There will be a version of this available soon in a massively reduced format, but for those of you with a penchant for punishment, or perhaps just an unquenchable interest in my ability to drivel on for a hundred pages, here’s my Major study in all it’s pdf glory!

The articles are written using a somewhat restricted word list, and it should force me to think clearly about what I really mean.

I’ve found that when I explain something in simple terms, I generally gain a better understanding of it, which allows me to put the richness back in with the complete range of expression offered by unrestricted use of English.

Anyone else up for joining in?

It is could have been written specifically for architects!

I particularly like the transformation of…

Every executive knows that constantly delivering superior customer value is an imperative to veritably creating shareholder value.

into…

If you want to make lots of money, you have to please your customers more than the other guy does.

So I suppose that the moral of the story is that; amongst the people who look at your work there are always going to be a few smart people out there that can read,  they’ll notice if you use a thesaurus liberally throughout your writing. So save yourself the ridicule later, and write down what you actually mean, it’ll be quicker, and it might actually be interesting!

The 21st century is hailed by many as a ‘make or break’ time for humanity, the tipping point between a technological utopia and a crushing blow to our species’ capacity to flourish. While every effort must be made to steer a path towards a bright future, contingencies for both extremes, as well as the vast, but discontinuous, range of circumstances and possibilities between must be considered.
Only in a very perverse utopia, or particularly devastating catastrophe, does architecture cease to be pertinent (the importance of architects is less certain!).

The risk of global catastrophe, ranging from super volcanoes and runaway global warming to doomsday machines or bio-terrorism, is non trivial. The contingencies in place to contain or manage these events may (if successful) affect societies as much or more than the event itself. Conversely the potential for technology to enhance our lives beyond recognition is considerable. Indeed, it has already been realised. Genetic modification, cognitive enhancement and life extension are just a few of the possibilities.

With these great threats and opportunities come ethical questions about how, and whether, to manage the risks that the implementation of these opportunities (or whether to implement them at all!). While forecasting has its perils, as recent events in the financial sector have shown, it is foolhardy not to prepare to manage the outcomes of potential cataclysms. The continually diverging tree of all possible events makes the odds of a particular event, even in the relatively near future, vanishingly small. We need better tools. I intend learn how to develop a better understanding of the future, and the methods that can be used to improve predictions. Architecture is one of our most persistent projections into the future, there ought to be some consideration of what that future is going be like.

If getting past the next 90 years is really as fraught as is claimed (disasters, divergent societies, etc.) then we have a lot of work to do to get there, but it would make me feel better if I had a bit of an idea of what we’ll find when we do.

If you have any thoughts on things I ought to be looking at then let me know.

There were great presentations from a few of the usual suspects, and a few unexpected faces. David Hines (Populous) showed the latest work on the Landsdown road stadium, and far from being boring (I hassled Roly so much about him showing Landsdown road so much that he mentioned it in his talk at SG this year) it was like seeing the progression of a friend’s baby into a toddler. Seeing the real scale of it finally was fascinating, as it’d always been on a screen so nothing had a diagonal of more than 19inches, but the real scale things were huge!
There was a presentation from Olivier Ottevaere from the Bartlett who was doing tiling patterns based on projections of n-dimensional solids onto a 2d plane that looked terrific, but really made me feel that I ought to have dome my reading before I had gone to class.

But anyway, onto what I was thinking about, there are two streams here that will combine eventually, so bare with me.

Jonathon showed his work on the new Crossrail station for Canary Wharf, and it reminded me a lot of the Dubai metro stations. He’s been having the same issues with solving the node trimming as I did when I was a lowly part 1 at Aedas Studio (rather than just lowly in general). He was taking a perfectionist approach (as usual) to his “systemic design”, and was tweaking the inputs to his system minutely to get the desired results all over the form, playing variables against each other to gain the perfect expression of the intent.

When I started doing my BTEC in mechanical engineering, the first thing I ever did in the workshop, after being shown how not to get a chuck key stick in my forehead or get my tie caught in anything spinning, was to make a tool makers clamp, the meta tool that everything starts with. It’s not a delicate bit of equipment, but it’s pretty versatile. It allows a tool maker to wedge bits of oddly shaped stuff together so that they can drill holes etc. My one was a bit of an odd case. I drilled in the wrong place a couple of times, so I had those mistakes welded up, but I also surface ground all the faces, even the ones that weren’t important, so that it was incredibly slick looking. I still have it somewhere, and I get it out and show people from time to time to prove that I’m not a total keyboard slave.

When I was making the clamp I measured where I should put holes (often wrongly) with instruments, and I then drilled them with tools. Pilots rely on their instruments when they are flying in dense fog. So it would seem that instruments measure things, but surgeons cut skin with instruments, and musicians play instruments, so that would imply that instruments are more to do with skill and precision.

