LAG

More Shift Practice. I am starting to understand the mechanical coordination needed for this new habit. There is a certain amount of timing involved with holding down the shift key that I am not used to, and more often than not I end up capitalising more than one alphabet because I didn’t time the lifting of my finger well enough. I also realise that I often use different fingers to hit the shift key, instead of just “training” one finger to get used to the rhythm of the shift, if you will. It is not just about hitting shift but also knowing when to let go. That sounds grossly poetic somehow, though I must admit I am a bit proud to have made that association.

To make a connection to architecture actually, I am realising now that I have been able to get away, (or think that I am getting away) with my presentations because I was able to frame my arguments for the project in a conceptual way, which professors are trying to encourage, but have not been able to test these ideas to their technical limits. There is a secondary argument to be made at this scale, which I have never been able to get to. Professors end up scrambling to make associations from the project in order to provide a useful conversation, and they end up talking about their own little worlds instead of directly addressing the work. I used to think this was a good thing, that the design was interesting enough to generate these associations, and I enjoyed listening to these stories. Now I realise what it was really the politics of critique that allowed me to save some face. But the protection of my pride has come at the cost of not realising this earlier than I could have.

Ian Ritchie talks about the reality of architects working in the conceptual realm. That the Western language of aesthetics is limited to three dimensions, that all other dimensions are left to “conceptual art”. And that architects have been limited by the perception that they need to be working as concrete artists, where in reality we need to be working as conceptual artists as someone will always be making the work for us. One needs to set up rules for their work, for someone else to interpret.

All this is to say that these 4 years I have struggled to support my instinct for a conceptual approach with the necessary work to set its limits in place. Really the most powerful thing for an architect is the ability to present conditions and a set of terms to be argued against. Specifically to get the client to argue amongst themselves about what they really want, for engineers to argue for their version of reality. In a sense architecture school should be training for this skill, a project is successful if it creates a set of parameters that trigger an argument. A bad project is one where everyone can agree with its specifics, there is not much to challenge, and the critique is framed around convincing the student that they need to give more thought and make decisions about certain aspects of the project. A good project is when most of these details have been thoroughly tested and figured out, what remains is the bare bones, a stark assemblage of the elements needed to agitate, offend, and delight. The smallest amount of force to set into motion the largest and most precariously linked chain of events.