The Petit Project
"Turn this land into something useful"
Pattern Language
More often than not, as an architect, your job is to build (or rather design) something that will help your client make more money. Perhaps theres nothing inherently shady about that. But the fact that that is usually, ultimately, the bottom line of a project is often also the most problematic part of a project. This becomes clear the moment you set out to craft your projects pattern language.
Quick: Whats a Pattern Language
An innovation of the British Architect Christopher Alexander, a pattern language describes a method of creating intelligent design that is made with its users and uses in mind. Isn't that a given in any project? No. It isn't. Currently, that is the design fields biggest problem.
The Problem is
If I had to describe it, it's like an architect designing a house for a blind person, without considering what life as a blind person entails. First of all, thats already unrealistic, because accessible design is nowhere near mainstream enough as it is. So the problem is really that architects often have lost touch with what the essential needs of human beings are.
Simple things
To shelter in a place thats warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer. To give you a place that lets you rest safely and to engage safely with others. To create a container that solves your problems instead of creating more. To ease your anxieties and let your heart as well as your body be at rest. This is the point of a pattern language: to make sure that at the end of the day; all features aside, your project makes sense.
But nobody tries to be a bad architect
And Apple doesn't intend to sell you a bad phone; but in the end, after two years your device is set to break down and that is very intentional. It's the cognitive dissonance of capitalism, that what works best makes you less money than what works up to a point. We can discuss the complexities of this in architecture during sessions.
Who cares if the design works
Does it look cool on the cover of this magazine?
So Patterns...
While Christopher Alexander enjoys some notoriety for this design tool, I've found him also to be really unpopular among the Big fish of this industry. With the exception of my cute architecture department where most of the faculty were fans, my Big Landscape school certainly knew his name but shied away from mentioning him much. Ironic too, because he was at some point a designer of their Campus. Thats another interesting story we can analyse later.
Pattern Language or not
As a designer, take note of how frequently your design goals are at odds with each other - and which goal tends to win over which. Don't ignore the sore questions. How much longer will we build never ending mansions on blood properties while a worldwide housing crisis spirals into chaos? What levels of crap are we ready to create because a client can't afford anything too nice - and we have bills to pay up? Don't ignore these feelings.
Because they won't admit this in school but
Architecture is very much about feelings. Both yours and those of the community you are building in. The Industry vibe is very "facts don't care about your feelings" thanks to guys like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and other Steel and Concrete bros. But no amount of theorising and postulating can make up for a fugly awkward building. Sometimes the hype is just propaganda; when your gut says ew, maybe you should listen.
A vaguely aesthetic LiDAR image like this may look cool in a portfolio, but it doesn't say much about your understanding of the site in question. Take note of the times when you use diagrams not to explain something complex, but to cover for a complexity you don't quite understand.
I've been guilty of that myself, obviously, but theres not much else you can do when you simply don't have the time to try and understand. You sort of have to pretend to know the details of what you're representing; mostly by bullshitting your way through a presentation.
