Duo Dickinson

A building architect who writes.

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Buildings Are Not Sacred, but We Can Find Beauty Through Them

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

What makes something sacred? When does a building mean more to us than nearly all other places, spaces, objects, or activities in our lives? Architects strive to achieve the sacred in buildings, but it’s the rest of us who either sense it or not, whatever the aesthetics may be. I think the meaning of what is sacred to us can be most profoundly seen and felt when things change.

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Why So Many Banal Boxes? Because Architecture Reflects the Ethos of Its Time

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

The whining of architects is futile. The stick-frame-over-podium building—the so-called 5-over-1—is here to stay. The Box, as I like to refer to it, utilizes the hybrid technology of a concrete-and-steel base below wood-frame construction, and is used predominantly for market-rate housing. Despite the common negative reaction to its banal aesthetics, the appeal to a large segment of apartment consumers is undeniable. It’s an obvious hit with developers, too.

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When Is Architectural Symbolism Hypocrisy?

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Architecture mirrors the culture it is built from, while simultaneously aspiring to lead that culture. This is almost oxymoronic, since reflecting and projecting our values is an essential part of every human life, and architecture is exquisitely human. Our buildings embody us, with all of our mixed messages.

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Why Time Is a Problem for Architects

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Since the advent of Modernism, architects have become schizophrenic in dealing with the reality of time. This is a problem, because time and gravity are two universal forces. Architects are exquisitely good at dealing with gravity—it is present in everything we design. We study it and engineer its unrelenting requirements. Gravity does a symbiotic dance with structure. No matter how a design feigns weightlessness, its mass cannot be denied. Architects must deal with gravity, whether it’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s sagging balconies at Fallingwater or today’s steroidally enhanced parametric buildings.

Money and the Conundrum of Architects Who Don’t Build

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

If you’ve been in the profession of architecture long enough, you come to know a certain rarified subset of fellow professionals: Those who call themselves “architects,” who have a degree, and who may even be licensed and members of the AIA, but who do not practice architecture. They simply like being an “architect.”

Architecture Always Reflects the Values of Its Current Culture

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

What we build can be metaphoric—often intentionally, sometimes subliminally. But architecture is seldom the intentional commentary of architects, crafting symbolism; more often it is a direct reflection of its time and the culture that made it.

Architecture and the God Problem

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

It has been about 200 years since the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris created an academic discipline—and thus the profession—of architecture. The central role of the architect as the defining agent of creation transcended the Master Builder, a role that defined those who designed buildings not as experts or celebrities but as stewards of building traditions.

The 2022 Pivots in Architecture

Every “Year In Review” assessment of anything is both myopic and timely. That being said, 2022 was a "Boom" time for architects (and the building industry in general). This snapshot will change in 2023 when this year’s manufactured interest rate jumps will crib death this short and intense boom.

But some things have more meaning than can be found in the moment. 2022 proved that the “Mad Men” model in the profession as a white male clubhouse is over. Gender and race inequalities remain in architecture, but they are acknowledged flaws in urgent need of correction. Beyond these evolutions and revolutions, a new generation of architects is changing the profession.

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"New Practices" in Architecture are Just an Evolution

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Despite Winston Churchill’s words, architects are shaped by our culture, and our work reacts to it. Because our culture evolves, the practice of architecture evolves. What is “New” in architectural practice has had accelerating change, exploding in the 21st century because new technologies have changed everything on a level of the Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago.  

Nameless Buildings Affect Us

Architecture is human. So when I entered Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in 1973 and the entire faculty were as white and male as I was, it made no sense to me but reflected the end times of the full-on male dominance in my chosen profession. In that world, a few professors would often comment on how female students looked at juries, and some sexually victimized some students (none of whom were male).

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Is Good Architecture Synonymous with Beauty?

Architecture is not simply building. Over 2,000 years ago, Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio defined two base realities in building: “Firmness” (Safety) and “Commodity” (Use) and then offered what turns building into architecture: “Delight” (Beauty).

“Firmness” has been recoined in this century as “Resilience”. After being unscathed in five hurricanes over thirty years, does this building have “Delight” beyond its “Firmness”? The property of “Commodity” is found in any design’s usefulness and fit: is this archive, in constant use, have “Delight” beyond its “Commodity”?

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Technology Isn't Trend, It's Timeless

“Hope for Architecture” is the calling of Clay Chapman and described by him as “a building initiative to address the challenges of an uncertain future.” In truth, “Hope for Architecture” is a masonry and timber technology, reinvented and adapted from antiquity for this moment. Clay and his young family moved to Carleton Landing, Oklahoma fifteen years ago to fulfill a mission: creating a community and explore that technology.

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New York’s Towers of Babel

The world is facing an Urban Century. The world’s population is collapsing into city centers as manufacturing and agriculture need fewer humans because technology replaces the human hand with machines. The world's urban population has grown from 751 million in 1950 to 4.46 billion in 2021 and will grow to 6.68 billion by 2050.

While architects and designers want to define and control the future of our cities, the immediate reality of New York City, now, is a lesson in what may be our future. It’s response can be seen by the advent of The Tower the fabric of Manhattan.

Democratizing Architecture vs. Aesthetic Apartheid Architecture

Architecture has long been a profession in aesthetic apartheid. The profession’s favored aesthetic, Modernism, has relegated all other “styles” to marginalized insignificance in laud, teaching and publication. The last generation has seen those following an aesthetic deemed “traditional” create an entirely separate system of schools, awards and publication.

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Creating Architectural Value through Aesthetics

Humans try very hard to make the inexplicable understood. Our spirituality becomes religion. Fairness becomes law. And what delights us becomes aesthetics, and aesthetics are dumbed down to “style” in fine arts and architecture. The description, then definition, of aesthetics enables us to judge, and hopefully, control what thrills us: "Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent". -- Roger Scruton

But the instant delight we sometimes feel when we hear, taste, think or see parts of our experience is unreasoned in its apprehension. We try to create value in our outcomes by defining them beyond experience – that is aesthetics.

The Future of Visualization May Be The Past

We deal with buildings every day. We sleep in them, work in them, live our lives using their accommodation. But like a song or a painting, a person usually helps create them, with those who use and build them, then the world receives that work. But before they are built, buildings are just ideas.

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“Net Zero” Homes: Marketing Morality

Almost no one buys an automobile for its stated price with cash on hand, so those looking to buy a car look to what the cost will be each month to own their automobile. Homes are our deepest investment, and most homeowners are equally as proud of their home as they are of their car and are terrified of its cost. So it is not surprising that “Net Zero” homes use the same sales tactic, proving their value by promising no monthly energy bills.

The Architectural Pandemic of the “Stick Frame Over Podium” Building

The Architectural Pandemic of the “Stick Frame Over Podium” Building - Featured Image
via Structure Magazine

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In case you missed it, our world continues, after two years, to suffer cultural spasms in response to unseen, unrelenting, and deadly infective agents that continue to wash over entire populations, spreading fear, illness, and death. 

The U.S. is also suffering a quieter—but equally invasive—architectural plague, metastasizing into every part of the country. This architectural contagion has largely escaped criticism, but not since the raised ranch has an architectural “type” so fully transformed communities. In the 1950s, thousands upon thousands of dumbed-down Prairie Home allusions swept across fallow suburban farm fields like a wildfire. More than style, the half-buried lower level and split floors (one half-stair run apart) were a new way to explore how buildings could house people, especially in rapidly suburbanizing America.