The Chronicles of N'Architecture: The Concept, the Diagram, and the Interpretation

Some of the readings for Workshop 1 raise the question of whether or not architecture should be concept driven, and if it is, should the concept be legible in the final design.  From pretty much the moment we set foot in our first studio class, we are taught that concept is the key to the development of a project.  Maybe because that is the particular brand of design philosophy I am most familiar with, but I mostly agree with the idea that design should be concept driven.  The reason is this:  good design relies on being deliberate and conscientious. Having a concept allows the designer to move forward with iterations and revisions in a coherent and thoughtful manner, providing definitive reasons for design choices.  If nothing else, we learn two major things in the SoA: 1) Know how to BS, and 2) Always have a good reason WHY.  With a concept, the question "why" can almost always be answered, at the very least with something more developed than "because it looks cool."  And even if the average pedestrian can't read it, having a good basis that all the rest of your ideas can stand on will lend a sense of integrity and harmony to the final product.

Diagrams.  One of the questions on the reading quiz was (spoiler alert) a true/false about diagrams being a means of compressing information.  Right now I don't remember if the reading supported the idea of info compression, and I can see how in some circumstances this could be true as in literature, but my stance on diagrams in architecture/design is that they are a means of organizing, therefore understanding, and thus expanding on (not compressing) ideas.  On that note, I am really terrible at making parti diagrams.  I've just never been good at the balance of too little information and too much information to constitute a "parti."  I have a tendency to skip right on over the big picture to getting too detailed too fast.  It would appear that I have a fever, and the only cure is more diagrams.

I liked the readings about the semantic/syntactic expressions of architecture because I am also a lover of languages.  Prose and poetry, like architecture and design, are the careful choice and arrangement of elements.  If you choose the wrong elements (semantics) in the first place, you can't really express what you mean.  If you choose the right elements but arrange them poorly (syntax), you can't express what you mean either. It kind of reminds me of poorly translated idiomatic expressions.  My French teacher in high school used to use jumbled metaphors all the time, like "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him get in the boat."  And while that kind of makes sense and is almost poetic, it doesn't make sense in the context we're used to.