# Critical Thinking | WHAT WHY HOW of Architecture + Design **Channel:** Archimarathon **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNk1UHWyuRc **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/wNk1UHWyuRc ## Chapters - 0:00 — Introducing the What Why How - 1:52 — Defining the What Through Objects - 5:24 — From Presentation to Concept - 11:01 — Reading Diagrams in Architecture - 17:19 — Why Fundamentals Matter Most ## Transcript **[0:00] Speaker A:** Hi, everybody. Welcome to Archimrathon. Today, Kev's going to hit you with his what, why, how of architecture. This stuff is critical. **[0:19] Speaker B:** So a lot of this came from sitting in critique and students and professions presenting the work, and often they just ramble on about all kinds of stuff, especially with students. When you're presenting, you know, they're all doing the same project, and at the end of the day, you just want to know what they're doing, which is different from everyone else's. What makes their proposal separate, why did they make that decision, and whether what they say is cohesive, what they're doing and why they're doing it, and then how does it work? **[0:50] Speaker A:** And that sounds pretty simple. That sounds simple, but it's amazing when you hear architects talk about their work, how often they're not talking about those things, they're waffling on and waving their hands, talking about this esoteric stuff. **[1:01] Speaker B:** When you're looking at precedence, you also need to know where the project is, who is it for, or who is it by, and then what is it they're doing and by what? We'll explain that in a second. Why and how? And I think the biggest question in architecture should be why you're doing it and how does it work? But unfortunately, I find students struggle with the what part. **[1:24] Speaker B:** The what is something you can draw. It is purely objective way of looking at something. It is the formal proposition. It's an object. Because that's what architects need to do. Right. You can't stand next to the building and explain it to it all the time. It has to read a certain way. You can see. And you can only achieve whatever you want to achieve through architecture, through a building, through a composition, through a form. **[1:52] Speaker B:** So here you have a design brief, which is a device that tells the time that you can carry with you. Okay, so what does this look like to you? How would you describe this? The what part? As an alien. Looking at this, you have never known what this is. You're just going to call it out, exactly what you see. So **[2:13] Speaker A:** I'm an alien? **[2:14] Speaker B:** You are an alien. **[2:15] Speaker B:** You look alien. **[2:16] Speaker A:** I'm an alien. So I don't know that that's a watch. **[2:20] Speaker B:** No, because it's like, you know, you're designing a library. We love using library as example. **[2:26] Speaker B:** So you're designing a library and someone says, you know, what are you proposing? I'm proposing a library. What does that mean? **[2:34] Speaker A:** Yeah, it's a circle. It's a round thing on a chain. **[2:40] Speaker B:** Yeah. In this case, yes. It's device that tells the time. So it's a circular disc which has two sides. It has a few needles that spins around the center. **[2:51] Speaker B:** There seems to be a 12 division and 60 division. There's a little knob and then there's a chain. So we have no any meaning whatever or even loaded terms into what this is. This is the diagram. You can draw any of the things we just said. We can draw that. You can draw a circle, you can draw, you know, all that stuff. We can't draw abstract ideas of time and, you know, cyclic nature and all that stuff here. The big question is why? So why it is like this, okay? Because time is cyclic. So decided to, in this case, this scenario, you. They divide because we use the Roman timing system. So we use 12 division and 60. You have a shorter needle that goes around and that tells the hour and the longer one tells the minutes. **[3:43] Speaker B:** And then has a knob which winds the mechanism. There's another, the back actually access the mechanism underneath. We don't need to explain how that works yet, but it's there and it's a chain so you don't lose the damn thing. Right. So together is a concept. So that at the end, yeah, time is cyclic. That's why it's a circle. You know, that's a simple way of looking at it and how it works. You know, that's where the drawing comes in. That's where the detail comes in. This is the time you spent. Once you understand that, you go and work out, well, okay, how does this thing work growing up? You know, as a kid, the first thing when they start to ask questions would be, what is that? What is that? What is that? **[4:23] Speaker B:** Then they get a little bit older, they would just keep asking why, **[4:27] Speaker C:** why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why **[4:32] Speaker B:** and why and why and why? Until your brain just about to explode from the amount of questions on why. Because