Architectural Techniques

1. Assess the urban environment. No new construction can occour without accompanying destruction. Construction is both physical and psychological, and will always have an impact on the city. Destruction is the same. Both are historical acts.

2. Begin from the center. Not the geometric or even theoretical center, but the center of what the project should be.

At this point you may cry 'but meaning in architecture is over, that has passed. Program is fluid and modular, as Cedric Price has illustrated, and the building is therefore nothing but a form to be activated, and to carry along the activation of program with it by its form,'

and you would be partially right. The idea of moveable (and removable) program is powerful and appropriate in any architectural project that has been dreamt up in the past 10 years. But this hardly means that the building has been reduced to a formal or technological shell. Not at all!

There is no such thing as an empty room, no meaningless architecture is possible. At worst what comes out is confused architecture, which tries to be meaningless but beccomes instead unusable. If every architectural move is consequential – that is if at every step the architect is culpable – then we might as well embrace it. The center of every project is the will you wish to impress upon space – this is not necessarily something so constrictive as program or form, but may address, ultimately, both of these concerns. I'm talking, rather, about the initial decisions – what do we wish to do, what do we wish to explore? Everything must come from there – not that these decisions are fast and hard, or must be adhered to. But without operational clarity, the resultant architectural musings will be nothing but empty formalism or empty functionalism.

3. Intrude. I wrote the phrase "impress upon space" above, and I apologize – technically this phrase is impossible. I use it out of rhetorical necessity. Space ought not be treated as if it had existed beforehand. There's this great myth floating around of the infinite Cartesian grid, this sort of tabula rasa upon which things are made or projected. This sort of thinking is useful up to a point, perhaps, but has been exhausted through 500 years of continual use. It's time for something else. Space, after all, does not exist on its own. Any architectural insertion must elbow its way into the city, edging out competition and things already existing; architectural designs must fight for resources. The condition of the city is of a thing starved for space. There can be no architectural injunction without destruction – not in a karmic sense, but in a very real constructive sense. There can be no architecture without catastrophe, without loss, without murder.

4. Extrude. Know your intent and your culpability. Edge out, nudge, impose upon. Architecture must grow from two sides: the context (danger: empty reactive shell, dead architecture) and the city (danger: murderous declarative architecture, heroism, dead cities). Both must be employed and bound together. The result will be more forceful.

5. Wash, rinse, and repeat.