I hesitate to call myself an artist; I hesitate to call myself an architect (which I’m technically not allowed to do anyways - yet). I have yet to feel like I truly get architecture, not in all my five years of crying and sweating and bleeding over drawings and models, not in the heart-pounding sleepless haze. But I loved it - the infrequent highs and the lowest lows, always after something, pursuing this idealistic standard of craft, representation, intention. I loved it, I love it still. The beauty of school was that it allowed you to fixate on certain aspects of a thing, to be absolutely obsessed.
I hesitate to call myself an artist; though my current job title is 3D artist intern, the process of relearning to shape and refine the tools I have haphazardly stitched together, (creating a patchwork workflow which worked fine in terms of academia but not so much in terms of billable hours) is tedious and methodical, not exactly what I would call art. More of a technical process like creating a basic dovetail joint or preparing stock for the CNC, less like blowing through commands and layers and instinctively shaping arbitrarily. They tell me it will come with time so for now I will be satisfied with clear, simple renders of olive oil containers and satellite disk-shaped chairs.
Arbitrary was a word I tried to erase from my vocabulary in second year, third year; I sought out a rationale for every single little thing lest someone tell me that my designs and projects were not intentional enough, my arguments lacking cohesion, my reasoning falling short. I spent more time thinking than designing, more time intending to than tending to. Now I find that I want the arbitrary, I want the happy accidents, I want the freedom that comes with not knowing where you’re headed in a design, in a project, in life.
I hesitate to call myself an artist; I hesitate to call myself an architect - because in my thoughts the two are inseparable; what is art without some form of underlying structure and what is architecture without expression? I want to find structure in abstraction; I want to find beauty in a simple floorplan. I want to be both - and so I hesitate.