they know they can just keep tweaking it. **[4:41] Speaker B:** And then when they get a bit older and you know, they start to take something and go hide underneath the bed and pull it apart and see how it works. And I think that's. That's the sort of human understanding. I think that that, that level of comprehension is quite important to realize that this is how you communicate. **[5:00] Speaker A:** That's super interesting because so many parents get sick of why, why, why, and how many kids. I can remember to you probably saying, if you could get something and get a screwdriver and pull it apart, it was joyful. And then try to put it back together and always get it wrong was Great. Then you've got parents saying, don't touch that, put that down. **[5:18] Speaker B:** Yeah, but that came later, Right. That came older. **[5:21] Speaker A:** Once **[5:21] Speaker B:** you figure out what it is and why it is like that. Yeah. **[5:24] Speaker B:** So you know, when it comes to presentation. Yeah. You often need to know that. Often students start off by going, this is how it works. You walk in the front door, you come through here, you go through there, you know, and not just students, architects as well. They start to walk you through the building without really understanding, well, what's the big moves, you know, in terms of design? And then why those decisions? And then this is the manifestation of it. **[5:49] Speaker A:** Yeah. So what you're saying is they start by saying, there's a cog, there's a screw, there's another cog. And you stop them and you say, what is it and why does it exist? **[6:02] Speaker B:** Yeah. And **[6:02] Speaker A:** they're pointing out the guts of it without actually letting you know that it's a timepiece and it's designed on these principles. **[6:08] Speaker B:** That's right. So with that, the brief of a time telling device that you can carry with you. Well, you know, there are different forms is. **[6:17] Speaker B:** There's the moonwatch, you know, it's something you can wear around your wrist with different dials. It does different things. More knobs. Unless you're a Leo, you wear on your fist for some reason. It could be squared, it could be digital. **[6:34] Speaker B:** There's nothing that says it has to be cyclic. That was just one form. This is a completely different thing. Right. And they're these guys, you know. **[6:41] Speaker B:** You know, they, they also do the same job, really. Or steampunk version. **[6:50] Speaker A:** Wow. **[6:50] Speaker B:** And in some ways, this is a device that tells the time. Well, technically you can carry it with you once you work out where north is. But it is. Right. **[7:00] Speaker B:** So again, it's a design solution that has completely different forms and that's what they are. So you need to know what is it that you're proposing and why? So the what part is something you can draw. And often that is the parti diagram. Parti **[7:19] Speaker A:** the what is the. **[7:27] Speaker A:** What? What? **[7:30] Speaker B:** No, you. You often hear that a party diagram is something you can draw. It's often a thumbnail. **[7:34] Speaker B:** It's something that is quite small you can draw and to explain a scheme. So in this case, I'm using a thing from the 101, things I learned from architecture school. There are a series of diagrams. In this case, there's the finger poking into the woods, radial scheme with missing spoke Ls in conflicts, a box subtracted core segregated public and private, you know, odd shapes intruding, a pure space. So again, no loaded value into it. It's just a little diagram, little thumbnail you can draw on the back of a stamp. And these are the **[8:06] Speaker A:** types of things that are so necessary to return to. You know, I often talk about being lost in the fog of war, need to be able to return to just a diagram and remind yourself what it's about. If you can't do a simple diagram of your project, then you're probably lost. It probably needs some editing **[8:21] Speaker B:** and that doesn't come straight away. I think a lot of architects present that as a sort of linear process where you kind of come, here's the diagram and there it is. No, that comes after you've worked, worked at it and understood the project and have multiple drawings and then to stand back and go, what is it? **[8:38] Speaker A:** So you just, **[8:41] Speaker B:** however you present it as if that's where it starts from, because you don't need to know all these other things. That's part of the conversation of why, but here's the solution and this is why. And these are the great things that you get by doing this. So. But I think it's misunderstanding, misconception that this, this idea, this concept comes like it's this kind of stroke of genius. **[9:02] Speaker B:** No, it takes a lot of work. And I think that's another episode altogether on how do you start a project that we will get to when we can talk in real life, in person or something. You can tweet, it's a, it's a sentence you can write down, you can say it, but again, it