After
struggling for years' to explain the seemingly haphazardness of the
home design process, whether carried out by amateurs or professional,
I recently
came across a few sentences that seemed to capture it perfectly;
I wish I'd written them.
"What usually happens is that you are first led to wrong conclusions
by some wild ideas, inspired by something you came across somewhere.
Or you may be guided by rigid rules, instilled by 'correct' high-school
reports. Everybody falls in love with silly ideas, and everybody
lugs around the baggage of unquestioned assumptions. It is only after
ruthless
self-editing and brutal cutting that the worthwhile ideas remain."
Interestingly, these thoughts weren't written by an architect nor
were they written about architecture. The author was Jan V. White,
in a book
called "Graphic Design, for the Electronic Age," published
in 1988.
Though the topic is only loosely related to architecture, White's few
short sentences capture the seemingly aimless and largely internal process
of design; a process architects are so terrible at explaining that most
people doubt that what they do takes much time or effort.
The
curse of every creative person is that such simplicity, which is the
hallmark of good design, is not at all simple to achieve. A simple solution
usually represents more effort than a complex one, not less effort; just
as the few exquisite words in a piece of haiku demand more skill and
struggle than a three-page rant to the gas company. The haiku poet strips
away words in order to get to a kernel of meaning from which nothing
can be added and nothing more can be subtracted.
The architect begins with a labyrinthine tangle of requirements and
then slowly begins to strip away everything extraneous to the problem,
leaving the irreducible kernel of the solution. Still, thanks to
our own confounded inability to communicate what they do, architects
still
routinely hear laments along the lines of, "Gee, why will it take
so long? It's just a kitchen," or "Two months? You're kidding!
My brother-in-law designed his addition in one afternoon." Well,
I can't explain it any better. Maybe you should just hire your brother-in-law.
The usual image of the architect has been that of someone sitting at
a drawing table, or more lately a computer monitor, drafting up elaborate
plans as if they simply were pouring out of him or her. Nothing could
be further from reality.
First, architects don't pull lovely, fully formed designs out of nowhere,
fairy tales about Frank Lloyd Wright notwithstanding. Nor is the drafting
that everyone pictures architects doing an especially crucial facet of
design; it's just a mechanical necessity, similar to putting a finished
pizza in the oven.
What
architects actually do is carry on a largely internal dialogue that over
the course of many days or weeks may or may not result in any kind of
tangible output. That this is so surprising to people, and sometimes
distressing as well, has always puzzled me.
Few people would dare think of asking an artist why it took him so long
to finish a painting and architecture is much like painting, except in
three dimensions and with vast amounts of technical complications thrown
in.
Simplicity takes time
Another surprise to many people is that the design process is subtractive,
not additive. It has much less to do with compiling than with stripping
away, leaving, ideally, a result that seems simple, inevitable and right.
Don’t try to rush the art, be patient and willing to wait for
the results that come from such “simple” efforts.
