From architecture to set design

People have different understandings of the term “good spatial vision.” Some might interpret it as the skill to navigate using a map or to accurately toss a crumpled paper ball into a distant trash bin. For me, it is the ability to always spot where the nearest exit is.

As far as I remember I wanted to become an architect. I drew a lot as a kid and like everyone else when I attempted to paint an image of my family I smudged a silly red gable-roofed house behind the potato-looking household members. A bit crooked house behind the bit crooked family. Till today I can not dissociate my family from the house we grew up in. It was my greatest and sometimes only protection from the outer world I was taught to fear the most. The building was indeed massive and deep-rooted in the ground where my great-grandparents settled many years ago, and it has never moved an inch since.

At the age of 10, my main hobby was building houses out of shoeboxes for my plastic tarantella. Some of her boxes had the coolest web-like loft area with an integrated hanging bed and some just a sofa with a TV on the ground carton floor. Losing myself in the details of a spider apartment became one of my first exits.

Everyone, since I was a child, kept telling me that I have a great spatial vision, and as a modest kid I believed it. Math and drawing came easily to me as everything else that mattered to a young girl trying hard to grow to be a real boy.
After high school, all fingers pointed to the architecture studies at the acclaimed Technical University of Budapest (BME). So there I went naively to harvest the many hours I spent building imaginary houses for spiders and later for anxious teenagers.
BME did strengthen my belief that spatial design is the right path for me and sometimes pays off to have a weird hobby but it also broke my spirit.
I won’t be writing about their dehumanizing, sadistic teaching methods long, my fellow sufferers/survivors know what I am talking about. Let’s just sum it up, they suck the life out of you, till everything tastes like the paper your exhausted zombie-like body carries around on the subway after three days of non-stop drawing.

I did enjoy seeing my imaginary houses on paper and I rediscovered that designing spaces is what gets me into the zone.

My first two years were fruitful and I was praised both by my teachers and my ego. I designed captivating and majestic modern buildings but they did have one flaw. They were unlivable. For humans at least. My tarantella wouldn’t have complained.

It took me years to realize how much I sucked back then. Now I know that during my years at BME I was an unhappy self-centered youth whose plans echoed her state of mind. In the shiny, modern but also cold and controlling, enlarged rooms.
The BME like other architecture conventions embraced this elitist, controlling way of designing. The ethics along which the institute operates are reflected in the works of the students. The designs that ignore human needs and scale are welcomed by a university that has no regard for the individuum or collective planning.
At the same time the most noted influential Hungarian architects, the crème de la crème, started to more appear like a pack of males with god complexes complaining about how the average inhabitants are ignorant and “blind to architecture”. So someone looking for an exit from the corrupt unevolving architectural university BME has found an even more corrupt and snob industry above it. Not seeing an enticing future anymore in the architectural scene, or it was some other personal affairs that made me hit rock bottom, but in a moment of enlightenment, I granted myself a bit of freedom.

I left the BME, I left the architecture profession and I left the country. I finally managed to leave not only by turning inward to my imaginary houses but literally.

Since I lost the engineered path laid before me to becoming an engineer, I tried myself out in many things. At the present, I am about to spread my wings in set design. My wish is to not lose the ability “to get into the zone” and become a responsible and thoughtful designer. Instead of creating shapes and forms impulsively, understand and analyze the ideas manifested on paper. To scale down both my designs and my ego.

Here in this blog, I will gather my thoughts on spatial design. To become more attentive I will try to understand the space around me and its effect on me. I am curious about the mysterious places we dream of. I’ll look for inspiration in film sets and interpret what they communicate. I want to understand where we feel unsafe in a city and how we are continuously deprived of public places. I will follow my passion on the path where the only everlasting motive is to always look for the exit. It’s just got a lot more challenging to find it.