reverse psychology...
i used to use the pillows off the sofas in the living room to build houses, and as soon as i had a garden i was building shacks...oh, the memories are flooding back!
architecture chose me.
One morning, about 8 weeks after turning down architecture and 1 week after beginning a business degree [what was I thinking] I awoke to the radio blaring an ad for the institution, stating that there were still places available in their architecture program. I got out of bed, rang the guy I had talked to, begged for my place and started the next day.
i just hated the fact that 2+2 had to be 4.
i didn't start talking or walking till i was four. between the ages of four and seven all i would eat was milk and chicken. my mom would take me from doctor to doctor and they all basically said i was retarded. some here would certainly agree.
my mom would put me in our backyard, and in costa rica, where i spent my early life, you only have to dig several inches before hitting some beautiful red clays....wet and absolutely giving to the imagination. and i built and sculpted with my hands, castles, dinosaurs, whatever my mind could come up with, it kinda became my voice and soon people started saying i was going to be an architect, i had no idea what the word meant, so they told me, and it made sense, so i said yeah, that's who i am.
As a kid, each time I took a train ride past some ugly industrial buildings, I swore that when I grew up, I would buy them all and fix them. Still trying to grow up - we'll see about the fixing.
Liked to draw but too scared/embarassed to take art classes - so I took a drafting class instead.
As Dave Hickey said, (many) architects are artists who want to make their mothers happy.
Liberty,
long time no talk. I've been actually keepin my nose to the grindstone. Not really, took a bit of a vacation.
You hit it for me - I just plain liked to draw. Every teacher I had in elementary school was always 'gettin' onto me' because I was always drawing & never listening. "Why are you drawing all the time? You're gonna be an artist. Artists don't make no money little boy. Do you want that?" Dang Mrs.Dixie! (yes, her real name) I wasn't drawing to be no damn artist (no offense to artists), I'm gonna be an architect. But first, I gotta be a garbage-man, bbq cook, bag-boy & yogurt maker....
but I digress.
When i was a kid i'd express or project whatever it was that seemed meaningful to me by drawing it, most likely indicative of the fact i was and am a visual/spatial thinker, and so as follows i remember wanting to be a firefighter so i'd draw fire engines, or i remember wanting to be a truck driver so i’d draw 18 wheelers. As i grew older and the drawings became more realistic i added skylines in the background, naturally as i lost interest in being a firefighter, a truck driver, I lost interest in drawing the trucks in the foreground and just found pleasure in drawing the city skyline in the background as I remember being taken by the mega shapes and forms the city and its skyline(s) presented to me on my visits to my grandparents. This eventually led me to drawing city plans for the skylines I drew and drawing perspectives and plans for fantasy buildings. I'd visit the local library, take out the architecture books and draw the buildings inside, sometimes adding them to the skylines I drew. So I think the choice of architecture came from the desire I had to express or understand the pleasure/fascination/wonder I had experienced traveling through the city in visiting my grandparents as a kid.
This is an amazing thread! I'm a junior at UCLA majoring in Art History, but preparing my portfolio for a M.Arch. And to think, I thought i was naive to turn my childhood obsessions with legos+building into a career in architecture..
Paul
in high school i wanted to study philosophy and was big into sculpting...my dad is an engineer, he suggested architecture. i put it down as a major i was interested in when applying to colleges, and just sort of got wrapped up in it.
it's just worked out for me somehow...
Also always loved to draw. First drawing was a house, age 2. Gave my OCD some exercise through repeated construction, then destruction, of buildings out of legos, blocks, and train sets. But always drew. Houses. Why? Who can say.... Anywhore, In 4th grade an aunt asked me what I liked to draw. I said houses. She said I should be an architect. I asked what an architect was. She said "They draw houses."
Well, shit. It was a done deal for me. I went right off and wrote an essay as to why I wanted to be an artichect.
Also, I grew up in a town of gorgeous old houses surrounded by miles of Levittownesque developments -- from early on, I realized that some buildings were thought about and some weren't. Some were unique and some looked like all the others.....
Bula: thanks for that flashback: I guess no ideas are original - still it's interesting to see how archinects answered basically the same question in Feb/March of this year
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