issues

Everyone, and I mean everyone, will have an opinion. That goes for anything and everything. Any topic you can conjure up. Anything that you experience, you interpret and therefore have a unique view on; the experience is all yours and different from anyone else. How loudly and/or often you choose to express it is up to you. It's like food. I LOVE dill pickles on my cheese pizza, but chances are you think it's revolting. Chances are you hate pickles, have never tried it, or just plain have thought a little too hard about how the tastes would mix and mingle on your tongue. It's all about what you know and how you apply that knowledge. Many of us may have similar basic ideas about architecture, because we all have the same basic training in it from good old Roger. But some of us interpret it differently and take it in different directions. I may like pickles and pizza....together.... and maybe Jane Doe likes both... separately. Same tastes in food- different outcomes.

When making your own stance about architecture, you may be wrong. You may be totally off from the norm and accepted values, but isn't that how we all learn best? Through failure? It's important to stand up and TRY. You can be theoretical all you want, but until you DO IT, how will you know. It's like Sam I Am with the green eggs and ham- you can proclaim, proclaim, proclaim, but until you nail down your idea into something solid and eat the damn eggs (or pickle pizza) how will ANYONE know, for that matter?

I think that all ideas are linked to our experience, meaning that all of our architectural ideas will be inexorably linked to what we have been exposed to. In this sense, when starting out, it may be best to place your physical realization in the space that helped develop its underlying theory. As far as every idea having to be new.... I don't believe there's such a thing. Look at all the inventions of Leonardo DaVinci we just recently realized. Yes, we are all geniuses for getting it to work, pat on the back, but the ideas were hundreds of years old. I am sure DaVinci wasn't the first to think of it either. He was probably just the first to write it down, make it known, and TRY IT. Note: all very important keys to being famous years from now.

Any idea you have should be a reflection of you, trying to do something for recognition, for the sake of argument, or for originality is futile. Be you, and be proud of it. Anything you do will be original because you and your ideas are unless you are just plain lazy and copy someone else outright. But even that will have a reflection of you in it, because it YOUR version, your interpretation. Good architecture, just like good theory, is timeless. I think there is too much effort put on things needing to be a reflection of the times. Too much of a push for originality. What if we deemed Leo's idea for a flying machine a thing of his time- and went off trying to invent something different. Where would we be without our jet planes and complimentary drinks on our first class trips to Toronto? I think everything we do is a sign of the times. ITS ALL ABOUT EXPERIENCE. What we know goes into it, we are part of the times, we are influenced by our times, so: so is our work. We benefit from looking back on forgotten things and referencing what worked and didn't. Everything is in a gradual process of reinvention. Like how we lost the formula for concrete and suddenly, it was the new face of modern. As if it had never been used before.... heard of that little empire a thousand or so years ago? Ya, they knew about that too.

Like I said, nothing is new. Its all about reinterpretation.