One of the most important insights I’ve had about my own worst tendencies as a designer came to me in my third year of architecture school. During the end of term crits of our design projects, one of the professors pointed out some pretty obvious shortcomings in my design for a college campus. I was forced to admit that I had recognized the problem already but failed to fix it because doing so would have polluted what I saw as the purity of the concept, which was a fairly simpleminded assemblage of concrete shear walls and floating glassy structures around a quadrangle. My desire to preserve the internal consistency in terms of formal relationships had overridden my desire to make good, usable spaces.
Talking to this professor after the crit, I realized that this tendency of mine was related to my love of math, in which I had taken my undergrad degree. What I found pleasurable about doing math was the perfect internal logic of it all. If you follow the correct steps to solve an equation, then there is only one answer and it leads inevitably from the information you started with. This was comforting to me, and it was a mode of thinking I tended to retreat to when I later faced the demands of architectural design. I always felt that I could find the ‘correct’ concept for the building if I only combed through the site and program information carefully enough, and that once that concept was in place everything else would flow naturally from there, with little additional thought. In other words, the constraints of the site and the required size and use of the building formed an equation that needed only to be solved. The solution, for me, was usually some kind of combination of three or four architectural elements, each performing a different programmatic function, all structurally and materially distinct. By strictly defining these elements early on in the process, I thought I would be freed from the requirement of ongoing invention, which I didn’t think myself capable of.
I still tend to design this way,though I think my ability to fine-tune a concept to make better spaces has improved a lot. The Mabou Studio is clearly a simple assemblage of three parts, and much of the effort in detailing has come from the need to keep those parts legible. But it seems to me that the generating ideas remain a bit simpleminded. I look at the work of, say, Louis Kahn, and see that, while his works were assemblages of distinct parts, the relationships between the parts were incredibly complex. Someday I want to reach that level of subtlety and richness. Rather than working with grade-school formulas, I want to do calculus.
- Geoff
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