Making Sense of It
It’s good to have a few things to believe in. Rather than some grand worldview, I’m thinking more of a set of observations that, over the years, help make sense of certain phenomena. Most of mine below relate to Architecture in some way and, perhaps because of that, only tangentially to How to live.
1. Let the inside be the inside and, whatever it is, let the outside be the outside
This doesn’t mean you have to live in a bunker. All it means is to accept the outside you have. If you have a large private garden or one of those dramatic cliff-edge houses with ocean views that AI does so well, then lucky you. In passing, the water never looks enticingly swimmable like as at E1027. Even the notoriously cliffy Casa Malaparte had stairs down to the water so Brigitte Bardot could take a dip. Casa Malaparte is a good example. The inside is famously enclosed with its windows as pictures framing views, but being on the rooftop is as outside of a building as a person can be.
If a Johnson-esque estate or its AI equivalent are both out of your reach, then think about how you can improve your relationship with your surroundings by relating to it at least some of the time. Not every part of our lives has to be conducted in secrecy. People aren’t as curious about you and how you live as you think. Just showing you’re there is a good start. I don’t want to be banging on about thresholds and Riken Yamamoto all the time,
1.1 If you want to be outside, then just go outside
The building that taught me this was Tōgō Murano’s 1978 Hakone Prince Hotel [more photos]. I’ve never been. Hakone is notoriously chilly even in summer but, if the weather permits and you want to sit outside, then tables and chairs will be there for you. This is a very simple and elegant way of relating to the outside. Did Mme. Savoye ever tell her head maid she’d like to take her coffee at a table and chair under a tree in the garden proper? History is silent. This whole 20th-century architecture inside-outside thing is neither here nor there. It’s time we outgrew it.
1.2 Keep the plants outside
Bringing things from the outdoors into the indoors is one of those ways of achieving that dubious effect of “blurring the boundary between indoors and outdoors”. Although John Lautner and Albert Frey did it with rocks, plants are a cheap way of doing this although more maintenance is needed. Plants are fine with temperature variations and don’t mind a bit of wind or rain to stop dust settling on their leaves. Plants were never meant to grow indoors and moreover, you don’t have to worry if overwatering your Hevea brasiliensis will cause its dish to overflow and ruin your laminated wood floor. I blame Julius Schulman. Oh, and John Lautner, Oscar Niemeyer …
But be sensible about it. We’re all attracted to the exotic but if you live somewhere sub-tropical, then don’t try to grow primroses. If you’re somewhere cool-temperate, then you’ll only upset yourself with orchids. Back when I was student in Australia, I used to have a thing about maidenhair ferns (Adiantun raddianum, specifically) in full knowledge that the slightest breath of hot air would instantly kill them. Where I live now they grow untroubled in gaps between stone steps.
This next one is an old one.
2. “Don’t fall in love with your first idea.”
It’s rarely going to be your best one. Don’t trust anyone who says it is. Not even yourself. It’s amazing how many students contact me after graduation to tell me that this is the thing they remember the best out of everything I ever taught them. It’s true, one’s first idea is special because it’s the first, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best – unless of course you stop there and don’t have any more. This advice may soon become outdated as architecture students cease to have ideas. And related to that is …
3. Curate your information intake
Be selective about what information you allow into your world. We’re told that filter bubbles are a bad thing but what’s the alternative? We simply can’t process every piece of information or even look at every piece of slop that’s either sent to us or we’re copied in on. I used to have an ArchDaily habit and now, looking at it once every three years, I find I’m not missing much. I was recently surprised to see I have a presence on ArchDaily – albeit not a recent one. That article I wrote long ago for Common Edge “The Nine-Step Architectural Beauty Detox Plan” must still generate some traffic. I would have clicked on the link but I don’t agree with ArchDaily’s constantly updated Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. In that vein, Clear your browser of all cookies and trackers and use private browsing whenever possible. It’s faster, as you don’t have to wait for adservers to analyze your recent browsing history and decide what to feed you next.
