emzee

Finding myself in Boston yesterday with a couple of hours to spare and a 4-hour train ride coming up, I visited what has to be one of my favorite bookstores on the planet. After an hour of feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer variety of interesting books written on important but obscure topics, I picked up a collection of essays by an impressive-sounding architecture professor I had never heard of.

The essays themselves are pretty good - nice and short and well written. They cover a variety of topics from the separation of communication from form in design (i.e. signage) to the democratization of surveillance caused by phonecams and youtube. There’s one particular paragraph in the preface that caught my eye:

Designing is always a matter of simultaneously crafting the required functionality and the intended messages, subject to physical and economic constraints.

One thing about architectural writing that has often amazed and occasionally frustrated me is how disconnected it can be from their actual craft of designing buildings. They’ll talk about philosophy, cultural trends, social dynamics, anything but the actual fact that they’re creating skyscrapers and houses. The cynic in me sometimes feels like they’re trying to glorify what could otherwise be a mundane profession - and the public largely buys it, judging by the whole starchitect phenomenon.

On my calmer days I think it’s simply an extreme example of what’s happening everywhere in the developed world. It has become so easy to fulfill our basic functional needs - in this case to provide shelter against the elements - that we spend the vast majority of our efforts on the emotional context of the physical object. We still think about whether a piece of clothing is warm enough or comfortable, but that’s long since stopped being the main reason we buy it. Maybe architects are just more conscious of that than anyone else?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 11:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.