“Buildings do not get sick, change their mind, have new buildings enter their lives, suffer emotional trauma, question their identities, have desire or fear, or fall in love—unless you believe in Rem Koolhaas’s story in ‘Delirious New York.’”
I always wanted to design. From making up castles in my mind as a child with cascading arches, spacious rooms, winding staircases and turrets, design became a primary way of seeing and building my world.
As my understanding of design developed throughout my academic and professional life, it became a word that showed up in many conversations about things as diverse as the nature of life and reality.
In architecture, the meaning of design is clear. Essentially, it's conceiving, developing, and executing an idea to solve a set of architectural issues in a prescriptive set of documents for the purposes of constructing a building.
When using design in general terms, it is similarly thought of as a problem-solving process toward an aesthetically engineered solution like in fashion, industry, and high technology.
Recently, I started to wonder if there's more to its meaning and deployment that I had previously thought. So, I decided to take a closer look in the hopes that a new perspective or insight might emerge.
Here's what I found:
The word evolved out of the Renaissance's conception of humanism, which was initially used in the context of life decisions—specifically regarding intention, purpose, and destiny—rather than just the fabrication of physical objects.
It referred to a mental plan, disegno. For artists and architects like Vasari, it was a scheme or a designated objective one intended to achieve as a life purpose. It was often used to describe things "marked out" by fate or providence.
The application to the physical "making of things" (art, architecture, and manufacturing) was a later evolution, emerging only after the word had already been established as a term for conceptualizing intent or strategy.
My intention here is the exploration of design beyond strict architectural practice in the larger scope of life as the original meaning denotes. Is design useful and relevant when determining the arc of a professional life itself?
Of course, there are significant differences between designing a building and designing a life:
I am not implying that making a life decision is like designing objects in the basic sense; the stakes are substantially different. However, I am suggesting that the practice itself is similarly useful.
Life is not controllable like a building, but it can be seen like a site that grows and expands with the investment in it, starting with a site analysis.
The first thing an architect or developer does when commencing a project is evaluate and analyze a site for its conditions, including hidden problems, constraints, best use, fit for its programmatic purpose, and an idea that best expresses and reconciles those criteria with the financial terms required to fulfill it.
Appropriating that process as an analogy, what might a professional site analysis look like? For example:
One can extrapolate and see how using the design stages might be adapted to life decisions:
A feeling that precedes most design decisions is intuition. What does a site want to be?—adapting Louis Kahn's dictum—calls on a designer's intuition to read the external world. What do I want to be? calls on that same intuitive capacity to discern a person's internal orientation.
The ultimate source of intuition remains elusive. Whether mapped to neural pathways in the prefrontal cortex that integrate affect and pattern recognition or defined by cognitive psychology as the brain cataloging statistical regularities for rapid, "gut"-level appraisal, empirical models capture the mechanism without exhausting the phenomenon.
A practitioner experiences intuition not as probability, but as direct perception. Yet nearly all of us rely on it—often staking our most critical design and life choices on its clarity.
Ultimately, it comes down to the alignment of internal and external systems through an iterative process that leads to an integrated result.
Intuition <> Awareness <> Design <> Determination > Result
Whether reading the latent potential of a site or seeking fulfillment and clarity in a career, 'design success' is realized through the alignment of internal intent with external reality.
Designing a site or a life decision is always a challenge. Becoming aware of the elements and progressive steps, deploying them critically and methodically to ensure effectiveness and reliability in the pursuit of a realizable plan is design in its original meaning: to achieve an intention, purpose, or destiny.