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At high school I was not a particularly enthusiastic student. One problem with high school for me was its pride in its science department and the prevailing nationwide push to get more girls into science. I love the English and other languages, but since I was capable of doing well in the sciences, I was strongly "encouraged" to enter medicine or engineering or some other science. Even my language teachers expected me to enter a science-related field. I was not against science in principle, in fact I loved it, but I also loved languages and the humanities, and I felt that it was wrong to ignore that love just because society now believed that science was the best option, especially for girls.
Well, during my Arts degree I came no closer to figuring out a career path. I seriously considered geology (palaeontology), writing, marine zoology (particularly cetology, the study of whales and dolphins) and the Diplomatic Corps. In summer holidays I went to Japan for two months, and then to Germany for two months on a scholarship. But by the end of my degree, I still hadn’t figured out what to do! I took the easy way out and got an English teaching job in Japan, to give myself extra time and money to think. While in Japan, I realised that wherever I travelled, I came back with the same photo subject: bridges and buildings. Quite accidentally, through travel, I discovered a deep love for architecture and structural designs. I married someone I met in Japan, and got a great job in New York as an editor with a children’s science magazine. However, soon I secured a new position at an architectural firm, where I hoped to get a good inside look at the profession before I applied to the architecture graduate programs. I did enjoy my job there very much, and learned a great deal there. I wrote reports on architectural, building and urban planning trends in New York and the U.S.. However, I also discovered that architecture was not really what I had thought it was, namely, a perfect blend of arts and science. Where else, I had thought, could one find a job that required knowledge of aesthetics, history, geography, physics, urban planning, sociology, materials science, and more? In reality, I found that in the U.S. at least (I have been told that European schools encourage more integration between architecture and engineering), architects, builders and engineers have grown further apart as they became more specialised. Architects are taught to be the artists and engineers are taught the physics, and they wrangle about the importance of their own fields. This is a pity, because a beautiful building fails if it does not stand up, while an ugly but safe building is demoralising to live or work in. Providing a spiritually acceptable living or working space, and a sensible design that makes good use of space, are both equally valid functions of a building. Go To Page: 1 2 |
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