The blinker is rhythmic, a 47-beat-per-minute pulse that usually calms me, but right now it feels like a countdown to a minor cardiac event. I am hovering, angled at 37 degrees, waiting for the blue SUV to vacate the spot. It is the only shade in the lot. Then, out of the periphery, a rusted hatchback-7 years past its expiration date-darts in from the wrong direction. The driver doesn’t even look at me. He just slides into that 17-foot rectangle of asphalt like he owns the meridian. My hands tighten on the steering wheel until my knuckles turn a shade of white that reminds me of the sterile office walls I’m supposed to be redesigning today. It’s not just about the spot; it’s the disruption of the expected flow, the violation of the unspoken grid we all agree to live by. This is the core frustration of what I’ve started calling Idea 18: the assumption that if we plan the space, the world will respect the boundaries.

The Friction Necessary for the Soul

Antonio R. understands this better than anyone I know. Antonio is a quality control taster, but not for food. He ‘tastes’ the environment. He’s 67 years old now, with 7 distinct silver rings on his fingers, and he has this unsettling habit of walking into a room and licking the air. He says he can taste the chemical off-gassing of cheap laminate or the metallic tang of an overworked HVAC system. I brought him into a project last month-a 137-square-foot studio that felt like a sensory vacuum. The client wanted it to be ‘clean.’ It was so clean it felt like an interrogation room.

‘This room tastes like a hospital cafeteria in 1987. It’s too smooth. There’s no friction for the soul to grab onto.’

We had eliminated all the ‘noise’ and in doing so, we had eliminated the humanity. We think we want smooth surfaces and perfect lines, but our brains are wired for the 127 different textures of a forest floor. We need the shadows. We need the irregularities. We need the grit that the parking-spot-stealer represents, even if we hate him in the moment.

Embracing the Crooked Line

There’s a contrarian angle to all this: the more we try to simplify our surroundings, the more complex our anxiety becomes. If you live in a house where everything is white and flat, a single 7-millimeter scratch on the floor becomes a tragedy. If you live in a space with depth and texture, that same scratch is just part of the story. I remember my grandfather, who carried a 7-inch brass level in his pocket every day of his life. He was a carpenter, but he never built a perfectly level house. He used to say that if a house was perfectly level, the water would never know which way to run, and the people would never know which way to lean. He built ‘lean’ into his work. He built 17 different ways for the light to catch the grain of the wood so that even on a cloudy day, the room felt alive.

This is where we usually fail in modern design. We mistake ‘order’ for ‘beauty.’ We look at a blank wall and think it needs to stay blank to be ‘minimal.’ But a blank wall is just a wall that hasn’t started talking yet. When I was working on that project with Antonio, we decided to scrap the flat drywall. We needed something that broke the sound, something that added a rhythmic verticality to the space without making it feel cluttered. We ended up looking at specialized architectural elements, specifically the kind of Slat Solution that provides both acoustic dampening and visual depth. It was about creating a sequence of 157 vertical lines that allowed the eye to travel, rather than getting stuck in the corner of a flat, dead plane.

Gratitude for the Friction

I’m sitting in my car now, 17 minutes after the parking spot incident. I could have looped the lot again, but I decided to just sit here and watch the guy in the rusted hatchback. He’s struggling to get a stroller out of the back seat. He looks tired. He looks like he hasn’t slept in 7 days. My anger, which felt so solid and justified 77 seconds ago, is starting to dissolve. The ‘grid’ of my day was interrupted, sure, but the interruption brought me back to reality. It reminded me that the world doesn’t owe me a 17-foot rectangle of shade.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my career. I once ordered 777 square feet of the wrong marble because I was distracted by a 7-cent discrepancy in the invoice. I’ve argued with contractors over 7-degree angles that didn’t actually matter. These mistakes are the texture of a professional life. If I never messed up, I wouldn’t know how to fix things. And the fixing is where the real expertise lives. We shouldn’t trust people who haven’t failed at least 17 times in a row; they don’t have enough ‘residue’ to be interesting.

Mouthfeel of Our Homes

Antonio R. once told me about a taster who lost his sense of smell for 87 days. The man was devastated, but during that time, he discovered the ‘architecture’ of food-the way a crust crunches or the way a liquid coats the tongue. He became a better taster because he had to focus on the structure instead of the surface. We are in a similar period of sensory deprivation in our built environments. We are so focused on the ‘smell’ of success and the ‘look’ of luxury that we’ve forgotten the mouthfeel of our homes. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to run a hand over a wall and feel 127 individual ridges of wood, each one reflecting a different 7-watt sliver of light.

I finally found a new spot. It’s 107 yards further from the entrance and it’s in the direct sun, but it’s fine. As I walk toward the building, I notice the way the heat waves shimmer off the pavement. It’s a messy, distorted view, and it’s beautiful. I realize that Idea 18 isn’t about making the world fit into our plans. It’s about making our plans robust enough to handle the 77 different ways the world will try to break them.

The Necessary Resistance

I’ll probably see that guy with the hatchback again. Maybe I’ll tell him his car is a piece of junk, or maybe I’ll just nod because we’re both just trying to navigate a world that has 7 billion people all fighting for the same 17 feet of shade. The irritation is gone, replaced by a strange kind of gratitude for the friction. Without the friction, we’d all just slide off the edge of the world, wouldn’t we? We need the resistance. We need the 7-inch level that shows us we’re a little bit crooked, and we need the grace to be okay with it.

When was the last time you actually felt the walls of your life, rather than just looking through them?