Stretch the bowstring: The one real starting point

My friend, architect and poet Masood Taj had referred to my way of working on TAD as someone stretching the bowstring back to shoot an arrow straight and focused.

I am grateful.

Ever since, I used that analogy in various talks at different places. I hoped to explain why it is critical for us architects to look at our subject from such a starting point; where the bowstring need to be stretched all the way back into linguistics -- but people get perplexed. Even bewildered. Some angry too at the sheer pompousness. How can this be that starting point which every architect MUST consider? Why such a demand?

You see, analogies always break when stretched beyond a point. Yes, a bowstring too

All architects lead a dual life. One, the life of the practical empirical truth out there. After all, the building ought to exist, right? So the architect is caught in the final form, functionalities and all the paraphernalia of the material self of the building.

The other life is a very deep, meditative inner one -- the one of possibilities, hopes, aspirations, inspirations ... stuff you can't place a finger on. Things you can't wrap your head around fully.

That kind of life starts when the design was just a dream in the client's mind. The dream was then passed on to us architects to materialize. We then enter the abstract thinking world and juggle around many points -- many of them inside our own heads. I think all architects, without exception, often goes into a deep meditative state when he/she is engaged in this abstract world. Each struggling with a set of abstract points to be considered when designing

In short: Whether we like it or not, architects simply have to wade through the abstract aspects of the upcoming architecture. Some do this consciously. Some semi-consciously. If it is done unconsiously ... well, then it may end up as a trial-and-error exercise.

This part of an architect's life is tough, disorganized and prone to errors. Over time, each architect discovers his/her own favorite starting points among a whole lot of points in this abstract process. We then start ruminating over our favorite points.

This architect, for example, would want the design to be sustainable. That is his pet topic. Some other architect wants to consider the user's lifestyle as the most sacrosanct point. That architect wants it to fit in well with the urban context -- for she was impressed by the impact of urban design. The other architect over there wonders about the style statement that the design ought to convey in that cultural context.... and so on

There is nothing that states that these cannot be starting points. Of course, they are -- for each architect has his/her own way to bootstrap the design process and get it all going. Each one of them should be right. After all, I am not undervaluing these architects.

When we architects meet, each of us are like one of the six blind men trying to define an elephant. Controversies abound -- one architect who believed in sustainability is wondering why the other one started with the urban context first; and so on.

Yet there is one common point that is even more of a starting point than anything of above: The real language of architecture.

But this is not something we architects usually stress on. You may wonder, why this point came up tangentially and is whacking you on the side of the head. Just a moment ago we were discussing architecture. Now, you are introducing linguistics? huh?

So to win this point over, I need to dip into another field. Hope the analogy does not break this time

Take music -- equally evocative subject or more evocative, some may say, when compared with architecture. I am sure I would find an audience who would agree to the following: Maybe musicians should take over the definition of "creativity" and not architects. 

Just the way there are a million way to start an architectural design, so would be in music. In fact, I would say that music requires really tough abstract thinking. Yet, like an architect, the composer too cannot let the music exist only in his or her mind buried in abstractions. Finally some musicians need to play the composition and the world needs to hear it. It has to make empirical sense. Just the way an architect's abstract thinking ought to result in built architecture

So, a composer is also caught in a lot of nitty-gritty experiential matters. The volume of sound of that instrument. The timbre of the other. The tonal range of the vocalist. And so on. An astute critic of music once told me that a lot of Hindi film music deliberately did not have much bass in it, few decades back. Why? Because the music was conveyed over radio programs -- and those days, transistor radios could never render bass sounds properly. Some of the most popular Hindi film songs clearly took this into cognizance. I thought that was a very insightful explanation.

But now let me introduce linguistics here again. It is really not tangential to music or architecture. For that matter, every field ought to first consider language as an overarching starting point

When a composer works out a piece of music, he/she has to put it onto a communicable form -- usually the music notation system. Transcribed onto a sheet. The sheet has alphabets in there. Musical notations that make sense to fellow musicians. The alphabets have to capture everything the composer intended.

A clear, distinct abstract language. One that captures all the notes. All the silences. All the nuances.

Now, if you can pardon my pun, let the language speak.

