I FREAKING LIKE BLUE.

It’s a common joke during your high school English class. You read a passage about the character “pushing back a blue curtain” and the teacher asks you why the curtain is blue. “The author likes blue” is not the correct answer in your teacher’s eyes – even if the author only picked it because they freaking like the color blue. No, your teacher wants to hear that the character and thereby the author has pushed past the sad moment of their life and is now seeing the world clearly. That the blue is symbolic of the tears they cried, or the ocean they met their first love on, or [insert bullshit here]. Everything in a Lit class is over-analyzed, and the field of architecture is just the same.

An architect that says “I just wanted X” is chastised. “What is the connection to the culture?” “How does this inform the site?” Questions like these are asked of every decision you make, because in our over-analyzing minds every decision came from a bloody essay worth of critical thinking. Buildings must be custom made to fit on the site, angles on the building need some relation back to the city, even the materials need to conform to the surroundings. “I like X” is not a valid reason for anything we do.

This approach seems harmful to me. Many times, we visualize what we want the building to be when we first hear about the project. Only after we visualize our perfect design do we actually look at the site/context/etc… forcing us to bullshit essays for something that should simply be accepted as “I freaking like blue.” It seems that designing with afterthought is for the architectural critics, but designing with intention is for the people who inhabit the building. People who will see the color and not the essay.

New Architecture: