THINK
DESIGN, PROCESS, ARCHITECTURE
WINTER 2009/2010
Design’s Puzzling Logic
By Christopher Kilbridge
“...architects rely heavily on
improvisation and testing to
negotiate the dynamic terrain
of design problems.”
© PLAIN SIGHT MAGAZINE
A friend recently lamented the difficulty architects have in explaining their
thinking to the public. He had just heard Anish Kapoor lecture on his work and
recounted how the artist related his sculptural forms to sexual organs. He found the
sculptor’s earthy frankness liberating. Kapoor, he said, made complex ideas ap-
proachable and illuminated the thinking behind his work. Why, he asked, are the pub-
lic statements architects make so often the opposite: gratuitously obscure, imprisoned
by their own rationalization? There are many probable explanations: academic styling,
the compulsion to theorize, the desire to create a brand, fear of being boring. Behind
all of them, perhaps, is a resistance to speaking definitively about something that
cannot be fully rationalized—the design process. This is not dangerous territory for
an artist, perhaps, but it is full of pitfalls for a designer of buildings. In order to work,
architects need to present themselves as professionals, experts worthy of the public
trust and their client’s fee. They must appear capable of organizing the thousand
needs, desires, and limitations of a commission and of creating something functional,
economical, and beautiful from it all. In short, they must project a reassuring inevita-
bility in the face of chaos. No wonder the anxiety about talking. Their verbal opacity
masks the contingent nature of architectural projects and the open-ended nature of
the design process itself.
•••
At a fundamental level, architecture manages accidents. “Even in the most
ideal of careers,” writes Stan Allen (2000), “the decisive limits to building programs will
be determined by agencies beyond the control of the individual architect, [and] these
variables are governed by complex political, social, and historical dynamics, and open
to continual revision” (p.xiv). Despite its reputation as a field of visionaries, architec-
ture deals more with balancing forces than with setting them in motion. Consequently,
architects rely heavily on improvisation and testing to negotiate the dynamic terrain
of design problems. They regularly modify their approach to compensate for shift-
ing, ambiguous relationships between conditions and ascribe and re-ascribe relative
values to requirements as they go along. These tactics are more effective than any
methodology for meeting the unexpected but, as a service, they are both difficult to
package by architects and hard to swallow by clients.
Every design project contains all kinds of needs, desires, restrictions, and
physical characteristics to which architects must respond. These characteristics
include the building program, the building site, climatological forces, government
regulations, approval processes, available building technologies, financial resources,
and so on. Although they provide an empirical framework for the development of the
project, they also compete for priority and frequently contradict one another. More-
over, in their apparent specificity, they both conceal and suggest connections between
the work at hand and a larger cultural, geographical, historical, and technological
context.
As a category, we might call these the conditions of the project, rather than
the criteria or requirements. The concept of conditions captures both the constrain-
ing force of the design brief and the provisional nature of those constraints. To give
an example, the site, as the term suggests, is not only a piece of land; it is a piece of
land that has been chosen. It may, in fact, have been chosen, shaped, and reshaped
many times before — it has history. Even in this simple instance, the condition—the
site—is far more complex than its appearance might suggest, and in general the facts
of the case—the conditions—prove to be highly circumstantial. Design problems are
ambiguous; so too are the “objective” criteria that inhabit them. Designers consider
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THINK
WINTER 2009/2010
“...This not to say that design
does not engage in rational de-
cision making and problem solv-
ing—it does. It’s just that knowing
what the problem is sometimes
requires solving it first...”
© PLAIN SIGHT MAGAZINE
DESIGN, PROCESS, ARCHITECTURE
myriad interpretations because the conditions comprise a complex matrix of possible
design directions. Thus, at its outset, every architectural project contains inherent
instabilities, lacunae, and contradictions that call upon the architect to “organize
the conflicts of a situation by functioning as a critical instrument for examining what
already exists” (Gregotti, 1996, p.xxii).
