What every architect wants to create

There are chairs that are beautiful and there are chairs that are comfortable.

The beautiful chair attracts to itself instantly. It commands attention, wins awards, gets photographed for magazines. But once you experience its discomfort, the way it makes your back ache after ten minutes? Well then, the rest of the time is spent ignoring it. Actively ignoring it.

The comfortable chair, which did not get the beauty advantage, also doesn't get center stage. It's usually shoved in the least visited room. And yet people go out of their way to find it and sit on it.

This is at the heart of what impresses versus what endures.

The beautiful chair ranks low in utility. You tolerate it because it was expensive. Had you known this would be its actual experience, you would have avoided it.

An architect's job is tough because it's always about hitting the sweet spot. To not make it feel like a compromise on either end. Sometimes you miss by a mile, but the aim is always to create something beautifully functional.

I've always wondered why architects rarely put their name plaques on buildings the way builders do.

Architects should. Because doing that could turn out in three ways:

1. People who like your work can easily approach you.
2. People who live with your mistakes know exactly where to send feedback.
3. Most importantly, you design differently when your name is permanently attached to the consequence.

Bad design isn't usually incompetence, it's distance. The architect who designed your frustrating building never had to use it and hence they don't know what's not working.

And lastly, the best compliment isn't a magazine feature, it's people going out of their way to be in something you made.