Three Questions to Find Your 'Why'
As an architectural designer, your mission is to create environments that foster highest function, beauty, and meaning — all while striving to meet and exceed expectations involving project deadlines, review boards, emerging technology trends, and even budget requirements. With all of these demands pulling back on a project's overarching grand vision, it becomes easy for architects to lose sight of designing for the highest purpose their buildings can serve.
Over the years, many architects have written to me — sharing how they have lost their "why". After all, knowing why you became an architect, and designing to meet that dream is important: not only for your overall career success, but also for your overarching happiness as an architect. Ask yourself: How do I find meaning in the projects I create? How can my building designs leverage my fullest potentiality as an environmental designer? And what is the highest purpose of architecture?
By answering the latter three questions, you renew your sense of purpose, and begin to discover your superpower as an architect.
Using Happiness to Design Masterworks
Finding inspiration, passion, and alignment in the work you do is important. These "North Stars" help you to uncover why you design architecture, and they help you to uncover your own unique design strengths. These strengths can be related to innate talent and/or years of skill-building mastery. Yet, you must ask: How can I use my unique strengths as a designer to create architecture that reaches its highest purpose? And how can I grow in my own self-mastery to create architecture that transcends into poetic realms that touch the soul?
When designing, you are either creating a building, an architecture, or a masterpiece. Again, to actualize the highest level in a masterwork, it is imperative that you know your "why". When you align your own purpose as an architect with your unique strengths, inspirations, passions, and curiosities, you will be positioned to design environments at your highest potentiality — and this is critical to growing your happiness and fulfillment as an architect over the lifespan of your career.
In this light, your "why" becomes your superpower.
Image Credit: © HomePlansIndia | Pixabay
