LIFE-WIDE & LIFE-LONG LEARNING

One of my favorite aspects of the profession of architecture is that we are, in a very real sense, method actors. We get to fully immerse ourselves into a plethora of different roles and fields and places and ways of thinking. This is a necessity for being able to understand the client and the criteria of their needs. In order to design a dance school, you have to understand dance. For a moment, you have to become a dancer to understand their needs fully. In this way every project can become a personal one, a passionate one because you put on the different hat, a new one every time, changing what you must know. This is the more vocational reason but beyond that there is a practical one. Life-wide and Life-long learning revolves around having a variety of knowledge at your disposal with the pretense that you never really know what skill of fact will be of critical use once you are working in the profession. Because architecture and furthermore, the design profession is so vast in its applications, knowing a little bit about everything is the best you can do because who knows what will be relevant or obsolete in the coming years. Knowing that what it means to be an architect, and designer will change with technology and needs, gives motivation to making ourselves utility players, able to do anything because you know a little of everything.