Slowing down

One thing I’ve noticed about the artist workflow is that they work at a much slower pace than the average professional, say, an engineer like myself. In engineering, the goal is to get things done as fast and as precisely as humanly possible. That’s not necessarily the case in architecture. There’s an aesthetic consideration that needs to be taken into account, and I’m not really used to doing that. I tend to be the one, I’ve noticed, in my class who finishes first and leaves early. I value my time and I don’t want to waste it decorating a cake, so to speak. However, my end product is surely not the most beautiful.

There’s this artist in my class around my age, or designer I should say, and I don’t think she likes me very much; I’m not sure. We have very different design principles. She’s clearly a professional designer: her products look great. I, on the other hand, got off to a slow start (because of logistical issues) and used an aesthetically undesirable image for the first step of my design pipeline that led me to produce something a little more experimental and abstract and, well, aesthetically not as pleasing. I didn’t spend the time to think about the aesthetics, which is not entirely my fault. My work doesn’t look great; however, it certainly looks like I’ve explored a lot of steps with the software using what I have. The “artist mentality” is something I will surely need to develop during my time in architecture school, if I do decide to go.