2408290733 react, observe, analyse, synthesise extending John Warner’s Writer’s Practice
2408290733 react, observe, analyse, synthesise extending John Warner’s Writer’s Practice
a review of How Architects Write 1st edition by Tom Spector and Rebecca Damron
Architects are lazy writers. They write for other architects knowing very well, but few read. We do thoroughly flip through all the books we buy since we are trained to read drawings and images predominately. There are two states thereof: reading to draw and reading to write. Only those who want to write read texts for everyone else flips through books. I had this file for a while, and it's been updated to a second edition that I haven’t bothered to look up. You could say this is a review of a dated work. I have read the text; therefore, revisiting the markups brings back all the latent notes. Rereading it to build on the narrative from the previous post gives the exercise new meaning.
A productivity hack to note is flipping a Kindle on a large screen, which is faster than leafing a physical book. Sentences, too, especially the highlights, have new meaning. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from getting that printed copy, though. The larger the font size, the faster you can read volumes of structured text. Productivity gains aside, building on the practice discourse from Warner’s treatise, my first problem with the book is its title. It is not a complete guide, almost an in-between textbook for undergraduates and a probable addition to the office library. There are exercises after each chapter that can aid in finding a direction for what may be considered architectural writing.
The contents contain eight chapters but could fall under three themes. The first is a purpose, how (and why) Architects Write, and the second is the need to maintain a design journal. The remaining may be restructured as academic and professional deliverables. I reorganised to think out an alternate perspective to read the material and how the present structure aids in reading each section as standalone narratives. The second edition, to interject, has an additional bit on online writing and many other updates. My interest is in the first two chapters, in which I guide writing in architecture as a site to deconstruct, even if it is unclear what the author intends.
The necessity to write in architecture is a very social-media-induced anxiety and, hence, generational. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, architecture was moving out of the convoluted arts-inspired French philosophy, whose access was limited to blogs on the web. Then comes Mark Zuckerberg with his apps as a service. Simple writing in tech originates in the Plain Writing Act of 2010, which advocates “clear communications that the public can understand and use”. The statue eventually trickles down to architecture thanks to the many tech services we subscribe to. A combination of early internet culture and frustration drives a drive for disciplinary textual clarity.
How Architects Write is a misleading title because it does not indicate practice but terms of engagement in working with types of knowledge products. The authors' four kinds of writing knowledge, subject matter, rhetorical, process, and genre do not lead anywhere. Their notes are from practice, and this gap indicates how writing in architecture is an appendix, not an integral part. The following section reinforces this disjunct, where the purpose of writing servers is in one part of the fraternity, and the other is in a community that provides building coordination services. There is a particular fallacy, I argue, that is promoted with the position that writing well is somehow an indicator of smartness.
Events of reaction, observations, analysis, and synthesis make writing practice instead of the types, Spector and Damron insist exist. A well-written text is always the work of a collective, which includes the author, at times, a proofreader and an editor. Any well-crafted body of work always has multiple stakeholders and cannot be ordered by an individual. The beginning of writing as part of architectural practice is deciding what you want writing as an activity to do for you. It is not about making term papers, project descriptions, reports, documents or anything else. Keeping a journal is the best way to start; once a rhythm builds, how, as an architect, you should write, you can make it from there.
Two parts make up architecture: the art and the science. Writing can contribute to both frames. When one is a discourse, the other is an activity. The practice of writing in architecture is an extension of the art. Providing building services can lead to architectural making, or text can be built into a spatial discourse. The ends of writing have changed, which the book misses out on. Although generative AI is here, even the second edition seems outdated. Even social media is now a subscription service and needs unpacking. Video instead of text is the new future of the internet. {What} Architects Write seems like a fun project to compensate for all the gaps.
Posted 2410180001
References & Links
Plain language makes it easier for the public to read, understand, and use government communications. [Regulation]
Plain Writing Act of 2010 [Wikipedia]
How Architects Write by Tom Spector, Rebecca Damron [Book]