When I first saw this blog prompt I felt completely over whelmed. I just kept thinking how in the hell am I suppose to describe myself through frameworks and clockworks. I do see how frameworks, clockworks, phenomena, and oppositions are used to describe and help explain the world, but to describe me. I find it hard enough to accurately describe myself through means designed to aid in such work; in fact I often flat out try to avoid having to describe myself. I do what to make clear that I am not talking about expressing myself; if I was there could be some major problems for me as a designer. I find it very hard to think of how frameworks, clockworks, phenomena, and oppositions describe someone. They might be able to describe whoever designed or built the framework or clockwork, but I think that they really just hint at some think rather than describe a part of someone. The ones of us that don’t have any part in the design really are somewhat forced then to contend with it.
As I though more deeply about the prompt how the built environment supports or detracts who you are. As you might guess from my above rant I sided with the built environment detracting from who I am because I am forced to deal with what is built I get little if any say about how it will affect me. This I have to say made me rather depressed to think that as an architect I will be designing things that may express what I and the client what, but everyone else is just going to be limited by it. I kind of thought I might as well become a dictator somewhere and have full control, you go big or you go home.
I then began to think of how people are in a part described by where they are from, are, are going to, and that those places are described by what is built there in large part.
To quickly test this I went to Google images and searched a variety of places, and I got images of the built environment.
Search New York
Search Las Vegas
We use the built environment to describe a place and we use places to help describe us.
This thought made me feel better about being an architect, designing memorable buildings to help them describe a place. I realized that in reality that both of these are true, and thus I have stumbled into some sort of opposition of using the built environment to describe ourselves. The limitations of the built environment are many but every day we make decisions of how to use it to our advantage including how we describe ourselves. It describes us as a species that we choose the built environment over the natural one.
