biography
biography
It was only a dream
She was sitting on the kitchen window playing with her Erector Set and Lego blocks; outside, men were digging a hole for the drainage pipes around her apartment building. It was raining; the graphite gray sky appeared to move with silent noise over their heads. Dirty, slimy, brown leaves stuck to the pavement, reflected the grayness of the sky. The winter was coming. She was five.
She could always hear the buildings talk. She could read their aura, knew which one was happy and which one was missing something. She spent many sleepless nights in her 7x7 bedroom transforming the world, and making it a better place. When reading the books about foreign countries, the pictures of the unknown were vividly rolling in her brain. She was hungry for a world, her lungs were gasping for foreign smells, her fingers were itching to touch and feel, her brain was shaking with excitement for what was ahead.
She spent her first five years learning to read and contemplating the surrounding world. She was lucky enough to move to different parts of Poland and to travel abroad to the Black Sea. Often she traveled with her parents - first tucked in between them on a little powder blue Lambretta scooter, then in a green pea cardboard Trabant. It was a great way to travel. She started putting her thoughts on paper when she was six. Her drawings were different than those of the children her age. There were just a bunch of square shapes on the graph paper, carefully placed with the ruler and blue ballpoint pen. Her soul was melted into every line and every dot. She lived inside of that labyrinth of lines, her imagination hovered from one space to another. It was her world. Those were her first floor plans. She learned perspective shortly after that, and it felt like flying to the moon. When she was seven, her classmate gave her some architecture magazines stolen from the girl’s father. It was her first formal education. Her floor plans were getting more and more elaborate. The lines become walls and windows, the doors get the swings. The furniture moved in. Her little world was becoming homier.
She was a tomboy blowing stuff up, cutting, drilling, soldering, and building. She had an urge to build, drawing and dreaming wasn’t enough. Her father’s garage became her second home. She discovered tool after tool. Finally at the age of ten she got her first real electric drill, and she flew a plane, contemplating for hours how it was built and, in her mind, disassembled it piece by piece and put it back together. The world was getting more and more fascinating and more and more digestible for her young brain.
She was turning her floor plans into Lego block structures, staring at each block for hours and feeling its meaningfulness. She spent hours reading, drawing, and dreaming. She didn’t have much time for school; her mind was too busy to bother with the daily chores. When she was about eleven her mother threw away all her drawings after getting a bad report card from school. She was prohibited from ever drawing again. From now on she was reading her books under the blanket at night with the small light bulb she attached to the battery herself. In the sixth grade she got an F from an art class when she designed a school of her dreams as a homework assignment. Her teacher never believed that she actually did it herself.
She stopped drawing when she was 14. Her mind was helplessly trapped; her skills stagnant. The four years of high school she spent only dreaming, a prisoner of her own soul surrounded by the blind, uncompassionate world. Soon after, she stopped dreaming, the war of hormones took over her world. After high school the reality of life became like a riptide – it took her for a swim on a boring river. The dark depth of the water surrounded her and she was slowly drifting away.
She rescued herself at the age of 25. She quit her accounting job, dropped out from Business College and came to America. Her dreams came back. She started taking art classes, Pratt, Cooper Union, and local Art Leagues. She learned how to draw, paint, sculpt, and throw pottery. She could finally feel the light breeze of the magical wind so familiar from her childhood dreams. She found her place, her love and her destiny. She realized that the dream she had when she first looked at the world is possible to come true. She started hearing the buildings talk again. She could feel their warmth or coldness; their feelings.
She signed up for Architectural College. Her long lost passion erupted like a volcano – but instead of burying land around with its ashes, it is spreading its lava farther and farther into an ocean full of possibilities. She is yet to discover an architect in her, but one thing she knows for sure – whatever it is she will do in her life, it will be with or around architecture. Whether she will learn to become a great architect or take a pride in being a great draft person, or model maker, she knows that whatever she will do, she will be good at it. Her dream became her goal, and is becoming a reality.
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