Introspection is a very refined and thick word. In nowadays society –inwhich we experience everything as objects, where we ‘live in a material world’and it appears, as we do not have the time to look deeper and beyond superficialperception- this word has gone in disuse and is considered to be out of fashion.

It is a random, mid-July, typically Spanish, warm, summer evening and I amon the train on my way back home. I am observing from the inside the outsidesurrounding landscape, which goes by terribly, fast. This experience can be seenas a metaphor; as a matter of fact it truly embodies contemporary living andlifestyle. Time goes by quickly, but its perception is terribly relative andsubjective. As a matter of fact, for me, it gets difficult to weigh time and define itsvalue and my mind goes often blurry: sometimes few month can feel like days, 3years or even 30.

I was living in Carleton exactly when the canal started to melt and thisspectacular show, reminded me and looked like Italian coffee ‘granita’ – the one Ilove most is Sicilian ‘granita’ because it still has a genuine and full taste.

As an initiated professor, I felt very responsible about how to fulfill, feedand stimulate, the mind and brains of my –then- 17 students, who were eager toknow and learn more about being an architect today and it todays world. Thisbrings to my mind the key question: What is an architect today? Is an architect asocial employee, a creative engineer, a sculptor or a person who needs to work tosurvive? As a consequence I needed to understand these 34 eyes which wherelooking at me with curiosity and hope, looking forward to getting an answer. I hadto create osmosis in their heads without flattering their personality; I needed to‘introspect’ their brains, travel across their soils in order to exteriorize their futurevision, their feelings so that they would be able to find their own way in thisworld. A world that everyday gets smaller and smaller, that shrinks just like whenyou wash a jumper with the wrong program…

In this campus where people jobs are in the tunnels, where the sun isprecious as salt, where respect is naturally part of the DNA; I, for the first time ina long run, had the time to stop and look at my self in the mirror. What I saw wastime had been carving its way through my skin and finally realizing that time goesby always, it passes, it flows, sometimes quicker, sometimes making us livemoments which feel eternal; but no matter what or how, it does and in thischaotic society - it is difficult to stop and realize it, but when you do, you learnyour lesson.

‘‘My experience on Carleton University’’ by Teresa Sapey