If Emerald City was as Dorothy had always imagined it would be — the great Wizard kind, and its glittering spires, just like home — then it would be similar to how I’d always imagined my future. Not to say that I thought every minute of my future was golden, but that I’d always pictured life to be something like the yellow brick road; if I can endure the journey, then at the very end of the road I will reap the reward. More specifically, if I drive myself harder than anyone else, bust my ass to be the best, and cry bitterly at least once while trying — whether it’s in school or at the workplace or simply during the everyday process of trying to better myself — then I will have earned happiness in the end. Something akin to eating the yellow skittles before the green ones: I would suffer in order to win.

I’m not sure if this mindset was entirely thanks to nurture rather than nature, although I’m inclined to believe it was. Maybe my parents instilled the concept in me while young — Tiger Mom says eat your broccoli, then candy maybe! (just kidding, my mom is great) — but I think this outlook on life was mostly the result of my own accumulated experiences (and maybe a little due to society’s mantra of “work hard and retire early!” impressed on America’s youth ever since they’re able-bodied enough to earn a penny). Every time I did something I despised — like memorizing the multiplication tables or practicing the violin or drilling myself for the SATs — it ultimately paid off in spades. Up until last year, I wholeheartedly believed in what I thought was an infallible system, that gain is only through pain, and that if I worked superbly hard in school, in my career, and in life, I’d achieve that most coveted reward in the end: happiness.

But what I never truly imagined was what would happen if I took this idea of “no pain no gain” from my past experiences and applied it to the much larger scale of a lifetime, like taking a tiny, frayed piece of string one end in each hand and stretching it as long as my armspan. What if I really did bust my ass starting now — say, throw myself into the fray as someone’s subordinate, work long hours for monetary and psychological rewards that don’t quite measure up, consistently prioritize work over love and family, and do this for thirty long years — what then? Will I have achieved happiness at fifty? Will I finally have the peace of mind combined with the rigor of imagination to write that story that’s been sitting in my head, or the time to visit the Amazonian rain forests and gaze wide-eyed at the Northern Lights?

Of course, happiness to me doesn’t only involve the comforts of retirement. I yearn for a successful career as well. But I realized that even in the case of an architectural career, I had, like I had with my general outlook on life, only set my sights on the reward near the end — the joy and prestige of owning a firm and creating my own designs — rather than the process of getting there. And that is where I made my mistake.

I found out in this past year of working and communicating with professionals that passion is, indeed, required in the architectural field as in any other, but not in the way I’d thought. The majority of my passion can’t simply lie in creating my own designs if I want to enter architecture as a life-long profession; I must also love the process. One must embrace the field itself, fiercely admire the work of those greater than her, keep up with the work of her colleagues, have an unquenchable thirst to learn the technical aspect of building in addition to the creative, and have incredible patience as a member of the creative team, collective, which will trump her, singular, for the majority of her career. All of these things compose the real job of an architect, and would take up most of my young life — my twenties, my thirties, possibly some of my forties — if I chose this path. If I didn’t love it all, then I’d be throwing away decades of my life. I didn’t love it all.

There emerged the conflict: should I struggle during my youth to achieve happiness later, or choose a career that I’d enjoy more now but promises a smaller pay-off? I’d thought, panicking, surely I could not achieve as much happiness, whether that lies in money or success or family, if I did not first suffer through pain and sweat and tears. Surely. But why? Why should I have to put off happiness?

Isn’t it interesting that society frowns upon “more immediate” gratification as much as it does? As much as teachers encourage children to “study what you love!” as soon as the economy wobbles, any level headed teenager realizes that they should sacrifice whimsical dreams for job security and one’s annual bread. Even science supports the saying “good things come to those who wait;” a study done at Stanford University showed that toddlers who could resist instant gratification in the form of 1 marshmallow by waiting twenty minutes for 2 marshmallows grew up to become more balanced individuals and to score higher on the SATs than those who couldn’t resist the 1. I’ve always been one to wait and hope for 2. Now I’m slowly changing my mind.

Of course, the matter of choosing a career is not as simple as choosing to eat 1 marshmallow now or 2 later. In other words, it’s not accurate to say that if I choose a career I enjoy more now, I would experience less happiness in the long run than if I choose a career that saves all the happiness for the end. But even if that were the case, I think I’d still choose the former, just because of one simple matter: scale. After all, twenty minutes is a far cry from twenty years. I may be willing to waste twenty minutes on your experiment, but I won’t waste away twenty years of my life waiting to do what I love.

