Once Upon a Time

It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I feel I can begin to explain this, so here’s the start:

Once upon a time there were two brothers. One brother, Elliot, liked to play with computers and math, and he really liked to make the computers play with math. The other brother, Tom, liked to make pictures, but what he really liked to do was to look at the pictures other people had made. Fortunately, the brothers ended up going to a wonderful school where they were able to study that which interested them.

Despite their divergent interests, the brothers were very alike in many ways. One trait the brothers shared was that when presented with a challenge, they were compelled to take it. Sometimes this helped them be great at things. Other times this caused them to do things like swim in the ocean on a cold Christmas day in order to keep a “days of swimming in a row” streak going, or nearly freeze to death in order to have “first coffee of 2010 on top of a mountain”. You might say the brothers were obsessive in this way, once the challenge was laid out for them, it was very difficult for them to ignore it.

One wonderful thing the wonderful school they attended made them do was satisfy a diversification requirement. So even though one brother loved fine art, and the other brother loved functions, they each had to learn about the others interests.

This diversification requirement is how Elliot found himself to be in a Survey of Architecture course his junior year. Elliot had enjoyed the other Art History course he took, but had a difficult time preparing for the tests. He felt the tests were too much memorizing other people’s opinions, and he wasn’t good at that. Luckily, memorizing dates was also deemed important, and dates are numbers so he liked that.

On the first day of Elliot’s course, the professor said something that blew his mind, “There will be five tests including the final, each test will be worth 25% of total grade and I will take your best four scores. So, in theory, if you do well enough on the first four tests you don’t have to do the final.” The challenge was out there.

Incredulous, Elliot called Tom, “Is he serious!? I wouldn’t have to take the final?”, “Yeah, and, better yet, you wouldn’t even have to go to the last three weeks of class. It was like that when I took his course, I made sure I had my ‘A’ by the first four tests.” Now, even if these were two regular brothers, that would probably have been enough. For the only thing more enticing than a challenge is a challenge the other brother has already accomplished.

For the next ten weeks Elliot looked at pictures and memorized everything. He could name the parts of every type of Greek order and mimic a tour of a French cathedral. The reward for his diligent studying came when he received his fourth test back. Like it’s own brothers before it, it had a nice big ‘A’ at the top. With the challenge accomplished and his ‘A’ secured, Elliot then did what any logical 20-year-old would do: he stopped going to class.

This was probably not what the professor thought would happen, but then the professor was probably not thinking about teaching challenge obsessed brothers. The brothers believed they had won; and technically they had: they both had passed the course with the highest grade possible -- what more could you ask for?

Such is the naivety of 20 year-olds. (And thus, by extension, the naivety of your 26 year-old author)

Some time after this the brothers were talking about the way the architecture course had been structured when Tom said, “..and of course, thanks to that I have no knowledge of modern architecture.” This momentarily confused Elliot: why wouldn’t Tom know about modern architecture? Hadn’t he beaten the class too?

Then it dawned on him: the course was taught along a linear time scale, you learned about older things first and newer things last. So, because he had worked so hard and stopped going to class with three weeks remaining, he too had no knowledge of modern architecture.

This gap in knowledge didn’t bother Elliot in the slightest. In fact, if pressed, he probably would’ve told you that modern churches have the same architectural layout on the inside as renaissance churches. Why would Elliot need to know about modern architecture? People seem to be obsessed with the classical stuff anyway. That’s all they ever talk about. No, this blackout of knowledge wouldn’t be an issue for Elliot. Not at all.

That is, until one day about a year and a half ago. Elliot was walking down a street near his apartment in Calgary and noticed something very peculiar. There were two apartment buildings, next to each other, and when he looked at one he felt a deep and inexplicable disgust. And when he looked at the other he felt a calming evenness of neutrality.

This was a very strange sensation for Elliot, he had never been in either of the buildings and knew no one that lived in them. Why would he have such a visceral and emotional reaction to two buildings? It was illogical. For all Elliot could tell, both buildings did equally adequate jobs at staying upright and providing shelter to their inhabitants -- why would one make him feel sad inside?

Elliot, in the way that he does, pondered this for some time. During this time he noticed that there was a third possible reaction, some apartment buildings made him feel happy inside. While this further served to confuse Elliot, he was at least glad he had found a way to make the experience positive and he began to keep track of happy-feeling buildings in the city.

Ever wary of people thinking he is crazy, Elliot chose to share this experience with only a few people that he was sure already thought him crazy. Their reactions were partially predictable: a look, or tone of, “you’re crazy”. But also, an inquisitiveness, a push. Questions. “Why do you like that one?”, “What do you think makes nice ones nice?”, “What about this one?”.

For a long time, Elliot couldn’t answer any of those questions -- which further bothered him. Answering the questions became a new challenge for Elliot.

Googling didn’t help, as he didn’t know what to search for. Eventually, Elliot realized he had two questions to answer, if only as a start: what qualified a building as a happy-feeling building or a sad-feeling building, and why does that actually cause a tangible response in him?

To try and answer the first question, Elliot tried to find commonalities within the building types. This was pattern recognition, this was something Elliot was good at. After working at it for some time Elliot started to find the pattern, and he realized that part of the reason he couldn’t Google for help was because he was missing the words he needed. He didn’t know the vocabulary of modern architecture and it was patterns in architecture that appeared to make the difference.

For the second question though, Elliot thought that if he could adequately cope with the first question, that it would some how make the second just go away. That, if he were able to analyze a building and pick it apart, it would amputate the feeling. In reality, the opposite happened. Analysis just amplified the feelings, rendering them in higher resolution. Now buildings could be neutral, but leaning toward sad. Or, just as possibly, happy and leaning towards very-happy.

Elliot was just as confused as ever, but felt like he was making progress. While initially he was frustrated for having skipped the classes that would’ve given him the vocabulary he needed, he realized that his investigation in to the issue was opening up new doors for himself. Doors that would take him on explorations of knowledge far beyond an appreciation of high-density residential architecture.

And that exploration, the endeavor to answer those two questions, is where our story will continue...

Please be patient, it has taken me 18-months to be able to sufficiently express this problem and to begin to explain the answers I’ve found thus far.