I’ve been challenged to spontaneously tweet 100 different opinions about experimental methods in architecture. This is occurring at the suggestion of @vgr, who is promoting this kind of exercise as a new format for tweets.

I’m going to assume it’s one opinion per “like” in order to pace myself. Don’t yet know how many I will do in one go, but I’ll make sure I get to a point where I’m doing enough at once to come up with unexpected ideas without overthinking them.

1. It's ironic to think about architecture as having any kind of experimental method, because architects tend to approach architecture as being as all hypothesis with no subsequent experiments/data collection/analysis/conclusion.

2. I used to think the quantitative approach proposed by the Environmental Design movement of the 1960s-70s was inherently a better way of doing architecture, but now I find it kind of unsettling. Feels a bit like they were trying to analyze something which wasn't really there.

3. Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman have more in common than either architect would like to admit.

4. Architecture schools invented a type of design iteration similar to lean startup methods, except occurring within a sandboxed simulation of the external world instead of testing iterations of ideas within reality. The results are less accurate but would be better for society.

5. Corrugated cardboard is an underrated prototyping material.

6. You will know that you have become a real architect when you stop bothering with using Pigma Microns to sketch ideas and just use either a Sharpie or a ballpoint pen instead.

7. Architecture has nothing to do with buildings.

8. The most fundamental question which architecture asks is instead about whether it is possible to solve an important problem on a deep subconscious level by believing that we are solving a different and more immediate problem on our more conscious surface level of thinking.

9. Architecture (when defined as a separate act from building) attempts to resolve questions about how and why humans often still seem to think and experience emotional feelings in pre-linguistic ways, even though we ostensibly know better.

10. Alberti's development of architecture as a discipline separate from the act of building was fundamentally positive in nature.

11. The form-finding emphasis of contemporary parametric design approaches is a distraction from the real potential of digital architecture.

12. The most exciting potential of digital architecture lies in sampling rather than synthesis; from collecting and re-interpreting information from the world around us instead of from trying to generate forms from scratch.

13. Architecture's intellectual potential as a discipline is compromised by the extent to which architecture schools emphasize the design studio at the expense of history and theory classes. (As well as, in the case of professional undergraduate degrees, the liberal arts.)

14. The all-nighter is an effective driving force of creativity within architecture, since the act of dedicating a specific expanse of time to work when you are unlikely to be interrupted can help encourage you to think outside of your existing biases and assumptions

15. Experimentation in architecture is heavily dependent on people and firms being willing to work without pay. Efforts to reform architecture from a labor perspective will be futile unless they begin to acknowledge the existence of this problem.

16. One approach in architecture is to heavily research the context in which you will build, and sensitively respond. Another is to ignore surroundings so what you build feels like a magical imposition of artistic will into the existing world. The 2nd approach isn't always bad.

17. The willful approach to architectural intervention will only come out good if it uses the responsive approach first; you need to learn about what kind of context you are going to disrupt.

18. Every act of building is a disruption of an existing equilibrium. (IIRC Raimund Abraham talked about this, and I agree with it.)

19. The goal of architecture is to research and understand every aspect of your site, program etc. so well you produce a result which synthesizes responses to all those considerations into something others cannot immediately understand, because it transcends the sum of its parts.

20. The current generation of emerging architects and designers will be regarded by history as a lost generation, because they are afraid to experiment too radically now that ambition within architecture is unfashionable.

21. Most architectural experiments happen by accident, because they appear within the 99% of building commissions in which minimal design intervention is exerted against the will of developers who have no idea what they are doing spatially except that they want to make money.

22. Every individual architectural career is an experiment, because the odds of whether you will be successful are so random since they're dependent upon the peculiarities of networking. (Ofc. there's socioeconomic prerequisites of who gets to take those chances to begin with.)

23. Aldo Rossi's weird sketches of teapot-building hybrids were as valid as works of architecture as any building which doesn't attempt conflate miniaturized and human scales.

