Monday 17th of May 2004, 23:00
Once You Know How To Do It, It’s As Good As Done
Comparing the discussions that took place at the beginning of the final year of the MArch course with the formal (id est pertaining to form) considerations that occupy tutorial time now, near the end of the final design project, I realise how much more appealing the early stages of a project are to me, when no possibilities are yet concretised. Once a path becomes clear, one is only left with the menial task of walking it. Choosing (or devising) the path is much more significant and exciting.
In short, while the work is hard, psychologically I am just coasting till the end of the academic year, in a month’s time.
Comments
Oh no no no! Thank god I left Bath. What you’ve just said is part of the problem I always had with the mentality at Bath - that there is a foreseeable and measureable answer to an architectural question, that you set out to resolve a brief by means of ‘x’, you do ‘x’ and you arrive at the destination you expected and they (the powers that be at Bath) expected. It’s like the ending of a Disney movie, when the entire plot comes together ever so neatly at the end that there’s nothing to talk about after the show - except the fact that life might not be worth living anymore.
I now see sense in the labour intensive processes of places like the AA and UCL. And I think that all projects should offer up delight.
Picking a path is straight forward enough. But it’s all a game, surely you want to really test the design-method - you’d want to throw all sorts of conditions at it and see how flexible/responsive your initial trajectory was. What could knock it off course? Could that even be a positive development? Only then is there something to talk about.
And then, once you get from A to B, I would want to know more. How you a designer maintains the operational values of the design once he/she is dead, exiled, imprisoned. How the thing expands in the hands of Architect B. How the thing wears or falls apart. And how it one day could be bought by a rich Nigerian developer who wants to move it brick by brick back home to a smaller site.
Even “the straight story” wasn’t that straight.
I’m sure the grass is always greener on the other side. After three years at the aa I sweated the ‘process’ phase so much that the years out spent working gave me a big shock, enough to persuade me to only sweat the ‘resolution’ phase in diploma. This year I came up with my form and programme intuitively and without any process, and I am spending the year like a true architect, refining the design and 3d modelling. It’s not the usual Bartlett way of doing things but I find it incredibly fulfilling. My friend calls ‘process’ -focused design ‘masturbating’.
YES!
Give up the path once you know how to follow it.
The utility (in every sense) of knowing another path is greater than that of walking a known one. Listen to your ancestral instincts of a mathematician, purify yourself from the engineering bastardisations.
What Nigel argues are fun aspects of the design process might be fun indeed; so think away and enjoy - no need to waste your time and energy on practical friction.
If you need stimuli, imagine them.