Killing Your Darlings and Learning to Let Go

 

As a designer in any field, it is natural that we get attached to our work, pouring our heart and soul into our creation and forming a deep bond and understanding for our work that no one outside the creation process will ever truly match. Yet, as the process continues, we are forced to relinquish control of our design. First, in small ways, bringing on others to develop or draw it, then perhaps handing it over to engineers or construction workers, and finally, releasing it to the client or the public. How can we ensure our precious design is safe? That the vision is being maintained? That it is being used and appreciated correctly? In short, we can’t. And this is a lesson many designers and architects, including myself, deeply struggle with. You want me to give up control?! Willingly?! Absolutely not!! 

Nevertheless, this moment of relinquishment will come and we must be ready. In some sense, it’s akin to being a parent - allowing your child to develop and evolve into their own person, trusting in the knowledge that you have raised (or in this case, designed) them to succeed and flourish. Your design provides the foundation (pun intended) for users to make the space their own and inhabit it as they choose. You don’t make them sign contracts promising they will never change it. You embrace their changes, use them to learn and improve your future designs by seeing how it met their needs and where it could have done better.

Our job as the architect is to create something functional and beautiful that meets the needs of future users, no small feat without a crystal ball, then step back and allow them to take over. If we do our jobs well, they make few changes, or perhaps you’ve created an adaptable space that fosters change and development. No matter the case, you have a death of the author, you are no longer the sole shaper of reality and, as hard as that is, it’s also quite beautiful. Architecture is one of the more permanent forms of design. Being able to shape something so solid and timeless is an expression of hope that should not be undervalued.

Lefebvre states that “for an individual, for a group, to inhabit is to appropriate something. Not in the sense of possessing it, but as making it an oeuvre, making it one’s own, marking it, modeling it, shaping it.” Giancarlo de Carlo similarly notes that “architecture is too important to be left to just architects…therefore all boundaries between the builder and user must be abolished.” I think these two quotes perfectly encapsulate the conflict between the control of the architect and agency of the user, the importance of the exchange, and the hope it embodies. We design for others, for the future, and that ensures our designs do not stagnate and sit as a monument to the past, but grow, evolve, and flourish into the future.