architectural dialogue

These posts concern ruminations on the role of the architect as a phronetic extemporiser – a notion that developed after I was asked to write an essay on architecture, on what it was all about. I realised that the question ‘what is architecture?’ is too blunt, that one can’t approach it directly. I also realised that behind this question lies others: what ought I, as an architect, to do and how ought I to do it? And I knew that the issue of being an architect was of more interest and significance that the issue of what architecture was.

The outcome was a book called Meetings With Buildings, a work in two volumes. Volume One is currently going through corrections, etc.

The book has an academic and philosophical bent, but it’s not academic and it has been written  outside of any academic framework. (I confess: much as I respect the work of academia, I have little patience with PhD studies turned into books in order to serve a university’s research rating.) The book deliberately, it intermixes passages on theory and philosophy related to architecture and its experience with deeply subjective ruminations that bring theory down to a more messy particularity, striving to ground what otherwise floats likes one of Ibsen’s ‘castles in the air’. That’s how this blog started: putting out fragments going through my mind. Occasionally, I might put out a PDF of sections of the book.

Sections of the book will be posted in the Categories section, under meetings With Buildings. Large sections will be as pdf’s.