Think Like An Architect

How to develop critical, creative and collaborative problem-solving skills

Randy Deutsch

• Editore: RIBA Publishing
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000221923
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arquitectura
• Categoria: Arquitectura general

Do you know how to think like an architect? Do you know why you should? How do you make sure that you have the critical thinking tools necessary to prosper in your academic and professional career? This book gives you the answers.

Architects have a valuable and critical set of multiple thinking types that they develop throughout the design process. In this book, Randy Deutsch shows readers how to access those thinking types and use them outside pure design thinking – showing how they can both solve problems but also identify the problems that need solving. To think the way the best architects do.

With a clear, driving narrative, peppered with anecdote, stories and real-life scenarios, this book will future-proof the architectural student. Change is coming in the architecture profession, and this is a much-needed exploration of the critical thinking skills that architects have in abundance, but that are not taught well enough within architecture schools. These skills are crucial in being able to respond agilely to a future that nobody is quite sure of.

PART I:
CRITICAL THINKING

Fig 1.0: Critical thinking as a go-to tool in your toolbox

Architects think critically. Architects recognise that there are consequences for their architectural actions. For them it cannot be out of sight out of mind. Architecture has serious consequences – people may get hurt – and so, architects are responsible for the health, safety and welfare of inhabitants and passersby alike. They can’t be flippant or sloppy in their work. If they are to build, architects can’t just design for themselves. They need to think not only in terms of the owner – who pays for the work, and with whom the architect is contracted – but the building’s users, neighbours and the public-at-large who will have to live with the resulting building. The architect uses real materials that obey physics, physical constraints and laws – but architects also have to consider future generations, giving heed to their voiceless concerns.

SECTION 1:
CRITICAL THINKING

1:
What Were They Thinking?

Fig 1.1: View of Hunters Point Library across New York City’s East River

Architects need to think of everything.

The new Hunters Point Library in Long Island City is the third completed building in New York City by the New York-based, internationally recognised prize-winning architectural firm Steven Holl Architects.

And unlike the first two, this third innovative work made the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

There is certainly much to like: landings and terraces, natural light, stunning views of Manhattan across the East River.

But to take in those views, and despite disability rights laws, the library relies heavily on stairs – to get to some of those landings and terraces – making it difficult for people who cannot climb them to access all of the library’s levels.³⁶

There were reportedly other barriers at the library, including a potential hazard on the children’s stairs, and the fact that the five-storey building has only one lift, one that does not stop at certain levels.

So, a class-action lawsuit was filed, calling out the architectural firm over the library’s alleged Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) violations.³⁷

You would be right to ask: how did no one catch these oversights?

Architects – at least those who want to see their buildings built – don’t design in isolation. In the library’s case, among others, there’s the client and approval agencies with their lengthy planning process.

Focusing on the architect – this book is after all about how architects think – while one might question the architect’s QA/QC or code analysis check process, we will question their thinking.

Suggestions that architects should be required to go through sensitivity training, or spend time with kids so they understand how kids behave – while well-meaning – miss the point.

This isn’t about codes, mores or public sentiment changing from the time the building was first designed until it was constructed and opened. Things change – and people, including architects, adapt.

This isn’t about the building needing to adapt or the staff needing to adapt but the architect needing to adapt so that this doesn’t happen again.

Thankfully, because architects don’t design in isolation, they don’t need to know everything.

When necessary, we turn to experts for answers. But: architects need to think of everything – with an emphasis on the word ‘think’.

People will assume everything in a building is deliberate – the architect might as well make it so.

And so, architects need to learn how to think more critically: so they can adapt in real time – ideally during the design process when potential problems are still digital – before there is a need for sticking plasters, roping-off or retrofits.

Fig 1.2: Hunters Point Library, on the banks of New York City’s East River, was never intended to be an island

For starters, it’s not always clear what is meant when we say ‘critical thinking’.

If almost 90% of faculty consider critical thinking to be important to instruction, why can only 19% of them adequately articulate what critical thinking is?³⁸

More than half of companies say that new employees aren’t sufficiently trained to think critically.³⁹

Critical thinking is like jazz or obscenity: you may not be able to say what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Professors, university administrators and employers all want you to have it – even if they can’t explain exactly what it is.

They know when students have it and – as importantly – when they don’t.

TRY THIS

Critical thinking is a lot of things, especially the ability to: look at facts in order to come to sensible conclusions to help make decisions; analyse the way you think then present proof for your ideas, rather than presenting your personal opinions as sufficient evidence; see both sides of an issue, be open to new evidence that challenges your ideas, reason equitably, expect claims to be backed by evidence, deduce conclusions from available facts, and identify and solve problems.⁴⁰

ASK THIS

Why open a section on thinking critically with an example where the architect apparently wasn’t? To emphasise the fact that buildings are complicated? That there is too much to think about? To point out that to think critically it helps to have some industry knowledge?

Or some common sense?

ASK THIS

As some of the alleged accessibility problems are rooted in the design itself,⁴¹ here we must ask: is there a way the architect could have thought to make the outcome better for all involved – the architect, the owner, the library’s current and future patrons, community members and the city beyond?

2:
Architecture Can’t Be Reduced to a Formula

Fig 2.1: Hunters Point Library interior

Architects are expected to think both deliberately and intuitively.

Architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange visited the Hunters Point Library before it opened, and to her credit asked at that time whether all of the levels were accessible. It’s a good question – but one that could be answered, with room for interpretation (accessible to whom?) in the affirmative.

Soon, though, she realised that she could have asked another, more specific, question. Evaluating her thinking process, questioning her question. Not to have gotten a scoop on what would become a headline-making story, but to identify the question behind the question. That question would have been: if you are unable to climb stairs, can you still access every level?⁴²

Had the architect asked precisely this question during the design process, perhaps they would have avoided many of the building’s preventable shortcomings, not to mention the lawsuit and unwanted publicity.

As an architect, would you have been able to come up with the second question?

It’s a subtle difference – between the word accessible and the ability to climb stairs – but the specificity of the follow-up question is an exemplar of critical thinking.

Today there is an imbalance in our thinking – where less rational thinking is winning out.

Glancing at the headlines, nobody would mistake our time period for an Age of Enlightenment.

‘There are enormous challenges for the built environment ahead,’ explains Alexandra Lange. ‘Sea level rise. Wildfires. Decaying infrastructure. Insufficient housing. But access should not be difficult. The design imperative to make public spaces that are open, usable, and even fun for the widest possible audience isn’t new, or novel, or much affected by technology. It is a design problem that’s solvable and, at this moment of crisis, the need for public space for people of all abilities only gains imperative.’⁴³

This section attempts to address this imbalance and provide some tools for thinking more critically about your designs, thoughts and ideas, helping you along the way to think like an architect.

There are specific kinds of critical thinking characteristic of different subjects, helping you to, say, think like Sherlock Holmes or like a futurist. This is what is meant when we say we want to think like an architect.

Here’s a quick way to remember what’s involved in the critical thinking process. In this book, critical thinking is defined much like the design process, where you:

• Conceptualise: consider, visualise and conceive
• Analyse: take apart, inspect, observe, scrutinise and study
• Synthesise: incorporate, bring together, converge, unify and integrate
• Evaluate: assess, check and decide

While shortcuts like CASE can be helpful in the short run, like design, critical thinking isn’t a simple formula or linear process – first this, then this – otherwise everybody would already be doing it. The architect gathers an...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: Solving Wicked Problems
• Prologue: How to Think Like an Architect in Under Three Minutes
• Part I: Critical Thinking
• Part II: Critical Creative Thinking
• Part III: Critical Collaborative Thinking
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index
• Image Credits