SANNZ JOURNAL #3
MATT ASHWORTH, SAM BOANAS, NINA BOYD, WILLIAM BROOKS, ROSIE EVANS, TYLER HARLEN, SHARON LAM, BENNETT HUME, MAX IRVING-LAMB, ELENA LOCHORE-WARD, RYAN MAHON, JONNEL MAMAUAG, MICHAEL MCCABE, NHUT NGUYEN, JESSICA O’REILLY, HARRY PLATT, FRITHA POWELL, MICHAEL STRACK, PRIAR SUTHERLAND, SARAH TYRRELL, OLIVIA WONG, VINCENT WOON
Failure. An inherently nasty word. Particularly for anyone who has spent enough time in the academic world. The word failure pierces the air like no other word that doesn’t require an asterisk to be written on this page. Failure, drummed into us in our largely capitalised world, is a bad thing and should be best avoided for a healthy, well balanced, academic lifestyle. On the face of it, failure is largely black and white, i.e. you did not meet required expectations. The politically correct way of saying “you are an incompetent fool, what are you doing here?” In truth, failure is far more than the dreaded D that may await your assignment you have yet to receive grading for. Much like its equally intangible sibling, success, failure is a relative attribute, defined by one’s own perspectives. The creative world has a troubled relationship with failure, something that is not helped when it is framed in the rational world of academia. My own relationship with failure is a glorious, and unfortunately, regular affair. To break it down, all of my projects, essays, reports and other academic ramblings, are failures to varying degrees. My own mother bore the brunt of this tyrannous attribute throughout my schooling years in many a teacher-parent interview. Alas, “he has a lot of potential” they would say. There is nothing more disheartening than the failure of not reaching your own potential. Well that is what Mum would say. To which I would say, “at least I have potential.” I still tell myself that. Just. However, while I generally always fall short of any “academic success” that I set myself (hence why I don’t bother anymore), there is a notable example of my own work, which I elect as a true failure. By my own reckoning this project was, and still is, about as successful as Colin Craig’s 2014 election campaign. An absolute bomb. In fact, I pretty much bombed the whole course. The 3rd year design project, a ferry-terminal or some such predictable garbage (I still have some gripes with it), was the design task at hand. The proposition you see here is a super-yacht marina. Yet, that is not the issue at hand, as we know deviations from an architecture brief are an easy thing to wing your way around. This project is the outcome of a perfect storm for “failure.” Every ingredient was thrown in the pot, largely by my own doing. Ignorance of the brief, disrespect and disagreement with the tutor, and that concussion I had, which caused all sorts motivational and lethargy issues; brewed the complete opposite of the soup of success. Somewhere, hiding deep within the project may have been a good idea, but that is arbitrary, as an example of work, particularly that of a final year bachelors student, it is a pile of ****. While it may have scraped through academic criteria, to earn a pass of some grading (I daren’t check), this was one of those projects that you know you just really cocked up. This was not a “run to the course co-ordinator and complain until my grade improves” failure, but a self-recognised, I have really gone-a-miss here, doozy. More than crap grade, bad feedback, or a rubbish crit, self-acknowledged failure is the real pits. The grade next to your name is irrelevant. The feeling of knowing you really didn’t do what you know you could have, is the crystal meth of failure. Bareback rock bottom. In a perfect world, you learn, you get good grades, you succeed, you are considered educated. In reality that is a load of unadulterated codswallop. The times where I have learnt the most, coincide with the times where I have made a royal balls up, such was the case with the aforementioned “ferry terminal” (was still such a crap brief). In the creative fields, understanding your own self is just as important as understanding your subject area. I learnt sod all about architectural design in ARCI 311 (jury is still out on whether that was my fault or Peter Wood’s), but more importantly I learnt a limestone quarry’s worth about how I work, or don’t work, my processes and my chains of thought. At the conclusion of that course I dissected everything I did and didn’t do to figure just why I fell by the wayside. That course, if not that trimester, was the pivotal point in my academic career. The following trimester was the most successful, by my own and academic standards, I ever had. To a certain extent I believe that to truly succeed, one must first truly fail. Now I am not recommending you go out and intentionally make a mess of something you wish to succeed at. True failure is not something that you can find with intent, and hence I suppose perhaps neither is success, which is a bit stupid. However, in the context of academic assessment, if you have never had a “bad” grade, you are probably doing something wrong anyway, which potentially is your failure, shortcoming or mistake. Behind every great success is a great failure. Yes that is terribly cliché, but undeniably true, winners learn from their mistakes, blah blah blah. Failure, and success, are defined by our own ambitions, experiences and expectations. We try and rationalise both failure and success into measurable, evidential datum, money, grades etcetera; but what they both are, really is emotions. You cannot have experienced one without the other, in the same way one cannot understand happiness without sadness. Just know this, in search for success, failure will find you first. When it hits you, embrace it, it won’t get any worse. Probably.
Harry Platt
P.S. Such ramblings don’t apply for exam-based courses. You ain’t hiding from that ****. Oh and that project got a B+ with a bit of polish in Daniel K Brown’s Portfolio course. Absolutely ridiculous!
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I am a failure of an architecture student: 1. Spent 6 hours on a 40% assignment 2. Have an A-grade average but super unhireable because wtf is CAD 3. No idea what GIB is either 4. I can name like, six, architects without using Google 5. I still don’t get what the big deal is with Corbusier/Mies van der Rohe??
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