Category: Architecture

One of my favorite hobbies is boardgaming. And actually since I don’t get to play boardgames too much, its actually shopping for boardgames. Its easy to forget that imagining yourself in a situation playing with this or that boardgame is not actually playing the boardgame in real life. This is a minor issue for a hobby, if I’m getting entertainment one way or the other its really not big deal.

But in design that is a problem. Not so much in the professional world, but it was the one piece of valuable education I got from my time in graduate school. For all the benefits of the rigorous program in Berkeley, there was a tendency to allow students to wallow in conceptual design. My first couple professors at Rice, David Guthrie and Doug Oliver, taught me to get past that phase. Shopping for the right idea to jumpstart your design is a necessary task, but after that comes the hard part of design. Its easy to be stuck in the world of ideas, but there is so much more to be done if you just drill down a little more.

Last year I started taking Tai Chi classes at a local school. It was a long process of learning and training the body. Through the process I slowly learned the traditional Yang-style long form over the course of a year. Aside from the long term health benefits which I hope to reap if I continue to practice, I think the most valuable lesson was learning how regular repetition of a simple task can pay off over time. During this process I had to have faith that my daily stumblings would pay off. I had to have faith in very small incremental improvements over a long period of time.

For better or worse, our American educational system, especially in architecture, is on a project by project basis. Its a lot more exciting than doing rote repetition, but I think it makes you sometimes forget the long term value of mundane practice – maybe that’s why so many of us bail out so soon after entering the practice of professional architecture.

Its funny how you can do something and very quickly get distracted by all the things around the something you set out to do. In this case after a week and a half I started looking at stats and have been playing around with ways to redesign the blog. I’ve decided to force myself to get at least a week ahead in posts before messing around with the design of the blog.

But still, its so easy to be distracted doing all the auxiliary stuff in lieu of the primary task!

(from a forum conversation on boardgame geek, elaborated to tie into architecture)

There’s a particular game of Go between two masters that’s held up as a classic, even for the eventual loser. Perhaps it’s strange that one’s best game would be one you lost, but I like that attitude.

There is an interesting idea in our Tai Chi class. When we do push hands (basically trying to make your partner lose their balance) we use the term “partner”. It is light martial training for real confrontations, but they strongly emphasize the fact the person your training with is not an “opponent”. In that vein, this anecdote seems like a case where the high quailty game that was produced came because both game partners so skilled.

I think its because of my background starting with residential remodels and additions, but I’ve always contended that great architecture often arises due to a confrontation between an architect and nasty limitations. When given a blank slate, even the most brilliant architects struggle with the lack of limitations. That’s why I think Villa Savoye is a great rhetorical gesture, but I find Villa La Roche an infinitely more interesting project.

Witold’s Rybczynski discusses the idea of having 36 inch deep counters in his book about building his own house, The Most Beautiful House in the World. 

Typical kitchen counter are 24 inch deep.

It has been years since I read about the idea and I think it would work.  It sure would blow some minds if you tried to pull it off though.

Alongside the break, I had been mulling over whether to start studying a weapon as a part of my Tai Chi studies. And if so which weapon. I had been thinking about it on and off during this monthlong hiatus without any real conclusion. So while getting back working on the form this Monday, I came to an epiphany. (For those curious, I think I’ll study the saber because it has both a kung fu and tai chi form).

It reminds me of my old approach to design in school. If I ran into an intractable design problem, I’d often take a nap. Shutting down your brain for a little and then cranking it back up was often the best way to cut through the haze and make some decisions.

I just took a month long break from rock climbing…and unfortunately as it turns out the Tai Chi form. The climbing break was due to my fingers, they were feeling the strain and I had to take a break. The Tai Chi hiatus was just an unfortunate confluence of a long vacation with lots of work before and after.

As I experienced after a previous lengthy break from Tai Chi, cranking up the form again was painful. I could just feel how utterly unsharp I was – not that I was all that great to begin with – but it was really bad, out of rhythm, unrelaxed, just “off”. Surprisingly, the climbing went surprisingly well. I stayed on the easy routes, but I was surprised how much muscle memory and technique remained. The stamina and strength was not all there, but surprisingly not nearly as diminished as I expected.

To drag all this back into architecture. I think the practice of architecture, as a professional in the building process, a our work is much more like rock climbing than Tai Chi. Its a practice of working through problems and sustained effort, not as much a high finesse skill activity. And similarly taking a long break is a lot more refreshing than one might intially expect.

I was reading the cover story of Afforable Housing Finance“Seniors Tsunami” and coincidentially Professional Builder (which deals primarily with ground up tract homes) had an article “Multi-Generational Joins the Product Mix”.

It somewhat mirrors the forked path I stared at in my master’s thesis where I was debating between larger buidling products (apartment complexes) and small scale upgrades (such as the single family homes with in-law units in the second article). My personal interests lie with the latter, I think its a more interesting architectural design problem to develop a new housing typology. But honestly, the example of my girlfriend’s grandma, who lives on her own in Hangzhou, pushes me towards the realization that higher density is what we need.

High density is the drum I seem to be hammering all the time, but I think that our suburbanized cityscape is just an unsustainable way to design our metropolises.

I’m posting this for Sunday but its Thursday as I write. So its been 5 days since I started the experiment and I have 7 posts. I’ve fallen back on some tropes that I often talk about inconjunction to architecture and I suspect I’ll revisit them soon enough. One positive side effect I can see already is that I’m actually reading some of the freebie magazines around the house. These past couple years I’ve gotten on the mailing lists of a few homebuilding/multifamily housing magazines but the dead trees have just been stacking up. Now that I’m looking for ideas, I gotta start reading more!

I suspect if I keep doing small short posts (almost-tweets) I can keep this up or the next three months, the length of the experiment. But I wouldn’t be horribly shocked if I run out of steam also (see all my old hobbies except for boardgaming).

And here’s a shout out to Seth Godin since its his blog that is the model for what I’m playing with.