The office dispersed a year ago and we have been designing at a distance ever since. Online we employ awkward drawing tools offered through primitive digital formats, like Blu Ray PDF, Adobe Power Point, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, Go To Meeting and Zoom. However much our language has evolved in descriptive efficacy and detail over the last year, we are daily reminded of the limitations of words and the imperative of drawings in advancing design. All words, even specialized ones, are selective, general in meaning and ambiguous in practice and as inadequate as they are for our purposes, were this not true, we would sadly enjoy neither wit nor poetry.

When we founded our practice, Steve and I resolved that we would know how to do anything that we asked anyone in our office to do—drawing, modeling, writing, invoicing-- whatever necessary. Technology, though, got a head of us. We were in our 40s by the time Auto Cad came around and then a decade later came Revit (Building Information Management, BIM). Like learning a new language, each upgrade in digital technology has, with age, become increasingly time-consuming to master. We still draw and make models, but the drafting has moved to the computer where we manage, but mostly second-hand and at arms-length. Senior associates are more current with building codes and construction details. They manage our projects while our management director runs the business—none of which we could do on our own.

The 20th century gave us the “school of management”, the business school, whose mission was to create managers, the management class. A whole profession was invented called “management consulting” which grew from a multi-million-dollar industry in the 1930s to a multi-billion-dollar industry today. Managers now permeate the American corporation and the construction industry. Builders are “construction managers” who manage subcontractors who do not so much make anything as install manufactured products. Architects are now “consultants” and as consultants we get managed by “project managers” who keep us at arm’s-length and in second-hand relationship with those we serve.

“After a comprehensive evaluation of the responses we received and based on our needs, the evaluation committee has decided not to forward your firm to the next level for consideration, we hope you will consider responding to future requests and thank you for your interest.” The evaluation committee for the engagement to which this letter refers, a campus master plan for a local college, included a director of facilities, maintenance and operations, a vice president for business and administrative services, a college services supervisor, an administrative assistant, student services assistant, instructional laboratory technician, instructor, counselor, another instructor, an associated student vice president, and a director of general services. The letter was signed by the college’s “purchasing specialist” to whom we are a “vendor” like the copy machine maintenance technician or the office supplies provider.

While perhaps not experienced or literate in matters of planning and design, these are not unintelligent people. And yet, just as we would not feel qualified in our ability to evaluate the suitability of a candidate for the position of college vice-president of business and administrative services, we would not expect such a person to feel adequate to the job of selecting an architect, especially for such a complex and nuanced undertaking as a campus plan. Still, these are indeed those who do select architects for projects like this, projects that guide how taxpayer dollars are spent on some of the largest capital investments on their campus in their lifetime.

Do we think of the city we live in as our home? Rooms and hallways constitute what most of us think as a home and were we to think of a city as our home the corollary might be squares and streets. But how many of us do? It is more likely that we think of a city as a home base, a marketplace of relationships and acquisitions, an environment in which we go about our business of work and play. Our perpetual transience, mechanized mobility and the geographic extent of the environments in which we daily circulate hardly encourages the kind of intimacy we attach to our home.

We have been writing on walls since we could write and make walls and on everything else that we could get our hands on. It first came in the form of glyphs in fields and on hillsides, then hieroglyphs on monuments and tombs, then inscriptions on palaces and temples. From the beginning, we are told most writing on walls was neither formally designed nor officially sanctioned, and instead transgressive-- graffiti. Archeologists and historians recently uncovered, deciphered and excitedly reported on well-preserved, mostly mundane, sometimes raunchy graffiti at long-buried Pompeiian ruins--the ancients were just like us! Times change but it appears we less so.

The moon has no light of its own. And while we can see the sun, we cannot see its light. It is when the light of the sun meets an obstacle upon which that light then reflects that we know that both the light and the obstacle are there. We would not know that the moon is there were it not for the light of the sun and conversely, we would not know that there is light from the sun were it not for objects such as the moon that it illuminates. We cannot see light any more than we can see wind. We only see its effects.

As sentient beings, we evolved within a narrow spectrum of reality, our environment, to navigate it using among other things light. By the shade and shadows cast by opaque surfaces under the light of the sun, we can tell where we are in relation to the things around us—the ground and objects (or “figures”) that inhabit it. And even now, with clocks, we still tell time in relation to how and when opaque objects occlude light. We sense the time of day (morning, noon, afternoon and evening), what day it is (new, quarter, half and full moon) and here in southern California, the season (winter, spring, summer and fall).

The word “typology” or “type” (same thing stripped of the esoteric tone) to architects has more than one meaning. Sometimes it refers to the shapes of buildings (shoebox, square donut, drum) and sometimes to the roles of buildings (city hall, school, library). The building’s shape and its role have often related to one another but not always. These days we tailor buildings’ shapes to their purpose sometimes in the minutest of ways, tight as a glove. We live chastened by the now one-hundred-year-old commandment that a buildings’ form shall follow its function even as we yearn to be free, give them shapes that defy category, free up the forms.

Stairs are a Baroque thing. Until the 16th and 17th centuries in the western tradition, stairs inside buildings were rarely meant to be seen. They were a means to get from floor to floor. It was not until the sculptor Michelangelo Buonarotti, faced with an odd circumstance at the Laurentian Library in Florence, that the stair came out of the closet. Auspiciously (or inauspiciously?) he turned it into an opportunity to invest in movement--a kind of controlled agitation-- in the composition and experience of a room or sequence of rooms.