So where does one begin a biography?

In the womb...? or further back with the idea of past lives. Or maybe it is a projection of ones future life and where ones path is headed.Well I suppose it is that too. All I can really affirm here is that via the vehicle of my work, my life has been the discovery that....... all I really am.....is that I am.

For the working record, and since this is the only lifetime mortal me can recall at this time, I guess I will mention that it is influenced by having been educated around the world in at least 25 schools, having lived in as many cities and even more homes.On reflection, that is perhaps how I began my journey into wanting to understand the environment and how design may affect us.

I am the youngest in a family of 5 children brought up from an early age by a widowed and rather eccentric father. As siblings we experienced a rather unusual view of life, one which included not only many cityscapes but also long periods living at sea, and even surviving a plane crash.

To cope with all the continual crossings of culture and curriculum at the multifarious schools, I personally found it easier to lean towards the more common ground of maths and art. And so it was that architecture became my preferred area of study, though I did initially take a detour to Fine Art. Not surprisingly when I did my final thesis it was on.....architecture.

If one values ones worth by editorial credit and financial reward,I suppose in my early working years I was a successful building developer and designer. But my real passion lay in understanding better what it was that made a building tick. And I was curious as to whether such a building could make us tick.

Over the years I studied social architecture, psychology of design, colour theory and human physiology in relation to ergonomics.For historical classical input I studied the Greeks and Egyptians, then drifted east for a while, investigating the Chinese philosophy of the Tao, feng shui and India's vashtu to understand the Eastern take on environmental design and architecture. As a balance to these escoteric investigations, as best I could I studied lay biomolecular-chemistry and quantum mechanics to understand us and matter itself.

It was by integrating this unfolding information into my work that I found myself reaching for deeper pickings at the tree of life in general.

At a point of change in the 90's I took a gap year. I used it to work as creative director on film and video, along with lecturing at art schools. Working with leading lights of the stage and art/architecture world, as well as major players of the business world.....during this time I grew my skill... and my questions. At one stage I was invited in a professional capacity to Downing St. There,while sitting in Churchill's famous armchair and in response to questions about my evolving perspective on design, I was rather serendipitously able to quote the great man himself.

"We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us." Sir Winston Churchill.

While working on my current book on quantum mechanics and architecture, and generally blowing myself away with the wonders of our Universe, I wrote two other books on the Tao,the environment and us - 'Chinese Whispers' - and - 'Good Vibes'.

Researching and writing through the night while working on sites during the day, my life went from teach-ins to academic soirees', and from spiritual retreats to building sites. Designing churches, factories and high street shops, along with country house estates and live / work studios, altogether a rather satisfying play on my evolving stage.

Oh - and I finally found out what made a building tick.

WE DO.

We are the cause, the affect and the effect.

So in that my biography and my life comes back to its beginning. From many environments as a child to more as an adult.Via architecture my life has been the search and discovery of my simply being an interdependent vibrating mineral in water along with everyone and everything else.

I am that, you are that, this is that and that is this.......

Rosalyn Dexter