When I was young, I loved music, but never quite made it to the kind of concert where one could ride on a mosh pit. It always looked fun, but scary. A lot of trust involved there, trusting the crowd not to drop you. The other day I suddenly got it into my head to write about mosh pits as metaphor for life. Like most of my writing ideas, this one came seemingly out of nowhere, rising to the surface of my brain like words rising to the surface of a magic eight ball. Such ideas usually come when I'm trying the least, while doing the dishes, taking a shower, or when first waking in the morning. So I keep pads of paper and pencils all over my house, since without a notation, those best writing ideas disappear, slipping back into the dark, murky water of my brain, often never to appear again.
The pencil instead of a pen next to my notepad comes from years of being an architect. I never lost my love of a good pencil. It used to be pencil holders with leads I sharpened myself. A real draftsman can sharpen a pencil on a piece of sandpaper in a pinch. Ah, I miss the good old days. Now I use mechanical pencils of all sorts, collected over the years, that hold .7 mm HB leads. It appears you can take the woman out of architecture, but you can't take architecture out of the woman. It's been seven years since I closed the door on my one person architecture firm, but I still consider myself an architect. Architecture has been such a large part of my life.
Like most people, I went into my chosen field because I had the natural talent for it, and a desire to do something good, something bigger than myself in the world. And, if I'm really honest, it was also because I was tired of making minimum wage, managing offices for men who were making the big bucks while I and the other women held down the fort, made coffee, fended off unwanted advances, not career advances if you know what I mean, and kept our mouths shut in order to keep our jobs.
I was a timid rebel. I wasn't willing to be a pee-on the rest of my life, and I had a brain I knew could be put to much better use than it had been in the jobs I'd held up to that point. The only thing lacking for me was self confidence. I had virtually none of that. However, through a fortunate series of circumstances, I was lifted up and handed off from one caring soul to another, held aloft like a rock and roll fan in a mosh pit until one day, I found myself a licensed, practicing architect. Teacher after teacher and friend upon friend gave me just the right type and amount of encouragement. Although I had to do the footwork, there is no way I would have made it through without the cheering crowd slam dancing to the beat of the universe holding me up, doing for me what I could not do for myself, having faith in me.
And their faith was well founded. Architecture took me places I wouldn't have gone otherwise. I don't mean geographical places, I mean places in the mind, ways of thinking and of seeing things. For instance, it was through architecture I became interested in Buckminster Fuller, who by the time I came along was a very old man, but figuratively, he lifted me up. He launched me into outer space looking back at the earth when he coined the term Space Ship Earth. That is when I knew I would recycle whenever possible, and have done so ever since. His life touched and changed mine.
Likewise Philip Johnson. When I was a student of urban planning at Portland State as part of my architectural training, Philip Johnson, architectural icon, came to town to judge the Portland Building competition. There has not been such a competition like it before or since in Portland. Many admonish the judges for choosing Michael Graves' design, which later became known as “the birthday cake building”. It was a spatial planning and mechanical nightmare, that's true, but it symbolized something. It put Portland on the map architecturally speaking, and participating in that process, being in the same room with Philip Johnson, even as a spectator, made me feel important, part of something not just big, but internationally big. That helped mold my identity as a citizen of the world.
Most of the other teachers and architects who kept me buoyed were much less well known, some of them downright obscure. My first ever architectural teacher at PCC, a man by the name of Dick Kasal, to my great fortune came to the west coast from MIT and landed in the same classroom as me, he as the teacher, me as the bewildered, clueless student. For weeks, months, I sat in front of the blank white paper, terrified. Unable to even make a mark. But that didn't matter to Mr. Kasal. He pied pipered all of us willing to follow him. His vision was big. He was an amazing teacher, because he was brash and bold, said what he thought with his native New York accent, and he was interested in everything, including what his students thought. And he challenged us. What I learned from him was that I could do whatever I wanted to do, because he had done and was still doing just that. I did eventually make that first mark on the advice of another clueless student. Etched into the vellum with a 2H pencil, hard as a roofing nail.
Now I still make my mark with a pencil. Just in a different way. And I've learned to use softer lead. I'm glad of my years as an architect, and of late I've been having the feeling, I'm not done with that yet. It's so much a part of me, and I wouldn't have it any other way. In the mosh pit of my life, there have been so many people, I can't count them, and people are joining the slam dance still. For long after I became an architect, the knowledge I didn't do it alone has stayed with me. I like having had a mosh pit beneath me, it makes me want to do my part to lift others up as well. That's a good thing. How lucky is that for me? But I don't think I'm unique. No one is an island, especially where I live now, on an island. We all need one another. I think people who've been here a long time know that at a deep level. They are the ones who buoy me now with tips, suggestions, and encouragement. It's odd, because in reality, I never danced in, or was carried off by a mosh pit, the real thing's a bit too scary for me, but as a metaphor, to not a rock and roller, but an architect and a writer, the image of the mosh pit is an apt description of how people-rich my life has been, and still is now.
© M.E. Rollins
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