Choosing not to pursue architecture was a difficult decision, and one that I’ve dwelled on for most of this past year. It’s a completely wonderful and respectable field — just not for me. Since high school, I’ve hidden my love for drawing and illustrating in order to hug money and security and prestige closer to my chest. I never imagined I’d let that go and make this decision based on what I want out of life (rather than what people expect me to want), and not only what I want at the sunset of life but throughout the sun-shining day, the now. And I guess that’s the foresight that only growing up could have shown me: that what you get at the end isn’t everything. It isn’t even close.

My wish has always been to bestow art upon the world. I never cared overly much what format that art is in, because I love almost every craft and because my hands have discovered from a young age that they can handle most of them with a vengeance. At age six I swore I’d be an artist, at age eighteen an architect, and now an animator for the films I’ve always loved. I’ve tried flute, violin, piano, ballet, drawing, writing, illustrating, painting, Chinese calligraphy, architecture, photography. But because the world requires us to one day stop and choose, I believe with one whole heart that we should use only one criteria to make such a decision. The question is not what I want for the end of my life, but for most of my sweet, long life. And the criteria is love. A measure of true love. What I’ve chosen may not have been my first love but that’s okay because, perhaps, time is what gave it truth. Time gave me these first two decades to try almost everything — and thus enabled me to choose. And I’ve chosen.

Even as I wait to go to Academy of Art University this fall for my MFA in 3D Animation, I face the occasional moment of doubt. Will I regret this and turn back to architecture? What if there’s no money to go back to school, no time? I’m sure that I’ll work as hard at this as I’ve ever worked at anything; what if that’s not enough? But after only a minute of dwelling on my doubts, I think that perhaps the most important decisions must carry some doubt, or else they’re not as important as we’d thought. And into my body floods a wave more certainty than uncertainty that I should move forward.

And forward I will move.

A few years ago, I read an article in The American Scholar that became the subject of heated debate for quite some time. It was entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” by William Deresiewicz, and argued that the Ivy League trains its students to develop an inflated, false sense of self-worth and, as a result, its graduates take an ironically anti-intellectual approach to life: rather than engage in intellectually challenging pursuits, graduates set out on a low-risk, predetermined path toward success.

While my instinct was to adamantly side with the opposition, the more I thought about it, the more Deresiewicz’s non-scientific viewpoint rang of truth. How many Ivy graduates give up on their “true calling” in order to pursue a financially secure career? Who complain more about grade deflation than about not learning enough in class? Most people are afraid of failure, but among a group of people who are more used to success and are statistically capable of earning more, heightened expectations exponentially heighten their fears. Regarding fashion photography, some people have told me that they admire me for “pursuing” what I love. But I’ve never been sure — if my love of architecture were one day to die — whether or not I would just throw myself into such a high-risk passion.

However, there is one thing about my experience these past several months that convinces me, if I were to ever meet a fork in my career path, how such a high risk could be worthwhile. Some of you know that since August I’ve been preparing for and applying to architecture jobs (read: wandering the fields of unemployment) while dabbling more and more in the field of fashion photography. Now that I’ve finally found a full-time architecture job, I plan to continue creating photos, just at a slower pace. The most important thing these months have given me, however, has nothing to do with fashion photography; rather, it was the simple experience of meeting people — a peculiar thing that Princeton in all its power could never offer. If I were to concede to Deresiewicz one disadvantage to graduating from Princeton, it would be that our “orange bubble” deprives many of us of the experience of working with diverse individuals: whether it is our true calling or not, we engage in careers in which those we collaborate with and whose skills we rely on have similar educational and financial backgrounds. What months of dabbling have given me is the experience of true collaboration and respect for a diversity of people I would have never worked with if not for our mutual love of fashion.

Add to the models, makeup artists, hair stylists, and clothing designers the architecture graduates, dreamers, and professionals young and old that I’d met through my job search, and I realize I’ve got a slew of individuals of every imaginable type — who collectively and successfully punched into me some important lessons about the real world.

