Pete's 1701 Blog For The Ages

Most people have received many different versions of this question throughout their schooling, job searching, and other areas of life. The answer to the question, what makes you who you are, is varied from person to person but in many cases there are some consistencies throughout the answers. Most people describe factors related to their families or there childhood, their earlier schooling or their best friends.

In my life i would consider these factors, like everyone else to play a very important role, but what else is there? Is your life not being shaped or effected constantly? Who I am or what I think seems to change from year to year. Most people seem to refer only to their beginnings as creating who they are, but is that really fair? I argue that you are constantly being effected by the things and people around you and that you never stop changing.

Because of this, many people have a hard time trying to pinpoint a few let alone one factor that has influenced their lives in the previous five years. For me this is not difficult. The built environment as it relates to architecture has been a driving force in shaping the last five if not seven or eight years of my life. I have had something to do with art ever since someone put a pencil in my hand. I started with cartooning, moved towards real life drawing and painting, and from there expanded into everything from photography to ceramics to drafting. There are very few forms of art that I am not interested in trying or learning about. As my art oriented mind began to mature I began to notice the things around me, form nature to high rise buildings I began to wonder why they were there? What caused them to be there? What was the reason behind how they were created? These and many other questions led me into pursuing every aspect of architecture that I could get my hands on.

The built environment has not only shaped my past but continues to shape my future as my wanting for knowledge grows as I continue to learn more. In a way it seems to almost be an attempt to define who I am through the type, area of, and ideas I hold on architecture. Although there is no way for me to completely define this with such little knowledge of both architecture and myself, here is where I am right now using some of the main topics covered so far in 1701...

Physical Phenomenon

This is to represent the way I am able to learn the best and why I love art and architecture. Although it is not something easily defined it is something you can grasp and mold to reflect your ideas and thoughts.

Framework

Architecture and the built environment can be used as a framework for small amounts of people to affect large groups of people in need of help.

Clockwork

The built environment can be defined as the inner workings of a society. The thing that allows the city and those in it to exist and create.

Opposition

Architecture as a way to push limits of where and how people can live and exist. Ways of change through ideas that make the impossible possible.

Although this is only a beginning who I am through architecture it is a start, something to build off of, it is much like my architectural schooling to this point and the 1701 class...