Hey, Eric here were Thirty by Forty Design Workshop, back today with a book review - actually
two books - sort of a companion set.
They're not new releases, but they're new to my library so, I thought I'd share a quick
review of them.
It's easy to get comfortable as designers and rely on familiar compositional tricks
that have worked for us in the past, but falling into these familiar patterns can leave our
work feeling stale and uninspired.
Learning from the work and processes of others, outside of our own professional orbit, is
a necessary part of keeping our work fresh and exploring new ideas.
These two books do that for me, they're sort of like miniature form-making reference manuals.
Book one’s foundation is a system devised for teaching spatial manipulation by the authors
while they were teaching at the Harvard GSD.
The book is organized into basic formal operations: subtraction, addition, and displacement, and
they are meant to set in motion the designer’s work.
Rather than finite forms or end products they are the means to an end, a jumping-off point.
The book’s diagrams are simple and they effectively communicate the transformations
possible using the one word verb on each page.
I view them as a writer might a thesaurus, as a way to say something more precisely,
or a way to color an existing design language.
It's a concise book with only a very few introductory pages of text in the beginning and as such
it leaves room for interpretation, but equally it leaves out some of the more complex variants
of form and space making specifically curvilinear or non-orthogonal geometries.
But, it certainly opens the door to those prospects with some of the hybrid compositions
presented at the end of the book.
The bulk of the book doesn't present the manipulations as works of architecture necessarily rather
they’re organizational diagrams and in this way, they're useful instruments for conceptual
design; for diagramming.
It's not difficult to envision real work evolving from each operation and the authors do supplement
with real-world examples from notable architects.
Conditional Design is an evolution of the more abstract Operative Design and rightly
acknowledges that the conditions of architecture are defined by more than simple volumetric
manipulation, we must also consider the site, program, light, scale, circulation, and structure.
If Operative Design is an abstract manual, Conditional Design grounds the abstract in
the real conditions of architectural design.
Now, it's proposed as a design methodology but it's difficult for me to see that here,
there are no specific steps per se.
There's transformations, iterations, and rightly, a testing of ideas.
Now, perhaps that's because although we're always seeking a methodology, the design process
refuses to be prescriptive in this way, you're free to start a design process with any variable
you choose, any one you think most important and then begin testing ideas.
These books reinforce that notion.
Now, the books may seem to promote a kind of kit of parts design mentality, one can
imagine borrowing the operations or the resultant forms and collaging them together.
Now, you might be thinking, “is this what architecture has been reduced to, selecting
parts and pieces from a catalog?”
But, before you dismiss it entirely I do think there's merit to it.
Timothy Love wrote an interesting article in Harvard Design magazine called, “Kit-of-parts
conceptualism” where he talks about the value and also some of the shortcomings of
this kind of approach.
This was actually how I was taught when I went to architecture school.
I, somewhat naively, fully expected to start right in on day one designing buildings - homes
actually - I thought I could choose.
But no, in architecture school they start off by purging all your received architectural
knowledge, your notions of what good architecture is, sort of an informal brainwashing if you
will.
What you think about architecture is based on a lot of things: where you grew up, your
social class, your culture, where you vacationed, all the media you consumed.
In architecture school they want to start you off fresh, with first principles; introduce
you to space making rather than your baked-in notions of domestic perfection per se.
To do this, they arm you with a kit of parts and a composition challenge where you can
only use the fundamental building blocks of architecture, planes and piers.
They give you a set of basic rules and you complete a series of abstract projects.
What this does is it forces you to think about creating space first rather than the iconography
or imagery of a home, for example.
And so, there's validity to the kit-of-parts approach but not as the only approach.
Architecture is the result of many complex motivators, formal composition is but one.
And, as Love says in his article, “Architecture cannot only be about itself,” as the kit-of-parts
teaching might suggest, it must solve tangible problems.
So, for a kit-of-parts to be truly useful it has to be informed by other meaningful
ordering systems.
As a pairing, these two books neatly address that idea.
Now, without question there's lots of obvious value here as a teaching tool and so, I think
these will be most helpful for students and teachers.
Having said that, I think they also have a place in the library of experienced architects
too and used as a reminder of first principles, a tool to incite new ideas, and to help counteract
our own well-trod - perhaps tired - natural design tendencies.
And, quite honestly, that's why I picked them up.
I have to admit there's a certain delight in flipping through these and whether that's
because of their size, their ordered simplicity, or just the air of possibility they project,
I think they're hard not to love.
The authors’ apt usage of verbs throughout the book suggests these manipulations are
only stops along the way, one in a series of infinite possible iterations as one digs
deeper to find the proper resolution of the architectural idea.
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