•••
There is a famous quotation attributed to Jean-Luc Godard that provides an
apt description of designing architecture: “A story should have a beginning, a middle,
and an end... but not necessarily in that order.” Godard’s aphorism captures the
paradox that, while architects design toward an obviously tangible goal, they rarely
get there by following a straight line. In fact, there is no one way of ordering design.
As Brian Lawson (2005) points out, “it is clear that many components of design prob-
lems cannot be expected to emerge until some attempt has been made at generating
solutions…Indeed, many features of design problems may never be fully uncovered
and made explicit” (p.120). Architects take this for granted and in daily parlance talk
of design “iterations” and “cycles” of design, rather than of a single, known path.
They are used to beginning in the middle to define the beginning. This not to say that
design does not engage in rational decision making and problem solving—it does. It’s
just that knowing what the problem is sometimes requires solving it first.
In his book Design Thinking, Peter Rowe (1987) describes this jumping
about as “design episodes,” a concept that helps to explain how architects manage to
work productively within an open-ended “problem space” (p.34). This concept is valu-
able not only because it explains a tactic for managing indeterminacy, but because it
illuminates the very nature of design problems as being open-ended. What the author
finds sheds light on how design is non-linear. “It is apparent,” he writes, that the un-
folding of the design process assumes a distinctly episodic structure [characterized]
as a series of skirmishes with various aspects of the problem at hand” (p.34). These
two terms—episode and skirmish—help bring into focus how architects handle the
multiplicity of conditions.
Episodes, writes Rowe, are discernable events in the flow of design char-
acterized by moving “back and forth between the problem as given and the tenta-
tive proposals [designers] have in mind” (p.2). Such oscillations might be between
“architectural form and evaluations of program, structure, and other technical issues”
or, more generally, between “unfettered speculation [and a] more sober [taking]
stock of the situation” (p.34). There is a binary character to this moving “to and fro.”
On one hand, a designer will throw herself into a problem with commitment and
tenacity (p.77). On the other hand, this commitment is provisional; if the speculation
doesn’t pay off, the designer may simply scrap the pursuit and take up another one.
This might sound commonsensical but the frequency with which architects invest
themselves in an investigation and then nonchalantly exchange it for another can be
alarming and frustrating to someone unfamiliar with the process.
For designers, episodic situations bring together the objective realm, consist-
ing of the programmatic requirements and physical conditions of the project, with the
subjectivity of their own beliefs and intentions (Rowe, 1987, p.77). Thus each design
problem is both real and potential, and each requires delving into to reveal its possi-
bilities. Perhaps it is an essential trait of designers that they find this situation alluring.
Since new situations yield productive discoveries, designers tend to seek them out by
persistently turning the components of a problem over to look at them in new ways.
This effort is not for the sake of novelty or to achieve an effect, but rather, to find the
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THINK
WINTER 2009/2010
Design’s Puzzling Logic
By Christopher Kilbridge
“...In short, putting the middle
before the beginning may be
true but it also has to be believ-
able. .”
© PLAIN SIGHT MAGAZINE
DESIGN, PROCESS, ARCHITECTURE
right balance of values. This takes us to the skirmish metaphor: Design episodes
do seem more like a series of skirmishes than maneuvers in a campaign. They are
messy, unpremeditated, and rarely conclusive. Nonetheless, in design—an undertak-
ing without a single, clear objective—skirmishes are more useful than an all-in gamble
because they help to find the edges of a problem and to gauge its difficulty.
