Overthinking
Hey ArchiDabblers, it’s Linda here. This week’s post is a bit of a personal one, relating to overthinking in architecture. Whilst this isn’t something that I’ve overcome completely, I hope that by sharing my thoughts and experiences with overthinking during my studies, I can at least relate to, if not help out any of you guys who might go through similar things during university or in other areas of your life.
As architecture students (and future architects), we have to deal with a lot of decisions, analysis and considerations during our design projects. On one hand, we can never get bored as there’s always such a variety of things to work on, from site analysis to drawings to model-making and everything in between. In fact, the multidisciplinary nature is what got me into architecture in the first place. I loved the idea of being able to bring all my interests into one field of study. But in reality, it can sometimes be overwhelming to deal with all the different factors that affect the outcome of our projects. In addition to this, the nature of architecture school teaches us to constantly improve our work, leading us to perfectionist tendencies and therefore never being satisfied with our work. When you put the two together, you get a desire to perfect every single factor that affects the design process which simply isn’t realistic. As a result, we run into issues like overthinking which can hold us back from proceeding with our projects to the fullest potential.
Overthinking caused a lot of problems for me, and being stuck at home during the pandemic whilst studying didn’t help. My progress was stunted and my grades suffered as a result. Having said that, I learnt a lot on how to combat this or at least recognise when I’m struggling as a result of analysis paralysis.
The things I’ll talk about are based on my own personal experience. Whilst sometimes I struggled to believe in them fully, I trusted these principles enough to get me through the worst of my overthinking periods. In a way, these are things that I wish I could have told myself throughout architecture school when I found myself thinking too much and producing too little.
Done is better than perfect
One of the biggest things that held me back was being afraid to start, work on or finalise a piece of work because I didn’t feel ‘ready’ to produce it to the standard I want. The more I progressed through architecture school, the more I struggled with the idea of what my work ‘should look like’ as a second-year student, third-year student, environmental student etc. I held myself to unrealistic expectations and as a result, I fell behind as I struggled to execute my work in time. The reality is that your drawing could always be more detailed, your render could always be more realistic, your collage could always have more elements added to it. There will always be more, but architecture is about communication, and whilst it may be satisfying to have an amazing drawing of some sort, having one at the expense of a set of representations that adequately describe your proposal isn’t worth it if your audience can’t understand your project.
The perfect project/concept/idea doesn’t exist
Compared to the first projects you get in architecture school, you'll find that you get more and more freedom with the briefs you get given for your design modules. Each tests your ability to come up with creative design solutions that respond to the given issues of your project. Whilst architecture revolves a lot around problem-solving, you have to remember that there are multiple solutions to the design issues you’re trying to resolve, and you can’t respond to every issue perfectly with your project. There’s always a better way to respond to the site, client needs, and optimise building performance to contribute to sustainability, but time is limited and you have a set number of weeks or months to work on each project in architecture school. As an architecture and environmental design student, it feels like we have to achieve more in our design projects with less time on our hands; this adds to the challenge of trying to find a concept that sufficiently responds to all aspects of a design brief. I realised at some point that things don’t work in isolation in architecture – everything affects everything else. It just isn’t realistic to optimise every variable that goes into your design because it isn’t possible. This is why you prioritise what you want to achieve through your design, rather than trying to do everything to the best possible standard.
Commit to your decisions. They’re probably better than you think.
You could always do more if you had more time, but you don’t. You have to accept that at a given time, you’re as informed as you can be to make a particular design choice, whether on materiality or spatial organisation. If you don’t move on with the design process, your chances of meeting your deadlines will become slimmer and slimmer. My biggest downfall is not committing to a particular concept that I don’t see perfect, forgetting that a large part of the concept evolves with the rest of the stages of a design project. The truth is, a lot of the concepts I come up with could be developed into a really successful project. But when I was working on my design studio work in both second and third year, because I didn’t allow myself to develop the ideas I saw faults in from the get-go, I was stuck when I really just had to commit to an idea that had potential to inform my work in the best way possible with the time that I had.
Solve one problem at a time
I’m guilty of sitting at my desk for ages trying to formulate a draft that addresses every design problem. But that defeats the purpose of iteration and a concept. You have to allow yourself to draw out and test ideas that don’t respond to all your design variables yet. Your programme might work with one site orientation at the conceptual stage of the project, but could pose problems when it comes down to resolving the circulation. It’s a process. Plus, the whole point of tutorials is to evaluate your projects so far - that means getting feedback on the design issues you’ve addressed to this point in the project, and potentially uncovering new design solutions (or problems) to inform the next step of your design process. It doesn’t happen in one sitting.
Get out of your head
A lot of the time, I found myself going round in circles in my mind and not getting anywhere with my work. Just as you can only focus on revising written material for a certain amount of time, my problem-solving capabilities were time-limited too. Grounding exercises helped me to shift my focus to a wider perspective of my project and see solutions that didn’t come to me before. These might include doing something to take my mind off architecture completely for half an hour that was unrelated to my work; or it could be as simple as looking out of a window, perhaps sketching something so I ground myself and pay attention to what was around me, not what was going on in my head. Additionally, talking to peers or presenting your ideas to others can help bring some new perspectives into your work that you might struggle to see when you’re struggling with brain fog. It helps to draw back your focus to individual tasks when you’re feeling overwhelmed with the wider scope of your whole project.
Action > Thinking
Thinking about your project but not actually creating the work to represent your thoughts is definitely not as useful as you might feel it is in the moment. A studio-mate of mine told me something along the lines of ’4 hours of doing is better than 20 hours of thinking’ and that hit hard, because it brought to light my bad habit of overthinking my work and how detrimental it was to my studies. Up until now, I didn’t know how to prevent myself from ruminating on my project all day, but barely producing any output to do my mental problem-solving justice. However, I’ve gotten into the habit of recognising when I’m getting lost in the thought process of my work and purposefully not engaging with it until I’ve set up a way to translate my thinking directly into an output. Whether that’s sketching out what I’m visualising even if I don’t have the perfect mediums with me to do so, or starting a section with placeholder elements for unresolved parts of the structure when my plans are not fully detailed or complete, it is always better to physically produce something imperfect than to think about it until the best idea comes to mind (which it probably won’t). You’ll never regret making something instead of thinking about everything.
That brings us to the end of this week’s post on some personal insight into overthinking in architecture. Keep an eye-out for our follow-up Instagram post from this blog post. Follow us on Instagram @archidabble to stay informed on our other content, like our CAD Store!