24. I should try to relate these tweets to Trump or something so that this thread will get more attention, but doing so would go against architecture's deepest experimental potential; its ability to resist ephemeral fleeting changes by requiring designers to think beyond them.

25. Architecture's experimental nature is thus on some level inseparable from its conservatism. It takes so long to build anything that old ideas can almost become new again by the time that they are realized.

26. The experimental potential of architecture is limited by the extent to which it is an artistic medium developed for and by wealthy people. This is a troubling problem.

27. It's disappointing that cybernetic theories became discredited, because they could have helped to liberate architecture from assumptions that it is static in nature.

28. More people should adopt the approach to conserving design process work encouraged in architecture school, where you ideally don't throw anything which you produce away. Instead of re-doing an existing model, you make a new iteration of it.

29. Sometimes your best work is actually one of the design iterations which you were planning to re-do or throw away.

30. Difficult critiques in architecture school become easier to deal with once you realize that they exist on a separate plane from the real world, because they are actually supposed to be theater.

31. The more dramatic and theatrical approach to architecture critiques produced more creative results by creating a space for novel opinions to be uttered which would otherwise go unsaid.

32. A complete architectural education requires spending a few months of design studio on projects which aren't buildings. You have to unlearn what you assume that a building is.

33. Architecture is always about the drawing of a building rather than the building itself.

34. Since drawings are easier to alter than completed buildings, architecture is inherently an experimental process.

35. People who completely disagree with me and have their love of architecture come from craftsmanship and the physical act of building have a valid point of view which I respect.

36. The trend of increasing specialization within architecture is a positive development which will make it easier for people who have conflicting opinions about what architecture is to collaborate.

37. I am aware that on some level I may secretly be a phenomonologist without being able to fully admit it to myself, and I am not afraid of that possibility. I am trying to figure out why that might be the case.

38. Interrogating why you would put yourself through the demented task of signing up for an architectural career is a promising method of expanding the boundaries of the discipline.

39. Ubiquitous headphones are an existential threat to architecture's ability to define social space, a social experiment playing out in real time which we can not yet anticipate the long-term future outcome of.

40. The original World Trade Center was one of the most exciting spatial experiments in recent memory. Because it was scaled beyond the architect's intent & its development arbitrarily bypassed existing rules, the result was it engaged with an unprecedented new scale of form.

41. It's common for inexperienced architecture students to ask what the giant circular openings on Louis Kahn's buildings are supposed to mean, but we don't talk enough about the fact that nobody really knows. That state of not knowing is precisely their point.

42. I’m still stuck in the late 2000s movement to connect everything in architecture to some kind of larger-scale network or system, and I don’t want to leave.

43. Increasing interest in automation among current theorists & practitioners is a good sign, but I’m concerned it will develop too fast for me to be able to contribute to its development as much as I‘d like. I need to anticipate what the next big idea after it is going to be.

44. Aspiring innovators should care less about latching onto current trends for immediate attention, & more about producing work which will be retroactively seen as pioneering. (Hopefully if that happens to me it will incl. my experiments w/ automation from before it was trendy.)

45. Whatever the current trend is, you need to incorporate some of your own personal psychoanalytic material into your artistic interpretation of it in order to create something which drives its development forward beyond just imitating the advances of other people.

46. For whatever numerous flaws The Fountainhead had, the character of Peter Keating was actually a fairly accurate representation of a phenomenon which happens a lot in architecture.

47. After you think that you have come up with a new experimental idea, you should show it to someone else who has an unbiased opinion and see if it surprises them. If not, try again.

48. Architecture is a form of media, and robotics + ubiquitous computing will render it increasingly similar to digital media in its nature.

49. If you are serious about architecture as a creative pursuit, you should always have at least ~2-3 Corbusier-scale manifestos floating around within your head which are yearning to be written.

50. It is very likely that you have grand visionary ideas within your mind already, and if you are not currently aware of them that is due to issues of technique rather than lack of imagination. They may initially appear in the form of boring mundane problems.