By now it should be clear that “the design process” is more like the prover-
bial sausage factory then an automobile assembly line. At the center of this confusion
is an architect. In contrast to the stereotypical single-minded visionary or flamboyant
stylist, most practitioners are agile realists. This quality is beneficial for designers
because the efficacy of design depends on their sensitivity and flexibility in the face of
novel situations. This is where design manifests itself as an inherently effective and
necessary act. It is effective because it engages unique and unpredictable conditions
of the project in concrete ways. It is necessary because no other actor in the process
takes on the full burden of translating these disparate conditions into a coherent solu-
tion. In the words of John Fernandez (2005),
The making of buildings is unkempt, difficult, and costly. It is a messy and frag-
mentary business involving huge resources and an array of technical special-
ties. [Nonetheless], the architect continues to be the specialist that is needed to
address the very particular issues of performance and integration between the
various building systems of contemporary architecture (p.28).
In short, the need to manage the shifting priorities of design is best served by the im-
provisational skills of the architect. All stakeholders in the making of a building rely on
the architect to comprehend and manage complexity and to create meaningful form
and space from a farrago of desires, needs, and data.
•••
Let’s jump to the beginning. The design process is difficult to talk about be-
cause of its open-ended nature. It is non-linear, and people are used to hearing linear
explanations. In our culture, it is “the natural shape of remembered knowledge…a
root metaphor, the stuff that holds meaning together—just as our sequential writ-
ing lines up so well with our sequential tense system or our notions of causality and
history” (Clendinnen, 1995, p.234). So a consequence of design’s puzzling logic is
that telling the story of its process requires reassembling events in a way that makes
sense to the listener of accidents, discoveries, and disparate facts. It may be recount-
ed accurately, but only with artifice. In short, putting the middle before the beginning
may be true but it also has to be believable. And explaining one’s work to stakehold-
ers in a believable way is a central task for practicing architects.
There is more at issue here than how to concoct a story or what style of
speaking to choose. For, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1983) succinctly ex-
pressed it, “those roles we seek to occupy turn out to be the minds we find ourselves
to have” (p.155). In other words, how we describe our interest in architecture defines
a frame of reference for practicing it in reality. Are clients to be trusted as collabora-
tors in the design process or to be regarded as intruders upon it? Most architects
would argue that an open dialogue makes better architecture. Perhaps it’s not going
too far to say that architects must explain well what they think and do or risk losing a
vital connection to the larger culture.
So how does one go about explaining design to someone uninitiated to
the practice of architecture? What about students or colleagues, for that matter?
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THINK
WINTER 2009/2010
Design’s Puzzling Logic
By Christopher Kilbridge
“...By looking at such encounters,
it may be possible to enter what
Pierre Bourdieu (1985) called “the
practical space of journeys actu-
ally made, or rather of journeys
actually being made...”
© PLAIN SIGHT MAGAZINE
DESIGN, PROCESS, ARCHITECTURE
More generally, what kind of discourse might grow out of the concrete experience of
practice? By focusing on the primacy of the struggle with open-ended problems, what
Peter Rowe (1987) calls the “dialogue between the designer and the situation,” we
may demonstrate that how architects frame (and reframe) the conditions contributes
rigor and discipline to the design process (p.35). This rigor, in turn, allows one to tell
the story with tangible content and with facts that give a believable reality to more ab-
stract thinking, procedural operations, and clinical-sounding techniques. By looking at
such encounters, it may be possible to enter what Pierre Bourdieu (1985) called “the
practical space of journeys actually made, or rather of journeys actually being made”
(p.2). The ultimate goal is to open up the process for all interested parties to appreci-
ate its complexity, improve collaboration, and make better architecture.
Literature Cited
Allen, S. (2000). Practice: Architecture, technique and representation. 1st Ed. Amsterdam: G+B Arts.
Bourdieu, P. (1985). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Clendinnen, I. (1995). Aztecs: An interpretation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Fernandez, J. E. (2005). Material architecture: Emergent materials for innovative buildings and ecological construction. Oxford:
Architectural Press.
Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. 3rd Ed. New York: Basic Books.
GregottI, V. (1996). Inside architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lawson, B. (2005). How designers think: The design process demystified. 4th Ed. Oxford: Architectural Press.
Rowe , P. G. (1987). Design thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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