Architecture Family
I’m realizing, more now than ever before, how small the architecture community is. How interconnected. How closed. How similar we are to family. This past week, especially, has highlighted this in two ways.
The first, the most important, the one that assures me that everything will be okay despite it all, relates to the death of my classmate. His loss, in so many ways, felt like a loss to the entire architecture community. We loss one of our own. So it was fitting, moving even, that those in Austin who knew him best chose to remember him in, of all places, the courtyard of the architecture school. Goldsmith, the only true oasis in the vastness of the university.
What encourages me is how the school came together. It reminded me of just how important these people are in my life. All the time we spend together, through the long nights, through the frustrations and breakthroughs, pursuing a craft that we love. It is what binds us together. By choosing architecture, we inherently stepped away from the stability, the pay, the consistency that so many others chose. On a daily basis, I spend my time with people who share the same passion that I have. It is inevitable that we should form such close bonds.
In a separate sense, the architecture community is surprisingly small. Just yesterday, as I joined a friend for drinks, I unexpectedly ran into a classmate who I did not know was in Copenhagen. When his colleague stopped by, we discovered a common friend from Lausanne. Furthermore, his roommates happened to be friends, and fellow Belgians, with my coworker.
I’m not sure if this is particular to Copenhagen, where I am constantly running into people I know, but I do feel that architects seem to find each other. There are so few of us that it is not long before you are just a couple degrees removed from all architects in the city. The smallness of the community sometimes feels like we all share this enlightening secret. In truth, this also bothers me from time to time. But at this very moment, it makes me feel alive, inspired, optimistic.
