During my personal training session last Friday, Ron- my trainer- assured me that our focus was on strengthening and toning my muscles. He told me that I was not to worry about building bulk because my stretches and exercises are targeted for building lean muscle mass, not big muscles.

Our conversation would not leave my head. I remembered a photo of Tryvanstårnet that I took while visiting Norway in 2005. Though my workout situation necessarily excludes the result of one (bulk) for the other (tone), this image causes me to contemplate the question of whether a building can be a product of both. From the perspective of an architectural massing language, that is.

As a material, I typically think of concrete as ‘bulk’. Hefty, weighty, and chunky are adjectives I use to describe its essence as an element of an architectural form. Viewing the tower from below, as I did when I captured this image, gives me pause to observe that tone and bulk are equally present. Since the majority of the project is concrete, the use of volumetric toning (base and spire), while keeping the design’s bulkiness (midsection) evident, is intriguing and thought-provoking.

*There are many photos online that depict the entirety of Tryvannstårnet, if your curiosity is piqued.

While driving north on Route 52 recently, I saw a sign. There it was. The familiar feeling of dread that I hadn’t felt since my late teens. A ‘good’ parcel of land is given up to a large residential development. But why dread? Am I not an architect? Is not this what I yearn for in my spirit? A chance to make a mark on the landscape?

With the few seconds that it took for me to choose to look away from the yellow and white-striped asphalt stretching in the proverbial one point perspective in front of me, I began to hark(en) back to a time in my life when I abhorred these signs. Were we destroying the land? My sister was convinced that I was the graffiti artist in the early 90s that spray-painted the words FREE THE LAND all over the signs dotting the landscape in my suburban section of Centerville, OH.

Many years have passed since that time, and I find myself reliving that moment whenever I make a line on a page to start a new project. Is ‘nothing’ better than finding a space to fill with ‘something’? The giddy feeling of changing the very foundation of the earth, and our perception of it, is tempered with a reminder- from my graduate school days- to explore each project with rigor and in relation to its context.

Failing to do this will lead me to doing, and ultimately romaticizing nothing.