THE CRAFTED CITY

Many of us can feel the shifting of tectonic plates whose positioning deeply affects the success or failure of our cities. All the factors that we can consider are now all under constant change. Whatever we determine to be the truth will be considered passé and irrelevant a couple of years from now.

I am an architect. I’ve been at it for awhile. I still love what I do.

Going back to my first days in my profession, an epiphany came to me about my building designs. The epiphany was that the original conceptions about my building designs, through all of the planning and documentation, were one thing, and the constructed realization was another.

My newly constructed building, by itself, was much as I imagined, with maybe a few surprises both good and bad. What was different was the much bigger surprise about how the surroundings of my creation affected my design, and about how my design affected its surrounding. Sometimes in surprisingly good ways, and sometimes not so much.