I'm gazing out into the room, taking in every detail I possibly can about the building encasing me. Stained glass, ribbed vault and pointed arches; this is definitely Gothic architecture. I think about how I know that. I love how I know that. I love how much passion I have toward architecture and everything that it encompasses.
Everyone has a certain acknowledgment for their surroundings, but I think what sets me apart is how much I care about how my surroundings came to be. What could just be a room to someone else is an expression of one's art to me, and it's almost as if it is my job to piece together why they made the decisions they did. Was it because of the standards of idealized architecture of the time? Or was it just because the artists themselves wanted to bring their own views of beauty to life?
If you are obsessed with architectural features and decisions, walking into any space that was designed is an intellectual journey for you. It's taking in every feature and analyzing it as a whole, imagining how exactly this building was built and what the floor plans looked like before it came to life. It's collecting keychains from every architectural monument you visit and filling up your keys with little memories from your favorite structural artworks. It's capturing how you're feeling at that moment by photographing it from different angles and perspectives, all in the hopes of maybe, one day, being able to recreate the work but with your own personalized touch.
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized," Daniel H. Burnham once said.
Burnham was an architect — the very one who designed the extravaganza that was the Chicago Fair. He was one of the visionaries behind bringing the city of Chicago as we know it today to life, with its skyscrapers of impossible heights. This very ideal is prominently displayed throughout his decisions in designing the fair, as well as every other architect's decisions in creating a framework to something that they can bring to life. It's an ideal that we all should strive for, whether we are involved in the world of architecture or are not.
If you're an architecture lover like me, you know how beautiful it is to be surrounded in a place where someone put time and love into the creation of it. You also know how much effort it takes to be someone who is capable of bringing floor plans to reality. To all of the architecture lovers out there like myself, I hope we can one day inspire others in the same way.
