3. THE PROCESS OF ARCHITECTURE. Architecture is a process. Critical to its success is knowing when to reject a design solution, when to develop it, when to move things along, when to slow them down, how to organize the firm’s time and resources, and when to modify that organization: in short, the craft is manifested through the ability to manage the design process efficiently. This class defines the process in terms of two factors – the client’s brief and the architect’s aspirations – and proposes ways of balancing them.
Comment
Absent the class, then guess. Balance them. Keep the job by being precisely, completely and quickly responsive to client directives, but bring the client to an awareness of consequences of certain decisions, the larger issues and desirable solutions.
4. THE CREATIVE DIMENSION: THE TECHNIQUES OF FREE ASSOCIATION. Creativity is what transforms the design process from an apparently deductive sequence into an artistic activity. Inventiveness, talent, formal imagination and originality are qualities that stem from a common psychological activity: the capacity to associate randomly about a problem while maintaining a critical control of that process. The knowledge and the mapping of precedents, the scrutiny of one’s thinking modality, and the awareness of the importance of preferences, are the tools to uncover the mysterious character of one’s creative process. Training our creativity depends on finding ways of liberating ourselves from the pre-conceptions that restrict our capacity to re-define the design problem.
Comment
Social science has provided a number of constructs such as mind-mapping and brainstorming. Some find these useful, others repulsive. Willing to be open to aspects demanding attention of the problem itself that suggest a unique solution is very important, rather than just impose a pre-conceived solution even before thinking about the problem.
5. POSITIONING A PRACTICE. How you conduct your practice has a lot of do with your beliefs, and in particular why you think you are practicing architecture. Why do you want to do what you want to do? Because you are a socialist, a humanist, a capitalist? For money? For glory? Whatever your particular ideology, you will probably find yourself swinging back and forth in a dialectic between your approach to architecture as a craft and the idea you’ve formed of yourself and your practice. Building on the concepts developed in previous classes, this class focuses on how to create a productive relationship between your work and your ideology – whatever it may happen to be – that can help you build both your skills and your practice.
Comment
No class, no thinking can solve a problem like this at one go. But a willingness to entertain the questions liberates the practitioner from the narrow confines of the drafting board.
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