The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.
A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
This week David and Marina of FAME Architecture & Design discuss architecture concepts in the office. The two cover the importance of conceptual thinking, the lack of concepts in architecture offices, projects in architecture school vs in practice, the challenges of merging conceptual thinking and technical aspects in practice, and more. Enjoy!
Highlights & Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction.
(01:31) Importance of Concepts and Parti.
Students [tend] to put too much pressure on finding the “best” concept. But really, the training in school isn't about who's going to come up with the “best” concept. Instead, [it] is about learning your conceptual thinking process. Because over 4 or 5 years in school, not every project [will] have a great concept or a great parti. [School] is more about practicing and developing skills. (04:03)
(10:19) Why do most architecture offices lack a conceptual phase?
Once you get into the real world, the actual practice of architecture, the conceptual phase gets inundated with a lot of other things. Because you're operating in the real realm, you cannot completely ignore everything until the next phase because those “real world things” are… just within you and you can't remove that knowledge from your head. (10:38)
(26:28) External factors that reduce conceptual thinking in practice.
(32:05) Conceptual thinking helps articulate the design process.
It’s unfortunately common for most offices to not think about concepts and even the ones that do, it's common for them to not explain it to the client because they think, “Well, the clients are not interested. As long as we get [the design] approved by the client, that's all that matters.”…Some architects will even develop a fake concept as a way to pitch it to the client because they know the client likes analogies, for example. I think you should give people a chance and explain your actual thinking…[If] we don't explain the concept, I think it's hard for us to make [clients] understand our value and how we work, and therefore how much time we need to create. (34:18)
(38:43) Architects vs Contractors.
(43:45) Projects in school vs practice.
(52:19) Producing beautiful buildings.
(58:27) Architecture schools are either too conceptual or too pragmatic.
[When students are pushed to use BIM software for their projects, they] are learning a very technical program but for only the conceptual phase. [It] makes no sense at all. Most BIM programs are designed for the CD [Construction Documentation] phase, which is multiple phases after the concept design. (59:53)
(01:05:21) Students struggle to merge conceptual and technical in practice.
The greater danger is the lack of interest graduates have [designing real buildings]. I’m happy to train somebody who has bits and pieces [of skill], but if they're not interested [in designing real buildings] because they've never been exposed to [the architecture practice], that's a huge risk [from an employer’s perspective]. Unless you've attempted to make a building at least a couple of times, you don't know if it's for you. That's one of the reasons why people don't end up doing architecture. Because they've realized, “Okay, well, practicing architecture isn't like school, and I don't want to do it.” So when I'm interviewing a student, I don't know if they will be good at designing a building. More fundamentally, are they even interested in that? I don’t know and they don’t know because they've never tried and they were never given an opportunity to. (01:10:33)
