My mother was a music teacher, sang in a group that recorded some very famous and well-known songs, and we had musical instruments literally in every room of our house.

Music has been a significant contributor in my life – particularly during my formative years. This brings me back to my childhood and to musical things. After a while, I started to think about harmony in a different way, one that doesn’t have anything to do with what I do as an architect. When I sat down to write this post, I sat here looking at the blank screen and started to process my thoughts, think about how much I should write, how the text would sit on the page, what images would I use, how those images could pause the story, interrupt the block of text, etc. I literally deal with harmony all day, every day. I rely on my ability to find harmony and balance in the relationship of things, whether it is the shape of buildings, the open space around those buildings, material choices, patterns, etc. I am an architect – but more specifically I am a designer and a communicator. Harmony is a word I rarely use but if I slow down enough to think about it, it might actually be the most appropriate word that describes my life. That could mean building massing, the colors in a painting, a combination of notes within a chord, etc. That resonates with me because the word sounds like what it means – a pleasing arrangement of parts.

It’s nice to say because it has a hard consonant sound and the beginning and a soft vowel sound at the end.

Architectural harmony definition