Contrary to what Deresiewicz thinks, Princeton didn’t make me less of an intellectual. But I can agree that the curriculum does miss a few important lessons. Here’s what Princeton never taught me:

1. People are never on time. Although I never gave a second thought to the straggler who stumbles in with fifteen minutes left in class, I’d always figured that punctuality in the professional world would be held to a higher standard. That’s not exactly right. While I’m not the most punctual person ever, I’ve had an interviewer come into the office two hours late (because he forgot what day it was) and team members for fashion shoots arrive twenty minutes late on average (because they got lost). In the real world, which doesn’t involve students congregating in familiar campus locations every day, I’ve learned to give meticulous directions and to hold a special reserve of praise for those who arrive on time, or — it can’t be true! — arrive early. Being mostly on the receiving end of this behavior has taught me to be timely, because this is the truth: if you are on time, people will be amazed and thankful.

2. Optimism makes you a very likable person. This might seem intuitive, but I did not immediately make this connection before these past several months: your life view actually reflects itself very clearly in others’ first impressions of you. Out of all the people I’ve sat down to meet about job opportunities, the most likable ones were not necessarily the ones that were impressed with my work — rather, they were the ones that had faith in me as well as the future, the economy included. My very worst interviewers — every one of whom were unjustifiably rude and dismissive — surprised me with what they held in common: they were not big CEOs who held themselves above the “little people” but were consistently the owners of small firms that were struggling noticeably with the recession. One interviewer called my Ivy League education “unimportant,” and another started laughing, asking “don’t you want to be asking better questions?” when I requested advice on how to make my early career choices. It’s interesting how a cynical outlook on life coupled with insecurity can breed a nasty attitude toward other people. If this has taught me anything, it’s that nobody is exempt from the downturns of life — and that if and when that bad luck happens, cynicism has a funny way of making it cyclical.

3. Happiness can trip you up. There was one bad interview that was actually my very last, my very worst — and my fault completely. No, it wasn’t my interview with Pelli, the job I start tomorrow (how ironic and unfair if it was?), but a meeting that took place one day after I’d accepted Pelli’s offer. It’d been scheduled and confirmed a month in advance, and I figured that even though I was no longer on the job hunt it would be good to make an additional contact in the field. There were many things I’d assumed and taken for granted in order for this to become a terrible situation, one of which was that I presumed this small company — like all others before it — was not actively hiring and had agreed only to an informational meeting. As a result, jumping with happiness at the prospect of having landed a job, I did no research on said company before arriving — very late, mind you — at a PO’ed interviewer’s doorstep. Everything that followed — glares, incredulity as to what little I knew about the company (read: nothing), the realization that they were hiring, reprimands as if I was a little child needing to be taught common courtesy — was probably excessive. Buuuut I can’t say I didn’t deserved it.

4. Keep your college friends close. This seems like a given, but according to many older people I’ve talked to, the friends you make in college will more likely than not be the best friends of your life. Making friends at the workplace is unreliable: when the going gets tough, people’s self-preservation instincts kick in and they will defend their jobs — sometimes over their friendships with you. No matter how many times you collaborate, the friendship is rarely unadulterated by money and ambition. And if any of you think keeping close to friends was difficult at Princeton, it is much more difficult outside of Princeton. But I think we’ll realize more and more that it is so, so crucial.

5. Finally: life will throw its curveballs, but I am still the batter. Yes, maybe this is cheesy, but I cannot say how many times I’ve been terrified that, because of a bad decision of mine, fate will take over and lead me down an irreversible path. I remember how I turned down great job opportunities during the school year because it was not exactly what I’d wanted: the firm didn’t do work I was interested in, or it wasn’t located in a big city. I decided to pull out of a sketchy position in China that didn’t pay enough. I searched for nonexistent opportunities in San Francisco, and ultimately made the difficult decision to stay in New York. I invested in photography equipment. I built my experience by always working with people who are better than me, who could have laughed (and probably occasionally did) at my inexperience. I always refused to release work that was worse than what had preceded it, leading to a slow growth in my portfolio. I was terrified most of the time at my decisions. But perhaps in the end, making decisions wasn’t the hard part — it was having the patience to see good things come of them.