should be something you can draw. **[9:21] Speaker A:** And that's not to cheapen the architecture. That's not meant to suggests that architecture can be **[9:26] Speaker B:** sort of one liner. **[9:28] Speaker A:** Yeah, but that just means you go to great effort to be able to communicate central ideas clearly. Obviously the thing is much more sophisticated, but unless you can distill it down to those simple principles, people won't be able to come on the journey with you. And maybe you don't even know why you're doing what you're doing. **[9:45] Speaker B:** And then you've got people like Bjerg Engels, who's made a career out of all these beautiful little diagrams. He's very, very good. If one thing he's able to explain the scheme, the evolution, the reason behind the scheme and the composition and the website, you can see they all little diagrams, it just sums up the project. **[10:04] Speaker A:** And though he's a perfect example of somebody that allows the layperson, the client to buy into the scheme because it's not full of esoteric language, it's full of these didactic diagrams. So you go, oh, yes, I. I agree in these points of agreeance. Very clever. **[10:22] Speaker B:** So if the. What part is the party, the why you choose that party, that, that proposition is the concept together. So often people just say, my concept is, you know, this little diagram. **[10:35] Speaker A:** Nature. My concepts. **[10:37] Speaker A:** Community. **[10:39] Speaker B:** Yeah. **[10:40] Speaker A:** Sustainability. **[10:40] Speaker B:** No, it's together. It's together. I mean, yes, it could be about community, it could be about nature, it could be about community. But what is it you're proposing that makes it that. Because otherwise it's just fluff. Right? It's together they form. **[10:53] Speaker B:** The explanation of why you choose that particular diagram is the concept. And that. That's where the richness comes in. **[11:01] Speaker B:** So there's this great book called Precedence in Architecture, which is beautiful diagrams, and it breaks down a lot of these amazing buildings into diagrams. This is the palace of assembly in Chandigarh by the Corbusier. **[11:15] Speaker B:** And here's the elevational diagram. So you can see this is a datum and that there's two things that pops up in plan. I think this is the diagram that's quite, quite nicely drawn. What do you see here? **[11:29] Speaker A:** A boundary wall and some shapes. **[11:33] Speaker B:** That's right. Well, what's the relationship, though? Because I can literally draw a boundary wall and some shapes. The shapes could be somewhere else. It could be any kind of shapes. So what you see here is a square. It's a compound, it's a courtyard building, it's a square. So it's a balanced form. It has a southern boundary, which is the entrance, which faces the main axis and that has different address. **[11:56] Speaker B:** But within the square there are two forms. And the most important thing, as you can see, is the circle. It looks by size and by geometry is different. That is the lower house, that is the main people's assembly. So it's free from the government. It's not in the center. Right. It doesn't belong to the geometry, but it's within there, because it's within the government, but it's free. That's important point. And the other element, which is the little square pyramid, that leans to that, there's a relationship, direct relationship between the two, which is also not within, which is within the square, but is not bound by the square in terms of its alignment to the geometry. That's because the Senate looks to the Lower House in making laws. So that's why it looks like this. But the what is pretty simple, just a few forms. So that's the why and a much more complex, richer understanding of just a few forms, where they're placed and what does it mean? **[12:55] Speaker A:** It's wonderful. **[12:56] Speaker A:** Yeah. **[12:57] Speaker B:** We're going to do an episode specifically on party diagrams to come, but I'm just going to explain that a project. Have you been to this thing, Andrew? **[13:05] Speaker A:** Yeah, a couple of times. Thought it was rubbish and then I arrived and checked it out and it's actually quite good. **[13:15] Speaker A:** I like being wrong. **[13:16] Speaker B:** So Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheimheim which basically, you know, changed the generation basically. So it's got this crazy looking thing right on the outside. It looks kind of wild and mad. But has anyone ever looked at the plants? **[13:32] Speaker B:** Has anyone looked at the sections? It's not as crazy as it seems. In fact the starting point of him talking about it. This was the site so you can see on both sides of the bridge, industrial zone. This was some of the first drawings by Frank Gehry. **[13:49] Speaker B:** The relationship between the old museum view from the City hall bridge and a view across the river. This was the very, very first sketch in the hotel room. **[14:00] Speaker A:** Yeah, it's **[14:01] Speaker B:** a