a career objective: I read somewhere once that there is a difference between a "building engineer" and an "architect." With eyes wide open, and feet ready to jump, I have allowed myself to be submersed into this professional life of architecture. And in doing so, the realization is that I have been immersed in some strange mix of building engineering with a mere side of architecture. While building reality and shop drawings are a necessity, so also is the exploration of the mind, the exploration of boundaries to be pushed and pulled. An architect must live this life of co-existence between paper and mind, between fiction and fantasy, between tangible and intangible. He must impossibly balance the practicality of money with the art of imagination. I choose to be an architect.



In my mind, somehow architecture lives somewhere between the sheets of the school studio and the on-site meeting with the builder. Within the trace paper, pencil in hand, no budget to worry about, ideas flow and run freely, able to go beyond the bounds of gravity and concrete. The "idea" of architecture is given it's first breath of life. The office allows the "idea" to achieve "conception" into the physically built realm we live in daily.



It is important that I find this juggling act in my own practice of architecture. I find myself right now working in a firm, working towards Registration, participating in competitions, and going to school or lectures in the evenings to learn about the most recent architectural technologies. In the future I hope to still be working in a firm, Registration in hand, continuing to participate in competitions, still going to school (a teaching position perhaps), and still attending lectures. Practically speaking, much will not drastically change, just a further continuation and further exploration of what is today moving on to tomorrow.



In reality, that is all one can do, choose to be an architect and then keep pushing, pulling, skewing.