Why the question is worth working on
I assume scarcity is ending. Not tomorrow, but within the working life ahead of me: artificial intelligence, robotics and cheap energy are lifting the material limits that have organised building for a century — and with them the constraints architecture has used as its main argument. Efficiency, economy and optimisation stop being the hard part.
I also assume that saving the environment is crowded. It is the defining problem of the century and it already has excellent people working on it full time. I would not add much by joining that queue.
What is not crowded is the question that arrives immediately afterwards: when almost anything can be built, what makes a thing worth building? Which places, rhythms and stories make a life feel meaningful rather than merely comfortable? I would work on this whether or not anyone else found it useful — to me it already has its own value. But I think it is also about to become the practical question in architecture, and very few people are treating it as a technical problem with methods, prototypes and results rather than as an essay subject.
Where this could lead
Concrete directions the work points toward:
People designing where they live
If construction stops being the bottleneck, far more people will shape their own homes, and the interfaces they use will decide the quality of what gets built. My game is partly a study of exactly this: how the rules for forming and placing a block reward certain attentions and ideas, and quietly suppress others. That finding is transferable to any tool that puts design in non-architects' hands.
Reading a landscape before building on it
Large areas can now be 3D-scanned. What a scan does not contain is where the views are, where a place is strange or charged, what happened there and who cares about it. Locating that — the magic held in a landscape and in its history — is what my written work is practising. The Kurama-dera study is a method for registering how a construction and a mountain negotiate with each other; the Alhambra essay is about how a building's position is experienced by a moving body rather than read off a map.
City planning that behaves more like a game
Planning tools show planners what planners have decided to check. A game shows a player what a place is like to move through. If planning ran closer to the second, public space would be argued about by far more people and on much better grounds — everyone, in reality, wants to live somewhere beautiful.
Games as works in their own right
A game world can be a serious piece of art that makes someone reflect on how they are building their own life, and on making in general.
What the work has taught me
Staying inside the uncertainty is a technique, not indecision
In the first semester project, the strongest feedback at the final review was that I had not resolved the project too early. Two timber frames that did not match were kept mismatched, and their overlaps and awkward transitions became the spatial material. I now treat premature resolution as the more likely mistake.
When work feels noisy, it is usually avoiding its own subject
Portrait of Us asked for one image containing hundreds of fans. I composited them together and it was wrong — crowded, and pretending the lockdown was not happening. The client and I could both feel it was dodging the situation. The fix was to stop compositing and place people on screens inside a 3D room, which is what that year actually looked like. The failed version was the part that taught me something.
A medium with too little resistance gives you too little time
Drawing Kurama-dera, the oil pastel established its line instantly and could not be corrected. Because it was fast, there was no room for the care the slower pencil work allowed. Resistance in a material is not an obstacle to the work; it is where the attention actually happens.
The tool teaches the builder
I built a construction system for the game because the game needed one, not because I was researching it. Testing it showed how strongly the rules for forming and snapping blocks reward particular ideas. It was not the original research intention, and it has become part of what I study.
One I have not resolved
The Kurama-dera analysis leans on Ingold, who dissolves the idea of an actor into relations between materials — while my own method depends on naming actors: those who intervene, and the place that answers. That contradiction sits unresolved in the assignment. I also used photographs from 2026 as the background for a temple founded in 770, which leaves the historical claim considerably weaker than the phenomenological one.
Limits and open problems
The curiosity may be working as a filter
I choose projects by whether they let me keep working on this question, and a filter that strong necessarily excludes things. There is a great deal of architecture — structure, regulation, budget, the unglamorous coordination that makes buildings actually happen — that I am not drawn to and could end up weak at. A practice assembled only from what fascinates me is a practice with holes in it. I would rather name them now than find them at thirty-five, which is part of why the internship and the years just after school are a deliberate exposure to the parts I would not choose on my own.
The research is not cheap
Scanning at landscape scale, generating and testing worlds, and running simulations detailed enough to be worth anything all require real computing power and far more hours than I currently have. Much of what is written above is a direction with a small prototype underneath it, not a result.
It is still one person's account
The learnings above come from my own projects, assessed by my own school. They have not yet been tested against anyone else's practice, or at any real scale.
