How to Become a Famous Architect

Fat: "How to Become a Famous Architect"

Perspecta, Vol. 37, Famous, pp. 136-137. The MIT Press

"Becoming a famous architect schouldn't take too long, but don't expect too much. It's not a passport to riches nor an introduction to high society. But if it's what you want, here's how to do it.

1. First pay a visit to any well-stocked news agent. Buy one copy of each design magazine. You will use these to find out what not to do.

2. Now go on to your local remaindered book store. Buy a copy of a design book with lots of pictures in it. Not only is the remaindered store cheaper, but its stock is between ten to fifteen years old. These are the least fashionable and so most shocking of all styles. You will use this to copy your new designs.

3. On the way home, choose a name for your cutting-edge design firm. Something punchy, arty, and a little stupid should do. There are not too many rules about this but make sure it doesn't include "urban" or "studio." Your name will present an efficient image and suggest that you have an office in a fashionable part of town and a committed workforce. No one will know that you are really operating our of your bedroom.

4. Now that you have a name, you need a project. It must be a radical design of a house. It needs a catchy title. Pick a popular word or phrase, then add "house" to the end of it. If it sounds good, it is good. Scan in some of the pictures from your new book. Scan in some other pictures you like. Stick them together in the latest version of Photoshop. Play around until you get a nice picture that you can believe in. Check that it doesn't look too much like the pictures in your magazines.

5. Now it's time to develop your mystique. This is all-important, because it is what you are selling. Remember, you won't have to design a building for at least ten years. And in this time you will live off your mystique, so make it good. Mystique is what you say and the way that you say it. If you come from continental Europe, great. If you don't, pretend that you do. Mystique should also suggest revolutionary politics and French philosophy. Don't talk bout these things directly, as it never makes good copy and will only confuse you.

6. In order to alert the magazines, you must write a press release. This should be full of good copy, convey your mystique, and have your telephone number in it.

Know your audience: journalists. It's important to remember that design journalists are desperate for anything interesting. This is because architecture is mainly boring. So be interesting. Make outlandish claims; tell them everything they know is wrong; most of all, be prepared to have a radical opinion on anything that may crop up in conversation. They will print it and thank you. Fax your press release to the magazines. The numbers are in the magazines you bought earlier.

7. No rest yet, because you must now prepare the press packs that you will send out. You will be too busy answering the inevitable calls over the next few days, so do it now. The pack should contain your new picture and a radical design statement (see how useful developing that mystique was?).

When the phone starts ringing, you know what to do: use your cutting-edge firm's name, your exciting new house title, and your fascinating mystique to full effect. When the phone stops ringing, go to the post office and send your press packs out.

8. Now it's time to relax. Head on down to a fashionable architect's bar (you will recognize it by its converted industrial look, expensive bar snacks, and the presence of people with strange glasses on). Enjoy yourself, but remember your mystique! All you need to do now is remember to buy the magazines that you are featured in."

El viajar como aprendizaje o el contexto como experiencia (Jorge Morales Meneses)

Jorge Morales Meneses /Arquitecto
Director de la Escuela de Arquitectura
Universidad Finis Terrae.
Publicado en: www.plataformaarquitectura.cl
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"Un viaje de estudios no se puede googlear, ni sirve que te lo puedan contar. Es como la buena mesa, nada reemplaza el saborear una delicia. A lo más se puede conocer superficialmente por croquis, fotos o alguna anécdota. Y las páginas de Internet están llenas de degustadores de arquitectura que tratan de transmitir lo intransmisible y de paso causar envidia, aunque en estos relatos más se conoce del degustador que del plato.

Foto: Cristina Dreifuss 2008

Viaje de estudios, peregrinación, Gran Tour, o como se le quiera llamar, el viajar es un sistema de aprendizaje que se pierde en los orígenes de la arquitectura: desde los antiguos constructores libres de la edad media -únicos que podían libremente viajar entre feudos- hasta Sir Norman Foster que viaja en su jet privado, los arquitectos peregrinamos hacia los centros epocales de la cultura, para convencernos de algo que la academia, los libros o las fotos no entregan.

[...] el viaje de estudios para un arquitecto -y de paso también para un diseñador, un artista, un antropólogo, etc., todo profesional que deba conocer profundamente al ser humano- pone de relieve varios asuntos obvios pero olvidados: primero, que la arquitectura debe ser valorada por todo el que la habita, es decir, no sólo hay que escuchar a los especialistas, sino todo el público que recorre y cohabita una obra tiene el legítimo derecho a valorar; segundo, que la arquitectura es un hecho, pero que su observación o su significación es subjetiva, aunque no arbitraria, es decir, depende del que observa, de sus conocimientos, emociones y de lo que culturalmente valora. Esto hace que la interpretación sea un intangible y como tal es de muchas voces: nadie tiene la razón y a la vez todos la tienen; tercero, algo obvio pero que hay que decir, que la arquitectura es con un contexto: su lugar, su gente, su atmósfera, su circunstancia y su entorno.