All the ethos, emotions and what-have-you that the composer considered when composing that piece of music can be checked against the sheet. The music expressed in the music notation is out there available to all the musicians and critics who want to see/appreciate if indeed the abstract thoughts of the composer were realized or not

Music is a very interesting analogy for architecture.

Like in architecture, music too has a "figure-ground" illusion. In architecture, spaces can only be perceived when there are built form around them. But then, you create the built form to punctuate the spaces. You concentrate on spaces, the built form becomes the background. When you focus your attention on the built form, spaces recede into the background.

In music, the silences can only be understood when there are notes around them. You focus on one and the other becomes the backdrop.

There is a term called "poché" in architecture -- it means the black marks we leave on drawings to represent built matter. We ask the mason to construct those pochés-- the walls. Similarly, the composer asks the musician to construct the notes. The period of silence -- just like spaces in architecture -- need not be "constructed" The silence emerges gracefully from around the notes in the music

Coming back to architecture. Whatever be the favorite starting point a particular architect may have had -- behind all that lies the need to express all that in a clear language.

Yes, language is the deeper starting point. We architects all have to start expressing one clear language so we can collaborate and criticize; and therefore direct the design process accurately.

Language is needed to walk the intentions. There are many subjective aspects in our field. But there are objective aspects too -- the language is surely needed for the latter.

For if we architects are not communicating our intentions clearly in a neutral manner, we end up squabbling like frustrated folks, each with unresolved ego issues. It does not take us anywhere and finally each architect has his/her own silo of knowledge.

In fact, I dare say, each project itself becomes its own non-criticizable silo of information. Society can no longer afford to have this haphazard way of communication in such an important field as that of architecture

In case of a music composition, if it was not written down, at least the group of musicians can sit together and communicate reasonably well. There are of course composers and musicians who do this. The drawback, of course, is that the music is not readily available for analysis later. Today we can appreciate Bach and Beethoven, even though they don't exist among us; because their music is available in a written form

Unfortunately, architecture is not an easy subject. An architect and his/her collaborators are doing a balancing act, walking various tight ropes with all kinds of baggage dragging the collaborators down

At this point, some architects may pipe up and say: "But we do have a language. It is called drawings"

I disagree.

At best, drawings are only a partial language. It captures the built form. As explained earlier; the pochés. It does not capture the spaces. The spaces in a design have to be interpreted.

That is not the case in a musical piece written down using musical notation system. Every silence is clearly delineated there. No subjective interpretation there. 

I would say a neutral linguist would call a technical architectural drawing a "pictograph" -- a very primitive and error form of modern languages -- one that uses visual analogies. There are many reason that pictographs are error prone and linguists have done a better job than me to explain why

BIM (Building Information Modeling) brought some amount of uniformity into this communication. But not a full fledged language. A language, for one, need to have abstract alphabets. In the musical notation; none of the symbols used there are analogies of anything in music. They are stand-alone and abstract. It makes the communication lot more easier as there is no pre-conceived visualizations to quarrel with.

Conventional BIM as practised by Revit, Archicad, etc. all talk about designing AFTER the design has been finalized. The horse has run away. It has moved out from the abstract world into the epirical world of experiences.

What I have been striving to do for last twenty seven years, is to give all architects a common, neutral language with all the required alphabets to express any of their individual starting points and also the dynamic processes of designing beyond the starting points.

You want to talk about sustainability? You can do so with TAD. You want to talk about energy calculations? Yes, can be done in TAD and so on... yes, each and every architect with his/her own pet starting point can easily peg all those into the 'script' when designing.

Many people think my obsession is TAD, the software I wrote. That is just the vehicle. The really interesting aspect of TAD is the language for architecture for which it is the vehicle or the medium. Unfortunately, such a language of architecture cannot be expressed on a simple piece of paper and I had no choice but to write this form of BIM software. It handles designing from very early stages of design onward.

The abstract world of thinking now has a chance to be expressed into a clear, abstract language -- one that can then be communicated to all the collaborators and critics of the design process.

That is why when Masood Taj came over to my house to understand what TAD is all about and spent a day -- he gave me that crisp analogy of someone trying to pull the bowstring back to let the arrow fly straight out. Many did not know why.

Now you know.