hunting & gathering

Focusing upon buildings rather than architects and upon the ways in which space and structure as well as style and surface are produced culturally, socially, economically, and politically, they have instead changed the way in which the history of architecture is written.

The research activity that most interests me involves shortening the lag between societal needs and their reflection in architectural form. Institutions are the intermediary between the recognition of a need and it’s expression in form. There is a built-in inertia in the organization of societal institutions that results in facilities being built for objectives that are often obsolete. Fundamental innovation can take place only rarely within the confines of the normal architectural commission. Architecture is often an instrument that inhabits necessary change in institutions. Because architecture is oriented to solutions rather than problems or results, forms and images tend to be perpetuated long after the reasons that made them that way have changed.

Thus, the new environmental designer must be someone who has a sense of a new skill, a new kind of production, a sense of the importance of program requirements as well as of the programming schedule, and an ability to combine a knowledge of technology and structure with that of function and beauty. However, without predetermining the nature of that future beauty, we have to fortify students with a sense of the origins of the beautiful, whether they be from environmental and cultural history, or from the natural sciences and the very special aesthetic that the natural world and even the abstract world of mathematics provide. A concern for beauty is, after all, still what distinguishes the environmental designer from others.

Programming these problems may become a profession in itself. The concept of programming itself will have to be enlarged to include the phasing and scheduling of public and private investments.

… the environmental designer will have to be responsible for the programming of the problem, that is, for developing a set of requirements to serve as a basis for design.

What do we mean when we speak of architectural quality?… when a building manages to move me. What on earth is it that moves me? How can I get it into my own work?… a building I just love looking at. How do people design things with such a beautiful, natural presence, things that move me every single time.