I have no idea what the future holds, only that I’m thankful that things haven’t turned out all too terribly. I’m employed, have some cool photos in my portfolio, have wonderful friends, and an awesome boyfriend that I will be seeing very soon. So for now I guess I’ll try to be on time, remain optimistic about the future but never take for granted, visit my dear friends as often as possible, and live life outside of the orange bubble exactly how I think I should. I don’t think Deresiewicz can argue with that.

Two years ago in the summer of 2008, while Beijing was in a frenzy over its Olympic games, I found myself in the city to the south: Shanghai. I was at the tail end of what I’d hoped to be an eye-opening architectural tour of developing China. I expected to see the country divided into quaint countryside and modern metropolis — but it was so much more than I’d expected. From the architecturally polarized Hangzhou to the floating Venice-of-Asia village of Suzhou to the towering, silver monster of Shanghai, China was an elastic band. The very pull toward cultural and technological advancement had created a gradient of styles and impressions richer than I’d ever thought — and each band was intensely, vibrantly, frozen in the nation’s architecture.

I remember standing atop the Jin Mao Tower (the menacing-looking building to the left below), thinking vaguely about how my trip was ending and how strange it would be to return to the US until I steadily came to realize what was framing my view: a silver-blue structure with a curious rectangular aperture — the top of another tower across the way. I proceeded to climb into every niche of Jin Mao’s observatory deck to see this building from as many as angles as possible. This neighboring tower, seemingly held up only by the tension between its lines and arcs, overshadowed the Jin Mao for me through sheer elegance. But unfortunately the tower had not opened to the public yet. I’d learn afterward that the structure, the World Financial Center, was set to open only a few days later…

Fast forward to 2010, just a week ago, and I’m sitting in Josh Chaiken’s office, Princeton alum and principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox — and senior designer for the Shanghai World Financial Center. I told him the deep impression that this curious tower made on me two years ago, and in turn he shared an amazing story about its design. Initially, the trapezoidal aperture was proposed as a circular void, a shape that Chinese mythology uses to symbolize the sky, while the square symbolizes the earth. The opening reduced wind pressures by such a large amount that the tower would have never reached its proposed height without it. The design was received well on all fronts. But all it took was for one dissenting voice to spark a fire storm. A journal article accused the Japanese developer, Mori Building Company, of commissioning a structure featuring Japan’s rising sun. Considering the tense relations between Japan and China, a tower then perceived to carry the Japanese national symbol was unacceptable — and there was no small change KPF could adopt to destroy an idea that had already been implanted into the public memory.

KPF changed the circle into a trapezoidal shape, which gracefully responds to both the gently tapering lines and twin arcs in the body. The updated aperture actually ended up being more cost-effective to construct, and served the same purpose in reducing wind loads. The improvisation was necessary, Josh said. “But would I have preferred it?” He thought for a bit. “No. The circle and line created a nice tension that I’d grown attached to. But does it work?” He smiled. “Yes, of course.”

Architecture as art that serves the public will be forever molded by it. Just as I will probably forever remember the view of a silver-blue tower framing the sky from the neighboring Jin Mao, Chinese citizens will remember their city’s Financial Center, thankfully, without negative political associations.

Endearingly compared to an elegant bottle opener and admired for its form and sustainability, it was named “Best Skyscraper of 2008″ by an international council of architects.

I recently applied for an architecture internship to work in New York on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and slated to open in December 2013.

In the process of applying, I found myself doing research on a piece of architecture that has, undeservedly, played the role of “neglected monument” in my life: what the Statue of Liberty is to New Yorkers — “Oh, that landmark that I haven’t actually visited because I could visit whenever I want to” — is as Frank Lloyd Wright’s original Guggenheim is to me. Despite of all the splendor of its famed white spirals, unique circulation, and (now this is unforgivable!) invaluable collection of Impressionist and Modern art, I have only visited once, and only when I was very young.

Since then, I’ve seen the museum only as a dramatic backdrop in films: vaguely in Men In Black and extremely memorably, on several occasions, in The International with Clive Owen (It’s one of those films you see three or four times because its generic cover leads you to swear that you haven’t before). The shooting scene in that movie, in which bullets graze and pepper and gouge the museum’s precious walls, actually takes place in a life-size replica. Whew.

