When the Tower Falls:
Redesigning a Life Through Tarot

In her new book, Tarot for Change, teacher, writer, social worker, and tarot reader Jessica Dore likens The Tower to a series of personality traits that work to buffer against existential anxiety. In this context, a falling tower is transmuted from “one of the most feared cards in the deck to a powerful blessing.” I, too, often tell my tarot clients that The Tower can be a blessing in disguise. A Tower moment is nature’s way of course-correcting us, reminding us that while the horrors of existence can induce trauma, there is always potential in a clearing. When a structure falls, there is an opportunity to rebuild should we dare to envision what’s next.

As I’ve developed a relationship with the tarot over the years, I’ve learned that this practice isn’t an exercise in fortune telling so much as a game of I Spy. Reading tarot cards is a method similar to what my late mother, an architect, would describe in her work as “making visible the invisible.” My first step in any tarot reading is to look at the spread in front of me and ask myself what I see. What questions do the shapes, colors, symbols, or numbers on the cards incite? What are their patterns? What might be missing?

Students of art, architecture, and design often begin their studies by relearning how to see. In her classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards insists that to draw requires skill in perception of edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows, and the whole. Consider observation as the mycelium that connects the process of design and the process of divination. The interpretation of these observations results in the sprouting of new spaces and structures, of new instructions and stories. Like trees that grow by cycling through iterations of shedding and rebirth, expanding over time, the ongoing revisions of our personal narratives and reshapings of the spaces we inhabit are the ingredients to our own growth, healing, and transformation.

In both tarot and design practice, observing humanity on the ground (our bodies and our natural environments) as well as in spirit (the cosmos), and deriving meaning from these observations is key to a meaningful intuitive reading or creation. The sensual furniture designs of Le Corbusier’s undercredited protégé, Charlotte Perriand, are said to be inspired by pebbles, driftwood, and debris she collected scouring the beaches of Normandy. Former Bauhaus student, architect, and theorist Siegfried Ebeling conceptualized his Space as Membrane approach to design through keen observation of bodily functions. Bioarchitectural structures like Mexico’s Casa Orgánica or Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye’s Winter Park Library project in Florida rely on a sensibility to nature’s patterns.

The entire minor arcana of the tarot, represented by more than half of the 78-card deck, is also organized according to nature’s four elements. Earth, air, water, and fire symbolize the ways in which we experience life: materially, through the mind, through our emotions, and through our spirits. It’s not uncommon to christen or purify a tarot reading with natural material such as crystals, holy water, or smudging—the indigenous ritual practice of burning sacred herbs or resins.

Design approaches that observe the realm of the cosmos are endless. Famed modernist architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe is often quoted claiming that “God is in the details.” In a fascinating etymological comparison between angles and angels, the late Italian architectural theorist Marco Frascari hinted at a spiritual undertone in geometry—a necessary mathematical and engineering foundation in architecture. Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Carlo Scarpa, and Adolf Loos is understood to incorporate Japanese spatial principles, like Zenshūyō rooted in Zen Buddhism.

These approaches call to mind major arcana tarot cards such as The Star, The Moon, Judgment, or The High Priestess, illustrated with cosmic symbology and depicting an angelic, spiritual dimension. Of course the act of divination itself is one of communion with this realm. Prolific French-American multidisciplinary artist and architect Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, an expansive sculpture park inspired by the cards in Tuscany, is the paragon of this nexus between an intuitive divination practice, design, and the natural environment.

Just as I am drawn to a tarot deck’s ability to both visually inspire and share a meaningful message, I find that the most beautiful designs are functional, narrative, and aesthetically pleasing. That with every line or detail design objects can string together a message is an act of care.

In a reading, the card spread speaks to the stories that are immediately available to us, reminds us of where our imagination has taken us in the past, and encourages us to imagine and embody new narratives. This reflection sets in motion an alchemy of change and transformation symbolized by a card like The Tower. “The one thing we know about this age is it’s all about change, if there’s one constant, it’s change,” Richard Rogers, co-architect of the Pompidou Center in Paris, told Dezeen in 2013. Whether or not he had read Octavia Butler, who similarly posited in her Parable series that the only lasting truth is change, that God is change, remains unknown. The Pompidou building, admired for its innovative exoskeletal architecture, was designed to achieve flexibility with constant interior rearrangement. This ability to consistently reidentify itself within its own context is an exquisite parallel to the act of redesigning one’s own life through a tarot practice. Excavating what’s within through a tarot reading, so that our internal corridors and stories may be refashioned with ease, is powerfully transformative. Therein lies my case: that designers are healers too.

Khalila Douze is a freelance writer, creative consultant, and tarot card reader based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Cultured Mag, Vogue, Dazed, i-D, and more.