1 A personal note

Our drawings were beautiful (as drawings). But none of us had the least idea what they meant, whether they worked, whether they fit, and made whole, or extended in a living fashion, the part of the building where we were using them. Most often we did not even understand why the details were shaped as they were, nor certainly, how to go about making those details, physically, with our own hands.
We were never asked to admit that we did not understand these things. Indeed, many architectural students of that era became architects, continued the pretense that they knew what the details meant, drew them up religiously, gave them to the builder (or contractor) to build, were not present to hear the chuckles or see the shaking of heads as builders on site examined the drawings. They deceived themselves, and their clients, into believing that the art of building was profoundly known by them.

The architectural drawings which I learned to do in school in most cases had an empty quality. It made me almost sick trying to draw something that I could not build, while pretending to myself that I understood it. For myself, I cannot understand something in a building, truly, unless I know how to do it with my own hands, or unless I am actually building it.
Also I felt — naively perhaps — that it was only if I made it myself that I could really make it the way I wanted it to be. More significant, I felt it was only if I made it myself that I could get it to be the way it had to be, so that the fine structure, the fine adaptation, came out right.

This is exactly how I feel about some of the app ideas in my head. Including the part that I’m still trying to find out and learn how to “do it properly”.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/15 All Building as Making#