Story of my life
On what was a sunny Saturday this past March, the last person I called my best friend got married in the last place I called my hometown. The next day, I drove to the apartment complex my mother and I moved to after my parents divorced, shortly after I immigrated to America. I pulled into the church lot next door and parked next to the chain link fence. For an uncomfortable quarter-hour as somber clouds threatened rain overhead, I sat there comparing my gap-addled memory with the place before me.
In front was the cracked asphalt road where my first bike ride ended against a carport pole. Across the road was the pool where I learned to swim from watching the other kids. In the back was the laundry room we dubbed the secret clubhouse. And there on the right was the split staircase with wrought iron railings I descended in triumph like a debutante, dragging the bike still chained to my ankle after breaking out of the apartment. When I stood at the top of those stairs and saw neighbors lounging and kids running around, I felt only excitement and joy, not shame and pain, for finally getting to participate — to play. No program — policy, plan, pamphlet, or app — told us to gather. We simply saw each other and went outside.
The faces and names were long gone from my memory but the architecture remained the same. And yet, I found it hard to remember anything in my tech career that had brought people together across time and hurricanes, like the cheap, undecorated buildings before me. I remembered the makeshift village of paper homes I constructed on the dingy brown carpet in that upstairs unit. I thought about the meticulously landscaped but habitually empty lawn in front of my windows now. In moving so far apart from the past, I wondered what I had left behind. In our individualized pursuit of economic and technological advancement, I wondered what we had forgotten.
The climate crisis, the housing shortage, the loneliness epidemic — these aren’t separate crises. They’re symptoms of our increasing inability to take care of each other. The next few years will force all of us to radically rethink what we do with our time and how we live together. In returning to school for architecture, I hope to invest my time in making shared experiences of our material world, creating shared futures in our collective humanity. I hope to advocate for why architecture matters, why now, as digital spaces increasingly replace real ones. It is not skyscraping ambitions that pull me down this path; it is the study of humane scale, the safekeeping of synchronous time, serendipity without the screen, meaning beyond the meme.
The night of the wedding, a sudden storm had poured onto the ceremony through the opened James Turrell-designed roof. As the rain drenched my radiant friend, she laughed. From the built-in pews encircling them, we all looked at each other and our laughter too echoed through that hue-filled hall in Houston. Knowing the risk, we had committed to the skyward view, the open air. Now strangers and friends forever share a moment blessed by wayward skylight tears.