The “architect as tool maker” question popped up briefly again today, and it seems that people are getting used to the idea of building tools to help them in their every day life. Tools seem to be utilitarian, something that is concerned with getting the job done, and getting the wielder of the tools out of work and to the pub as fast as possible.

Given the two definitions of instruments given above, i.e. something to do with precise measurement, or a device that can be mastered as an art form, ‘tools’ seem to be a class of thing that we make to help us in our life that makes it easier, but it will probably never become a thing that we gain much satisfaction from using. Jonathon’s Crossrail model is probably on the way to becoming an instrument as it requires nurturing, and investment of time to make it yeald the quality of result that is desired.

There is probably an argument that a programming language is an instrument, it requires a significant investment of effort to make it do the things that we want it to, but the counter argument to that is that using that argument a piece of wood is an instrument because with an appropriate investment of effort and the right tools and techniques it will do what we want it to.

So where does that leave us? If tools aren’t the raw material, embodied with all the potential, and they aren’t a utilitarian labour saving device then what are they?
They must be something that is more refined than the raw material, but is also not primarily concerned with making things easier (although this shouldn’t be discounted as a side effect).

Does this mean that they are something that needs us to invest effort into to gain benefit from? I think this is probably somewhere on the road to defining it. There is also the aspect that an instrument can also take us beyond what it possible without it. A micrometer can measure more precisely than we can by eye, and a piano can make sounds that are far beyond what we could do without the skill of the expert piano maker – and the virtuoso pianist.
So as architectural tool makers (or architects that make tools of themselves) what is the step into being an architectural instrument maker? I suppose a good start would be to make things less deterministic, once the output is uncertain, yet controllable by a skilled operator then we might be some of the way along. If I can build something, and then someone else can do amazing things with it, then maybe we have an instrument. We needn’t even have intersecting skill sets, but we could work together to produce something great.
So what have I managed to define? Well probably not much, but it’s helped my thinking, partially by just filling the time between the three pints I had after this afternoon’s meeting,and partially by putting my thoughts down.
I’m going to be provocative and define instruments (without recourse to a dictionary as I’m on the train).

“An instrument is something that allows us to go beyond our normal range of ability”

There are probably a lot of problems with that (the difference between an instrument and an augmentation springs to mind).
I’d love to see examples of instruments that confirm my theory, and any caveats to the definition would be welcome too.

If you are reading this on facebook and you feel moved to make a comment, spare a thought for my online karma and copy the comment from facebook to www.notionparallax.co.uk/blog so that it shows up in both places. Ta.

Bizzarely enough, even though it isn’t directly linked from anywhere on this site, it is still one of the most popular downloads, with one of the main sources coming from somewhere buried deep inside the rhino wiki. That version has loads of blank pages and over set text, so I’ve tried to fix that.

What I haven’t done anything to is the content. I wrote it in late 2004, and a lot has changed since, the industry has changed, and I’ve changed immeasurably. Going though the text to weed out the spelling mistakes, I’m amazed at the bold, and often factually incorrect, statements that I pepper the text with, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see what I thought in those days!

You can get the file from here as a print res version, or from here for screen res.

Materiality

Materiality is the chief offender of a group of words that end in -iality. You can take any word, and add -iality to it, wordiality, dooriality, spatiality, doggiality.The phrase that really makes my blood boil is often uttered in crits accompanied by copious beard stroking -

“have you considered materiality“

What this really means is ‘what is it made of?” or “what are the properties of this material that make it particularly appropriate for this situation?“, or any number of other similar questions related to materials, and the offending, beard stroker will counter, ‘but every profession has it’s lexicon, it merely allows me to convey my meaning in a succinct and crisp way‘, with a subtext of ‘you clearly don’t understand, and you are beneath me‘. My rebuttal to this I’m afraid is a DH0 disagreement, “bollocks!” but when pressed further I’ll try and rise up the disagreement hierarchy and give a more complete answer.Other fields use their specific language to sharpen their enquiry. Paramedics can recount the treatment given and condition of a patient being brought into A&E precisely because their words are so accurate that they need very few of them to completely describe the situation.Our field does exactly the opposite. My main gripe with the “have you considered materiality” probe, other than that it infects young impressionable minds with the idea that it’s ok to ask that question, is that it’s lazy, that’s it, just plain lazy. The M question (as it shall henceforth be known so that my blood remains at a gentle simmer) allows the questioner the luxury of not really having to ask a question. It is really the equivalent of a raised eyebrow that a nervous student takes to be a indication that they ought to keep talking. Its rise to ubiquity seems to stem from the the questioner not really knowing what the right question ought to be.If you find yourself about to ask the M question in the future, stop, for the sake of cute puppies and fairys everywhere don’t do it. Instead, ask yourself what is it that I really want to know and ask that question.When presented with a beautiful white card model of a – well, an anything really – the M question is a very easy trap to fall into. But really we can add so much richness to the discussion by simply asking real questions.

