wyliepoon
Senior Member
One conundrum I had back in my days at RyeArch was why so few architecture students are on Urban Toronto or any online forums. Perhaps this is the answer...
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Artful Writing
Well-crafted words complement well-drafted images
By NORMAN WEINSTEIN
Campus Architecture
Black holes, notoriously resistant to improvement through the design process, aren't the most glamorous subjects for student architects. But one black hole in architecture education demands transformation: Too many architecture students can't write.
I recently had the opportunity to hear graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture defend their designs at a midterm studio review, a distinct pleasure marred only by a curiously repeating incident. Under vigorous grilling from professors, several students became inarticulate and left participles or sentences dangling, while nervously gesturing toward their tabletop models of urban renewal. Mere nerves? Surely understandable in any student-faculty exchange with a grade at stake, heightened by their peers looking on. But then I noted moments when their professors also seemed at a curious loss for words. More privileged than their students, they concealed their unease with grandiose arm gestures.
Look at the course catalog of the Yale School of Architecture, and you can spot a course on writing about architecture, taught by Carter Wiseman. Yale is fortunate both to have an architecture writer of Wiseman's quality — and uncommon in actually offering such a course. Imagine that the students and faculty members fumbling while they spoke spontaneously had to commit the rationale for their architecture to paper. The pressure of having to extemporize with precision would be removed. But what in their professional training has given them the writing tools to communicate their words to their clients exactly, concisely, and elegantly? Or, keeping in mind the principles of architectural form established in the first century BC by the Roman architect Vitruvius, how can architecture communication reflect the values of utility, beauty, and enduring meaning?
You would think that architecture schools would require at least two writing courses. One would be a variant of technical writing: no-frills, materials-based, trade language — but a technical writing infused with artful expression, sensory immediacy. A writing where "HVAC" design is written as flowingly as air is circulated in an intelligently designed building. Are these utopian and inappropriate expectations to place upon technical writing? No — unless you think a divine injunction ordered all technical writers to be dry, dull, and viscerally dead. Try this visualization: Students are assigned to write an exacting description of a proposed school building. They must draw quotations from only two books, John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and the Dictionary of Architecture and Construction, edited by Cyril M. Harris.
The Harris dictionary offers technical definitions in a plainly readable and concise style, strictly business, though not devoid of wit and wisdom. Ruskin does his share of defining of architectural terms, but his style is anything but plain and brief. How can the best of both writers be synthesized? It could be an exercise in reconciling what C.P. Snow called the tragic irreconcilability of "two cultures," art and science. Where better than in writing about architecture can the rift between scientific and artistic thinking be healed? Since architecture is a meeting ground of artful design and scientific engineering, how can the language of architects not judiciously juggle both? That takes training, rarely offered anywhere.
Now on to the other type of desirable writing course for architects: an aesthetically colored writing thoroughly infused with scientific weight and precision as well as commercial savvy. Why does an architecture student in the 21st century need to know how to write about architecture artfully? The answer is plain: because accelerating technological advances call for it. The sloppy public confusion surrounding words like "green" and "sustainable" is evidence of a deeper problem, the one spotted when words evaded Yale's actual and future architects. How can buildings that seem to take flight, like the futurist architect Zaha Hadid's, be explained in all of their rippling, fluid, locomoting glory, except through a metaphorically rich, lyrically evocative writing? Perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright understood how his voluminous writing needed to mirror his architectural process when he described himself as a "weaver." Our English word "text" is derived from a Latin word meaning "weave," and Wright's books, as much as his architecture, are a dazzling, seamless weave.
What Wright couldn't imagine about our time is a new sense of how architects play with principles of chance, mutability, and impermanence, and a spectrum of novel construction materials and design processes that change by the month. These technological advances require complex, multidimensional, written descriptions that, nevertheless, can be put into commercially compelling narratives for the general public. One computer-composed image is not worth a thousand words to a nonarchitect. It is pulsating electronic graffiti signifying nothing. An architect's job is to translate architecture to nonarchitects through the spoken and often written word. How can this be achieved without professional training?
The freshest new architecture in my city — Boise, Idaho — is an art gallery initially constructed through a writing exercise. The architect presented a plan to the client: Both would spend a week writing an uninhibited, extravagant, richly imaginative description of the proposed gallery. They would then meet and discuss their writing. Surprisingly, each wrote a description of an uncannily similar design originally inspired by the designs of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The gallery was written into existence, a mutual weave of writing as much a part of its foundation as poured concrete.
In an architectural culture as image-saturated as ours, it isn't surprising that architecture students can't find words as satisfying as pointing to models or conjuring images on their computers. Digital imagery is the sweetest of confections for the current generation of students, but excessive sweetness is eventually dulling. I suggest architecture professors impress their students with the fact that the most neglected architecture software is Word. Why not create "Writing for Architects" courses that bridge Andrea Palladio with Peter Eisenman, and Wright with Palladio? Juxtapose the Indiana Limestone Handbook with Robert Frost's poetry ("Something there is that doesn't love a wall"). Stephen A. Kliment's Writing for Design Professionals would make a great textbook. What about having students critique a star architect's book containing never-realized buildings, and consider whether the author's writing actually impeded possible construction?
One thing is certain: When the cream of today's architecture students run their own firms and communicate regularly with their clients, they had better not overindulge in pointing when le mot juste is called for. All architects worthy of the name need to know more than how to make a building stand. They need to appreciate Hemingway's maxim that writing is architecture, and know that architecture is writing. They need to stand by their words.
