2025

Sean Kamana
Jan 4
4 min read

Updated: Apr 5

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Revisit the whole blog and reflect on progress as artist and architecture. Master building and referring to theory and art. Connect the dots bring others up to speed. Reflect on outlooks and return to where I’ve been. Establish goals. Name them. Make them real.

Reflection and wisdom have echoed from cliff sides and into the forefront of my awareness for the last handful of years. Much has happened, and much is yet to occur. I am 26 years old, and I see in the sobering quiet of northern New Hampshire a reclusive, biting ambition that swells inside me. I see more now in the prioritization of certain qualities of living how others become impossible. I am confronted with endless possibilities and choices at my fingertips.

New trajectories avails themselves to me at every corner. New opportunities, languages, people, and places seem so accessible regardless of where it is I am. Businesses can be conjured, and services provided which offer some value and equally to others liability. We spend much time negotiating with the pride of other people in order to accomplish our own aims and interests. I am often optimistic that through consistent exchange, there will always be room for the resolution of mere curiosity.

As an architect I respect the history of my craft. I acknowledge its existence and value its wisdom. The ignorance of the worldliness and vast expanses of precedent that compose the stitch-work blankets of our collective past do not deny its library of citations. There are some ways to build buildings that are objectively better. There are other ways which are necessarily worse. What fascinates me at times is the fact that these winning and losing ideas will only ever podium themselves as a result of the context they exist in. The manufacture and repetition of certain ideas can be cheaper and quicker and more profitable for vastly different reasons.

I say all these soft musings to set forward a notion of the complexity and nuance that remains possible to produce the most satiating events of life as the background of any sensation, feeling, experience, result, or conception. I remain in passionate awe at the possibility that lies ever ahead of an individual to simply manifest the most idyllic visual and functional representation of space for customized enjoyment. What a privilege it truly is to afford, direct and desire the containment of life into spatial arrangements.

As I flirt with my own language for describing architecture - a vocation I am eternally grateful for not only being good at, but also passionate about - I generalize the profession. The layman is so critical to my existence as an architect that I seek him out every day and ask him what he would like to build. I spend time with them and allow them the trust to bestow on me the product of their visions and dreams for the future. After sufficient time has allowed for the resolution of a preliminary concept, I embark on locating a foreman who will understand only parts of the vision I have resolved through instructive diagrams. At every instance my thirst to expose the deeper qualities of paired materials and construction processes question themselves and offer explanations who do not always find the lightness of casual conversation. The layman can perceive every quality of building because of how familiar it can be in everyday life. Everyone has a house or a room or a bed or a Saturday morning they can draw on to explain why such paint and such panel should have such a placement on a wall. This universality remains the beauty of all threads woven into the complex weave of human creation.

I have used this space over the last half decade to keep a dialogue about the universal and the niche. I have attempted to represent honest questioning and at times mildly insightful research about my tightly wound relationship to this mysterious profession. I find I do not have the ability to separate my observations about living life and designing architecture. Perhaps it is because I am always questioning and considering every decision that someone has had to consider and act upon to make any frame of any life that someone could live out.

I find even in mundane existence the quality of a breeze through a window with a view has the capacity to exact on you a spectrum of emotions and thoughts merely by its relationship to the sun and the moon on any given summer's evening. What sublime divine order is capable from the systematizing of parts of the world simply so you can have eggs beside a lake without wondering if the rain will wet you? I think so much thought and questioning lends to a higher quality of life and a more present relationship with life itself. A quiet place gives thought while an active place gives action.

I yearn to know the unknowable. So how does a man come to know the unknowable?

I suppose he does so on a walk through nature.... This year I'd like to reference a brief history of architecture to become a better designer and write something critical funny, serious and dark: Perhaps a small play and story made from a mild mannered hero with low expectations for the world who paradoxically remains optimistic about its virtues while suffering its trials.

Vitruvius began here:

Thoughts of battle:

There will be war

the Sumerian and the Elamite

Saxon fights the Viking

histories grew

wars of roses

oranges

the opium wars

one day

six day

thousand day