When you look at most modern architecture, it is usually only necessary to look for the door. Enter it and eat in it, work in it, live in it if you have to—but don't look to it as a model for how to design your own life. Rather, as one example, look to the best medieval cathedrals, those with a thousand intricate details, each smallest part suffered over to perfection. Nothing rushed, no aspect thrown together just for the sake of easy completion—these beautiful constructions help teach the meaning of what it means to be complete, to complete anything.
Oh drab pragmatism! Mass production is always a quicker, cheaper imitation of the once actually beautiful. So much more is produced by the day, and yet it seems to add up to so much less! In a world whose production schedules are outsourced to rabidly utilitarian demands, the deepest beliefs of the soul, once prolific designers and constructors, have mostly been put out of work.
When constructing your own life, don't rush yourself out of the details. The heart of a life well-lived is in the embellishments! Chisel methodically away even on your slowest days. Not detail for the sake of detail, but always for the addition it makes to the whole. Today, you may be sculpting one small gargoyle, destined to peer out of a brief era of your life, housed in some corner on the far side of your life's ultimate work. Still, make it exact, labored over with the same focus and care as any other portion of that personal cathedral you are building.
Great architectural works are not constructed in any other way. It is not your job to calculate the amount of dust today's task will one day gather—no, keep your eye on the more important calculations: the dimensions and blueprints mapping out the way towards the building up of awe-inducing complexity. Do you have many interesting stories to tell of the life you've (thus far) lived? If so, I will listen as entranced as any attentive sightseer.
I write as one born in a place where history was found primarily in books and not bricks. I ran from Western strip malls, shopping centers, and parking lots hardly more bland than the buildings they were associated with. I couldn't look at them and not fear that I was being trained to build myself in a similar fashion. Perhaps, though, I took the easy way out. Imagine yourself, right where you are, becoming a methodically built Gothic cathedral—something that your community likely currently lacks and cries out for.