Where Buildings Meet the Brain — But Why?

How did I get here? To today, to this actual moment, where I’m drafting a blog post?

Well, as you might imagine, first — it’s taken time. Lots of time. It’s taken day after day of working a repetitive desk job, questioning why I chose this. Do I even like architecture anymore? This can’t be what I signed up for. Which leads me to, second — it takes not accepting a job for what it was, because it was exactly that: a job.

It wasn’t my career. It is and will always be just a piece. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve grown to love my coworkers — well, some of them. We don’t want to fool anyone here and act like everyone is sunshine and rainbows. I’ve established invaluable relationships, learned how to survive in the corporate world, and gained insight into clients and contractors, office politics, and leadership. Most of all, I learned the essential skills and knowledge to get me where I am today. I will never not be grateful for that piece of my puzzle.

However, all of the skills I’ve gained, all of the ways my brain processes information, and every moment of my life before the job is exactly why I’m here writing this. I refuse to accept that anyone will ever have an identical path, because no one has the same brain that reacts to the same information in the same way.

My journey into psychology was driven by question after question that arose from my childhood. I couldn’t — and still don’t — fully grasp why certain things and events were the way they were. Since then, I’ve always been intrigued by how the mind works. I pursued psychology as a minor to architecture in college and, at the time, accepted that I was leaving it there and moving on to my big career.

My brain, on the other hand, has always had different plans. That little girl in the back of my mind is always asking, but why?

So here I am today, finally giving in — one week away from starting graduate school to answer some of her questions. The biggest ones I have right now all revolve around how my passion for architecture can inform, respond to, and support the world around us — to heal, to encourage, to relax the mind.

Next week I begin an MSc in Applied Neuroscience at King’s College London. I don’t have all the answers yet. But I finally stopped pretending the question wasn’t there.