A Home for the Journey
Li Lian Tan
January 1, 2001
Most people envision an ideal future in terms of their childhood dreams. I've always been something of a contrarian, so it's fitting that my own current calling finds its seeds in the insomnia of my youth. Late at night, passing the time, I would pretend that I was an architect. I designed houses in various geometric shapes, worked out solutions for traffic problems in my Singapore neighborhood, and came up with renovation schemes for the three old row houses my parents had purchased. During the day, however, I was failing my art classes at school, which suggested that architecture was not the career path to take. I eventually found myself graduating from college with a degree in finance. But architecture kept nagging at me, surfacing in my envy of friends who were working in architecture studios and in my insatiable desire to travel and to see more of what architects call "the built world."
During and after college I traveled everywhere—tourist traps, cities, and places off the beaten track, from Estonia to New Zealand to the Ladakh Range of the Indian Himalayas. I reveled in Islamic architecture like Istanbul's sublimely beautiful Blue Mosque—where, even though I was a Christian in a Muslim place of worship, I was overwhelmed with the desire to lay prostrate and worship God. The ornate churches of Europe did less for my soul, but a cluster of monasteries in Meteora, Greece, did linger in my memory.
Travel was a quick fix for my dissatisfaction with life. But the more I traveled, the more I sensed I was avoiding the question of home. My constant peregrinations cut me off from most of my friends. At the same time, after working as a disgruntled financial analyst for two years, I took a summer course in architecture, ...
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