I was watching a favorite TV show of mine, Top Gear from the BBC. During a segment, a presenter offered this insight into supercars, using beer as the analogy.

So, beer isn’t complicated, it’s just a few simple ingredients, all brewed up together – but you can still get it wrong – you could get lager. Supercars aren’t complicated either. Power…..good looks….a great noise…..but you could get that wrong as well. You could end up with a Ferarri Testarosa”
- James May

I think this is just fantastic! When I heard this, it immediately clicked that architecture isn’t complicated either – just a few simple ingredients. Space, material, light, and a few others if you want to elaborate. Just like beer and supercars, you can analyze and study them and certainly find complication, but in the end, it’s the impression they leave you with that’s everything –  which is quite simple. Everyone can sip a beer (except for kids and pregnant women), and understand it. Architecture is the same. You can read an intelligent and long winded critique in a newspaper or architectural journal, and it makes architecture sound complicated. Really, what buildings come down to is the impression they leave you with. The experience they help frame. Just a few simple ingredients – but it can certainly go wrong.

Two things:

1. The delivery of buildings

2. Impossible maths

Let me explain.

The first is straight forward – architects deliver buildings. This is what we are licensed to do. We are tested on how to do this, and a governing body says you know how to do this well enough, here is a stamp. It’s a rigorous and important process. Ensuring buildings are safe; running a project team of engineers, owners, and contractors who’ve never met each other before; navigating the complex process that originates with a conversation and terminates with a constructed space. There are many talented people who do this well.

The second thing architects do is impossible maths – that is, we instill in buildings something that makes them more than the sum of it’s parts. Allow me to qualify my thinking:

When you drive to work, you likely pass many houses, most of which don’t mean anything to you. They may be interesting, or dilapidated, or have scary people of the front porch, but there are simply houses. The dwelling you live in, however, is a home. There is something different than the sum of it’s parts lurking there. Theoretically, one home is as good as the next, and you could move your stuff into a different house and call it a home. That’s not true, and you know it.

Our home possesses the meaning we’ve instilled in it – something those other houses don’t have. Our memories and lives have been assigned a place – they happened somewhere, and that place takes on meaning just like the memory. This means places are capable of taking on meaning, and when that happens, places become more than the sum of their parts. It’s this fact that allows architects to operate on this notion: we can instill meaning into space, and then it becomes more than the sum of it’s parts.

Good architects achieve #1. Great architects achieve both.

-archeblog

It’s required for an architect. If your clients don’t trust you, then can anything great be accomplished?  They are putting resources in your hands, and therefore they are putting at least a part of their fate in your hands. The success of your design will impact the quality of their life, and something like that requires trust.

One thing about trust though – it must be earned. People won’t give you their business without caution, just like you won’t marry someone unless you trust them (infatuation aside). Once you have someone’s business, you don’t necessarily have all their trust.  So how do you gain trust in the architecture world?

Is it me, or does Country music talk an awful lot about place. It seems like every other song (at least) is about where I come from, or it’s about the small town life, or life of the farm. Country singers recall time spent on their front porch, or cooling off in the creek.

I listen to radio when I’m working on my little attic construction project (which is a lot), and in listening to both country (both old and new) and pop radio, it seems Country artists speak often about their connection to the environment where their from. There are many examples to pull from, but here is The House that Built Me by Miranda Lambert. It’s a pretty popular song at the moment, and it’s about the connection to her home – both literally and as a metaphor for her past. I’d also encourage you to listen to the song or see the video on Youtube. As always, please comment on your thoughts – do Country artists have a stronger connection to place?

I know they say you can’t go home again
I just had to come back one last time
Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam
But these hand prints on the front steps are mine

Up those stairs in that little back bedroom
Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar
I bet you didn’t know under that live oak
My favorite dog is buried in the yard

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could walk around I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

Mama cut out pictures of houses for years
From Better Homes and Gardens magazine
Plans were drawn and concrete poured
Nail by nail and board by board
Daddy gave life to mama’s dream

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could walk around in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

You leave home and you move on and you do the best you can
I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I walk around I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

…because it will.

Every profession has its share of problems. The difference with architecture is the problem becomes manifest in a building – a roof leaks, steps are too tall, a hallway too narrow. We make lots of drawings to prevent this, but occasionally, something slips by. Recently, I was involved in a drive-thru gone bad. The drive was a little questionable, but then the call button turned out was impossible to reach, and my lovely little canopy above sheds water into the open transaction drawer.

In this case, the kindest thing I could say is it’s not ideal, but mistakes happen. Professionals are held to a higher standard when it comes to mistakes, which I take to mean that there should be fewer of them, and when they happen, we own up to them.

How do you deal with mistakes?

Google books has, as far as I can tell, just about every Dwell Magazine issue available for free. If you enjoy architecture and design, Dwell is a great magazine with great articles. Enjoy.

I have a fairly large house project right now – finishing out 600 square feet of my attic into a master bedroom suite. Some architects don’t like to swing a hammer, but I grew up in construction, so I always want to be building something. So during the day, I work in an office, wear dress clothes, and spend most of the time at the computer or on the phone. Nights and weekends, I’m wearing old jeans and working upstairs (drywall at the moment).

It’s funny, when I’m at my desk, drawing on the computer, I often want to be in my old jeans, working on the attic. Today, after working Saturday and Sunday on the attic, I am ready to get back to my desk and computer!

Does anyone else experience this dilemma?

Although it is young, there are some goals I have for this humble blog. I’d like to have guest contributors, both in writing posts and in writing meaningful comments. I’d like to over time build a deep repertoire of solid and interesting articles on architecture. Not simply on buildings or critiques of buildings, as many architecture publications tend towards. When this happens, it seems to limit the readership to just architects, and even then only a small percentage of us. There is a place for this, just not here.

That’s why the tag line is writing on our built and environment and the life that fills it. It’s not just about high art architecture. It’s about any facet of our build environment, but also about what we do inside that space. I believe this opens the opens the conversation up to a wider audience.

Enjoy.