Our projects in the public and the private sector take anywhere between six to eight years to realize from the moment of our hiring through completion, sometimes less, sometimes more. (Yes, the private projects take as long as the public ones). And good thing too, because architecture that lasts needs incubation. I can’t think of one instance in which we got something right the first time we drew it.
There are plenty of reasons it takes so long—lots of people to attend to and collaborate with, the politics of decision-making, the grind of regulatory reviews and construction. There are a lot of opinions out there and we learn from all of them. And while we always seem to be under deadline (more like hurry up and wait), we exploit the protracted, often awkward fits and starts of the process for the benefit of the work.
This isn’t to say that our process is all that different from that of anyone else who makes things – the unpredictability and spontaneity that, for example, we celebrate in fashion designers. It’s a myth to think that inventions of any kind spring fully formed and effortlessly from the mind as if from some oracle or conversely that design is somehow a linear, logical process with a beginning, middle and end.
There are moments of logic to be sure. But it is with a light grasp on the order of the process rather than a stranglehold on it that we make room for the spontaneous to register. Accidents happen (we cut a model piece differently than we had planned, our collaborator misunderstands what we said or vice versa, randomly we see something on the street or on the web that triggers an unexpected thought) and when we’re alive to them even as we maintain our grasp on the process we make room for the accidents and we use them.
The benefits of spontaneity may seem like gifts but more often they are earned. They emerge from our having thought and drawn through things over and under, inside and out and all around. Contemplate something long enough and suddenly it hits you, oh that’s it. Or struggle with something for what seems like forever, then leave it alone, come back, and the answer’s obvious, or more often, no, that’s not it, what was I thinking. Or struggle with something until in defeat it gets left where it is and only later does is seem like a success. Having exhausted the possibilities resolution feels like less like elation than exhaustion.
Sometimes we never get it right. We engage in life- long questions, pursuits for which there are never clear answers only provisional responses. We struggle with ideas and get obsessed with images that capture us until one day they (might) let us go. We hop onto trains-of-thought and sometimes ride them out over one project after another maybe even a lifetime. It is a never ending and yet fulfilling pursuit and something of a way of life.
In our time, if you want to be an architect you go to school. This is the system we live with. I value my time in architecture school for the fellow students I met and still admire as well as all the things I learned—the skills, the knowledge, a feeling for the depth and breadth of what had to be mastered. Our moment in school was a singular one where particular things were taught and I am happy to have had the experience, one that I put into practice every day. To this day we explore ideas to which we were first introduced in school over forty years ago.
But architecture school is contrived. In school we get assignments then pretend we’re our own client. We make up circumstances in order to keep a project from drifting on the tide of its own artificiality. We work under unrealistic time frames in which we are expected within the span of a semester with virtually no experience to conceive and manifest a fully realized project. This in no way corresponds to our experience since school. School is a place to be a student of architecture, but a student of architecture does not an architect make. As architects who practice, we never really master the practice, we just practice.