El viaje de estudios permite a la arquitectura entrar en el juego de la valoración, donde incluso los malos resultados pueden ser buenas experiencias. Esto es, experimentar la libertad de la obra, que es entregada -por el mandante, el arquitecto, el propietario, el que sea- a un contexto que la va a conocer y reconocer según parámetros que no siempre son pensados en el diseño arquitectónico.

De las muchas etapas del trabajo del arquitecto, el viaje de estudios -o el trabajo de campo- representa una de las fases más importante en su formación, porque lo vincula con sus pares y sus obras y le permite observar la exposición que tiene toda obra al juicio de la posteridad. Concepción, proyección y construcción son las mas conocidas, y aunque luego de la inauguración acaba (o debería acabar) el trabajo del arquitecto, es justamente entonces cuando comienza a aparecer el valor de la obra de arquitectura porque el tema de la refiguración de una obra, pone el acento no sólo en el autor y en sus aspectos constructivos-estructurales-expresivos, sino en el valor que se le asigna posteriormente, como impacto que dialoga en un conjunto de otras obras de diferentes estilos, épocas, materialidades, con diferente rol urbano, y cuya apreciación cambia según la sociedad va cambiando. [...]

En la época actual, donde la movilidad y la comunicación han adquirido una dimensión superlativa -y conviniendo en que la comida y la arquitectura son dos placeres- lo único que se puede enseñar de un viaje es que hay que hacerlo. El contexto no se encuentra en Internet y tenemos que aprender a ver las obras también con la mirada del usuario. El llamado entonces es a viajar para profundizar una visión propia y desconfiar de la crítica. Todos tenemos derecho a observar y a aprender del contexto, es al fin y al cabo, nuestra experiencia."

De vocación Maestro

Luis Jaime Cisneros (1921-2011)

"Cuando estás frente a un aula estás frente al porvenir."

"Para ser un buen maestro hay que comprender a la gente, hay que saber escuchar. Todo eso que la gente llama 'mi éxito' se debe a que yo aprendí a superar la vanidad y aprendí a escuchar con paciencia."

"Aun en lo más remoto y oscuro de la conversación ajena, hay algo recuperable, algo importante, que al fin y al cabo te beneficia. Al escuchar descubres que no eres el depositario de la verdad, o de la verdad absoluta. La compartes, a veces, con quienes no tienes idea que tenías algo que compartir, o con quienes estarías dispuesto a negarles todo."

"Hay que aprender a aprender para aprender a enseñar. Descubriendo los obstáculos que se te presentan a ti, intuyes lo que se les pueden presentar a los otros, a tus alumnos."

"No se trata de que tus alumnos te sigan o te obedezcan, sino de que te ayuden a entender mejor las cosas que tú mismo te empeñas en que ellos vean con claridad."

"Ser maestro es una vocación por entregarse al otro. Pero insisto en que esta vocación empieza por un saber escuchar. Te obliga a compartir con el otro. Más que ganas de transmitir lo que sabes, enseñar consiste en proporcionarle al alumno lo que no tiene."

http://pieldelagarto.blogspot.com

"La escuela no puede hacerte creer que el conocimiento se adquiere fácilmente. El conocimiento tiene que costarte trabajo. Debemos luchar para ser los descubridores del conocimiento, los aprovechadores del conocimiento. Y así aprenderemos que tenemos derecho a usufructuarlo, porque no lo hemos recibido gratuitamente, nos ha costado. Si la escuela no anuncia que el problema existe y existe para tu formación, estás perdido. La gente se ha asustado con los problemas.

"Los griegos inventaron el problema para ponerte a prueba. Para que descubrieras que podías resolverlo ingeniándotelas, esforzándote, pensando, creando. El objetivo del problema es que tengas fe en ti, no en el obstáculo. Tienes que tener la fuerza, la voluntad, la inteligencia y la decisión para superarlo. Y si no tienes eso, mi deber es ayudarte a encontrarlo. No dártelo."

"Si no aprendemos a escuchar no hay salida. El maestro no tiene soluciones listas a los problemas de sus alumnos, el maestro tiene que aprender a buscar soluciones ayudando al otro a encontrarlas."

"El mejor maestro es el que te ayuda a descubrirte. El que te muestra que eres mejor de lo que creías. Que no eres el que creías, que eres otro."

Fragmentos de una entrevista realizada por Patricia del Río, publicada en el diario El Comercio, diciembre 2006. Vuelta a publicar por la misma autora en "De vocación Maestro", revista Somos, 22 de enero de 2001.

Bogotá: La Candelaria

Bogotá: Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez (R. Salmona)

Estilo (IV) / Style (IV) (J. Mordaunt Crook)

"Architecture is two things: it is service and it is art. It has to work and it has to be seen to work. It is building and an image of building; structure and an image of structure. An architect is thus both a builder and an image-maker, and styles in architecture is just a way of building codified in imagistic form. In simply organised societies - communities with unitary cultures - there is no radical choice of image. Style is still a vernacular medium, not a product of aesthetic preference. But between the disintegration of the classical tradition in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the rise of the Modern Movement  in the first half of the twentieth century, architects were faced with a choice - in many cases a multiple choice - between alternative images, alternative codes, alternative systems of design, alternative styles. That choice I have called The Dilemma of Style. [...]

