Lagos, Nigeria

Just came back from my working trip to Lagos, Nigeria last week, my first visit to the continent of Africa. Culture shock indeed especially when the city is so congested and chaotic. There seems to be a lack of order in that country and we were advised not to wander around alone especially at night. The time I spent on plane was indeed more enjoyable than we actually ended on our destination. Picture above shows me with our client.

Design = 70% Thinking + 30% Drawing

After a break of 3 years from the architectural industry, it is such a coincidence that my first major design project is related to education. I’ve always believe that education and profession must have strong link in order to push the industry forward, that was exactly the reason why I decided to teach 3 years ago. It is interesting to note that when I get myself involved again in building design after a long period of absence from the industry, I noticed that my approach in making architecture has somewhat changed from where I stopped. I found myself able to look at the entire scheme more holistically and with a more tranquil mind too.

I guess the management skills that I’ve learned from KDU College really benefit me after all. 3 years ago, I used to design building in a very ad hoc manner, in other words chaotically and without any clear sense of direction. The painstaking scheduling exercises that I’ve been through as the Academic Department Head of KDU College really transformed me to be a more organized and focused person. Now, I treat the design process as management of problem solving exercise.

I was trained that drawing is a very crucial exercise in designing. I didn’t understand this when my lecturer first told me that our drawings will have to ‘speak’ for themselves. He was right but what he forgot to emphasize to me was that thinking is inherent in drawing. Whenever we draw a line, our minds are actually processing various information about that line such as:
Is it a wall?
Is it transparent?
Does it have rough or smooth texture?
How will it affect the perception of the space?
What is its impact in three dimension?
Has it got any cultural significance to the place?
etc……etc………etc………

In other words, if we spend 3 minutes drawing perspective of a room, we actually have to spend 7 minutes conceptualizing the spatial significance of the room. After this thinking process, we may decided that what we’ve drawn does not work at all and we spend another 30 minutes amending our drawing which lead us to think for another 70 minutes of a revised design! This is the truth about designing. No one ever said that design is easy, it is tough and time consuming. However, once we clear all the contradictions in our minds and convince ourselves that we have arrived at the best solution at the end of the day, it will be a rewarding experience to just sit back and enjoy the creation of our design endeavor.