Norman Weinstein, an independent scholar and poet, is author of A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Rowman and Littlefield, 1992) and several books of poetry.
Link to article
Artful Writing
Well-crafted words complement well-drafted images
By NORMAN WEINSTEIN
Campus Architecture
Black holes, notoriously resistant to improvement through the design process, aren't the most glamorous subjects for student architects. But one black hole in architecture education demands transformation: Too many architecture students can't write.
I recently had the opportunity to hear graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture defend their designs at a midterm studio review, a distinct pleasure marred only by a curiously repeating incident. Under vigorous grilling from professors, several students became inarticulate and left participles or sentences dangling, while nervously gesturing toward their tabletop models of urban renewal. Mere nerves? Surely understandable in any student-faculty exchange with a grade at stake, heightened by their peers looking on. But then I noted moments when their professors also seemed at a curious loss for words. More privileged than their students, they concealed their unease with grandiose arm gestures.
Look at the course catalog of the Yale School of Architecture, and you can spot a course on writing about architecture, taught by Carter Wiseman. Yale is fortunate both to have an architecture writer of Wiseman's quality — and uncommon in actually offering such a course. Imagine that the students and faculty members fumbling while they spoke spontaneously had to commit the rationale for their architecture to paper. The pressure of having to extemporize with precision would be removed. But what in their professional training has given them the writing tools to communicate their words to their clients exactly, concisely, and elegantly? Or, keeping in mind the principles of architectural form established in the first century BC by the Roman architect Vitruvius, how can architecture communication reflect the values of utility, beauty, and enduring meaning?
You would think that architecture schools would require at least two writing courses. One would be a variant of technical writing: no-frills, materials-based, trade language — but a technical writing infused with artful expression, sensory immediacy. A writing where "HVAC" design is written as flowingly as air is circulated in an intelligently designed building. Are these utopian and inappropriate expectations to place upon technical writing? No — unless you think a divine injunction ordered all technical writers to be dry, dull, and viscerally dead. Try this visualization: Students are assigned to write an exacting description of a proposed school building. They must draw quotations from only two books, John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and the Dictionary of Architecture and Construction, edited by Cyril M. Harris.
The Harris dictionary offers technical definitions in a plainly readable and concise style, strictly business, though not devoid of wit and wisdom. Ruskin does his share of defining of architectural terms, but his style is anything but plain and brief. How can the best of both writers be synthesized? It could be an exercise in reconciling what C.P. Snow called the tragic irreconcilability of "two cultures," art and science. Where better than in writing about architecture can the rift between scientific and artistic thinking be healed? Since architecture is a meeting ground of artful design and scientific engineering, how can the language of architects not judiciously juggle both? That takes training, rarely offered anywhere.
Now on to the other type of desirable writing course for architects: an aesthetically colored writing thoroughly infused with scientific weight and precision as well as commercial savvy. Why does an architecture student in the 21st century need to know how to write about architecture artfully? The answer is plain: because accelerating technological advances call for it. The sloppy public confusion surrounding words like "green" and "sustainable" is evidence of a deeper problem, the one spotted when words evaded Yale's actual and future architects. How can buildings that seem to take flight, like the futurist architect Zaha Hadid's, be explained in all of their rippling, fluid, locomoting glory, except through a metaphorically rich, lyrically evocative writing? Perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright understood how his voluminous writing needed to mirror his architectural process when he described himself as a "weaver." Our English word "text" is derived from a Latin word meaning "weave," and Wright's books, as much as his architecture, are a dazzling, seamless weave.
What Wright couldn't imagine about our time is a new sense of how architects play with principles of chance, mutability, and impermanence, and a spectrum of novel construction materials and design processes that change by the month. These technological advances require complex, multidimensional, written descriptions that, nevertheless, can be put into commercially compelling narratives for the general public. One computer-composed image is not worth a thousand words to a nonarchitect. It is pulsating electronic graffiti signifying nothing. An architect's job is to translate architecture to nonarchitects through the spoken and often written word. How can this be achieved without professional training?
The freshest new architecture in my city — Boise, Idaho — is an art gallery initially constructed through a writing exercise. The architect presented a plan to the client: Both would spend a week writing an uninhibited, extravagant, richly imaginative description of the proposed gallery. They would then meet and discuss their writing. Surprisingly, each wrote a description of an uncannily similar design originally inspired by the designs of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The gallery was written into existence, a mutual weave of writing as much a part of its foundation as poured concrete.
In an architectural culture as image-saturated as ours, it isn't surprising that architecture students can't find words as satisfying as pointing to models or conjuring images on their computers. Digital imagery is the sweetest of confections for the current generation of students, but excessive sweetness is eventually dulling. I suggest architecture professors impress their students with the fact that the most neglected architecture software is Word. Why not create "Writing for Architects" courses that bridge Andrea Palladio with Peter Eisenman, and Wright with Palladio? Juxtapose the Indiana Limestone Handbook with Robert Frost's poetry ("Something there is that doesn't love a wall"). Stephen A. Kliment's Writing for Design Professionals would make a great textbook. What about having students critique a star architect's book containing never-realized buildings, and consider whether the author's writing actually impeded possible construction?
One thing is certain: When the cream of today's architecture students run their own firms and communicate regularly with their clients, they had better not overindulge in pointing when le mot juste is called for. All architects worthy of the name need to know more than how to make a building stand. They need to appreciate Hemingway's maxim that writing is architecture, and know that architecture is writing. They need to stand by their words.
Norman Weinstein, an independent scholar and poet, is author of A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Rowman and Littlefield, 1992) and several books of poetry.
