"Architect"

Week 1

Growing up in a small town in central Minnesota as the son of a third-grade teaching mother and a dairy farming father, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in my free time to keep me busy. Sure, I could annoy my two older sisters, but I would always much rather sit down and draw. I was always inspired by the talent of one of my sisters in her ability to draw faces and people. For me, however, I found my strength in drawing buildings and structures. Every Sunday, when my family went to church, there I would be with my little sketchbook and my big ideas. People would always look at my drawings and ask what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I never really knew. Then one day someone brought up the word architect.

“Architect”

St. Jordan, my made up city that has been in the works for over a decade

I had never heard it before. What was this strange term? At that time, when my little 8-year-old brain learned what that word meant, I knew that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. From that point on, my sights were set. As I made my way through school I would keep coming up with new ideas and even went so far as to create my own city on paper. As I entered my final years of high school, I went on my first and only college tour of NDSU. There, when I stepped into Renaissance Hall, the architecture building in downtown Fargo, I knew that was where I wanted to go. After that, I applied and got accepted and, in the fall of 2017, I attended NDSU to study Architecture.

From there, the journey has continued. The first year was a busy one as, in order to get into the program, you had to get good grades to make the cut. We had many classes to challenge us in different ways from studio to history to design, each with different twists and turns. At the end of the year we applied for the program and in the middle of the summer when all the grades were processed and the selection had been made, we were notified. I am pleased to say that I am now in my third year in the five-year program at NDSU and I am on track to graduate with my master’s degree in the spring of 2022. The path has been full of challenges starting on day one, but I have enjoyed every second.

A bridge that I drew for one of my first architecture classes

As I will soon be immersed into the real world and eventually be a licensed architect, it’s important to look at the future of architecture, as shortly, I will be a part of it. In my studio class this year, a class where we put our knowledge and creativity to work, I’m looking at those ideas of the future to implement into my projects now. With climate change being a massive issue the world is facing, architects are in many ways on the forefront of this battle. We are the ones designing buildings that require extensive amounts of energy that put vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. It is our job to counter that by designing sustainable buildings that have little impact on the environment around us. With these ideals in mind, as I work on my studio projects and continue my studies, I will be challenging myself to go above and beyond of what is expected so that I can be ready for not only tomorrow, but also the future.

So whether it be today, yesterday, ten years ago, or even ten years from now, architecture has and will continue to play a massive role in my life. From that first moment when I learned what the word meant to now, as I begin my third year, I am so very excited for this journey to continue in pursuit of doing what I love every day of my life.