Why am I starting a blog? Me of all people!

First of all, I have always wanted to share my thoughts and the way I see architecture through my eyes for a long time. Maybe you see the same things as I do, get inspired, or see it in a totally different way and want to share those thoughts with me. In that way, we can learn and get inspired by each other.

Perhaps we should begin at the beginning and tell a little story of how nature, psychology, and motorcycles have come to have such a profound impact and relevance in my work.

Designing from the roots

Growing up in the Icelandic countryside, the beauty and roughness of nature has surrounded me. Forgetting the time that exists, I have spent many childhood days traveling through the mountains on horses, where I was taught from a very young age about the duality of nature. On the one hand, you have to learn to survive its roughness. On the other, you’ll be rewarded with the beauty and its kindness. To this day, I find beautiful and the strange, ugly, and the precious – the nature’s creations that I values as art. For me, plant that blossoms new leaves with the water droplets shining through the green steams is a living creature. A spirit that has a sense of magic and wonder. A root that both inspires and provokes to create aesthetics that are just as functional, as they are beautiful. Nature is therefore an enormously important source of ideas.

Layers we all have

I am intrigued by the psychological layers of human beings. The many layers we all have, and how we choose to show, hide and connect to our surrounding environment. Deep and yet simple. These curiosities influence the physical and psychological aspects of my creativity.

Poetry of craft

My affection for craftsmanship is mostly heightened by my love for the detailed engineering found in automotive design. Crafts­men who gained their sense of design by feeling of the wind, by roughness of the path. Functionality, materials, design – a combination that inspires to create with minimum use of materials for maximum results.

There is something poetic in feeling the rough wind on your body when the speed accelerates. Being by yourself, with unlimited horizon, simply exposed to the kissing of the sun, and feeling different moods of the rain.

My work

I have been working as an architect for eight years, working on many different projects, big and small, artistic as well as corporate projects. Working with small and big companies, flowing through time, getting experiences in my pocket, and tasting the variety of human behavior at all levels. (better to say on many levels) Today I run my creative studio, Rakel Karls Studio.

My approach to every project is through discovery, an ongoing dialogue, and a collaborative journey that benefits my understanding of the client’s needs as much as it teaches the client to feel the space in a way that they never knew before. And through this knowledge, I am able to create the spaces, pieces, and places for the people that let them immerse in the experience.

So why am I writing a blog?

I have many questions about why we are doing the things we do today and how we got to this point. The psychological aspect and behaviorism of the human being and the interaction and the impact architecture and the environment have on us have interested me for many years and as well our history. I believe there is something hidden and forgotten that might help us to understand us better, and therefore be able to create our surroundings to its greatest value for all life. So for me, this is a beginning of a journey of analyzing, researching, conducting interviews, traveling, and more.

I call this blog “Architecture we feel,” and I want to share this journey with you!

This first post briefly introduces why I am going on this journey. For my next posts, I will start to go into my thoughts on the human layers, as I call them: the mind and the body, our senses, energies, and our emotions.

Our senses act as receivers and gateways to our minds and bodies. Therefore, they receive any stimulus from the surrounding environment and physically and psychologically influence our minds and bodies. Our brain never recognizes a majority of the information that our senses take in. So whatever our senses receive will affect our life experiences.

That’s all for now!  

Ps. Please bear with me about my grammar and spelling mistakes. Thank you! 😊