In brief the stylistic dilemma was a product first of the Renaissance (which gave us the idea of individual style), and then of Romanticism (which gave us the idea of a multiplicity of styles). [...]

It was in the area of romantic landscape that the idea of appropriate form, that is a style appropriate to a particular context, first came to fruition. Of course the idea had a long history. Vitruvius endowed the different classical orders with distinct characters - masculine Doric, matronly Ionic, and so on - establishing a classical tradition of decorum, or manner, and this variation and stylistic differentiation; ideas which in turn were developed in eighteenth-century France. J.-F. Blondel explained the appropriate use of style as a kind of 'colouration', 'the poetry of architecture'. 'In a word', he suggests, 'style... enables the architec to create a sacred genre, a heroic one, a pastoral one'. Ledoux took such ideas of stylistic expression a good deal further, designing buildings such as his notorious phallic-shaped brothel, or his barrel-shaped house for a cooper or barrel-maker, which are themselves three-dimensional metaphors. Architecture thus becomes a symbolic language.

[...]

In the early eighteen century - the cultural watershed when nature replaced religion as the motive force for creative artists - the cult of styles had become rooted in the soil of the Romantic landscape. But it was not until the early nineteenth century that choice developed into conflict. [...] Buildings were now pictorially conceived as memories in three dimensions [...].

The habit of regarding buildings as scenery - as aggregates of separate visual units - encouraged not only irregular skylines and asymmetrical plans, but triangular, hexagonal, and octagonal features, eyecarcher and all manner of follies [...]. Picturesque thinking was certainly an encouragement to drawing-board architecture: designing a house from the outside inwards, rather than from the outside outwards - a process of design ideal for landscape features. Carter's triangular fort is reciprocally picturesque: a building designed to be looked at as well as looked from; an example of scenographic design, based on the multiplications of points of vision."

Van Eck, Caroline; McAllister, James; Van de Vall, Renée (eds.) (1995) The question of style in philosophy and the arts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Words about Architecture (D. Scott Brown)

"Charles Seeger, philosopher of 'musics', believed that art, music and architecture cannot be explined in writing, baceuse words are linear and hide the essence of arts that are nonverbal and nonlinear. Stravinsky, too, when asked the meaning of a composition just played it again. But then what were Seeger and Stravinsky doing, and what am I doing writing words?

Bob [Robert Venturi] and I write mainly to clarify our ideas. As makers and doers, we have evolved a troika between looking/learning, writing/theorising and designing/building. We jump between these in no particular order and require al three to produce our work. We feel that new architecture needs words to help it along (the photo essay is our preferred method). And setting down an idea helps us to understand and use it, and eventually to go on to the next one. But architectural writing also serves to describe, direct and explain projects, to express criticism and conduct polemics.

[...]

How do you learn and teach architectural writing? I learned it in primary and secondary school, then on my own with help from friends like Charles Seeger; and, although I would not dare teach the personal and poetic, I am accustomed to helping interns learn to write everyday prose. A few arrive with this ability but most seem not to have learned it in either their liberal arts or professional education. I gather that some professional schools (engineering, for example) run in-house courses in expository writing, having discovered that the last place they will find this teaching is in university English departments. I tell young architects that building an argument is like building a building. You cannot just throw thoughts at a subject; there must be a logic and pattern to the development of ideas. This then gets translated into structures and substructures, with the alteration of none part requiring the restabilisation of the whole. Student architects are sometimes told, if you can write, you can draw. I reverse the argument: if you can draw, you can write (not poetry, but good working prose).

[...]

Then forget words. Creative cycles call for reading, thinking, impassioning, then sleeping and opening a new book. There need be no preconceptions. The world can start again on a white page. As Lou Kahn said, the process passes from the unmeasurable, through the measurable, to the unmeasurable again. On the way there is room for scientific rigour and for penetration, consciously and unconsciously, of all we have ever seen or read. As the design evolves, the words return in altered form."

Scott Brown, Denise (2009) Having Words. Architectural Association, London.

Espacio (IV) / Space (IV)

Extraido de / From:
Frederick, Matthew (2007) 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

MIT Press, Cambridge.

3. Figure-ground theory states that the space that results from placing figures should be considered as carefully as the figures themselves.

Space is called negative space if it is unshaped after the placement of figures. It is positive space if it has a shape.

6. We move through nevative spaces and dwell in positive spaces.

The shapes and qualities of architectural spaces greatly influence human experience and behaviour, for we inhabit the spaces of our built environment and not the solid walls, roofs, and columns that shape it. Positive spaces are almost always preferred by people for lingering and social interaction. Negative spaces tend to promote movement rather than dwelling in place.

8. "Architecture is the thoughtful making of space." - Louis Kahn

10. Our experience of an architectural space is strongly influenced by how we arrive in it.

A tall, bright space will feel taller and brighter if counterpointed by a low-ceilinged, softly lit space. A monumental or sacred space will feel more significant when placed at the end of a sequence of lesser spaces. A room with south-facing windows will be more strongly experienced after one passes through a series of north-facing spaces.