51. Architecture involves a process of learning that the world around you which you take for granted is really much weirder than you think. That learning process also feels suspiciously like an act of remembering something which on a deeper level you already know.

52. You can’t fully appreciate the conceptual side of architecture if you haven’t seen it at its least conceptual, by working at a bread-and-butter firm or growing up in suburbia. People privileged enough to have chances to do conceptual work tend to lack those life experiences.

53. Deconstructivist architecture is more than just another style on a list of passing historical styles, because the issues which it raised are applicable to all architecture.

54. Architecture could simultaneously become more innovative AND more equitable if it didn’t involve so many zero-sum contests over scarce opportunities. They may be necessary in practice, but excessive extensions of that competitiveness into academia are an artificial constraint

55. Remember that you should feel free to say and do ridiculous-sounding things in situations where your audience intuitively understands that they fit within the implicit non-rule rules of an artistic game.

56. The best architectural criticism goes beyond critiquing existing buildings to effectively design new ones, using words instead of lines on a page.

57. Raster drawings are overlooked relative to those which are vector-based in construction, and represent a territory which should be further explored with ex. digital graphics. Stereotomic 3D forms are similarly neglected in comparison with the tectonic.

58. People who complain about modern architecture being unnatural or unsettling should see what the baroque stuff looked like.

59. Using a 3D printer to produce repeated identical duplicates of an object may in theory contradict its nature as a machine capable of producing distinctive objects at the same speed as identical ones, but approach is still valid b/c it conserves attention in addition to time.

60. I haven’t been able to prove that it is useful to have really spatial dreams, but they can be fun.

(They tend to occur more often when I have been thinking a lot about a design project.)

61. The panoramas of the 18th/19th centuries were ahead of their time in terms of anticipating the spatially detached nature of digital media.

62. Within the next 250 years someone may figure out a more meaningful kind of formalistic correlation between architecture and music beyond the usual shallow comparative tropes which you see thrown around, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon.

63. The largest building in the world might be the ocean. It has been insufficiently analyzed as a spatial entity.

64. The evolution of the skyscraper as a building type is still in its infancy. We have just barely started building them in two dimensions, ex. as lateral elevated extrusions in addition to involving vertical columns.

65. The process of studying & utilizing historical styles of architecture is not a matter of copying other forms instead of inventing your own, but rather an opportunity to more fully understand the shared language which you will inevitably use to communicate in any event.

66. Vaporwave aesthetics will become a valid part of architectural history. Among other things they involved an unprecedented use of digital media to assist in the preservation & evolution of a vernacular style.

67. Never forget what sorts of innocuous sights and images used to seem scary to you as a child.

68. The fact that many people prefer the design philosophy of Dieter Rams over that of Richard Sapper is a behavior pattern which can be correlated with a wide range of different problems in our society. We favor concise easy answers over mysterious inscrutable challenges.

69. By extension the design of the PC is superior to that of the Mac. Any unintentional aesthetic chaos involved is a feature rather than a bug.

70. I can’t endorse the flashy aesthetics which tended to be associated with the early 00s era idea that you‘d want to “mod” your car or your computer or your cell phone case or whatever, but it’s troubling that we’ve forgotten the driving spirit behind that impulse.

71. Those last two takes are really an extended application of Venturi & Scott Brown’s ideas. They have a permanent place in the canon of transformational architectural thinkers.

72. The most interesting aspect of digital technologies is their ability to process quantities of information beyond what humans can comprehend. Architects who try to explore the potential of technology without remembering that will be lost.

73. Humans lack the mental capacity to fully comprehend the complexity of our existing built environment (ex. the modern city), and that’s interesting. Automation will further intensify that situation.

74. That situation is not anything new since nature is also vast and incomprehensible to us as well. We seem to like it that way.

75. Always ask whether the work you are doing is for yourself vs. someone else, but be careful in doing so. In school you may need to push against the bounds of your studio brief in order to advance your own interests, but sometimes their arbitrary requirements are good for you.

