Wildly Appropriate

My idea of the architect as the coordinator- whose business is to unify the various formal, technical, social and economic problems that arise in connection with building - inevitably led me on, step by step, from study of the function of the house to that of the street: from the street to the town; and finally to the still vaster implications of regional and national planning.

Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Faber and Faber, London, 1935, p. 67

Architectural conception and realisation [sic] usually assume a one-to-one correspondence between the represented idea and the final building. The fact that digital media also make this literal transcription more feasible through automation and robotics has resulted in an unwillingness to question this premise. … The process of creation prevalent in architecture today assumes that a conventional set of projections, at various scales from site to detail, adds up to a complete, objective idea of a building.

Alberto Perez-Gomez, “Questions of Representation - The Poetic Origin of Architecture”, in From Models to Drawings (2007). Routledge Press

The profession generally follows a misguided interpretation of what tradition and contract jurisprudence have codified , for the purposes of billing clients and guaranteeing products and services…. [and] most of these codifications have been the outcome of some not-so-proper market-driven and technologically biased events that have disguised themselves behind the manifold masks of professional appropriateness. The depressing consequence of all this is that the current architectural graphic productions have reached an unchangeable and highly sterile phase of inert classifications and taxonomies, based on a pseudo-transparency of scope and a pseudo-scientific justification of the functions and roles carried out by the different kinds of architectural representations… They offer, as a panacea for the deficiency in architectural imagination, the most insidious graphic banalities that can be applied in a set of architectural drawings as allegedly effective means of design and communication… smooth ever-so-accommodating confirmations of graphic conventions that prevent any critical dispute of the most pedestrian and prosaic design protocols. Architectural drawings have become highly deceptive and frustrating didactic and professional tools that magnify the false traits and values of graphic architectural articulation.

Marco Frascari, “Models and Drawings - The Invisible Nature of Architecture”, the introductory essay in From Models to Drawings 2007 Routledge Press

At long last… all five parts of my interview with RSW in one audio file:

• iPod/iTunes chapterized version
• mp3 version

You can subscribe to these current and to future interviews in podcast format by clicking here

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And here’s the final segment of my interview with a truly great man. Soon I’ll post a single-file version of the whole interview. The money quote from this segment came in reply to a somewhat whiney observation I made about how RSW’s methodology is bitter-sweet to me because I perceive it as one that somebody like me couldn’t reverse-engineer and use in my own practice. He disagreed. Kindof:

Why not? Why do you not think that? You just have to rewire your fuckin’ brain is all. You have to grasp your life as an ignorant person and nobody’s willing to do that the way I am. Unless you really empty yourself you can’t fill it up in the proper way. And you’re not willing to do that. It’s too… it’s too… it’s SCARY!

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I’m reading a book called “Masters of Modern Architecture” and ran across a quote from Walter Gropius which gave me pause and which reminded me of the situation with JJG declaring there’s no such thing as an information architect and how people like us are actually and have always been User Experience Designers. In 1933, Gropius said this about differentiating building and architecture:

For whereas building is merely a matter of methods and materials, architecture implies the mastery of space

I have a two part question that I’d love for you to suggest answers to and for in the comments space below. 1a) If architecture implies a mastery of space, what does information architecture imply the mastery of? 1b) If we changed the text to read “user experience design implies the mastery of ____________” and compare that with what we said in the context of information architecture … what’s the quality of the difference there. Or is there not a significant difference?

Bonus question: remix the first part of Gropius’ quote to better describe your world, eg “For whereas software development is merely a matter of procedures and rule-sets, information architecture implies the mastery of … See what you can make of that.

In this segment, RSW talks about his approach to creating websites (spoiler: it’s how he approaches everything), extolls the “mundane” aspects of IA, and expresses skepticism about the idea that architects’ work might benefit from separating out the instructional and diagrammatic from the emotional and experiential.

The common thought is that architects build buildings. No, architects make instructions for having someone else build them. So basically architects, if you’re talking about architects… or CEOs or generals… they give instructions. So what you’re really are in as an information architect and a big hunk of information architecture is giving instructions.

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Came across a brief Design Intelligence blog posting from back in January about RSW’s new book, which is called 33: Understanding Change by Changing Our Understanding.

My friend Marta Strickland at Organic did a write-up on Three Minds today around the stuff I did a talk on at IUE2009 a few weeks ago. What’s especially sweet about this (besides lending my humble blog some of Organic’s google juice, traffic and pagerank) is the way Marta has internalized some of the ideas I’ve gathered up in my context and has expanded on them and re-contextualized them in a broader context:

It applies to design … … but it also applies to strategy and research. We have researched how new moms socialize online, and we know what new moms look for in a new vehicle, but have we thought about where and how moms look for information about vehicles online? A + B does not always equal C. The joints are what get us the really good insights. The transitions are what tell the real story.

I’m grateful to Marta for attending my little talk, and for bringing some NTISI thinking into some places it might not otherwise find its way into all on its own.

UPDATE: fixed the bum link to Marta’s Three Minds blog posting - thanks Timothy!