I’ve been having an ongoing existential crisis lately, which I suspect is a fairly common occurrence in 19-year-olds and young adults in general. I know it was just wishful thinking when, just a year ago, I thought that going to college would clear up my uncertainty on what I wanted to do with my life. As if I would be suddenly enlightened. However, I feel like it just complicated matters, with the addition of money and time (or lack thereof).
It doesn’t quite help that I’m fearful of committing to do one thing my entire adult life. I have heard that most adults nowadays have more than one career, and that architecture majors go off and do all sorts of things not necessarily directly related to architecture which is reassuring. The suspense is terrifying me though, part of me just wants to know that I’ll be content with my career(s) and know whether or not I’ll be in debt for the rest of my life, ya know. I hope these long hours in the studio will be worth it in some way. I’m also terrified of dying young, not living long enough to live up to my full potential, and the fact cancer seems to run in my family at least on my paternal side. Yeah there’s a lot to unpack there in my mind but I’m not gonna dive too deep right now.
Nowadays my uncertainty has moved on to not just worrying about my own future but the future of the world. Which I figure is the next logical step, though not necessarily an enjoyable one. I had always been aware of problems greater than my own (the mess of politics, global warming, etc.) however it always appeared those were the problems meant for adults to figure out. But now I’m an adult, technically. And I sure as heck don’t know what to do.
The main problems that are on my mind include global warming caused by humans and the unethical sides of architecture. This is just a thought dump to help get it off my mind so I apologize for anything misinformed or not expanded on enough :T
A week or so ago I read an article about married couples who do not intend on having any biological children as an effort to slow down overpopulation, decrease their impact on global warming, and are afraid of the world they may bring their children into (which is totally valid, and there are plenty of children up for adoption anyhow). But for some reason it really sunk in with me this time, thinking about how humans are destroying themselves and the planet, and how we’re past the point of ‘reversing’ what we’ve done. It goes back to me being younger and just kind of assuming that global warming would become a solved issue as I would grow up. When you’re younger, adults seem to be able to do anything but they kind of just pass the problems they couldn’t solve down to the rest of us (and hopefully they raise us and equip us with the skills that will help us solve the problem, but I guess we’ll see).
Another, more recent thing, is about the unethical side of architecture. At the core, architects design a structure to control/influence people. That sounds really sinister but like an open floor plan influences people to spend more time with one another and maybe inspire someone to hold a dinner party, that kind of thing. There are plenty of cool design concepts that influence the occupants in an interesting and not-sinister way. Then my mind kind of spiraled into the designers of prisons or detention facilities. Like how do you determine the ethical size of a holding cell? What about solitary confinement? In what ways can architecture serve as a punishment? I found an interesting interview conducted in 2018 by PBS NewsHour regarding the ethics of designing prisons, which is especially important as the amount of prisoners increase (which is another issue, of course). I’ll probably look more into this subject.
In the same vein, the workers who build and construct the architecture are often treated unjustly and are a footnote in the design, not considered until the end. Also architecture can assist in the gentrification of a place, and remind me again why we are making a $200 million dollar design if there’s homeless people and we could’ve used that money to make affordable housing? There’s just too much to think about. Here I am just screwing around with models on my desk and there’s this weight of decades of bad practice looming over me.
But yeah I don’t really have any answers or solutions so I have to bring this ramble to an unsatisfying close.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your own existential crisis thoughts below or with me on instagram (@ elclapp) and whatnot.
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