What is More Important

    When you are walking down the street or surfing the net in search of inspiration do you look at exteriors of a building or how that building is laid out.  What is more important to people?  The way a building looks or the way it works for the people using it.  A building could be the most beautiful building on the exterior but could be an absolute disaster on the interior.  A building could have the best setup in terms of plan, but be the ugliest piece of shit ever designed.  Which one would you prefer?

    Should we design for the eyes, which help us determine so much in our life, or design for our feet, which help carry us to the things we see?  How much must these things be in balance?  And how much of this balance is determined by our own bias?  If our bias is so different from the bias of others, should we even care about what the design looks like?  Why?  Why ask so many questions within this blog when I could just make statements instead?

    These questions go through my mind and probably others when they are designing a project either in school or in the office.  We ask a lot of these questions on a daily basis when we are choosing things within our daily life.  An example would be food.  I am sure we have all ordered something and when it arrived in front of us we looked at it and asked ourselves, wtf is this?  Sometimes that disgusting presentation tasted amazing and other times it met our expectations.  The same can be said for Architecture.  Sometimes pieces on a building that are meant to be used for Sustainability look absolutely ridiculous and other times they make the building look amazing.  And some buildings that have amazing exteriors might be an absolute shitshow on the interior.  There might be walls or details that are unfinished or do not make sense no matter how much you look and learn about the building.  This makes you wonder, was that action of sustainability even worth it if the interior sucks and makes a person not even want to interact with the building.

    A piece of Architecture should be more than just the exterior or interior or plans or sections.  It should also include details, connections, space, light, darkness, and much more.  Someone will have to be in that building and it might be the exterior that a person sees first, but it will be the interior that a person interacts with.  This is not to say that it does not matter what the exterior looks like.  I meant that when designing an exterior, do not forget how it will impact the interior.