I have very much appreciated Mark’s comments questioning how I can incorporate my own personal form of artistic expression into my designs, many of which have strict, exact guidelines. During the first few assignments, it appeared that you were doing something wrong if your design did not turn out exactly the same as your fellow students. However, as we have transitioned into creating more personalized drafts, we have been given many more opportunities to represent who we are in our work. This opportunity became especially available to me while I was completing my bathroom assignment. Unlike the other spaces I had drafted, this was a space that only I could see in real life–only I had interacted with it. This was the assignment where I had the opportunity to make choices for myself: what parts of the bathroom were important enough to include? Which were worth leaving out? How could I represent the distances of the objects in my bathroom using multiple line weights? How could I make everything represented as clear as possible–so that even a young child could understand it and translate it into a three-dimensional space in their head? Of course, that last question is a bit of a stretch. However, I think it can be an important goal to keep in mind when drafting. The goal should always be to make your designs as clear as possible.

What I don’t know–and I hope to figure this out one day–is how to strike a balance between representing my own form of creative expression in my designs, and how to appeal to my supposed client. This question came to mind while meeting with Arian Ghousi, who discussed human-centered design and the process of working with clients. He discussed how important it is to design for the people you are designing for. At the same time, we discussed Zaha Hadid, who I would argue had a very prominent architectural style, despite the fact that she designed buildings with many different purposes and for many different people. I suppose the answer to my question depends on how flexible and open your client is–do they trust your judgement, or do they have a particular idea of what they want their item, furniture, room, building, etc. to look like? What I mean here is: might it depend on whether the client is depending on you for ideas, or whether you are simply the path towards their vision? It also may depend on the client’s judgement of their designer’s personal style. Zaha Hadid was famous, therefore her clients likely wanted their buildings to be in her “style.” At the end of the day, I hope to learn more about this subject of personal style vs. client work and learn for myself what the answer to this question is. Asking questions such as these are a great starting point to preparing myself for my future architecture education.