on the written word in architecture and design
graham resource center book award recipient, 2024.
“Architects hate to write – and when they do, they do it poorly”: An accusation I was unfamiliar with until two months into my Master’s of Architecture degree, when a professor and field professional decided to incorporate the art of language into a short written exercise for my cohort.
“Getting an architect to write is like pulling teeth,” he told us.
I asked to know more.
I could not fathom that this discipline – in all its complexity – the very discipline that had generated texts like “Junkspace” and “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, would ever consider itself free of perhaps the most integral, most reductive, most clarified form of design. I could not fathom that all the practitioners I had known, who spoke of the wonders of design and theory and historical nuance to anyone who would listen, were not jumping at opportunities to enshrine those thoughts in paper, both at the office and in personal practice. I simply could not understand how the minds I looked up to, who seemed to tote around a book or three no matter where they were headed, were not contributors to the very art form that they referenced so heavily.
At some point I began to understand: the architects in question were not the Koolhaases and Jacobses of history-theory acclaim. All at once it became clear how the handful of voices that hold up the robust field of architectural writings are not the voices that surround us – not really. They might be prolific in their repertoire, or their domain might end at the back cover of an exceptional book, never crossing into the built environment – regardless, it hit me that these names were not the reality of the profession we as students have prepared to enter.
Intern Architect, Architectural Drafter, Architectural Designer, Junior Architect, Project Architect, Senior Designer, even Principal… The path to licensure and beyond is fraught with knowledge that is as of yet intangible to us. These roles are the reality of our field, and make up the majority of what those who stick with this path will encounter. We are ready to become the channel for marketable concepts – told that we could talk our way out of any problem, but if we cannot draw it, its value is lost.
I began to understand that there must come a time that signals the career-bound designer’s departure from studying (at least in the way we employ it in academia) and arrival at praxis, in some form or another. Architectural design becomes a means to an end, and to design well is to design quickly, clearly, concisely, effectively. What is more quick than a line, clear than a render, effective than a picture? That’s the question that’s driven the real practitioners of the field away from text.
The unspoken reality which became apparent as a result of this discussion was that the average designer, which many of us are sure to become, has almost entirely lost touch with the written word, out of the propensity for the visual tools that bode well with clients and colleagues, perhaps out of ease of access – the same pencil that produces a single construction line can make a sentence with the same effort.
“That’s not to say that those who prefer drawing over writing don’t value reading in the same manner.”
We were examining texts I had been exposed to many times before, with a few new ones interspersed. But, the relationship had changed. I became aware of how Zumthor’s Atmospheres might not stand alone without its left half; reference images that don’t carry the same weight without the paragraphs partnered to them. It began to fit into the narrative we were learning, and I focused on the text as a lone body, with fervor.
There was an immediate shift in my own personal practice. I have always been a bookworm in some form or another, long before my love for cities and spaces blossomed into a career (although, given that my favorite book throughout my formative years was titled City of Embers, I suppose I may have known). Suddenly, I saw my bookshelf in a new light. I dove headfirst into every form of arch-adjacent writing I could find, even works on the fringes. A poem about the American grocery store built an image in my mind and I sat in the aisles of the GRC to interrogate my understanding of the drawing it implied. I pored over texts about gardens from the 1940s and came away with thirty dollars of treasure from the annual book sale – each page inspired me to write more myself. I looked on in awe as my assigned readings piled up, drawings and photographs often outnumbering words by volume on the page. I committed myself to reading more.
Matthew Goulish’s 39 Microlectures has stuck with me since then. From what I know now, he has no more proximity to architecture than I do to theater (his primary discipline). Yet, “Failure: An Elegy” from this volume is a more potent vessel of spatial character than a number of drawings I’ve studied in my time at the College of Architecture. In all the simple sentences I read, there was a revolution.
So, reading became designing. The relationship between the two ironclad, their relationship to my visual work clearer to me than ever. That is, I knew I was not replacing drawing but rather supplementing it, in a way that was simultaneously integral in partnership AND entirely its own.
After that era, I found myself deeming the written word sacred – never again to avail myself to books composed only of construction lines – as clear and concise as they might be. Of course, we are visual thinkers – but I am beginning to challenge the idea that we as academic professionals must be visual communicators. Even if it takes ten thousand characters to equal one image, my newfound dogma around books is in service of the long-lost talent of painting a picture with words. Exceptional passages stick with me in a way that few images can rival.
The details of a drawing fade rapidly in the mind’s eye; text can stick, letter for letter, word for word. Thirty years down the line, it might still pack the same punch. And frankly, isn’t that what we work for?