This post was prompted by a comment a reader made in response to last week’s post, Associative Design. Thanks KT! I’ve disliked flashy architectural graphics for as long as I can remember. I could always sketch and, in my undergraduate course with its life drawing and sketching excursions I had occasional successes such as a […]
I was one of those undergraduate students who often worked late and I shared a studio room with two classmates who did also. We’d long ago run out of anything new in our lives to talk about and, as the semester progressed, our conversations became more like reveries, filling the time but increasingly random and […]
Anyone who was precociously imagining houses and spaces instead of playing outside like a normal kid probably has a series of formative houses they enjoyed imagining being in long before they even knew it was someone’s job to design them. These are mine. The first was an A-frame chalet with a spiral staircase, It was […]
The version of the Infinite Monkey Theorem I first heard went “If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters then, sooner or later, one of them will type Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” The correct version is “If you give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time then, sooner or […]
How many ways are there to generate a design proposal for a building? Some universities cut to the chase, and tell their students to walk down a certain street or around a part of town and “find an architectural project”. For what it’s worth, this is Identification, Analysis and Synthesis all in one. The rest […]
Identifying and defining the problem in the first stage of this thing called the design process is already loaded with assumptions such as, for one, the need being one an architectural response can satisfy. Already I’m not so keen to use terms such as problem and solution, let alone assume a causal relationship between them. […]
Last year I wrote a foreword for a book on the design process. I won’t be spilling any beans by saying that, however you look at it, it breaks down to the three sub-processes of 1) Identify/define the problem, 2) Decide what buildings, concepts, ideas, tools or techniques you think will be of use in […]
I am new to your blog, but i regret not finding it three years ago when I was in shock and depression as to where I found myself in architecture. I joined architecture instead of engineering only because it had lot to do with construction than engineering theoretical entrenchment. Now when i look back, I […]
Architectural ideas aren’t myths like The Architectural Imagination. Architects have architectural ideas in exactly the same way cooks and chefs have food ideas about ingredients, their combinations and processes and document them in things called recipes, and in exactly the same way composers have musical ideas about melodies and instrumentations and document them in things […]
Dear Prof, Today I had this idea about something I hope you can address in your blog. I thought about it after reading your latest post*. Personally, I usually start my projects without really thinking of any concept beforehand. I try to address the problem directly and then explore what solutions I can come up with. […]
I always thought that maybe the more time you spend in a field, the more comfortable you’d feel in it but it doesn’t ring true for me. I’ve been struggling with having confidence in my work ever since we started taking design courses. It’s usually because I do things differently but apparently in a “bad” […]
The architectural media likes an anniversary and 2019 is the year we’re meant to be grateful for The Bauhaus and all it did for us. Last week I suggested the real legacy of The Bauhaus lay in legitimizing the idea of design as a standalone activity isolated from manufacture because once design could be valued […]
I can’t say Ludwig Kurz was representative of all craftsmen any more than I can claim Anton Hofer represents The Bauhaus but this post is not about individuals – it is about two different approaches to education, design and production that coexisted once. Ludwig’s Kurz’s formal education took place over the three winters of 1922-23, […]
Born on the 5th of May 1898, Ludwig Kurz was thirteen when he became carpenter’s apprentice to his brother-in-law. In this photograph, that’s him holding the front end of the timber. At the time and in the Tyrol region with its traditions of building in timber, a carpenter was a craftsman who could construct out […]