In any case, the Guggenheim was not covered specifically in most of my architecture classes, and what education I received of it was in passing. Relearning the history of Wright’s masterwork reiterated, as inspirational achievements often do, how the most innovative works that hope to achieve ultimate importance will inevitably greet controversy. Upon the design’s unveiling, critics complained that the unique architecture overshadowed the art, distracting visitors. The combined spiral circulation and exhibition space also provided curved walls on which paintings hung uncomfortably, and also forced sculptures to stand in the middle of walkways. Before the museum opened, twenty-one artists had already signed a petition protesting the display of their work in Wright’s space.

The Guggenheim building, which underwent a meticulous restoration process in 2005, is now lauded as “the most important piece of art in the collection.” It completely transformed museum design, rethinking the circulatory experience and exhibition organization, opening doors to modern design.

But how frightening it must have been for one’s master work — for Wright, the design itself had been 15 years in the making — to greet heated disapproval (like how many before and after it? The Eiffel Tower? The Vietnam Memorial?). And how difficult it is to have faith that it’s change that they hate, not the art. I think all those who love to create will have to keep this within a balanced mindset, including myself, and find a little faith through history.

I will depart a little from the usual entry tonight, because there is something that I need to write down. Yes, it is, however much of a stretch, relevant to architecture — but more so to current circumstances than the idea of architecture. In essence, this is how a little-known tidbit from my past oddly resonates with my current situation.

After interviewing with several prominent individuals from respected architecture firms, I’ve noticed a common theme. While interviewers possess varying degrees of honesty and optimism (the proportions of which influence one another, of course), the overall impression I’m left with is one of cynicism. The signs range from the subtle to the obvious, from current, prolonged “no hiring” statuses and assurances of future opportunities to offhanded remarks (“Why did I start the company, you ask? For all the wrong reasons.”) and tone (When I suggested that the job market may be improving, a design principal asked, “Really?”). As most architects know, the general lack of architectural opportunities — although there are, of course, exceptions — fosters an unfortunately but understandably grim outlook.

As I draft application after application and carry through endless strings of follow ups, I find myself wondering whether I’m trying hard enough. Compared to many others, I do not seem to have been unemployed for very long, but as an individual so accustomed to (Quickly! With haste!) moving on to the next achievement, I find myself feeling sorrowfully insecure at moments. How long should I try before lowering my standards for the jobs I apply for? Sometimes, especially when looking at the whirlwind process that was college applications, I get the impression that the best things that have happened to me — like getting into Princeton — have been mostly based on luck. What in my life can serve as a reference to show me how hard I have to work before I reach a goal?

And then, in a second, my mind fluttered to a time in my past that I rarely think about now. I was a different person with different concerns then: in particular, I was kind of socially crippled. This is news to people I know now — I’d been described by various people as a “talented conversationalist” and someone who is “never not social.” I remember the painfully shy, utterly hapless girl that I was, and I realize that my teen self would be utterly unrecognizable to (almost) everyone I know now.

Instead of thinking about excelling in school or applying to college, the teenage me constantly felt like I was misstepping my social bounds and worried obsessively about social graces — tearfully balking every day at my failure to understand them. How long should I hold someone’s eye contact? As silly as it sounds: how do I hold a conversation? I didn’t know what responses deviated too much from what someone else said, similar to how I didn’t know when to start or stop talking. Somehow my teenage self had regressed from my younger self — or maybe I never actually learned these skills and simply lost confidence, thus exacerbating an existing problem. In any case, I was crippled, dragging myself every step of the path of self-teaching social rules that everyone else seemed to know intuitively. And because I was simultaneously hyper self-conscious, it was like pulling myself painfully up a mountain, mere inches at a time.

However, back then, I didn’t see it as a learning process. I simply no longer wanted to be in pain. I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, without feeling the need to plan my words before they came — stumbling, unnatural — out of my mouth. The process that I wasn’t really aware of until now, until I look at everything in hindsight, lasted at least six uncomfortable years.

But I must have steadily learned. Because today — like slowly coming to grips with reality from a smoky, hazy dream — I realize I’ve changed. I have new worries that seem more important, like job prospects and family issues and love. But my past worries are just as important, if only because they remind me of one thing: no matter how long I feel my current journey is, however unjustifiably hard I feel like I am working with my goals seemingly out of sight, it probably cannot compare to the agonizing six years it took to overcome a very personal problem. Even if the process does last as long, I have the comfort of knowing intimately the progress I’m capable of making.