bit hard to read. Yeah, yeah. That's actually the perspective across the river. That's a river there in front. There's a bridge and there's some kind of U shaped thing. It makes a little bit more sense here. There's another drawing. **[14:12] Speaker B:** Weird. There's a U shaped building. There's a square buildings at the top, the trees up the street and then this U shaped building with some kind of pond in front of it. Yeah, there it is. There's a bridge, U shape, some sort of square pond and something on the other side of the bridge view across from the river, all that stuff. Like you can imagine someone just take that diagram and extrude it and becomes a building. But no, and I hate that movie sketches of Frank Gehry. As if he's just like this mad genius. You can slap pieces of paper together, but no, this is the office doing the work. They took all the program and looked at different configurations of the various spaces. **[14:53] Speaker A:** They **[14:53] Speaker B:** did all the work back home. And yes, they did slap on some pieces of paper but that becomes the important bits because they're expensive. And then it evolves to be quite rectilinear because you can actually calculate the volumes. These are the evolutionary drawings. You can start to see the sizes of the galleries themselves as if how many of them will fit in, how many of these galleries will come together. And then there's this shape starting to emerge. The most important bit which Is the entry. Bit more focus. Early models didn't start with crazy shapes. **[15:23] Speaker B:** Starts off simple and evolves. This is the how, once you understand it, it's the evolution of that evolution of those spaces. It's not just something that's overnight slapped together in Rhino. **[15:38] Speaker A:** It's really interesting. I often think that you've got to discover the solution, then you've got to tame the solution and then you can push out the. **[15:47] Speaker A:** The beauty in it. **[15:48] Speaker B:** But look at the plans. It's actually quite rectilinear. Series of volumes coming together. Volumes again, rectilinear buildings just taped onto each other. **[15:58] Speaker B:** Because that's **[15:59] Speaker A:** it. **[16:01] Speaker B:** Radiating. Yes, that's the key word. You know, there's more plants, **[16:05] Speaker A:** so it doesn't matter if these were curves or not. At the end of the day, it's a radiating series of spaces off a central hub. And we see that in other projects that look completely different. Like Sanioke Library by our browser. **[16:19] Speaker B:** Yeah, but in this case, why is it like this? So it's basically going back to that diagram, the radial scheme with the missing spoke. Why does it look like that **[16:28] Speaker A:** entry? **[16:30] Speaker B:** Yes. The gaps in between. Because it's a radio. Well, why is it a radio scheme? Because it's a gallery. You walk in, you can choose where you want to go. You don't have to go through one to get to another, to get to another. **[16:43] Speaker B:** So you get special exhibition, you go straight to that one. And the idea that these are individual introverted things, a gallery, museum, they tend to be introverted because, you know, that's what it is. But when you come out of it, you're in this space and you can see through in between these things and out to the landscape and choose to go to the next one. That's why it's a radial scheme. And in this case, the missing spoke is the entrance. **[17:09] Speaker B:** That's why it's very simple. It's radical in his execution. **[17:14] Speaker A:** Yeah, **[17:15] Speaker B:** but not the diagram. The diagram is actually very simple. **[17:19] Speaker B:** So that's what. Why, how **[17:22] Speaker A:** you can imagine that some architects and academics probably think that this isn't wanky enough, it isn't philosophical enough. And I just think this is the kind of stuff that many people, especially students, yearn for. Give us the fundamentals of what makes how to build a project chips. **[17:41] Speaker A:** Give us the fundamentals of how to start a project. And then if you want to, you can get as waffly and as esoteric as you like. But if we don't get the fundamentals right, if we aren't, if we don't. You can see how biagay is really successful in being very didactic. Didactic and clear, talking to the general public. **[18:02] Speaker A:** And then after that, if you're just esoteric and you're not addressing these fundamental questions, then really it just goes just, you know, just architects becoming more and more irrelevant. So the what, why, how of architecture, that's really helpful considering how many sketch designs I've got going at the moment. And they are really important fundamental questions. Leave a comment below. Give us a like subscribe. **[18:28] Speaker A:** Hit that notification. **[18:30] Speaker B:** Patreon **[18:32] Speaker A:** Patreon **[18:33] Speaker B:** yeah, see Andrew being a dickhead. **[18:39] Speaker A:** See you in the next **[18:39] Speaker B:** one. Just Andrew being usual.