Descriptive Essay About Architecture

When I think about architecture, images come to my mind. Many of these images are not pure products of my conscious. Rather, they are related to the tools I’ve gained from training. A box of procedures I have gathered over the years. Some of the other images flow from somewhere more distant. My most distant architectural memory originates from my childhood. There was a moment when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. Those remain the most enduring images in my mind, and contain the deepest architecture memories in my life.

I was three years old when my parents left me with my grandmother in a small suburb near Shanghai. They did not have the time to take care of me whilst building their career. Leaving me some clothes, color pencils and loose-end

But the courtyard house was not large nor particular. It was a small and traditional Chinese house that became a giant in the eyes of an ant. The well was much smaller than I had remembered, and my 12-year-old self could see the pit when my 3-year-old self couldn’t. Subterranea did not exist. Of course, there were details that remained. The door handle reminiscent of the back of a spoon, and the screeching of the wood, and the dozens of doors that closed in a different manner. For the first time, I learned “doubt”, and at the same time, I learned “creation”.

The courtyard house is the first house I designed in my life. I come to this realization much later, and only recently in college. For a long time, I could not accept the incongruences between imagination and reality, but I’ve come to accept that they are really one thing in architecture. All reality, or all buildings come from imagination, and all imagination is derived from existing buildings in the form of memory. Memory, to me, is an imperative bridge between the two. This realization only comes with the addition of my box of tools that I only started collecting recently, on top of my box of