Actively teaching myself how to act normal in a social environment and practicing enough until it became second nature is one experience that serves as proof for myself, however unorthodox, that backbreaking work at one point in my life produced results I am grateful for, and that persistence — ah, stubbornness in the fight — is in the end good. As we all learn best from our own experiences, I’m glad I have at least one to sustain me in the moments when I need encouragement, and to remind me that circumstances, like a tough job market, sometimes only prolong an ultimately successful fight — even if the particular experience, far from a shining medallion around one’s neck, needs a little dusting off to be noticed.

Mash Creative has released a collection of merchandise and apparel, dubbed S/O/T/O (State of the Obvious), with a cleverly designed identity that pokes fun at consumers’ love of name brands as status symbols. Funnily enough, most consumers would buy this as another type of status symbol — an intellectual status symbol that says, “I’m smarter than your average consumer.”

In the end, even if S/O/T/O is probably guilty of exactly what they’re parodying — even seeking, perhaps, to be one of “those” name brands for the bucks — I admire the artistry in the identity itself. The kerning and leading is meticulously done, as should any type-based identity, and the use of the colon is an added spritz of cleverness that required a second pass to notice.

Its tongue-in-cheek “State of the Obvious” blurbs appropriately reinforce its name (obvious, obvious, obvious) into the consumer’s memory. They ring of Vitamin Water’s wildly (and perhaps undeservedly so) successful packaging that was brought to another level by its colloquial, witty blurbs; S/O/T/O’s identity similarly targets the thinking, fashion-conscious population.

All that aside, as I was an avid Vitamin Water faithful for years, I also really want one of these mugs. It’s just hard to turn away from good design. Let’s go shopping?

I recently read an article about the controversial Park51 to be built near Ground Zero — which was interesting because it was written from an architect’s point of view. Although an official architect has not yet been appointed to the project, international firm SOMA drew up and released renderings of the design last week.

In his article, Hill states that while the political and cultural community has riled up a storm — often over charged terms such as “Ground Zero” and its formal association with the mosque — the architects have succeeded in producing a design that helps to neutralize religious associations by including a diversity of religious symbols rather than only Islamic symbols in its criss-crossing latticework.

While I agree that the design could be interpreted as a pacifistic position that may ameliorate public ire, from an architectural standpoint the facade does not hold any position at all, either partisan or neutral. Rather, the facade containing various religious associations appropriately reflects what the structure contains inside: only two basement floors dedicated to Muslim prayer and thirteen stories dedicated to secular, multi-faith use. These spaces include a sports and fitness centre, restaurant and exhibition space, a playground and childcare area, and even a memorial on the 12th floor dedicated to those who died in the 9/11 attacks.

For a structure 7/8th of which contains non-religious program, the architecture presents a face that is secular at first glance. In a second pass, one may see Islamic inspirations in the overall visual treatment of the structure, which dedicates the other 1/8 of its space to that single religion. Upon even closer inspection, one may see symbols of other faiths entangled in the latticework — the Jewish Star of David among them — further reflecting the structure’s original purpose as a multi-faith community center.

My point is that the architecture is just doing its job. While users might ultimately perceive a design a certain way, or the architects themselves might hold a certain position, regardless of anyone’s intention good architecture produces an end result that is, by itself, apolitical. It fulfills programmatic requirements (in this case, the design even does a beautiful job of reflecting program by showing the variable amounts of light required in interior spaces). It satisfies the client. It houses and serves its users. Any political positions — even willfully neutral ones — are an interpretation rather than a goal. To me, SOMA’s drawings give me faith that architecture can stand on its own, outside of political controversy.

As for a designer’s individual expression, I don’t think that architecture as a service and the architect’s politics must overlap in order for a work to be expressive. Unlike graphic design and the fine arts, the requirement of architecture to serve rather than entertain or influence the user eliminates the responsibility to assert independent political ends. Thus, the SOMA rendering, while apparently pacifistic, should not necessarily be presumed to reflect the architectural team’s attempt to neutralize a politically charged issue.

More likely, the architects are doing their job and, in this case, they’re doing it well.

