Failure and Misery. Both bring
about growth and misery. All the best stories come from misery. All my best and
most told stories contain something miserable. Mostly it involving being in the
rain and being cold. The topic of failure came up during a recent history
design Charrette. We were given the coordinates for two locations and told to
design a women’s clinic at one and a temple at the other. This was for a non-western
history class and so we needed to take into account the local climate and social
structure of each. We had a week to tackle this project. So there was some
collaboration on the research but it can be hard to learn all there is to know
about a different culture just from internet sources.
After a week of working on this
Charrette and realizing how little I really knew about the functions of these
facilities in their perspective locations, I was just feeling hopeful that what
I had drawn was close to being correct. When it was time to pin-up or designs
for review we were told that this was going to be a pass fail review. Reviews
are rough but a surprise pass fail review sets everyone on edge very quickly.
And on top of this we are not allowed to speak during the review, the poster
must speak for itself.
Our professor made the comment, when
we was explain the process we were going to be using to review the projects,
that you learn the most from failure. Saying this reminded me of a quote I have
pasted on my desktop by Samuel Beckett. It goes “Ever tried. Ever Failed. No
matter, Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
I found this to be a very helpful
quote because as architecture students we are encouraged to stretch ourselves. Trial
and error lend itself to more error than success. There are lots of quotes
about the invention of the light bulb and I won’t go into them here but this is
a classic example of how failure, and large amounts of it can lead to something
good. Sometimes it is hard to remember
that failure is not all bad or unproductive. So continue to fail and know that failure will
happen again. But strive to fail better.
“Ever tried. Ever
Failed. No matter, Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment