Royden So

The rest of the week I'm a sophomore in architecture at Cooper Union, learning to speak very precisely and slightly ridiculously. A hallway is now "circulation" (centrifugal, on a good day), a brick wall is "stereotomic" while a timber frame is "tectonic," and I can't order a coffee without critiquing the café's spatial logics.

I call myself a cross-pollinator: I borrow proportion from architecture, rhythm from type and structure from product work, then mix them until something new falls out.

I also spend a lot of time asking what design even is. Is a designer an artist? A creator? Where does taste come from? I don't have the answers yet, which is half the fun.

Everything is designed, from the lamp above your head to the screen you're reading this on. Paula Scher said "You have to get bad in order to get good," so I keep picking projects a little too big for me.

When I'm not designing, you'll catch me running or cutting across the city on a Citi Bike.