CREJ - Building Dialogue - September 2015

My America: Navigating the Pastoral and Professional

Like many people, I have spent my week ends this summer taking planes, trains and automobiles to the wedding celebrations of friends and family in various corners of the United States. With my carry-on and camera in tow, each trip is a chance to taste the flavor of another American city or town, and to briefly imagine what my life might be like as a resident of that city or town, had fate taken a different turn.

This past weekend I imagined myself living in the countryside of upstate New York near Skaneateles Lake, one of eleven long north-south bodies of water aptly referred to as “The Finger Lakes.” As a horse and buggy trotted past the 19th century farmhouse some friends and I had rented and fluffy clouds speckled shadows across vast fields surrounding us, I indulged in the idea of what some might call a more simple life.

“If I lived here I would wake each day and walk down the dirt road adjacent to the house, observing the crops and flowers as the seasons changed,” I thought privately. “Upon my return to the house, I would sip coffee on the sagging clapboard porch, enjoying the view while the day’s tasks began to take shape.” As the weekend progressed, I became more enamored with the fantasy. After strawberry picking, swimming in the lake and dancing in a barn, my professional future seemed to fade in favor of small town life, not to mention reasonably priced real estate. (Listings of properties in small towns or rural areas in the region boasted multiple-acre properties with water rights for less than $250,000 – almost a farce in comparison with Denver’s soaring home prices and diminishing footprints!) The last day of the vacation, my fiancée and I made our way from Skaneateles to Ithaca, home of Cornell University and a town not unlike Boulder in its progressive celebration of local culture, commerce and recreation built around unique geographical features. Sunny skies had been replaced by ominous rainclouds, provoking memories of the long gray winters of my childhood in nearby Syracuse, New York. It seemed each town we passed became smaller and older, boasting tarnished placards of origination dates circa the mid-1800s. I was still charmed, but my train of thought quickly began to shift from porch-sitting to professional life.

“As a young professional and architect, what would I do if I lived here?” I wondered. “How would I still pursue architecture and experiences that would help me grow? Is there room for development, or are these traces of America’s past simply that – important vestiges of America’s bygone eras?”

Despite the thrill of travel and the opportunity to revel in the preservation of towns and buildings that serve as windows into many different “Americas” throughout history, I returned home thankful for choosing Denver as the home base from which I might continue to pursue my personal life and professional career.

Perhaps what is most exciting
for me personally about
practicing as a young
professional in Denver is
that the architecture and
development of the city
is not static, but rather
unapologetically in flux.

Bjarke Ingels, a prolific Danish architect with building projects currently under construction worldwide, was once quoted saying, “In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.”

Despite being bordered by many small mining towns with a rich history and narrative, perhaps what is most exciting for me personally about practicing as a young professional in Denver is that the architecture and development of the city is not static, but rather unapologetically in flux. Given the current development of projects related to public transportation, space and cultural landmarks, Denver is continuing to define itself as a representation of how the city’s collective residents imagine wanting to live their lives in concert with priorities that have emerged from existing lifestyles and attitudes that have served as cornerstones of the city’s current success and appeal.

As a result, amidst Denver’s growing city, the beauty of my routines are not imagined, but instead realities. Here, the lines between quiet and loud, busy and still are blurred in ways that somehow make sense. While historic landmarks and open space areas continue to be preserved and protected, there is an energy and pace that continues to spur new opportunities and experiences, allowing nature, main streets and a burgeoning metropolis to continue to evolve together as representations of different but related ways of living and congregating.