Mission Statement

Dear Student,

It’s probably best not to use the word vision because, when we’re talking about ideas and where they come from because people – including and perhaps especially instructors – might mis-understand you to mean that other overused word, inspiration. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to start with an idea of how you want your building to be. The problem is what kind of idea it’s going to be, and words like vision and inspiration pressure students into thinking they have to dream up something in the realm of Art. It’s terrible seeing young lives wasted.

Before I answer your question properly, I’d also like to exclude from consideration those people whose concepts won’t be great or even appropriate, but who have the graphic and/or presentation skills to convince you that they are. This is something else entirely and, even if there is a place for these people in contemporary practice, I don’t think you mean you want to get better at expressing any concept.

But to get back to your question, my first thought is that it’s good to have a vision for how you want your building to be or, more to the point, how you want people to respond to your building. Once you know that, it’s just a process of making decisions that move it in the direction you want, and not making decisions that don’t. It’s not really trial-and-error because things will happen and some of them will work towards what you want and some will work against it. If you have that initial vision then you can always test your decisions against it.

Perhaps instead of the word vision we should use the term mission statement and use that as a guide. When a company is first set up, it has a founding document called Articles of Incorporation that describe what the company will do and it will include something called the Mission Statement. The Mission Statement has a very important function because, whenever a company finds itself in a situation where they can’t decide which course of action is better, they look to their Mission Statement and ask which course of action is more in line with what the company is supposed to be about.

With that recent project of mine in the post you mentioned, my guiding principle was to allow those unforeseen factors to directly influence the outcome and I discovered they create an immediacy and specificity that wouldn’t otherwise have been there. In the previous semester’s project* where the “idea” was to let two rigid geometric systems intersect in ways I couldn’t anticipate, I learned to not be afraid of not knowing everything at the outset. Even though I relinquished a degree of (imagined) control, there were no situations that didn’t work and required some one-off cheat to solve. [*Spiral Binding]

You’ll notice I haven’t used the word concept. I’ve never liked it but, to be honest, I never find much appetite among instructors or students for my preferred term, organizing idea which is equivalent for the (now) archaic term parti that used to be used in architecture schools.

Dear Prof,

I think that’s what it is! A mission statement! Personally, I can’t design something without it checking the list of what I think it should fulfill at the back of my head so I think that could be one element that I never thought about before.

I remember back in introductory design, I couldn’t start a project without a vision of it in my head so I would lag for a while and have nothing to show for class. I think my instructor probably thought I was either lazy or stupid. I just couldn’t get my head around students creating things without a vision for it in their heads. In order to do well, I eventually just pushed myself to produce work even if it didn’t comply with whatever I thought the design process should be.

The next design course was an odd experience but also kind of depressing. It was more about creating things that look like buildings rather than creating buildings, or at least, that’s how I saw it. I noticed how the more “visually expressive” projects usually got the higher grade because they were deemed more creative. During my second year, it wasn’t the workload or the pressure, but this concept of creativity and how it was judged that almost made me change my major. 

I remember seeing projects with snakes, sea turtles and fish as their concepts. I remember the stated concept of one third year project was a man and a woman confronting each other. The project was simply two buildings facing each other with one taller than the other. I had no words. I’ve always understood that a concept is supposed to lead the design, kind of like what streetlights do when you’re driving through the night.

Thanks!

Dear Student,

Mission statement does seem to be a more useful way of looking at it. You can interpret it as something you believe in and that’s good too. Cost performance or environmental or energy performance are also things one can believe in and each can shape a building. Even if the criteria are more quantifiable – not that there’s anything wrong with that – it’s still the same process with criteria to guide your design and let you know if your decisions are moving towards them or not. Mission statement can also be interpreted as research agenda. In that Spiral Binding project I keep going on about, my mission was to test if letting two rigid systems intersect without knowing the results beforehand was a viable way to design a building. I suppose that, in the same vein, an artistic agenda is also a variety of mission statement and this is why we’re more willing to accept artists saying things like “with this work I wanted to express …” etc. The problem with artistic agendas, whether they’re used or misused by artists or architects, is that the end result must speak for itself.

Finally, I suppose we have to also admit the existence of the marketing & branding agenda where the mission is to use a project to gain as much publicity as possible. Whether the people who are good at this actually believe in what they’re doing beyond that is another matter. I’m not worried about you because you’re deriving your own criteria for what good and success mean. It’s the others I worry about.

In English there’s an old saying from the 1500s, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” It means you can’t make something good out of something that’s intrinsically bad. It’s true, but Post Modernism taught us you can still say something is good and you can still present it as if it were good, and people will believe you.

You’ve already noticed how some students spend more energy convincing instructors their design is good than they do on making it decent or even acceptable. You’ll meet these people again and again throughout your working life. You’ll have to try to not get upset when you see them succeed. In ways we’re not even aware of, architectural education is a microcosm of the world outside where far worse things happen.

You mention the man and woman project. Well, on the left below we have Vasily Klyukin’s In Love Towers rendered into London and, on the right, we have Gehry’s Fred and Ginger doing its thing in Prague. These are worse than anything that happens at university because one could happen anywhere around the world at any time and the other one actually did. If I had to choose, I’d choose the Klyukin for its aesthetic economy. The Gehry is equally trite but it’s heavy-handed. That “elbow” is unforgivable.

All the best.

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It’s Just Design

Spiral Binding