F is for F

One of the requirements for the 5 year B.Arch at Arkansas, when we were there at least, was to spend a semester outside of Fayetteville in approved "urban" study. We went to Rome - the Husband (then Fiance) as a student, me tagging along and taking care of things while studying the city with sketchbook and camera. 

The Program Director there had a habit quickly picked up and mimicked by the Toon Brothers over our late night card games. "When I was at Harvard," they would say with a mock-Italian accent, "Modernism .... F."  Apparently he said it quite a lot, and it began to apply to other things in life. It became a joke among us used in the same way the entire Internet uses Fail now. 

D is for Drafting

I remember when I first started architecture school, Granny told me, oh yeah, your uncle did that for a while. 

So I asked Talon, and he said, Oh, I took a few drafting classes at community college, you know. 

Even then I understood the difference between the education of an architect and that of a draftsman.  I sighed, but didn't try to explain. 

Most of the time these days I think of drafting as something one does with papers: Rough Draft, Revised Draft, Final Version. My son will spend hours staring at a blank sheet of paper.  What's the matter? I ask. Why isn't there anything there. 

I don't have it right yet, so I can't write it down.  

It's just a rough draft. It's doesn't have to be perfect. 

He sighs, gives me that You just don't get it ... look. 

And I usually just leave him alone at this point, because I remember sitting for hours in the studio, staring at the board, waiting for the project to spring fully formed from my head, my Athena of ink and paper. 

So, Drafting. In the office, when we get to the drafting, we usually feel like the project is nearly done.  It's time to put together the details.  But the definition of the word is something very different: it focuses on the preliminary, on the sketchy--on the Process rather than the product.  Indeed, Michael Graves in his still relevant 1977 essay, The Necessity for Drawing: Tangible Speculation , (full text published in Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour, 2005) notes: 

In exploring a thought through drawing, the aspect that is so intriguing to our minds, I suspect, is what might be regarded as the speculative act.  Because the drawing as an artifact is generally thought of as somewhat more tentative than other representational devices, it is perhaps more fragmentary or open notation. 

He continues to discuss how making those first abstract sketches tests  preconceived notions of the design solution, and how that speculative, tentative action guides the design process. In that sense, drafting is not, as the Old Guy in the previous post suggested, the most banal part of our profession, but the very core of it. 

B is for Barcelona Pavilion

My first semester at the University of Arkansas, I was still an English major.  An English/Creative Writing major, to be specific, so I was taking the first course in my major sequence and a bunch of Gen Eds, and spending a lot of time goofing off on campus waiting for the Boyfriend-who-would-become-the Husband to get out of studio.

More often than not, I'd find him in the Fine Arts Library encircled by a stack of books and magazines. One afternoon I found this issue of PA on top of the stack. Always a fan of modern design, I was captivated by the elegance of the columns, the grace of the colors, the integration of the views and the viewed object.

That one moment catapulted me into architecture school.