76. There is a number (probably in the low 1000s) of people working for starchitects under exploitative conditions right now. They are not all going to get to become the next starchitects. Whether or not they advance further will be ultimately unrelated to how hard they work.

77. If in the process of trying to advance your career someone says you have to re-pay dues you have already paid, that’s a troubling sign. You may not have the power to avoid doing it, but it means you need to try something new to get out of your stagnant current situation.

78. Responding to discussions of architecture & tech by immediately jumping to asking about VR/AR involves assumptions that architecture needs augmentation to make it worthwhile, ie. that space is boring to begin with. This discourages deep critical examination of 1st principles.

79. VR/AR will have to become more boring before it can start to become interesting.

80. Thinking critically about impending interactions between the internet and physical space is an act of anticipatory future historic preservation. It’s about trying to predict which aspects of our built environment those intersections will most likely threaten to destroy.

81. Not every acclaimed architect reaches the point of developing their own unique personal style which becomes an aesthetic world unto itself, and you can tell when someone does or doesn't reach that point.

82. Many historically significant architects, esp. in the second half of the 20th century, have produced written ideas which surpass their capabilities as designers of built work. It might be uncomfortable for some of them to admit that, but it's not necessarily a problem.

83. One of the reasons why history & theory is important for your growth as a designer: once you find an architect whom you admire enough to want to learn about all their work, you start to see where they made mistakes. This teaches you more about the design process.

84. Sometimes during the design process you have to plow through many iterations before you hit a vein of something which you care about. I once heard a studio critic refer to that along the lines of finding some kind of a sense of “love” which you feel, and that stuck with me.

85. Architecture, like programming, operates at higher and lower levels of abstraction. How much detail do you decide to show in a particular drawing, and on what scale? Are you going to quickly model broad outlines of an idea, or work on its technical specifics in a refined way?

86. Academic architecture's openness to interdisciplinary engagement is one of its greatest strengths. I wish that more outsiders to the field would become aware of that, but in order for such enlightenment to occur architecture schools need to remember that it is a possibility.

87. Following architecture long enough to see how trends shift is a wake-up call. Your past work now looks painfully dated, and all of a sudden everyone's priorities are upside-down from what they used to be. You begin to realize how few people really have any ideas of their own.

88. If you don't think that your design has a central concept, the concept has just been externally imposed for you without your awareness. Every building has an idea, but some ideas are more deliberate than others.

89. Formalist approaches are essential for understanding architecture.

90. One informative moment in my education occurred when I saw an instructor tell a student he needed to own the fact that his work had a conservative political agenda, even though I'd have assumed most people in that room were liberal. You need to have an opinion to produce art.

91. Forcing yourself to ask about what kind of meaning an inanimate object has is inherently an exercise in open-mindedness.

92. If you are starting to pursue architecture, learn about the idea of having a “project” as soon as you can. You’ll need it in order to holistically integrate your failures into your overall body of work.

93. Are you inhabiting a movie set right now? How do you know that you are not?

94. I once had an acclaimed architect tell me something to the effect of that school & not practice was where your real progress happened, almost as if any other work existed outside of time.
You need to take more advantage of your time in school than you may realize at the time.

95. Recycling of mental effort is as important as physical recycling. Your ideas which you come up with in situations where you lack an audience are as valid as those of some important person, and you need to find a way to more widely export them. Don’t let your time go to waste.

96. Opportunities for experimentation in architecture are excessively constrained by a hierarchy of gatekeepers, and you need to become aware of their existence in advance of the times when you will have to confront them. I’ll let you know if I find a way around them.

97. The forms and styles of the built environment which you grew up around as a child may have a surprising amount of influence on your current design approach now, even if you aren’t currently aware of their impact.

98. Potential relationships between architecture and philosophy (incl. whether architecture could work as a kind of applied testing ground for philosophy) need to be further explored.

99. The process is as important as the conclusion.

100. The ruin is at least as meaningful as the building was when it was standing, if not more so.