Since childhood I wanted to be an architect. I had the usual route, endless hours playing with Lego, a taste for drawing, often sketching house plans, imaginary palaces, spaceships, completely implausible vehicles, reinterpretations of the spaces I saw in animation movies or the ones with characters of flesh and bone. By chance my oldest son is also always drawing plans of houses full of gadgets, but as he has also interest in many things that never interested me, such as biology, I think the similarities stop there .
Basically, I wanted to be something that I didn’t even exactly knew what it was. I thought that an architect was just a guy who designed houses, which seemed pretty cool to me. It was an early call, but since I can remember I had no other except for wanting to be an astronaut, which for a kid raised in Portugal in the 70’s and that got easily sick on winding roads would have been a much more difficult career to achieve.
I have fulfilled my dream, I am an architect. It is a somewhat ungrateful job, especially when we compare ourselves, even at times when the crisis is not a concern, with our friends in other professions and the same age, who seem to have substantially higher incomes and benefits.
However I can’t imagine doing anything else, for a simple reason: I love what I do! I will point out some reasons:
And sometimes, and there are only few of them, when we hit the target and get to do something really different, beautiful or that makes perfect sense, we become filled with pride, we get thrilled and with high self-esteem.
In the best moments, this profession is sort of an ego-trip. And when that happens we just think it can´t get any better!