WHERE ALL THINGS ABSTRACT COME …

This chapter of my book Is meant to describe through my own words my experiences in creativity. In life and in architecture. At first while we were in school studying architecture we were tasked with free hand sketching in our first year, which was mostly about producing sketches of existing buildings around the faculty and within the University. Some of us had this task easy some didnt. It was designed to build attention and awareness of your environment and coordination between that and retaining images in your brain and using hand coordination and tools to put the images down on paper with clarity enough to communicate ones own personal perspective of what they see. Looking back now I realise that although we were all tasked with sketching the same building, every sketch made was different because although we all saw the same building our awareness and attention ere focused on different elements as individuals. While some focused more on the windows, some on shadows or lighting, some focused on trees. Etc. This is totally normal. But at the time one was more focused on bringing out a more wholistic representation of the subject building.

The same also applied in later years in the design studio. There was more emphasis on following rules or ideals that appeal to the lecturers and our peers, well these were our clients at the time. I wished we saw it from this perspective; That our lecturers and peers were our clients and just as we adapted our creativity to their various tastes and seasons we should also learn to adapt our works to each client’s unique taste and season. Design school was meant to equip you with tools for communicating from your imagination to media that others can understand, creativity however is an entirely different subject as I came to realise. And this realisation cut across many other aspects of life asides architecture. However for my self, creative Architecture became the key to understanding life.

So let me start it this way. Everything that exists in the material world first existed as a thought. Everything you see: the houses, furniture, food, clothing, products and even nature. Some crop plants, decorative plants have been altered from their original form. Mangoes, palms, rice, cassava, corn etc. Some of these are 4^th generations of their parent species. However through cross breeding and many forms of propagation These plants have been helped by humans to evolve into what they are today.

If we narrow this down to architecture for a minute: You’ll see how man evolved from a wandering specie, to cave dweller, to wooden or tree houses until the technology for stone masonry was discovered. Man has been an integral contributing factor to foster the evolution of the world since creation. There is hardly any aspect of the natural world that hasn’t been influenced by Man.

So, one would like to think, how did he come about these ideas. How did The early man discover that the cave was a better dwelling than sleeping under trees. How did man invent fire, and how did he discover numerous tasks that fire can be used for? As early as the 13^th century There has been records of research documents in scrolls testifying research processes undertaken by Man in pursuit of knowledge and skills. The greatest inventions all started with some sort of insight into something that was once impossible that someone person out of the collective sees and ventures most times in defiance alone to pursue and dedicate their lives into bringing it to reality.

In my own practice I had found myself fascinated with my ability to see a client’s vision for a home or a other project and maybe after series of fine tuning arrive at the one vision, he had imagined it to be. The hard part mostly is how to make the vision buildable as this most times depends on the capacity of the client at the time to afford what it takes to build the said project. I have seen scenarios where a client starts ambitious project with almost nothing and within a few years bring it into reality. This is a pattern I had seen repeatedly so many times in my career so far and it begs the question of how come we are able to achieve any vision no matter how huge or ambitious it is with nothing. This question had driven me to research into philosophy, sciences and psychology and even a little bit of quantum physics. I even drove into ancient religious texts including Hindu and Aztecs history. 

Exerpts from The Draughtsman by Kelechi Ukaegbu