Cardboard Chair by Frank Gehry - Flickr image by patrickd
One of the greatest life lessons I ever learned, may seem a bit of a paradox at first, but it is easy enough to understand when you think through it. “If you really want to find out how strong something is, then you have to destroy it. I learned this lesson about 17 years ago when I was in my first quarter of architecture school. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the inner workings of a college of architecture, during your first year of school, you will receive the most difficult projects you can imagine and will not have been adequately prepared to be successful at them. The reason they do this is to thin out the class. Each quarter of your freshman year would end with some ridiculous project, like building a working footstool out of Q-tips and Elmers glue. For my first quarter freshman project, I had to build a chair out of cardboard. It had to weigh less than 10 pounds and the Dean of the college of architecture had to be able to sit in it without it breaking. If it broke, they kicked you out of the college. No pressure!
No joke…I went through about 12 designs before I locked in on a winner. For the first 11, each time I would build a scale model of the chair, my professor would come by and press on it in certain places with his fingers or fists and break my model. Each time, he would just look down at the destroyed evidence of my sleepless night, and say, “you should probably fix that.” Read the rest of this entry »