What is it made of?What do you want it to feel like when you run your hand or your cheek along it?How is it made?What do you want the materials to say about the space?

Architectonic

This is a word even more shrouded in obfustication and cigar smoke than materiality but thankfully less commonly used.The wikipedia article for architectonic is pitiful, and this seems to reflect the general understanding of the term.From a quick survey of about 15 eloquent, educated architects, the general consensus was that architectonic was about the fact that architecture is made of pieces of stuff, and so the -tectonic bit was about the bits of stuff meeting each other and how they did that. However, it was also agreed that it was a frown, nod and stroke beard moment in any conversation where they pretended to know what was being said.Again I’m going to apply the charge of laziness to this one, but on additional charge of laziness of misapropriating words from philosophy without understanding their context.—I’ve been feeling very alienated by my distaste for these words, but recently I’ve found an underground movement of people just like me, so I’m making a stand.So next time someone asks you the M question, look them squarely in the eye, and ask them straight back

“what, exactly, do you mean by that?”

Paul Graham has written an excelent guide to levels of didagreement, and by understanding these it makes it easier to upgrade your responses.

The general idea is that you can clasify disagreement into

I won’t go into the details, you can see them worked out with much greater clarity here

I recently commented on a BD article, Concern as English Heritage cites Wikipedia in listing submission, and Verity Bird rebutted me. I’ve submitted a response, so hopefully that will be moderated soon and if it hasn’t fallen off the radar we’ll get a bit of a debate going!

My response level is currently about a DH4 though, so hopefully i’ll get to DH6 in the not too distant future!

Then today I was walking through the park thinking about exactly what it is that I do, or would like to do (I’m still no closer to an answer on that one), and the word literacy came up again, but this time in a totally different context.

I was thinking about improving people’s technical literacy, and then realising that ‘technical’ was probably the wrong word to use, and that the right one is still a long way off a, subject for another day perhaps, but also that literacy as a general concept was a bit of a mystery to me.

On the surface it looks simple – the ability to read something, but this gets complicated by the fact that reading is so tightly associated with text.

However, you often hear people talking about ‘reading a drawing’ or ‘reading the mood in the room’ so reading must be a more widespread ability.

In ‘Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom‘, a paper about Russell Ackoff’s taxonomy of content of the human mind there is a staging between data, the raw stuff that comes in from our senses, up to wisdom, which can roughly be though of as the sum of a persons experiences up to that point (real or imagined). I’d posit the acton of reading to cover the first three of these steps, data [gathering], information [interpretation into 'thoughts'], and knowledge [storage, at least temporarily].

So in my imagined situation where I walk into the bar room just after another man, and he exchanges a few heated words with some others in the bar, and then turns and locks the door.

In my reading of this situation, I ought to get out of there as soon as I can, as there is goign to be a full on wild west brawl, but what steps am I going through?

Data, is me looking around and seeing the two opposing factions, and hearing their sounds. It’s tempting to say that I’d be hearing their words, and their tone, but these are a higher level of processing over and above the raw data coming from my ears and eyes.

The information stage would be be turning that raw signal into things like words and shapes, but I still haven’t ascribed meanings to them.

Now that I have that information, I can start to turn it into knowledge. The process doesn’t require any great proccesing to happen in the brain, but more just a job of matching up the prexisting symbols from my experiences, with the new inputs ready for to take the next step of understanding them.

For me, that is as far as reading goes. I’ve often read whole pages of text and come away with no recolection of what that text was actually about. So I’m not convinced that it’s necesary for there to be a level of understanding to be included in the reading process. However, I consider the concept of literacy to require that extra step of understanding.

To explain this, lest assume that I’m still standing up, halfway to the bar when the aforementioned situation unfolds arround me. In a microsecond, the first three steps happen, this is me reading the situation, and then I start to understand that this is a very bad place to be if I want to keep all my teeth. Now I can act on this and start running as fast as I can toward the back door of the bar!

Assuming that the back door is unlocked and I make it out alive, then I can add that experience to my wisdom, the store of situations and symbols to search against next time.

I’m not totally convinced by reading and literacy, being slightly different, but my gut feeling is that literacy is asscribed a slightly higher status than just reading. One can be highly literate, but it’s not often said that one is a good reader (after the age of about 8). So i’m going to stick with it for the moment, and hopefully it’ll make deciding on my grand direction a little easier!

..and you can find the scans of the notebook that I planned it in below. I think these 3 pages are actually far more interesting than the finished product!


click on the images to go to flickr and see them at a decent resolution.