It’s a fuzzy line between curation and filtering. On the one hand we want some information to challenge our worldview yet on the other we also like information that reinforces the one we have. It’s probably not an either-or situation but I’d rather find my own balance without being pushed one way or the other as seems to be happening. Architecturally, what do we like these days? I feel we’re falling out of love with AI as we’re clearly not living in the promised Renaissance V2.0. For perhaps as long as I’ve run this blog, I’ve suspected that the most fulfilled architects are most likely the ones with the least regard for publicity. This means we may never get to know about them or whatever good work they might be doing. I’m okay with that. It’s never the good stuff that finds traction anyway. How many ideas with seemingly huge potential at the time have turned out to be one-offs? The History of Buildings that Actually Changed The World would be a very different one from the one we teach.
4. If you think you’re lost, then don’t take a chance on which way to go next. Return to the last place you remember and take a different path.
I mentioned this in some recent post post. It’s good advice when designing. Sometimes you have to all the way back to the beginning. This is called starting again. It’s parallel universe thinking I know, but I think the entire world should be reset to 1950 so we could have another look at what other possibilities there were.
5. “Rush at the beginning.”
I don’t remember whose advice this was. In general, clients trust architects to do their jobs but they don’t trust them to deliver on time, as illustrated by Mr. Kaufmann’s short-notice drop-in on Frank Lloyd Wright to see how the house that was to be known as Fallingwater was coming along. Clients have a difficult time understanding that you might also be working on other jobs that aren’t theirs, and can’t and won’t understand why there hasn’t been any progress since the last time they saw you two days ago.
6. “Either everybody’s driving this bus, or nobody is.”
This is something I wrote in the April 5, 2020 post Stock Market1 with respect to zeitgeists and the shaping of them. “But are we really the heirs of modernism and postmodernism? Perhaps. If on the one hand we have artists eager to capture the zeitgeist and on the other we have journalists shaping the zeitgeist for them to capture, then either nobody’s driving this bus or everyone is.” I mis-remembered the quote but it doesn’t matter because either way there’s no-one in control. The reason I recently thought of it is that it very accurately describes the current state of AI progress in general, and how and where it finds application in the field of architecture in particular with everyone urgently racing towards something they don’t know what. It’s becoming difficult to take it seriously. The big players supposedly driving this bus are alike in maintaining the illusion of being on the verge of significant breakthroughs in order to prevent their stock valuations from peaking.
I had to investigate that last dezeen headline. https://www.dezeen.com/2026/01/26/ai-da-robot-home-design-utzon-center/#/ We can rest assured that buildings designed by AI-powered humanaoid robots are just as tropey as those designed by AI-driven humans, all the way from the right ignorance of site down to how the furniture is chosen and placed. Can’t we include these in training please? Or are we being trained to aspire to live in somebody’s bad visualization – an architectural “Mar-a-Lago face”?
The article has nothing to show in the way of a layout and little to say about what prompts or training data were employed. Apart from the following.
- “The building Ai-Da [said humanoid robot] has imagined is a retro-futuristic pod house in the vein of Matti Suuronen’s space-age Futuro House, with bulbous curves and giant porthole windows.”
- “[Drawings] seem to show [ ! ] a house that has two living rooms, a spiral staircase, a kitchenette or bathroom [ !! ] , and a miniature pod contained within the larger one, presumably for the robot to sleep in.”
- “Meller [the robot’s originator] is elusive about where the line between human prompting and AI agency lies within Ai-Da’s work, saying on the project’s website that, like many successful contemporary artists, Ai-Da has a team of “studio technicians. “The postmodern critique reminds us that no-one exists in isolation,” he told Dezeen.”
Which again goes to illustrate the bus and driver conundrum, and also brings me back to an aphorism I’ve already used once today.
7. “Clearly, we’re not living in a Renaissance.”
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Nick Grant
says:If only this sort of stuff was taught in architecture schools but also to critics and clients who get taken in the cliches and so demand or at least accept more of the same.
Graham McKay
says:Thanks Nimmo. Differences between browsers and email clients continue to vex me as well. The endless pan sounds like a nightmare. I know the WordPress image gallery feature is hit-and-miss on some browsers. On others, everything gets left-justified. I hope something changes for the better. Thanks for your patience Nimmo.
Nimmo
says:That AI from #6 is even worse than the normal AI. Another good post, Graham – although there is always room for pot plants indoors (but they take supervision and care). For some reason, your posts now get sent to my email to be twice as wide as the window and require much panning on my part to read. No idea why, but it’s a recent thing. Cheers.