{Issue 10} Shattered Glass
Growing up, I was a very serious kid. You really can’t blame me– my parents are immigrants, I was the first born, I aimed to please. It’s a pretty typical story. What followed is a childhood fraught with a quest for achievement and perfectionism.
In our home, my mother had a formal dining room and in it was a delicate wood cabinet filled with exquisite and extremely fragile formal flatware and dishware. Opening the wood and glass doors would cause the entire cabinet to rattle, with glass reverberating. Like many people, we never used any of these plates, and this cabinet became a very ominous one that I despised greatly.
One day, pointing to the cabinet, I told my father, I wanted to open the rickety door, take one of the plates, slam it onto our concrete driveway, and watch the little glass pieces shatter.
Now as an architect, looking back, I can see a bit of wisdom in that young girl. Some part of me felt confined looking at that absurd piece of furniture.
Many many years later, I have a familiar feeling when I work with my clients. It’s natural to get lost in the details—the perfect floor plan, the flawless drawing—and forget to zoom out and find freedom in the process.
Left unattended, the craft of architecture begins to lose its joy and suddenly we are overwhelmed by a thousand intricate decisions, all demanding perfectionism. We plan and plan, and when we finally look up we realize we’ve constructed a glass home for ourselves, shiny, new, empty and untouchable. Sometimes the only thing that feels right is to shatter what we’ve built and start over.
This is the ironic thing about architecture. It takes great restraint to design something so incredible that it elevates you, but not too precious that it suffocates you.
I never did get a chance to break those plates, and the urge has subsided over time, but I have spent my career breaking this mindset. This is the foundation of what I call Extraordinary, Ordinary Architecture. Book a discovery call to learn more.
