As a designer you are always envisioning how to improve, create and augment.  An architect may spend their whole life designing the perfect building.  Imagine spending a lifetime training your mind and honing your craft.  Experiencing a career filled with success.  And failure.  Meanwhile, you continue to refine that dream, let it mature, put it down and pick it back up.  Until finally you are able to execute and complete your vision.  Each detail finely tuned, each sacrifice etched in stone and each flaw endlessly nagging away.  In the above video, Knud Holscher talks about his home outside of Copenhagen.

The first thing that caught my attention was when he talks about his designs being rejected at University and at a design firm early in his career.  Now, years later he is a successful designer with his own firm and had spent over 20 years as a professor at that same school.  I’m curious, did he ever walk away from his vision when it was rejected?  Or, did he have the courage to ignore the naysayers and proceed with what he loved?  What compromises were made over time?  And which ones were the right ones?

I think what was resonated the most for me was his remarks about how designing a teacup is more complicated than a house.  He talks about how a home exists within a single environment, whereas a teacup must be able to exist anywhere.  So many people we meet are built to exist within an environment, to exist within a certain set of surroundings.  It’s easy to get stuck, to be locked in.  Especially, when it’s a beautiful environment.  Personally, I like to think that I’m a teacup.  That I can exist anywhere and be exactly who I am meant to be.  I’m not so sure.  It’s so easy to get stuck.

One thing I definitively know, is that all of my favorite people are teacups.  I hope that I can continue to learn from those around me.  That my mentors will push me in the right direction, that my friends push me to live my dreams and that I push myself to exist outside of my self-made boundaries and serve my purpose in a bold and different way.