When I saw the Seashore Shell House built by Takeshi Hirobe Architects on Design Milk, its seaside setting and building materials reminded me vividly of a unique piece of architecture I had seen while on my trip in Portugal: Casa de Chá, or “Teahouse.”

At first glance, the two don’t share many qualities other than their ocean side location. The former is a residence while the latter is a teahouse restaurant. The former looks like it’s clad in metal — like an armory, it’s defensive, shrinking from the viewer, rolling into a ball — while the teahouse — floating above the rocks in the sort of airy wood our childhood homes were made of — is the epitome of comfort and welcome.

But take a look inside of the Seashore Shell House:

On the other side of its convex exterior is a concave U that hugs the ocean. It is literally as if one is opening one’s family — its turmoil, successes, and secrets — and revealing it to the great vastness of the ocean. It is a gesture of generosity toward both a family that gains privacy from facing a quiet, accepting sea and toward the viewer who better accepts this structure made visibly of soft, durable wood.

Looking at the curved side of Seashore Shell House brings a rush of nostalgia similar to the one I got beholding the quaint teahouse perched above sea-worn boulders. And, strangely enough, I think their building material had everything to do with it.

What is our fascination with wood? In spite of its difficulties as a building material due to its reaction to water as well as environmental implications, wood has offered psychological benefits for a long time. Roy Mantarri says that, because wood reaffirms the connection between our buildings and nature, it evokes feelings of security. Soft to the touch, it is welcome in the home. And, being a good light-weight insulator, it creates thinner walls, lending structures a pleasantly light rather than an intimidatingly cold and monolithic appearance.

Perhaps the reason why these two structures brought out nostalgic feelings of accumulated beach-side memories was less because of the view, and more because I want to be wrapped in its insulating wooden walls. After all, it was only after viewing the Shell House’s warm curve that I even thought of the Teahouse. Especially beside the occasionally tumultuous sea, a den perched above the tides that dulls the sounds of the storm may be our secret ideal when imagining residential architecture.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a call for entries for a competition sponsored by OpenHAUS Exhibitions and DARCH prompting entrants to design an “Advertisement for Architecture.” Contrary to what you may think, it’s not a poster for a firm, or a movement, or even a type of architecture. It sells the very idea of architecture.

In a more socially pertinent sense, the winning contest entry justifies to a financially concerned public that the design of structures still matters in an age when few people seem willing to pay for it. At its best, it is a visual manifesto. At its worst, it is a plea against the death of architecture as a necessary part of our everyday lives.

Especially now that I am job hunting, I see every day a profession that seems perpetually cynical, read forums about how unemployed architects scramble hopelessly for a small handful of jobs. This topic hits particularly close to home — and because of this, I feel galvanized to action. Why not defend my chosen career with what skills are available to me — even if the end result is much less than a blip on the public and economic radar?

It is something that I want to do well. So if some brilliant idea develops in this next week, I’ll be trying my hand at OpenHaus’s competition. You never know with these things, though. You either make no difference at all, or you’re the hero that saves architecture.

Or something like that (;

This prototype floorlamp, named ‘Colour’ by Norwegian designers Daniel Rybakken and Andreas Engesvik (photo by Kalle Sanne), allows users to arrange monochromatic glass panels in order to create different light compositions.

While the ease of handling (not to mention changing) the pieces of the lamp is questionable, I love an appliance that is art at its essence. It really cannot exist without an active effort toward creativity; thus, you have this interesting metaphor that one cannot function practically without constantly creating. Go further, and you have no light in the world without the pursuit of creation. Call me sentimental, but it’s a nice concept.

This lamp also brought to mind some of the greatest works of contemporary architecture that mold light. Light is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, tool available to architects — for if a caveman, without any other materials but nature as it is, had found a way to bend palm tree leaves (still growing) so that he received just the right amount of light and warmth day to day — and composed this light in a thoughtful way — I would probably call him quite a good architect.

The lamp makes me think of the effusive, spiritual power of light as it filters through works like Steven Holl’s Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle and Tadao Ando’s Church of Light in Osaka. The meeting, layering, overlap, and interaction between the material and immaterial create something much more than the sum of its parts. I feel like more architecture should pay attention to the visual and tactile benefits of light — not just as a tool for solar power and vision but of pleasure, delight, and very much of beauty.