CAN YOU BE A GOOD DESIGNER IF YOU DON'T USE BIG WORDS?

Originally published in ARCADE Magazine, Spring 2010.

It’s one hour before I begin crits at the U of W Architecture Department. My morning was spent arguing over liability insurance, persuading a client to pay additional fees for extra work performed, deciding between Starbuck’s or Tully’s coffee for the office, and figuring out how much we should spend on the spring office party.

The students don't know this but I’m petrified. I haven't used large architectural words in months. I’m not even wearing black today! Within the hour I will begin listening to several graduate students elucidate at length about designs into which they have poured all of their remarkable intellect for the last 12 months. They will be prepared with lofty concepts, compelling graphics, persuasive arguments and often unfathomable designs. Then, after each roughly 20-minute presentation, the whole room will go silent and 50 to 60 students and educators will look me in the eye and dare me to say something weighty. I will twitch in my seat and buy time by asking a few clarification questions. When I can no longer procrastinate, I will finally be compelled to say something…SMART!

This is criticism as performance art and I haven't rehearsed.

During my car ride to Gould Hall, it is an act of stout will that I shift gears by going over my backlog of architectural terms: juxtaposition is always a good one; sense of place is a classic; solid/void patterns, figure/ground relationships, layering, conceptual configuration… As I turn off the freeway and head east toward campus, I feel a bit easier about my vocabulary, but can I put the words together into coherent sentences? This concerns me only for a moment or two until I remind myself that coherence isn’t really the goal of an intelligent sounding architect.

After purchasing a clearly non-Starbucks latte at the espresso stand, I grab my sketchbook (I brought the tattered one so it looks like I use it) and open the doors into the den of lions. I am greatly relieved to see they are serving wine, even though it's just past noon. I greet the professor and students with an air of slight aloofness. I figure this will set the tone for my later pontifications.

And now, after the first 20 minute presentation, the moment of truth. By now I’ve had three glasses of wine and no tangible lunch. The class goes silent and waits… “It seems your concept proposes a radical challenge to the notion of ‘rational’ Cartesian juxtapositions of classical architecture finally exploded as an axonometric abstraction.”*

Wow, did I say that? The faces of the students suggest that they seem to know what I’m saying! Let me try another one: “No, no, this scheme only serves to heighten the conceptual inversion by taking the south quadrant — which is formerly monolithic in scale — and transposes the volume into a sense of objecthood.”* Damn, I‘m good, (or at least this fourth glass of wine is).

After the third student (and sixth glass of wine) I really get going. “You seem to be using a strategy of dis-junction and synthetic dissociation of disjunctive associations. I see a superimposition or juxtaposition of independently similar but unrelated elements.”** I feel empowered! I have no idea what the hell I’m saying but I feel it’s their responsibility to find the meaning in my words. “Moving toward interpretative infinity…refusing fixity is not insignificant to the dis-structuring of post humanist forms… Seismic plurality…didactic violation… confixturated animosity of exhumed meanings…conductroxicated hyperperbole.”*** YEAH BABY!!!

At the end of the crits, I begin to smugly stroll out of the presentation studio, but I stop to find my black sports jacket. Oh, how silly of me. I didn't wear a black sports jacket to the crit! The professor insists that I not drive home. He calls me a cab, and even offers to pay for my extra parking expenses. I notice that I haven’t been invited to the post crit party. I assume it’s because the students might feel a bit intimidated around me in a more social setting.

No problem. If I leave now, I’ll still have time to get back to the office and make a final decision about liability insurance.

*The author of this article was not able to actually construct a sentence this profound so he plagiarized it from a book by Peter Eisemann.

**The author ran out of Eisemann quotes and went to Bernard Tschumi.

***These are terms invented by the author.