Design is where science and art break even.
—Mieke Gerritzen
Be it a high-rise office building, a cathedral or mosque, a Cape Cod bungalow, a museum, or a theme park—any modern building, in fact—an architect is instrumental in the process of its creation. And that’s how we usually think of architects: as people who design buildings.
It’s a handy, utilitarian description or definition. Of course there are different kinds of architects who design a variety of things, not all of them buildings. And architects’ skills are useful and transferable to other areas, including graphic design, product design, or game design.
So what do architects really do? And why is your Inner Architect as instrumental in the process of creating your desired outcomes as an actual architect is in the process of creating a building?
Architect Doug Patt has a You Tube channel (How to Architect) that includes a series of short and engaging videos under the heading “So You Want to Be an Architect.” In the first video, he says that from the design perspective, an architect is someone who:
- is responsible for inventing or realizing a particular idea or project
- designs buildings and in many cases supervises their construction
- translates a user’s requirements into a built environment
In short, I would say an architect invents and designs the necessary architecture to translate desire into reality.
What Is Architecture?
One definition of architecture, and the one that applies most broadly, is the structure or design of anything.
The architecture of the physical/material world is relatively easy to spot. In addition to the architecture of the brain, you can find architecture in an individual tree or in a garden, in the constellations in the night sky, in computer hardware or the engine of a car, and in the urban infrastructure of streets, electricity, water, and other utilities.
But there is also plenty of architecture in the non-physical/non-material world—in systems, for example, such as government, education, or transportation. A family tree has no less architecture than a tree growing in a forest. An architecture supports our mental models and our personal operating systems.
And there’s an underlying architecture to a movie or a novel, as well as to the stories your Inner Narrator is telling about you.
In a very real way, we’re not only surrounded by architecture, we’re also part of numerous different architectural systems. If we want to create a specific result within an existing architecture, we’re more likely to be successful if we understand that architecture. And if we want to create something new, especially something sustainable, we must give attention to creating a structure that will be enduring.
Dialogue and Intersection
Architect William Conklin remarked that architecture is:
a dialogue between the future and the past, the new and the old.
And Ulrich Franzen said:
Architecture is the coming together of an idea and reality. The exciting thing is where that intersection occurs.
That intersection is where your Inner Architect takes center stage in the process of translating desire into reality. Your Inner Architect is at the heart of transformational change. It is the pathfinder who can map the space between where you are (your status quo) and where you want to be (your desired outcome), create the plan to get you there, and maintain focus and direction.
In a TEDGlobal presentation in London, Ole Scheeren said:
I believe that architecture exceeds the domain of physical matter, of the built environment, but is really about how we want to live our lives, how we script our own stories and those of others.
All architects need to master the same basic skills, but not all architects design the same kinds of things. Your Inner Architect must have the skills and characteristics to take you where you want to go. Just as if you were commissioning someone to design a building, in order to get the very best work out of your Inner Architect you have to begin by identifying your juicy desired outcomes.