Personal Design Style

As an architecture student, my own personal design style is constantly developing.  I really don’t feel as though I even know what my style is. Our ideas about design and our design tendencies are influenced by our experiences with the world around us. Every field study, lecture, and studio project I have ever encountered has, in one or another, shaped my design ability. I do not believe that design style is something that ever stops changing. The development of an architect’s design style is similar to human development, as infants and young children learn and grow exponentially in comparison to adults. The same is true of architecture students and experienced architects.

Even as a third year student, I am still discovering my own design style. Not only is it still rapidly developing, but I don’t even know my creativity well enough to completely understand what my style is yet. Even though this may be my first time really attempting to dissect and analyze my design style, I feel that if I had done this before, my previous design style would be unrecognizably different. Perhaps one day, my early designs will hold small clues and gestures that appear as fledgling creative trademarks, but for now, I feel as though all of my studio projects have been very different from each other. Comparing them side by side may indicate a similar simplicity or character, but this may just be exemplifying my lack of knowledge and design experience. After all, the finished products of my designs are not exactly what I would describe as perfections of the extents of my knowledge at that time.

Having said all this, I think that if anything can be said for my design style at this point in my life, I think it would be that I tend to approach design with a complex design-thinking. When I am giving 100% to the design, I prefer to spend a lot of time in the design phase of the project. I take a lot of care in the movement, concept, and experience of space. As an interruption, an example of just how fresh these thoughts are in my mind, I suddenly realized in writing that last sentence that my favorite designs have been those that create unique sensory experiences. Here are two that come to mind: a visitor center for the Rocky Mountain National Park wrapped with a screen of tubes that interact with the wind to create a buzzing sound, in order to hear the wind; and a design for a church in which the interior space is sculpted to carry the sound from inside the church to the outside of the building.

I realize this is a characteristic for my design concepts, and not really for the visual appearance of my designs, but this is reflective of the current level of my designing skill in that I struggle coming up with what the building should look like. I normally focus on the experiences of the building and become frustrated when trying to figure out what I want it to look like. As I said before, my design skills are still developing, and this may be something I’ll discover as I improve my designing skills.